Kai Bird: Obama's "Shah Problem"
[A Pulitzer prize-winning historian, Kai Bird's memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award.]
President Barack Obama has a "Shah problem" in Egypt. Recent events in Egypt recall the street protests of 1978 in Tehran when President Jimmy Carter had to decide whether to remain loyal to the Pahlavi regime, a long-standing American-backed dictatorship—or whether the time had come to abandon the Shah and support a popular uprising demanding human rights and democracy. Carter tried to have it both ways, modulating his support for the Shah, calling for political liberalization, and warning the Shah against the use of state violence against unarmed protesters. Obama seems to be following the same script, and the results may well turn out to be equally fraught with unintended consequences.
The 30-year regime of Gen. Hosni Mubarak is finished. Last week's events show that Mubarak has lost even the veneer of legitimacy. As in Tehran in 1978, a consensus has emerged from the Egyptian street that this pharaoh must go. A broad coalition of liberal human rights activists, genuine social democrats, old Nasserites, and Muslim Brotherhood advocates are supporting the spontaneous but politically inchoate street uprisings across the country. It was a similar coalition of secular liberals and religiously inspired political activists that brought down the Shah in February 1979—and only months later did Ayatollah Khomeini and his Shi'ite clerics forge a theocratic dictatorship....
Read entire article at Slate
President Barack Obama has a "Shah problem" in Egypt. Recent events in Egypt recall the street protests of 1978 in Tehran when President Jimmy Carter had to decide whether to remain loyal to the Pahlavi regime, a long-standing American-backed dictatorship—or whether the time had come to abandon the Shah and support a popular uprising demanding human rights and democracy. Carter tried to have it both ways, modulating his support for the Shah, calling for political liberalization, and warning the Shah against the use of state violence against unarmed protesters. Obama seems to be following the same script, and the results may well turn out to be equally fraught with unintended consequences.
The 30-year regime of Gen. Hosni Mubarak is finished. Last week's events show that Mubarak has lost even the veneer of legitimacy. As in Tehran in 1978, a consensus has emerged from the Egyptian street that this pharaoh must go. A broad coalition of liberal human rights activists, genuine social democrats, old Nasserites, and Muslim Brotherhood advocates are supporting the spontaneous but politically inchoate street uprisings across the country. It was a similar coalition of secular liberals and religiously inspired political activists that brought down the Shah in February 1979—and only months later did Ayatollah Khomeini and his Shi'ite clerics forge a theocratic dictatorship....