February 23, 2013

Advice on democracy from the only democracy in the Middle East

Here's a bizarre piece in The Times of Israel.  A former Israeli minister under Ehud Olmert and an adviser to the nearly but not quite late, Ariel Sharon, Rafi Eitan, has said that the USA should never have allowed Mohammed Morsi to become president of Egypt.
“The military unequivocally decided that [Ahmed] Shafiq will be president, not [Mohammed] Morsi,” Eitan told The Times of Israel. “But the Americans put all the pressure on. The announcement [of the president] was delayed by three or four days because of this struggle.”
Immediately after Egypt’s presidential elections in June 2012, Eitan spoke to unnamed local officials, who told him that with a mere 5,000-vote advantage for Islamist candidate Morsi, the military was prepared to announce the victory of his adversary Shafiq, a secular military man closely associated with the Mubarak regime.
But secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Eitan said, decided to favor democracy at all costs and disallow any falsification of the vote.
“This is idiocy. An act of stupidity that will resonate for generations,” Eitan said. “I also thought Mubarak should be replaced, but I believed the Americans would be smart enough to replace him with the next figure. Mubarak would have agreed to that, but the Americans didn’t want that; they wanted democracy. But there is no real democracy in the Arab world at the moment. It will take a few generations to develop.
I don't think the US approach to the Arab world is any less racist than Israel's.  I'm guessing they just don't like to be as obvious as Israel when it comes to throwing their weight around.

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