American Style Democracy

As Egyptians are still struggling to form a true democracy, Washington is getting nervous.

In a coordinated series of raids, Egyptian police accompanied by investigative judges entered the headquarters of several such groups throughout the country, seizing computers, sealing offices, and confiscating bundles of cash. According to the Associated Press, an Egyptian Interior Ministry official “said the military on Thursday found 70,000 Egyptian pounds ($11,600) in the office of one unidentified group, and seized half a million Egyptian pounds ($83,000) from the National Democratic Institute.”

The National Democratic Institute is the international arm of the US Democratic party: it receives its funding directly from Uncle Sam and a number of “private” contributors whose identities are kept under wraps. NDI chief honcho Kenneth Wollack is a former legislative director of the America-Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US.

Also raided: the International Republican Institute – the foreign arm of the GOP – Freedom House – the historic home of right-wing Social Democrats and international busybodies – as well as the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (funded by the German government) and fourteen other foreign-funded groups.

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The nature of that line was laid out in more detail by Charles Dunne, director of Middle East and North Africa Programs at Freedom House, who said:

“It is a major escalation in the Egyptian government’s crackdown on civil society organizations, and it is unprecedented in its attack on international organizations like Freedom House, which is funded in large part by the United States government. The military council is saying we are happy to take your $1.3 billion a year, but we are not happy when you do things like defending human rights and supporting democracy.”

  Justin Raimondo

Jon Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a very typical member of the National Security priesthood, [wrote] on Friday in The New York Times [regarding the popular uprising in Egypt:]
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American interests, however, call for a different outcome, one that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians.

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The fear of (and desire to stop) Arab democracy has been openly expressed for some time by many American neocons and even Benjamin Netanyahu; that it is now spilling over into America’s mainstream Foreign Policy experts is telling indeed.

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What Alterman advocates is a bulwark against the ability of the Egyptian people to free themselves of military rule, choose their own government, and decide their own fate.

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It’s what the U.S. has been doing, so disastrously, in that part of the world for decades: feigning support for democracy while working against it.

The Obama administration paid pretty lip service to the Egyptian revolution but then worked to install Mubarak’s chief torturer Omar Suleiman in power, who, for obvious reasons, is viewed with great disfavor among Egyptians. That propaganda ruse fooled one of its chief targets (the American electorate) but failed miserably among Egyptians, who knew exactly what the U.S. was up to. As a result, Egyptians now view the U.S. even more unfavorably than they did during the Bush years.

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This is exactly the behavior (along with blind support for the actions of the Israeli government) that has led to such vast anti-American sentiment (which in turns is what fuels Terrorism and support for it).

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.