You know, I seem to remember a U.S. president who had this crazy idea that overthrowing Saddam Hussein might help encourage the spread of democracy in the Mideast:
Police fought protesters in two cities in eastern Egypt on Thursday and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei arrived back in the country to join a major demonstration on Friday to try to oust President Hosni Mubarak.
Security forces shot dead a Bedouin protester in the north of Egypt’s Sinai region on Thursday, bringing the death toll to five on the third day of protests inspired by unrest which toppled Tunisia’s president earlier this month.
In a sign open defiance against authoritarian rulers was spreading, police also clashed with protesters in the Arabian Peninsula state of Yemen and Gabon in West Africa.
Major protests are planned Friday:
Of course, we cannot automatically congratulate ourselves about what wonders “democracy” would bring to Egypt, as this revolutionary moment might lead to the empowerment of Islamist radicals. Mubarak is authoritarian, but I don’t know that the average Egyptian in 2011 is any more enlightened than the average Frenchman in 1789.
“The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
