Paul Sheehan, David Burchell, and sssh, whatever you do, don't mention the United States ...

(Above: there's nothing like an irrelevant visual cliche to warm the heart).

It took some doing, but Paul Sheehan manages it nicely in We don't need another pharaoh after Mubarak's 30-year reign.

In much the same way as we've been shushed and told to avoid mentioning climate change - such an alarmist, warmist thing to do, and so upsetting to genteel members of the commentariat - so indeed it is entirely inappropriate to mention generous US aid, military and political support for the Mubarak regime over many years.

Naturally Sheehan is only too happy and too ready to maintain the silence, and so he begins his piece with stories of assassinations and Islamic evil doing, starting with the killing of Sadat by Islambouli.

In a classical and reductionist way, it seems all of Egypt's misfortunes can be lumped on to one man:

Egypt, and the entire Arab world, is still paying a heavy price for the actions of Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli. Under corrupt military rule, half of Egypt's population lives on subsistence income. Economic growth has been stagnant for a decade. Government debt has ballooned. Income inequality is extreme. Government control of the economy is excessive. State bureaucracy is incoherent. A quarter of young men are unemployed. Sixty per cent of women are unemployed. The police and internal security are heavy-handed, as was seen openly in Cairo last week.

Uh huh. And all because of one man.

Now I realise how utterly I wasted my time studying the many and various causes of world war one. I could have just handed in a thesis contained within a single page. Or a paragraph. Heck within a single sentence. It was Gabrilo Princip wot did it, and Europe and the entire world paid a heavy price for his actions in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

Such an appealing and simple theory, and so abjectly simple minded. In much the same way as Sheehan manages to distort the downfall of the Shah of Iran.

The Middle East's only previous experience of a grassroots revolt was in Iran, where what began as a pluralist revolution quickly became subjugated by Islamist terror.

Pluralist? As the wiki on the Iranian Revolution makes clear, and sadly for liberals and secularists - always the ones to cop abuse from commentariat conservative commentators, whether in Iran or Australia - it favoured conservatism and theocracy from the start:

The revolution was unusual for the surprise it created throughout the world: it lacked many of the customary causes of revolution (defeat at war, a financial crisis, peasant rebellion, or disgruntled military); produced profound change at great speed; was massively popular; overthrew a puppet regime heavily protected by a lavishly financed army and security services; and replaced a modernising monarchy with a theocracy based on Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists (or velayat-e faqih). Its outcome — an Islamic Republic "under the guidance of an extraordinary religious scholar from Qom" — was, as one scholar put it, "clearly an occurrence that had to be explained.

Well don't go to Sheehan for explanations, keep reading the wiki. And if you want a discussion of the United States part in the affair, why not head off to read David Rieff's The New Republic: The Failure of US Aid in Egypt. US$28 billion since 1975 - others claim as much as US$60 billion - and US$1.3 billion a year in military aid, give or take the odd F-16 or Apache helicopter.

Meanwhile, while all this lavish aid was being tossed around like cheap whiskey in a speakeasy, and the United States and Israel's strategic interests were being taken care of, and while a corrupt dictatorial government was propped up, what was happening to the people?

... according to the U.N. Human Development Index, Egypt ranks one hundred and first, between Mongolia and Uzbekistan. In the context of the Arab Middle East, it ranks tenth, below not just rich countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but behind Libya, Jordan, and Algeria as well. According to Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations, over the past decade, Egypt has experienced rising income inequality while failing to address root poverty. Ordinary Egyptians, she writes, simply not feel they were "reaping the benefits of [their country's economic] expansion." Food prices are rising to levels not seen since the global food crisis of 2007-2008, a recent World Bank study showed that the higher educational system is doing a very poor job of producing qualified graduates, and, whatever their qualifications, unemployment among the young is well over 30 percent nationally.

And yet, go to USAID's website and find the Egypt page and you will read that, "For three decades, the United States and Egypt have collaborated closely on economic development and regional stability." You will also read the grotesque claim that "USAID has helped Egypt become a "success story in economic development." More specifically, the site claims particular success in improving the quality of education, and, grotesquely, in light of recent events, taken the credit for having strengthened "the administration of justice," improved "access to justice for disadvantaged groups," and promoted "decentralized governance and more competitive electoral processes."

I quoted Rieff at length, because there's more insight in his thumbnail sketch than in Sheehan's entire speech. And it's not just Rieff who's pointing out the elephant in the room:

... in recent years the large amount of aid earmarked for the military, and the relatively low sums supporting civilian aid, have attracted scathing criticism from Egyptians, some of whom argue that US aid has gone to entrench a military dictator at the expense of the fledgling democracy activists. (here)

So when Sheehan wraps up his piece thus as he talks about the burden of fundamentalist Islamics and the Iranian matter ...

