Festina lente

At first glance, this statement seems to place the Bush administration’s Middle East policy in a more flattering light than that of Obama’s: always a sure sign that something’s gone wrong. It took the Obama administration approximately one week to publicly call for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave office. Such temporizing will not, I think, be forgotten by the Egyptian democracy when it is born — whether next week or in September.

To illustrate America’s change of tactic, Rice then went on to praise the Palestinians for their recent presidential elections, in which the pro-Western Mahmoud Abbas won the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority: “The Palestinian people have also spoken. And their freely-elected government is working to seize the best opportunity in years to fulfill their historic dream of statehood.” Within a year after these words were delivered, Hamas overwhelmed Abbas’ Fatah in the legislative elections of 2006, and shortly thereafter the old unity between Gaza and the West Bank fractured. Making peace between Israel and the Palestinians was hard; making peace between Israel and the pro-Fatah Palestinians and the pro-Hamas Palestinians promises to be harder still.

Obama seems to have taken as his motto, “festina lente,” a favorite quip of Augustus that means “make haste slowly.” This aphorism goes some way toward explaining why, two years after giving his own speech in Cairo, Obama was caught dithering about whether to help push a pseudo-democratic dictator out of office. Bets are still on about whether this revolution ends up yielding an Iranian-style theocracy; if the White House seriously fears a rerun of Iranian 1979 Revolution, it becomes much clearer why they would hesitate to nudge Mubarak out the door, much less stop signing checks. (Since the Camp David Accords, America has paid Egypt annual installments, lately in excess of $1 billion per year.)

Regardless of fears about the Muslim Brotherhood taking over — and the separate question of what they might do with power, if they got it — there was, I think, a crucial matter of principle in Rice’s formulation in her Cairo speech: Democracy is supposed to be a method of determining policy, irrespective of the policies themselves. Obama recognized this principle in his own speech, defining democracy as “governments that reflect the will of the people.” And although democracy has yielded messy results in Iran and the Palestinian territories, America’s criticism should be directed at the policies enacted; our constant support should be offered for democracy itself.

The arguments against throwing America’s weight against Mubarak are mostly twofold: the preservation of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and the threat of creating a Tehran on the Nile. The idea that America should support Mubarak in the name of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty — as though Egypt were Israel’s greatest security concern — is essentially the proposition that the Egyptians should accept dictatorship so that the Israelis can have a modicum of security on their southern border. (Not that this treaty comes remotely close to securing Gaza.) Rice’s speech neatly skewers the latter objection: History is replete with failures resulting from the “a bastard, but our bastard,” policy. Even laying realpolitik aside, Obama seemed to be a more idealistic sort of politician — all that vague talk about hope and change was more in the vein of Carter than Bismarck. So it was surprising, at least, to catch him hesitating over whether to give Mubarak the nudge.

As a matter of long-term policy, Obama’s delaying tactics make even less sense because they only fuel anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. Even setting matters of principle aside, we are hemorrhaging soft power and influence. A quick glance at Al-Jazeera illustrates the problem: headlines such as “America and Mubarak [together] until the last breath” sum up the view in Arab news media. Pulitzer Prize winner Nick Kristof has reported that the tear gas shells used by the police are marked “Made in U.S.A.” Levi’s may have outsourced, and IBM no longer makes laptops, but apparently we still do tear gas.

The best outcome is that a temperate democrat, in the mold of International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, takes provisional leadership, conducts swift and transparent elections and maintains a peaceful foreign policy while dismantling the undemocratic elements of Egypt’s security apparatus. This process will be difficult, and the cultivation of a democratic civil society may require years of encouragement. For all that George Bush tried to present Iraq as a new model democracy in the Middle East, it is Egypt that may yet be the hinge of history in the region (though itself was inspired by the Tunisian example). Mubarak is going to leave office soon and there are many more autocratic strongmen in the region who should follow him. As Obama’s press officer expressed with such lapidary eloquence, “[Leaving office] ‘now’ means ‘yesterday’.” America should have offered full support to the democrats a week ago. Let us not make haste too slowly.

Brendan Carroll is a philosophy major from New York City. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.