INTERESTS…WHAT INTERESTS?!?

 

Why is it so hard for America to support the cause of the people of Egypt? Why is it so hard for them to label the octogenarian President Mubarak a dictator - as he most truly is? Why does America speak very strongly about upholding the principles of democracy and good governance but fail to see the autocracy and lousy governance of the Egyptian government? Why is it that America is so hell-bent on protecting its so-called interests that the deaths of the now close to 200 Egyptian citizens at the hands of merciless Egyptian police can do nothing to knock sense and humanity into them? What are these interests? Does it have anything to do with America’s nature of exporting human rights abuses? Is America really as democratic in mind as it claims to be? Isn’t America the biggest human rights violator? What does America stand to loose if it proclaimed its support for the repressed Egyptian citizens? Has America made a bad choice of a partner in Mubarak this time round, and is it so stubborn to admit that it has? Why is it so hard for America to hear the hue and cry of the Egyptian citizen who has suffered for a long time from bad governance, a curtailment of fundamental rights and freedoms including the right to a be in an open democratic society? Is it that hard, this time round, for ‘big-brother’ America to condemn Mubarak’s desperate and deleterious attempts to cling to power? Is America waiting for a million people to die before it comes in as was the case in Rwanda? Are the purported practices of detentions, torture and "extrajudicial killings” by Mubarak’s government in line with America’s foreign policy? Does Africa have to beg for American intervetion – even when it’s quite clear that the continued instability in Egypt is bad for not only the region but the world at large? How diferent is the egyptian ‘lotus revolution’ from the american declaration of war against a repressive Great Britain in 1812 or the Civil wars of the 1860’s? Is it that much of a wrenching struggle to balance strategic interests, including loyalty to allies in the Middle East, with its desire for political reform in the region? Is it so late (and such an inconvenience to American) to let a country embrace democracy and good governance? Does America share the opinion that the internationally celebrated Noble Peace Prize winner, Mohammad Al Baradei is a dissident – a terrorist as the Egyptian government claims? WHAT REALLY ARE THESE INTERESTS?!?

Well, at the end of these close to TWENTY-ONE QUESTIONS…..I still can’t figure out what these interests are….!!!