This is the burden the people on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria are carrying, in addition to the burden of Mubarak, the 82-year-old plutocrat, with his multi-billions, his corrupt government, his 30 years of ''emergency rule'', and his grandiose notion that his son, Gamal, 47, could replace him as president. Another pharaoh was the last thing Egypt needed.

... does he bother to answer who was shoring up the 82 year old plutocrat or who was shovelling billions into his government, with much of it being shovelled back to US contractors, with tidy slices off the top?

As for the 'another pharaoh' routine, what was the United States' understanding? And here we can turn to wikileaks:

Despite incessant whispered discussions, no one in Egypt has any certainty about who will eventually succeed Mubarak nor under what circumstances. The most likely contender is presidential son Gamal Mubarak (whose profile is ever-increasing at the ruling party); some suggest that intelligence chief Omar Soliman might seek the office, or dark horse Arab League Secretary-General Amre Moussa might run. Mubarak’s ideal of a strong but fair leader would seem to discount Gamal Mubarak to some degree, given Gamal’s lack of military experience, and may explain Mubarak’s hands off approach to the succession question. Indeed, he seems to be trusting to God and the ubiquitous military and civilian security services to ensure an orderly transition. (here)

In much the same way as the United States seemed to be trusting to Mubarak. Or God ...

All this for geo-political strategic reasons, and to satisfy Israel, but sssh, whatever you do, don't mention Israel near a commentariat commentator. It only upsets them. So let's take a couple of random thoughts from Rieff:

Did Washington not think that a situation in which it was the Muslim Brotherhood that provided a huge part of the social safety net in urban Egypt was untenable? Apparently not. Perhaps it was all that "wise counsel" they were getting from President Mubarak ...

You get what you pay for, I suppose. Cynicism aside, this is not only a moral scandal, it is a geo-strategic blunder of huge proportions.

But then the United States has been there before, with the Shah of Iran. Not that you'll read about that in a Paul Sheehan column ...

And speaking of commentariat columnists with their heads up their bums, David Burchell chimes in nicely with No easy ride to freedom in Cairo ...

Rampant with prolixity, replete with the usual pompous asinine verbosity - is there any way we can also fit in wordiness and long windedness? - Burchell attempts to delve into events in Egypt, and he too - hurrah, hurrah - manages to devote an entire column to the question without any significant discussion of the role of the United States.

Instead we get talk of tousle-haired, scarf-wearing romantic participant-observers in the 1848 events in Paris, or blather about the funereal countenance of Klemens von Metternich and the world as a chimera, intoned with austere monkish zeal, and random nonsense about cynicism and idealism.

At the very end of Burchell's orotund myopia, we come to the nub of it, so far as Burchell can tell:

As we know from WikiLeaks, Washington has been communicating with the student opposition since at least the end of last year and has been endeavouring to arrange an orderly transition to a freer electoral process this September.

The United States on side with the students since the end of last year? In which alternate von Metternich universe?

It's such a distorted assessment of the United States' role as to suggest Burchell's preferred lollies must be humbugs, with a decent dose of peppermint. Even now, as Egypt collapses, and US Senators Speak Out on Egypt, the US senators can match Burchell's humbuggery:

Senators from both major political parties said Tuesday that U.S. aid to Egypt has been money well spent, and showed no inclination to alter or cut off that aid - at least for now.

Take that student leaders.

Bemusingly - as best they can and with wariness regarding the fundamentalist Islamic hordes - Sheehan, in his anti-pharoaic way, and Burchell with his small careful steps of hope, are strangely optimistic.

I guess having talked the democratic talk - and having watched the United States bomb the hell out of Iraq to implement it - they must now walk the democratic walk, their only refuge whipping up alarm and fear about Islamic fundamentalists along the way.

But if I happened to a secular Egyptian reading their tosh, which ignores the intricate decades old dance between Egypt, the United States and Israel, and the actual living conditions in Egypt, and the way the west looked the other way, though it was well known by anybody who cared to look for the last two decades, I suspect I might continue in a state of blind rage, throw open the windows, or take to the streets, and announce that I was as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore ...

Would it be wrong to mis-quote Sheehan from his Coptic Christians piece?

Throughout Western Europe and Australia, the right, commentariat commentators, and the United States have consistently made common cause with dictators perceived to be useful, an embrace of reactionary intolerance made without a shred of irony, and dropped when appropriate without a shred of irony ...

Not really. So it goes ...

(Below: a cartoon about General Charles Gordon and Khartoum. Those were the days, when the British ran the show in North Africa, and things went like clockwork. Admittedly without a mainspring some of the time, or with the general's head on a pike, but so it goes. Found here).