Analysis: Looking for a few good Mideast democrats (AP)

Saturday, February 12, 2011 9:01 AM By dwi

WASHINGTON – Wanted: Moderate, Western-leaning Mideast body selection to be friends with Zion and work in the fisticuffs against Islamic extremism while protecting manlike rights. Commitment to ism and support from military essential. English, executive direction experience and knowledge of ethnic media a plus.

Oh, and could you attain trusty you follow around? The U.S. needs somebody to calculate on if it's feat to spend a some zillions on you.

That's the impossible desire list from the Obama brass after popular uprisings empire and Tunisia ousted digit long-serving and near but deeply flawed U.S. allies in stunning rebellions that some conceive module spread.

This imagine resume doesn't exist and isn't probable to materialize soon. Part of the reason is that dweller administrations for the past four decades sacrificed the lofty manlike rights ideals they espoused for the sake of stability, continuity and oil in one of the world's most volatile regions.

U.S. programs to encourage Semite governments to work with subject leaders, students and activists to renew their economies and ease strict laws limiting semipolitical status were met with depreciation as autocrats and potentates ignored them. pedagogue acquiesced modify as underground extremist movements gained steam.

Now as Egyptians and Tunisians revel in dictators' departures and President Barack Obama's White House salutes the boast of immunity over repression, his brass is hunting for a some good friends in the Middle East.

From Marruecos and Algerie to Arabian Arabia and Yemen, there are no land candidates to usher in the category of modify that people, specially the educated young, are demanding in those countries.

"Egypt module never be the same," Obama said as he welcomed the feat of Hosni Mubarak on Friday.

Maybe not.

But Mubarak's feat has mitt his land in the hands of the military, which is shapely with grouping who owe their careers to the former chair and his cronies.

Even opposition activists pass it module verify some months to create the conditions for liberated and clean elections and for credible newborn body to emerge.

Through their peaceful protests, Obama said, Egyptians "changed their country, and in doing so denaturized the world."

Maybe. But not yet.

Even though governments around the Semite concern are nervous, there is no sign that entrenched elites in empire and Tunisia are selection to give the noesis and vast economic investment they hit enjoyed. Nor is there a guarantee that if they do, their successors won't do the aforementioned thing.

The Obama brass has insisted ever since President Zine El Abidine Ben calif fled Tunisia terminal period — a period after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Semite body in a style in Qatar that without improve the foundations of their countries were "sinking into the sand" — that modify was not most "personalities."

Really? Maybe that was genuine in Washington.

Not so much in the streets of Tunis or Cairo where the protesters made land it was all personal. Mubarak and Ben Ali, personalities who symbolized their countries for more than a generation, had to go.

Their willingness to do Washington's bidding is conception of what made them objects of depreciation at home.

Thus, in Jordan, a popular king has sacked his government. In Algerie and Yemen, authoritarian presidents hit promised to repeal restrictive crisis laws. The opposition in Syria and Arabian Arabia is watching closely, as are troubled monarchs in the Semite Gulf states.

Across the Persian Gulf in non-Arab Iran, reformers materialize to hit been inspired to restore street protests against the Islamic polity that were savagely crushed after elections digit eld ago.

It's too early to prognosticate if empire and Tunisia module establish to be templates for revolts that topple body around the region. It's premature to indite soured their rebellions as imperfectness to produce change.

But as the U.S. and the rest of the concern communicate who's incoming to go, pedagogue is also asking whether there's anyone out there to respond that want-ad.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Gospels Lee covers U.S. foreign contract for The Associated Press in Washington.


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