Those Who Have Nothing to Lose Can Easily Be Moral

The unassertive actions of the Americans and Europeans to the Egyptian revolution run contrary to morality. But there’s a reason.

It’s hard to say what can be learned from a little more than 200 years of European revolutionary history about the events to come in Egypt. Alexis de Tocqueville would have agreed with Rudolf Burger’s words in this “Presse” edition: “I have always observed that in politics one goes under when one has too good of a memory.”

Remembering past revolutions doesn’t help to stop current events, to achieve leadership or to become instrumental. Those are essentially the options of the big Western powers in the face of revolutionary events in strategic nerve centers. The morality suggests supporting the tactic of stopping such events and the strategy to stop them. What could one learn from the Iranian revolution in 1979, which also came out of nowhere? Nothing.

A few examples of big-power politics during revolutionary citizen uprisings appear to stay relatively constant. The decided ideology of American foreign policy in the past, with Caribbean, Central and South American civil uprisings against reigning dictators, has been: “He is a pig, but he’s our pig.” In the 1950s that was the sentiment toward Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista.

The U.S. let him fight (and later the right-wing Central American dictators) because in the 1950s, and then again in the 1980s, a very serious fear was forming that the Soviet Union could incorporate Latin America and the Caribbean into their empire.

After the downfall of the Soviet Union, the Islamic fundamentalists took over the role of the big threat. And the U.S. aligned again with the principle: “He’s a pig, but he’s our pig.” That went for the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; that goes for the Saudi Royalty, the Hashemites (of Jordan) and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

As often happens, this strategy of pragmatism provides a good deal of historical irony: After the end of socialist phobia, it was the representatives and followers of Arabian Socialism who took American foreign policy as a guarantee against an Islamic power-overthrow.

So long as the Arabian Kleptocrats were satisfied with enriching their families and only committing their systematic human rights violations in the name of security, it worked very well. Saddam Hussein overdid it at some point.

The American reaction to Saddam’s attempt to take over neighboring Kuwait was actually an energy-strategy consideration. The second Gulf War was led by Bush Junior out of conviction. He and his adviser Paul Wolfowitz, who went to the “neo-conservative” school of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss, believed, out of naïveté, in the possibility of democratization of the Middle East through the overthrow of dictators.

What’s happening now in Egypt is somewhat irritating for American and European foreign policy. One notes this in the embarrassing discrepancy between EU Foreign Minister Cathrine Ashtion and the government leader of the biggest European power (Silvio Berlusconi’s puff piece on Mubarak stands as a clear case of brain-in-the-pants and doesn’t count): The Democratic pathos of the commission is directly tied to their de-facto deposed former heads of state and government. Morality was always the refuge of the weak.

Those who have nothing to lose can easily be moral, for the big powers’ economic relations, strategic interests and military consideration are also in play. The allegations have always been made that they put such interests over morality.

Be glad that they do. Morality motivates the suicide bombers in Tel Aviv, Kabul and Baghdad.