MSNBC: You Know Who's Responsible For Violence in Egypt? United States Of Course

Via Firedoglake's YouTube account, Here's one MSNBC reporter's take on who's to blame for the violence in Egypt, and no, it's not President Mubarak:



He has a point that we are somewhat backing Mubarak, but it's not exactly an easy position that President Obama and the United States is in:

So confounded is the administration by all this that you’ve got some Democratic foreign policy specialists saying Mubarak shouldn’t go while other Democratic foreign policy experts are calling for democratic presidential elections. Look at it from Obama’s perspective: If he sides with Mubarak and the regime falls, the anti-American backlash will be vicious. If he sides with the protesters and the regime falls, he’ll be blamed for having helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Better to stick to neutral, well-meaning pap about “restraint” and hope for the best, no? Which of course also explains why U.S. foreign policy towards Egypt has remained basically constant for 30 years through administrations as different as Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Given the country’s Islamist grassroots, what was the alternative? Any president who came out whole-hog for democracy would have risked destabilizing the regime and empowering fundamentalists, which would in turn have encouraged fanatics across the region and potentially reoriented Sunni governments away from the Iranian threat and back towards Israel. As I recall, that was a chief “realist” criticism of Bush’s vision for the Middle East, later illustrated by Hamas’s victory in Gaza — that a democratic process doesn’t necessarily lead to a more liberal outcome. After 9/11 and the Iranian revolution in ’79, how could any American president gamble on backing reforms that might produce a net outcome that’s more Islamist? It’s political suicide.

Given that, I can see why there would be such a reluctance on the part of the Obama Administration to openly back one side or another.

However, this reporter went a bit further with it. He seemed to imply that the protesters believe that United States is backing the Egyptian president because the police used some tear gas from American companies. That is a bit far-fetched, but considering the Anti-American sentiment and the radical Islamic belief that the US is the Great Satan or something, it might be probable that some may believe that.

However, I have to wonder if those on the left actually agree with that sentiment.