History is moving along swiftly and shifting tides are sweeping Middle Eastern strongmen out of office at the unprecedented rate of one a week for the past three weeks. Tunisia, Lebanon, and now Egypt are in the throes of regime change. Egypt’s new political axis may well tilt in favor of the radicals, posing new challenges for US and Israeli policy-makers and military men.
There have always been two facets to the American dream.
One has centered on economic advancement as canonized in Republican Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign — “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”
The second facet has always been more of an appeal to the human spirit. America has envisioned as part of its destiny the promotion of a new world order where people around the world have the same freedoms of expression religion and choice as they do in the United States. Former president George Bush with moral support from Israel’s Natan Sharansky made exporting American-style freedoms to the Middle East a priority in the first decade of this new century.
Alas what works well in America gets corrupted quickly in the Middle East. The list is long and growing. Hamas has capitalized on free elections to take control of Gaza and hold the West Bank hostage. In 2005 the Western world kept its fingers crossed when the Lebanese people took to the streets after the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri to try to retake control from the Syrian-Iranian controlling axis. Six years later the terrorist group Hizbullah has just succeeded in manipulating the Lebanese parliamentary system to take de-facto control of Israel’s northern neighbor.
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