horse of george

Muslim Brotherhood decides to run candidate in Egyptian presidential contest after having claimed they had no such ambition. Wow. I'm shocked. When was the last time a consensus of the American intelligentsia, press or political classes got something right when it comes to the Mideast? Well... Obama does seem to have resisted the vacuous allure of his inner naive liberal idiot, ah, humanitarian by staying out of Syria - so I guess he sort of got that right.

NightWatch, in my experience one of the few open source intelligence voices to get the putative 'Arab spring' right, sums up nicely:

The irony of the fall of Mubarak is that it has untethered political activism far beyond anything imagined by the initial secular opposition and the US policy makers and others who backed them. The Westerners seem to have given no thought to the likelihood that powerful Islamic forces could not only emerge but appeal to a large portion of Egyptian voters.

Taking sides against a longtime US ally carried unforeseen risks. To paraphrase the concluding statement in Kissinger's essay on the Arab spring, what emerges from the Arab spring will determine the wisdom of the US policy approach.

What is emerging in Egypt is so viscerally hostile to US interests that the US now seems to prefer the Muslim Brotherhood to the alternative. Shatir, it turns out, is a millionaire who is well known to American diplomats. This is a study in democracy.