The epidemic of democratic yearning that has erupted in the Arab world is not good for the United States. America has too often been on the wrong side of the human rights struggle, and now, in a region of enormous strategic importance, we face unpredictable consequences and could end up paying for our long-standing hypocrisy in foreign affairs.
U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama, have long said all the right words about the importance of democracy. But Muslims, Christians and Jews from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Baghdad know that we haven’t really meant it. We drew uncomfortably close to Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria — and let’s not even start listing the tyrants further east in the former Soviet “stans.”
Superpowers have a tendency to side with authoritarian regimes that support their objectives — or at least pretend to. Democracies are too unreliable, too complicated, require a lot of maintenance and tend to challenge assumptions. “We preach democracy and then prop up despots,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, bluntly told The Root. “We do it all the time.” More.