[This goes out to those who think ideology is just a cover for "hard material facts"..... Steve Rosen of AIPAC: "It becomes hard to defend repression and say, ‘Go crack some heads.’ It’s hard to say ‘We want an undemocratic autocrat’ or ‘We don’t stand for freedom.’ The ‘freedom agenda’ is a compelling idea. It’s hard to defend Mubarak’s police”..... Note also the nauseating hypocrisy of Barry Rubin in the last graf.]
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http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=255F8172-1C87-4752-A5D1-571892B0271E
Mubarak splits Israel from neocons By: Ben Smith and Josh Gerstein February 3, 2011 04:30 AM EST
As Israeli leaders worriedly eye the protests and street battles in neighboring Egypt, they’ve been dismayed to find that the neoconservatives and hawkish Democrats who are usually their most reliable American advocates are cheering for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s fall.
The Egyptian autocrat has kept his side of a chilly peace agreement with Israel for thirty years, permitting an era of relative stability in the Jewish state. And as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear in a cautious speech to the Knesset Wednesday, Israel is deeply worried what will happen to that relationship when Mubarak departs.
“We expect any government of Egypt to honor the peace. Moreover, we expect the international community to expect any government of Egypt to honor the peace. This must be clear, along with the discussions about reform and democracy,” he said.
Other prominent Israeli voices are wondering why President Barack Obama didn’t back Mubarak against massive protests that – while not focused on Israel – featured some signs depicting Mubarak with a Star of David on his forehead.
“You should have also thought about Israel before hurrying to call upon Mubarak to go,” Dov Weissglass, a former advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote, addressing the Obama administration. “It is difficult to think of more serious harm to Israel’s security than the collapse of the peace accord with Egypt.”
But while a few American conservatives like former U.N Ambassador John Bolton share the same qualms as Weissglass, many of Israel’s most prominent supporters - some of whom are regularly accused of putting Israel’s interests before those of the U.S. - dismiss those worries.
In particular, neoconservatives such as Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, Bush National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, and scholar Robert Kagan are essentially saying good riddance to Mubarak and chiding Obama mainly for not making the same sporadic push for democracy as President George W. Bush.
“If [the Israelis] were to say, ‘This is very worrying because we don’t know what the future will bring and none of us trust the [Muslim] Brotherhood’ – we would all agree with that. But then they then go further and start mourning the departure of Mubarak and telling you that he is the greatest thing that ever happened,” said Abrams, who battled inside the Bush administration for more public pressure on Arab allies to reform.
“They don’t seem to realize that the crisis that now exists is the creation of Mubarak,” he said. “We were calling on him to stop crushing the moderate and centrist parties – and the Israelis had no sympathy for that whatsoever.”
Abrams, in the Bush years, was among the leaders of a neoconservative side of the Republican foreign policy battles, a side associated with a robust willingness to use U.S. military force – as in the invasion of Iraq – a pro-Israel bent, and a universal democratic vision that insisted that bringing democracy to the Arab world, one way or another, would result in a region friendlier to the U.S. and Israel in the long run.
More traditional conservatives have typically been warier of American military enganglements, and more intersted in preserving the status quo among U.S. allies – even when those regimes didn’t observe democratic norms.
The amount of daylight between Israel and advocates such as Abrams illustrates something important about neoconservatives, according to Noah Pollak, executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, a Republican-allied group Kristol chairs .
“This has always been a tension between the Israelis and the neocons — the neocons believe in the universality of liberal democracy and the Israelis don’t,” said Pollak, who argues that Israel, with Egypt looming on its border, has a right to be nervous.
“Israel is acting very much like a normal country in that it is acting much in its own interest, and its interest is not having the [Israeli military] take a posture where they have to consider the possibility of war with Egypt,” he said.
But while some of the most staunchly pro-Israel members of Congress say they understand Israel’s concerns, they are hopeful the Egypt crisis will end well for Israel and the U.S.
“Unfortunately, Israel has been seared by the experience recently by seeing democracy elect their enemies – you’ve had voters in Gaza vote for Hamas, you’ve had voters in Lebanon vote for Hezbollah. So, when people say ‘democratic movements,’ it makes some in Israel nervous,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.).
“But, overall, it’s got to be seen as a good thing where you have a big Arab state having a tumultuous uprising where it’s not ‘death to Israel’ and President Obama being burned in effigy.”
“The US and Israel both have a comfort level with a pretty bad guy – the question is do you try to buy three or four more years with this guy or do you try go get to the front of this parade for democracy and reform as uncomfortable as it is?” Weiner asked.
“To the extent that some people in Israel may think that Mubarak’s going to stick around – that’s obviously not correct. The only question is how fast he goes, what succeeds him,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler, another New York Democrat. “Some people in Israel knowing that what succeeds him may not be nice may be trying to deny the reality.”
Still, even those cheering Mubarak’s departure are clear-eyed about the possibility that what comes after him may be worse for Israel. They seem willing to take that chance.
