Originally published in Right Web.
There is enough awkwardness among the Washington establishment—bewildered at the sight of an uprising against a client state—that they are completely helpless to do much of anything in the face of the tumult on the Egyptian street. But no one is confronting a more awkward comeuppance, and responding to it more erratically, than the neoconservatives.
Champions of President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” the neoconservatives have repeatedly found themselves facing the discomforting reality that democratic change in the Middle East has more often than not led to the emergence of governments that are opposed to the state of Israel. First there was Hamas. Then Hezbollah. Now, potentially, the Muslim Brotherhood.
And yet, instead of injecting a bit of realism into their logic, these events have forced neocons to feverishly grasp either of two contrary positions: The freedom crowd sees the uprising in Egypt as vindication of Bush’s “global democratic revolution”; the Islamophobes have begun their predictable fear mongering about the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of the global Caliphate.
The Freedom Crowd
On Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog, Max Boot rhetorically asked in the title of a blog “Are we all neocons now?” The Council on Foreign Relations fellow, who has been generous in his views of President Barack Obama’s approach to Afghanistan, criticized the administration’s response to events in Egypt, arguing that Obama has continued the policy started in the second George W. Bush administration of abandoning the “freedom agenda” for a push towards an illusory Middle East peace.
In a Washington Post symposium, the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka, chided Obama for being “on the wrong side of history” and insisted that “our support for secular dictators does more for Islamists than democracy promotion ever did.” The think tank more directly implicated in the Iraq War than any other apparently blames Obama for the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Shiite analogs, conveniently ignoring decades of U.S. foreign policymaking.
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