The Good Doctor (TGD) reminds us that he is an inveterate paternalist, if we ever could have entertained such a doubt. He is also given to breathtakingly reductionist historical snap-shots, arranged a la David Hockney, to produce a re-imagined view of the world and its occurrences in time: history.  But he reminds us that history must be made under the guiding, benevolent hand of American thinkers, like himself. That is, in sum, his argument illustrated by the telling example of the Iranian Revolution, i.e. Radical Islam. Although one could argue that the Greens of Iran represent a nascent yet suppressed, subjugated people just as the Egyptians once were. But we must move to the present moment in the Political Melodrama as constructed by TGD, our dramaturge. The dramatis personae being the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed ElBaradei and the Egyptian military: TGD being a Neo-Conservative, he cannot forgive Mr. ElBaradei’s sin of a lack of solidarity with the Weapons of Mass Destruction theology, of the lead-up to the Iraq War, although that remains unmentioned. The military are the key players in the drive for democracy and Mr. ElBaradei is a ‘menace’. This excerpt from Wikipedia is illustrative of the cause of TGD’s ill will toward Mr. ElBaradei:

‘One of the major issues during ElBaradei’s second term as the Director General of the IAEA was the Agency’s inspections in Iraq. ElBaradei disputed the US rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the time of the 2002 Iraq disarmament crisis, when he, along with Hans Blix, led a team of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. ElBaradei told the UN Security Council in March 2003 that documents purporting to show that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger were not authentic.

ElBaradei described the U.S. invasion of Iraq as "a glaring example of how, in many cases, the use of force exacerbates the problem rather than solving it."^[13] ElBaradei further said "we learned from Iraq that an inspection takes time, that we should be patient, that an inspection can, in fact, work,"^[14] and that he had "been validated" in concluding that Saddam Hussein had not revived his nuclear weapons program.^[15]

In a 2004 op-ed piece on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, in the New York Times (February 12, 2004), ElBaradei stated "We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction, yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security – and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use."^[16] He went on to say "If the world does not change course, we risk self-destruction."

            Given this enlightening historical frame, is the hostility that TGD expresses toward Mr. ElBaradei in any way surprising, given the imperatives of his ideological politicking. For a thinker with no military experience, he seems to place an inordinate amount of faith in this one branch of civil society, as the engine of reform and peaceful change.  Is this faith misplaced?  Neither he nor I can answer that question, but it is worth pondering the question of an ascendant military, in a civil society struggling to realize a republican equilibrium.  TGD supplies no empirical evidence of the condition of other civic institutions, and their ability to perform their necessary functions, in a coordinated effort at remaking the Egyptian state.