“Depending on how things evolve, there’s a very real possibility that the government that emerges will be less willing to cooperate with Israel on a number of practical measures [but] it’s not foreordained that they would undo the Israel-Egypt peace treaty,” said Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who signed a declaration calling for free elections and an end to the decades-long state of emergency in Egypt.
Despite the vocal – and to Israelis, shocking – opposition to Mubarak in some quarters, some of those generally considered neoconservatives themselves are actually split on the question of whether it’s wise to encourage the demise of pro-Western Arab autocrats, several analysts said.
A former official at the pro-Israel group AIPAC, Steve Rosen, said the turmoil in Egypt has exposed a “debate going on beneath the surface” of the pro-Israel movement.
“The blunt reality is our alliances in the Arab world are with a thin strata of the ruling elite,” Rosen said. “We face mass movements in virtually every Muslim country that are profoundly hostile to the West and very uninterested in peace with Israel and many other things we’re interested in. When you start talking about democratization, you’re really unleashing these forces.”
Rosen says the optics of being against a shift toward democracy are poor, so those who view keeping the status quo as the wiser or more realistic course often keep quiet. “They are there, but they’re muted. It becomes hard to defend repression and say, ‘Go crack some heads.’ It’s hard to say ‘We want an undemocratic autocrat’ or ‘We don’t stand for freedom.’ The ‘freedom agenda’ is a compelling idea,” Rosen said. “It’s hard to defend Mubarak’s police.”
And indeed, while voices cheering Mubarak’s fall can be found across the political spectrum, the Israeli-style fears of the future can be found largely on the margins, and are more likely to be found in the old-line conservative – not neoconservative—foreign policy circles that sometimes clashed with the neocons inside the Bush Administration.
Bolton, one of those conservatives, urged greater caution on the White House’s part.
“I just heard [White House Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs doing everything but saying that the president in his conversation with Mubarak called on him to resign immediately. Now, we’ve got violence in the streets of Cairo. I think you’ve got to be humble and prudent in what you do here,” he said.
Bolton declined to speculate on why so few conservative voices are speaking out in favor of the status quo, or even slowing the process of change in the region, but suggested some naivete is at work.
“There sure is a lot of Wilsonianism going around,” he said. “The Wilsonians are out there trying to make the world safe for democracy. I adhere to Theodore Roosevelt’s response to that: first, we must make the world safe for ourselves. I think we have to look out for American strategic interests and the absolute foundation of that is our interest in the stability of the Egypt-Israel peace agreement of 1979.”
“If that thing collapses, the rock of stability in the region could easily come unstuck. Once that happens, it’s hard to predict the consequences,” Bolton warned.
Asked whether he thought the Bush administration’s “democracy agenda” was on the verge of being realized, or at least tested, Bolton replied: “It wasn’t my vision…..I think, mostly, we don’t know much of anything about what direction these societies will take.”
Bolton also suggested that some of the rhetoric about democracy in recent days had a pie-in-the-sky, academic tone. “I’m not interested in classroom discussions of democracy versus autocracy. Put me down in favor of democracy, but I’m worried about America and the region.”
And at least one pro-Israel Democrat in Congress shares some of this skepticism.
“The reality is this: Democracy as we think of it and democracy as it is often played out in the Middle East are two different things,” said Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley.
A longtime nemesis of the neocons, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said he didn’t care much about the stand they are taking on the unrest in Egypt and the broader region, but he couldn’t resist a quick dig.
“I don’t take neocon views very seriously, except when they result in U.S. policy which, in turn, means it turns into a disaster,” he said, a view he’s elsewhere attached to his criticism of the Iraq war.
Brzezinski, a national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and now a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he doubted the U.S. had as much control over developments as the neocon democracy advocates were suggesting. “It seems to me our power is quite limited,” he said.
But Brzezinski also said Mubarak deserves some degree of deference from the U.S., and suggested a scenario where Mubarak “ends up in some dignified fashion, which he deserves because of his cooperation with the United States and deserves probably for two-thirds of the 30 years of his rule.”
“It probably requires some sort of coalition government in the meantime to reassure the masses that wants democracy and freedom that [his pledge not to run again] is not a trick,” Brzezinski said.
Bolton said his views on the wisdom of overturning pro-Western governments like Egypt are driven in large part by a 1979 Commentary article by Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” The essay, criticizing the Carter administration’s approach to unrest in Iran and Nicaragua, helped Kirkpatrick win the job of U.N. ambassador under President Ronald Reagan.
“We went from two authoritarian governments that were pro-American to two governments that were even more authoritarian and anti-American,” Bolton observed. “Good intentions only get you so far. In a complicated, highly uncertain situation where, in this case Egypt, the U.S. has huge strategic interests, we’re rolling the dice on the Jimmy Carter theory of democracy.”
And in Jerusalem Wednesday, the criticism of American optimism that Egypt - Muslim Brotherhood and all - could find its way to secular, open democracy was even more heated.
The Israeli scholar Barry Rubin summed up the local view of Washington’s high-mindedness: “I have an idea for the prophets of Muslim Brotherhood moderation: Please experiment with the lives of people closer to your own homes.”