Obama backs democracy in Egypt.
Ever since tens of thousands of protesters converged on Tahrir Square in Cairo for the first Day of Revolution exactly 10 months ago, the Obama administration has struggled to strike the right balance between democracy and stability. In the early morning hours on Friday, President Obama came out on the side of the Arab street, issuing a call for the Egyptian military to quickly hand over power to a civilian, democratically elected government.In so doing, the president opened up a litany of risks, exposing a fault line between the United States and the Egyptian military which, perhaps more than any other entity in the region, has for 30 years served as the bulwark protecting a critical American concern in the Middle East: the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. - Helene Cooper
Ultimately, it's hard to see what choice the administration had. At the end of the day, it's not like the U.S. could hold back a democratic tide in Egypt if it wanted to, and why should Washington align itself with a military junta when it doesn't have to? To the extent any new civilian (or Islamist) regime in Egypt wants to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel, it will pay a lot higher price than the $1.5 billion in U.S. aid.
