Monday, February 21, 2011

Regional Stability

A quick president's day thought for you, what would the founding fathers have thought about "regional stability"?

I am thinking about the Middle East as I ask this question. Right now it seems like the entire region is engulfed in protests. There is a massive movement underway to oust dictators that have held power for thirty plus years. Dictators in Tunisia and Egypt are already gone, Libya appears to be next. Time will tell if this leads to a better, more democratic government, or to a new dictatorship.

In the mean time the U.S. state department is doing a delicate little dance. You see we've supported most of these regimes for a long time now. We have accepted that a dictatorship in Egypt or a Monarchy in Bahrain was the best government we were going to get. They were at least stable governments that we could deal with, and trade with.

What if, instead of Obama and Clinton, we had say Thomas Jefferson doing this dance? Or how about good old Ben Franklin? Would they be talking about regional stability? Or would they be talking about principles, like freedom and democracy?

It took our country a long drawn out war to achieve our independence from a monarchy. The men and women who fought that war risked and often gave their lives for our freedom.

We talk about this all the time. It comes up regularly in political discourse. Every war we have fought since has been justified by some threat (real or imagined) to our freedom. But when it's somebodies else's freedom we are quick to throw them under the bus in the name of stability.

Instability in the Middle East is particularly threatening to Americans because of our addiction to oil. Every episode of unrest in that region leads to higher prices at the pump. That makes Americans jumpy.

Maybe it's time to change the nature of this whole discussion. Maybe we should focus less on current politics, stability and the free flow of oil. Instead let's talk about the big principles at stake here; freedom, democracy, the right to self-government, all the freedoms we have had for over two hundred years in this country. It's worked well for us, why not let the Arab world try it out?