So, just now on CNN James Woolsey, former CIA director and all around jerk, argued that the US needs to start picking winners and losers in Egypt's current revolution. He instanced the French Revolution as proof that "revolutions eat their children." As I mentioned the other day, this kind of formulation denies agency. The Jacobean's gained power because of the King's trial and retained power, in important part, because of outside intervention. The Terror was horrid, stupid, and wrong, but France was, in fact, surrounded by enemies and infiltrated by counter revolutionaries. Had Louis not been suchmediocrity too blinkered to understand the utter bankruptcy of the Old Regime's social, political, and economic institutions, who knows what would have happened. If you want to take a lesson from history, it would be to not intervene, aina?
Woolsey also claimed that the US needs to go back to the Cold War mindset and replicate CIA successes in creating a new and more democratic world. We all know of the disasters that followed on the CIA's intervention into Iran after Premier Mohammad Mossadeq' election, so no real comment here is needed. But it is important to remember, that the CIA's influence on the countries with which it interfered was nearly always benighted.
On Fox someone who used to be an undersecretary for some Republican or another was making more or less the same argument but a was bit more vehement in demanding that the US send a military man to Egypt as our new ambassador and work closely with the Egyptian army and the decents in Egyptian society to create a new democracy which will exclude the Muslim Brotherhood. This is just a terrible idea. If the democracy you create can't defuse anti-democratic elements via the ballot box what other method will or must it use?
Hands off, I say, of both history and the present because if you understood the former you'd do the latter.
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