The uprising in Egypt on Tuesday is of infinitely greater importance than the goon show staged by the corporate-lackey-in-chief and the great mooing herd of cud-chewers in Congress the same night. For decades, the remarkably brutal -- and rottenly stagnant -- dictatorship in Egypt has been one of linchpins of Washington's never-ending effort to "project dominance" over the Middle East. If the Cairo regime falls to a popular revolution, it will send shock waves all through the world-spanning tentacles of the American Empire.
The dictatorship has received tens of billions of dollars in American military "aid" -- most of which, of course, circulates back to the coffers of war profiteers in the States -- along with other bribes for Egypt's ruling clique to buy their obedience to Washington's wishes. Cairo responded by making itself a quiet partner in the great game of murderous deceit that America and Israel have played for years in the so-called "peace process" with the Palestinians -- a deadly sham now being exposed in great detail through the leak of diplomatic cables by al-Jazeera and the Guardian, going back several years.
(Here, in one particularly hair-raising release, Secretary of State Condi Rice suggests shipping Palestinian refugees off to South America -- a macabre echo of the Nazi's early plan to resettle Europe's Jews in Madagascar. This is how our high and mighty really think. This is the moral abyss in which they operate, behind the soaring rhetoric of their goon shows.)
A truly free Egypt would pose a serious challenge for America's Dominationists. It would also without doubt be a target for the long-established bipartisan American policy option which George W. Bush called "the path of action." This could be overt intervention, some hot proxy action from Israel, or, more likely, various covert measures (terrorism, subversion, economic warfare, etc.) aimed at destabilizing an independent Egypt. That this would plunge the region into even more instability -- and empower violent religious extremists -- is of no moment whatsoever to our illustrious goons. War, fear, chaos and terror are meat and drink to the thoroughly militarized American power structure; it thrives on them, it can't exist without them.
