FAILING UPWARDS:

Guarded Eye on Arab Revolt? (David Ignatius, 1/28/11, Washington Post)

"I think it's overdue," says Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who runs the Alwaleed 24-hour news channel, speaking about the street protests in Egypt. "There were reasons for people to get angry 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and now it is here." Indeed, he says, "the Arab world has been seeking renaissance for the last hundred years," but has stalled the last several generations, caught between fear of authoritarian regimes and anger at their corruption.

It's an easy revolution to like, and U.S. officials have wisely endorsed the protesters' goals of openness and reform. But in truth, there's little America could do to bolster the octogenarian Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, even if it wanted to. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may endorse reform, as she did Wednesday, but this is a post-American revolution, encouraged in part by a recognition of the limits of U.S. power.

The unrest follows a series of American failures in the region.

Demanding democracy in the Arab world and liberating the Afghans, Liberians, Shi'a of Iraq, South Sudanese, etc., leads directly to democratic revolutions by Africa's Sunni Arabs and we're to consider it a series of failures? Hate to see what success would have looked like for Mr. Ignatius.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 28, 2011 7:08 AM