Sixteen months after the United States abandoned its
loyal satrap of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, to champion democracy
in Egypt, the returns are in.
Mohammed Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, is
president of Egypt, while the military has dissolved the elected
parliament that was dominated by the Brotherhood, and curbed his power.
The military and the mullahs will fight for the future
of a country that is home to one in four Arabs. The soldiers who have
dominated Egypt since the ouster of King Farouk in 1952 show
no willingness to surrender what they have long controlled of the state
and economy.
Yet in the long run, the Brotherhood — whose claim to
guide the nation’s destiny is rooted in a faith 1,400 years old — is
likely to prevail.
In Syria, the uprising against Bashar Assad appears
headed for civil war, with atrocities on both sides. Some 10,000 are
estimated to have died, a far bloodier affair than Egypt. And here, too,
the day of the Brotherhood, massacred in the thousands by Bashar’s
father in Hama, seems not far off.
Witnessing what is happening in these critical Arab
countries and across the region, one is tempted to ask: what are the
fruits of three decades of compulsive U.S. intervention in the Islamic
world?
Ronald Reagan put Marines in Lebanon to support an embattled Beirut regime and saw 241 of them massacred in their barracks.
In 1986, he ordered air strikes on Libya in retaliation
for the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by GIs. Reagan was paid
back in his final days in office when Moammar Gadhafi’s killers blew up
Pan Am 103, scattering the bodies of U.S. school kids over the
Lockerbie landscape.
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