Romeo Area Tea Party

Posts Tagged ‘Egypt’

Today, President Obama

addressed the United Nations Assembly.

In President Obama’s speech, he praised the many regime changes that occurred over the past year, citing how change does not necessarily need to come by violence.  Specifically, the portion of text from his speech to the U.N. Assembly was…

“So this has been a remarkable year. The Qaddafi regime is over. Gbagbo, Ben Ali, Mubarak are no longer in power. Osama bin Laden is gone, and the idea that change could only come through violence has been buried with him. Something is happening in our world. The way things have been is not the way that they will be. The humiliating grip of corruption and tyranny is being pried open. Dictators are on notice.”

Here again, is the same text,

parsed with snippets of news reports of the day.

“So this has been a remarkable year. (The unemployment rate in the United States was last reported at 9.1)

The Qaddafi regime is over.(Libyan rebels on Monday said they had sent more fighters and weaponry to Tripoli…)

Gbagbo, (Toure says no U.N. troops were involved in Mr. Gbagbo’s capture which he says was carried out by fighters…)

Ben Ali, (The departure came as a dramatic climax to weeks of violent protests against Ben Ali’s rule in the north African nation…)

Mubarak (It was a moment they had anticipated throughout long days of relentless demonstrations — sometimes violent — that demanded Mubarak’s departure….)

are no longer in power (Rockets pound ghost city as allies say Gaddafi must go…)

Osama bin Laden is gone, (The president called the killing of bin Laden the “most significant achievement to date”…)

and the idea that change could only come through violence has been buried with him.

Something is happening in our world. (The crowd I saw and spoke with were well informed, and deeply concerned Americans about the direction their country was headed. They were polite, courteous and above all–patriotic.)

The way things have been is not the way that they will be. (“We’ve come to take our government back,” Paul declared to a cheering throng.)

The humiliating grip of corruption and tyranny is being pried open. (A federal jury found former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich guilty of 17 of the 20 counts…)

Dictators are on notice. (President Barack Obama is rapidly advancing an executive dictatorship)

The only question that remains is,

“Who will write the history”?

…Shouldn’t throw stones. We all heard this from our mothers, or should have. This week we were reminded that this ancient wisdom is both metaphorically and literally true.  Every time a protester in Egypt threw a stone at the opposition, the opposition hurled it back. The fellow below figured out not only a defense against his stone’s return, but a unique protest fashion statement.

When they hurl my stones back at me...

In the short history of the Romeo Area Tea Party, we have spent precious little time on foreign policy. This makes sense since we originally came together when the financial crisis led to government takeovers, soaring debt, a stalled economy, and a health care bill that to us is 2800 pages of complete disregard for the American Constitution, American traditions, the American free market and American values.

But the foreign policy of the new Obama administration, while in the background, still grated us . One of the president’s first acts was an Executive Order to close Guantanamo. And we noted with dismay the president’s frequent apologies for us to foreign countries, foreign governments, and even foreign dictators. After eight years of vicious criticism of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, the new president, a man of limited achievement and limitless confidence, was going to show us the way to make the United States beloved of the world’s peoples while maintaining strict adherence to our fundamental values. He introduced these ideas like he was the first person to think about them seriously. Take a look at this video of his 2009 speech to college students in Egypt. Like many of Mr. Obama’s speeches, this is more a lecture than an address. The gist is that with the professor’s unique understanding of the past the future path is known.

But these past two weeks remind us how complex the world is. A man, an unknown simple man, set himself on fire in Tunis and we now have revolution in Tunisia, Egypt and several other Middle Eastern states. Who knows what the next month brings? We certainly don’t know and we would be foolish even to speculate an answer. Revolution is like that.

Walter Russel Mead has an excellent essay on America’s historic experience with revolution. It opens as follows:

The Obama administration is now living through one of the oldest and most difficult recurring problems in American foreign policy: what do you do when revolution breaks out in an allied country?

The only clue history offers is not an encouraging one: there is often no satisfactory resolution of the dilemmas revolutions present.

The timing of the revolution could not be worse for the administration. After a “shellacking” in midterms, they were all set to work like never before to get the economy, and the voters, working again. Jobs, jobs, jobs was going to be the new focus of the administration, but they have now run squarely into the 24 hours in a day problem. Huge foreign policy issues are like that, they suck up the energy of the White House like nothing else – just ask George Bush.

So where do we go from here? A lot of people think that the Obama administration is Jimmy Carter’s second term, so is this President Obama’s 1979? Victor Davis Hanson thinks it is in this post. Hanson poses the dilemma we face when we host state dinners for the adversarial, communist leader of China, as Obama did for Hu on his recent visit, and then, in the course of the same month, turn our back on a friendly, anti-fundamentalist dictator in Egypt. Is Obama being idealistic or pragmatic? Certainly he can’t be both, but he has thrown his stones now, and we must wait to see how and who hurls them back at us.