Crisis in Egypt: Did America open the gates of Hell?

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We like to see think that the United States is above the fray. We like to think that we are the good guys, but let’s face it, we act in our own interests. From time to time that serves the American people, but more often than not it only acts to suppress the freedoms of others and serve big business.

As the world has watched the drama of the Middle East, Americans would hardly know that the United States had a thing to do with those events.

For its War on Terror, of course, Washington has long backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege (or anxious that they may be next). In September 2004, Amr Musa, who headed the Arab League, described the post-invasion Iraqi situation: “The gates of hell are open in Iraq.”

This was not the sort of language we were used to hearing in the U.S., no matter what someone felt about the war. It read like an over-the-top metaphor, but it could as easily be taken as a realistic depiction of what happened. America’s go-it-alone strategy drove blithely through those gates, its stars and stripes waving, as if they were the gates to paradise.

And our policymakers are obliviously careening along once again. Today’s situation in Egypt initially elicited much polite (and hypocritical) media discussion about how American interests and values were in conflict, about how far the United States should back off its support for Mubarak, and about the “tightrope” the Obama administration was walking.

While the President and his officials flailed, questions loomed about whether we should “take sides” — as though we hadn’t done so decisively over the last decades.

With popular cries for “democracy” and “freedom” sweeping through the Middle East, it’s curious to note that the Bush-era’s infamous “democracy agenda” has been nowhere in sight.

Still, make no mistake, there’s a story in a Washington stunned and blindsided, in an administration visibly toothless and dismayed over the potential loss of its Egyptian ally — “the keystone of its Middle Eastern policy.”

People Power – 1991, 2011

Shadowing today’s spectacle is the slow and reluctant march for the exits of that other great power of the Cold War. When the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, and the United States found itself the last superpower standing, Washington mistook that for a victory most rare.

In the years that followed, amid clouds of self-congratulation, U.S. leaders would attempt nothing less than to establish a global Pax Americana, another era of an American-imposed Peaceable Kingdom. Their breathtaking ambitions would leave hubris in the shade. Two decades after the Soviet Union left the world stage, the “victor” is now lurching down the declining slope, this time as the other defeated superpower of the Cold War.

So don’t mark the end of the Cold War in 1991 as our conventional histories do. Mark it in the early days of 2011, and consider the events of this moment a symbolic goodbye for the planet’s so-called sole superpower.

Make no mistake, either: These two moments of people power are inextricably linked.

In the Middle East, the two pillars of American imperial power and control have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia — along with obdurate Israel and little Jordan. In the larger region the Bush administration liked to call “the Greater Middle East” or “the arc of instability,” another key pillar has been Pakistan, a country now in destabilization mode under the pressure of a disastrous American war in Afghanistan.

Now facing the people’s version of shock and awe, the Obama administration has been shaken. It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events.

Count on one thing: Administration officials are undoubtedly worried about a domestic political future in which the question — never good for Democrats — could be: Who lost the Middle East?

In the meantime, their oh-so-solemn, carefully calibrated statements, still in commanding tones and focused on what client states in the Middle East must do, might as well be spoken to the wind.

The question is: How did this happen? The answer, in part, is: Blame it on the way the Cold War officially ended, the mood of unparalleled hubris in which the United States emerged from it, and the unilaterialist path of American individualism its leaders chose in its wake……….