StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/06/AR2011030602928.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

‘Why Egypt has to be the U.S. Priority in the Middle East’ is both the title of an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan and Michele Dunne,dated March 7,2011, and an imperative to political action for the United States. They present a set of policy prescriptions that seem mild, even progressive in consideration of the Egyptian Revolution and the resultant ‘Arab Spring’. But might a closer look prove illuminating? Could we take a more critical look at the source of data or at the least the opinions of Senators McCain and Lieberman, as representative of a certain mind set or even a set of preconceptions regarding America’s place in the arena of global politics, with a focus on the  ‘Middle East’? I would say that McCain and Lieberman represent an unapologetic hawkishness!  Mr. Kagan’s  own dubious record precedes him: The Project for a New American Century does not represent anything but a kind of Neo-imperialism in its most virulent form, while not determinative of the ideas presented, it sets the stage of argument, in the  intellectual place of an unapologetic American Paternalism, even aggressive militarism.

Also,is the notion of the implementation of ‘Free Market economic philosophy’ compatible with the reality of readily available and cheap bread, a staple in the Egyptian diet? Or will the ‘Free Market Ideology’ prove to be an unwelcome practice, representative of a Western secular moral bankruptcy? Is the new atmosphere of the post-revolution simply setting the stage for an Egyptian, even a Cosmopolitan Islamic answer to the demonstratively hollow and self-seeking nature of Western Political Modernism? The political position of the ‘Working Group on Egypt’ is centered on American interests not on the interests of the Egyptian People, and their drive for a self-defined pluralism based on the universal aspiration of freedom: exercised in the actuality of a specific,indigenous context.