David Brooks and Leon Wieseltier, whom I'll politely call "historically neo-conservative" commentators, are singing Kumbaya and shouting whatever is Arabic for "Right on!" to Egyptians who are pressing bravely for democracy and Hosni Mubarak's departure.
At least one might think so, reading Brooks in the New York Times and Wieseltier in The New Republic. They aren't actually there in Cairo with the demonstrators, of course. But they do sound amazingly like liberal Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is in Egypt praising the movement for democracy. All agree that Obama hasn't done enough to oust Mubarak and hearten the people.
Huh? This from Brooks and Wieseltier, who've long countenanced Mubarak and his regime without a murmur? If it was just them, it wouldn't matter. But they're exemplars of a mindset that endangers Egypt, Israel, and the United States, especially when it's opportunistically on the side of what's best in all three.
Egyptians, Brooks informs us piously, are no different than Russians, Ukrainians, and South Africans in their quest for dignity. True. Yet Brooks seems bizarrely out of character, as if he were channeling The Young Rascals: "All the world over, it's so easy to see, people everywhere just wanna be free!"
Wieseltier, less rapturous, decides that Obama is hesitating because he's still recovering from Liberal Iraq-War Syndrome and We Unjustly-Overthrew-Mossadegh Syndrome and is taking the wrong lessons from history. Although "the rebellion [in Egypt] is still maddeningly obscure, and [Obama] must be careful," that only makes his "support for the democratizers of Egypt more urgent," Wieseltier advises us.
He even quotes Kristof quoting demonstrators craving American support. Tahrir Square is Tienanmen; all it needs is a visit from the real Statue of Liberty, instead of a Chinese demonstrator's poignantly hoisting a model. But I am not making light of the upheavals in the Arab world. I am observing the upheavals in neo-conservatives' minds.
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