Democracy is Great, unless ...

I just want to start off by saying that nothing I have ever seen in my entire life on 3 continents has ever been quite so ridiculous as “pro-democracy” protesters and their world wide supporters celebrating the installation of “temporary” military rule in Egypt. I’m sorry if you’re buying the media coverage of the events in Egypt and think that some how that the people have won and defeated a bad dictator ... because that is not what happened.
Egypt: A Brief History of the Presidency
The first President of a modern free Egypt was Muhammad Naguib, who was an Army officer prior to Britain’s withdrawal, the second president was Gamal Abdel Nasser who was an Army officer prior to becoming president, the third president was Anwar al Sadat who was an Army officer prior to becoming president and the fourth president was Hosani Mubarak who was ... you’ll never guess ... an Army officer prior to becoming president. When he resigned he turned over power to his recently appointed vice president Omar Sulieman (army officer) who then turned over power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
The military has run Egypt since 1953, and it’s not going to change now, you can have all the elections you want, you can talk until you are blue in the face about the Muslim Brotherhood and the possible Islamification of Egypt, but at the end of the day it is the army that will decide the next president and the next and the next and so forth and so on. After a week of being head of state General Mohamed Hussain Tantawi has declared that labor and civil unrest will no longer be tolerated and that everyone need to go back to work .... hooray democracy!
So the American news media spent two weeks canonizing the Egyptian protesters and tell us how fantastic they were, so when the attacked Lara Logan, beat her and brutally sexually assaulted her, the language used to describe the horrible attack was so muted and shaded it was obscene. The crowd forcibly removed her from her crew and her security detail, NBC reported the she “became separated” and then she was brutally attacked and sexually assaulted by “a separate violent element”. So good, it wasn’t the wonderful protesters you were telling us about, it was someone else ... that’s good to know. There is a picture taken seconds before the attack and I can tell from the giant democracy protest sign that they are holding that it wasn’t the same people, clearly a separate violent element.
So now there are protests and clashes in Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and of course don’t forge the Tunisian thing from last month, and if you’re a geography student then you know all of this is right next to the bastions of stability Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Iraq and Afghanistan. Basically a 3500 mile swath of equatorial Asia and Africa are exploding in unrest and chaos and violence (4000 miles if you count the unreported, disastrous regime change in Kyrgyzstan). So what are we to do? President Obama says he supports to protesters for democracy ... in a place that polls repeatedly to be in favor of the destruction of our nation and our way of life ... so that’s odd. Add the head of or nation’s intelligence tells the world that he doesn’t really know what’s going on and it’s all a big surprise and the Muslim Brotherhood is a good bunch of guys, like the Knights of Columbus ... do you believe that? Do you believe he’s incompetent? Then there’s the little matter of the leaked cable (thanks wikileaks) detailing how the US state department was collaborating with elements inside Egypt to plan and carry-out a revolution in early 2011 back in 2008. But everyone was caught off guard and they loved Mubarak, or hated him, no wait, he’s great, no ... no he’s got to go.
So where’s it all going? I’ll keep looking and I’ll let you know as soon as I do, but just don’t believe the hype, the result of all this is not going to be a free and prosperous northern Africa/Middle East.