The Egyptian Crisis - A Question of Morals

There's been a lot of coverage on the news lately about the uprisings throughout the Middle East, most especially in Egypt . Many of the commentators have been making doomsday prognostications of a repeat of the Iranian revolution, claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood may rise to power in the turmoil. I've also heard many making excuses for America 's support of Mubarik saying things like, "better to support a dictator than to have chaos".

Let me make myself absolutely clear. America has a clearly stated set of over-arching collective morals. Our forefathers proclaimed those morals loudly and boldly to the whole world saying:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

This statement put for the first time to pen something that every person has always known instinctually in their inner core. This incontrovertible truth must be our answer in every such foreign policy case. To see success, we must be true to our core beliefs and live that bold and unprecedented truth to its fullest.

All too often we've side-stepped these principles and paid the grim price. We've supported one despot after another out of expedience. We've allowed an enemy of our enemy to be our friend. We must never do that again. A deal with a devil inevitably and invariably ends up costing you your soul. We have paid that dire price far too frequently. Those who wish to harm this country from within have often used this sort of expedient relationship to point out how base and evil America is. We are indeed imperfect and must learn finally and at long last from the error or our ways.

America must always stand on the side of liberty. Expedient deals with dictators may get you what you want in the short term. It may prevent a war now that would make your political waters perilous, but to avoid the short-sighted mistakes of the past our stance should always be that self determination is the inalienable right of all men.

Sure, the people may choose poor leaders (Heck even we have elected our current disastrous president). Some time ago, a frequent critic of mine cynically pointed out the results of the election in the Gaza strip where Hamas came to power as an example of how my belief was flawed. These things do happen, but we must support the will of the people and fight to preserve their right to choose. We must do this because while the fervor of the moment may lead the masses to a poor choice, inevitably free men will choose peace. So if they elect a dictator, we must oppose the ability of that elected dictator to prevent being removed when the people change their minds. Our only response to such an unpropitious choice in leadership is to insist on preserving their freedom to choose more appropriate leadership once they have tired of the predations of the thugs they've chosen and to isolate those governments we disagree with to hasten the people's reawakening.

Modern progressive liberals see this as their core conundrum. They despise the fact that men are fallible and believe that an all-powerful government is the only way to dispense with the fallibility of man and thus protect us from ourselves. They strive to create perfection with more regulation and ever more complicated and convoluted laws intended to address every odd edge case. But that government too is a fallible construct of fallible men. Chasing perfection is a fool's errand. Instead I choose to believe that the majority of men long for peace, seek justice and are innately good and with that in mind, I cast my wholehearted support behind the notion that the fallibilities of man will come and go and that they are always best countered by allowing free men to learn from the errors of their ways.

I've heard many from the left say that we can not "impose" freedom on a place. In response to that I am going to say something that I do not often say. That stance is utterly and absolutely un-American. It flies in the face of that preeminent foundational statement of our collective morals made so many years ago. The words expressed are not that "All white men are created equal" or "All men in this country" or even "All men in this hemisphere". It states that unequivocally ALL men, wherever they may happen to exist, are created to be equals and that they have at the center of their being a right to liberty and self determination. If you seek peace, then we must strive to introduce freedom in every land and have a responsibility to impose the will of the people over every despot that constrains freedom. For only when all men are truly free will we as a species experience lasting and durable peace.