And his name wasn’t Barack Obama – from Commentary:
…It’s worth comparing what is happening in Egypt with what happened in the Philippines during the Reagan presidency.
In his book An American Life, Reagan writes about how Ferdinand Marco had stolen an election and that an uprising of Filipinos on behalf of Corazon Aquino, the legitimate winner, was inevitable.
On February 23, Reagan was at Camp David and told that Marcos and a loyal general, Fabian Ver, had amassed a force of tanks and troops to attack army units of two military leaders who had resigned from the Marcos government and given their support to Aquino. Ver’s tanks were turned back by hundreds of thousands of civilians — “but the next time,” Reagan wrote, “the result might be huge casualties.”
Reagan drafted an appeal to Marcos not to use force and attended a meeting in the Situation Room on February 23, 1986. “We agreed that it was inevitable that Marcos would have to give up power,” Reagan wrote. “He no longer had the popular support to remain in office. … Everyone agreed that we had to do everything possible to avoid bloodshed in Manila; we didn’t want to see it come down to a civil war. I also wanted to be sure we did not treat Marcos as shabbily as our country had treated another former ally, the shah of Iran. At the same time, I knew it was important to start off with a good relationship with the new government of the Philippines.”
On February 24th Reagan noted that Marcos would have to be told to step down, some negotiations went on about what would happen and on the 25th, Marcos and family presented themselves at the then-US airbase in the Philippines and out the dictator went. The situations are not, of course, exact – but here we have Reagan acting with courage and conviction, not wanting to harm a man who had been a loyal ally yet understanding that a new day was dawning. Obama has been floundering around trying to figure out if he should stick with Mubarak or go with revolution.
There is an indecisiveness in American policy these days; no hard center – nothing which you can identify as an “Obama Doctrine”. With Reagan it was “not one more square inch falls to communism”; with Bush the Younger it was “freedom is God’s gift to mankind”. What is it for Obama? Given this, we’re already starting to see us getting the short end of the stick in Egypt – the regional tyrants are not pleased with us while the revolutionaries are increasing the anti-American rhetoric. We stand to lose friends on both sides of the equation.
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