An interesting question. It is unknown as to whether “propping up” Mubarak would have kept him in power.
To any extent, we weren’t propping him up. We gave Egypt aid, which he used, but we still give that now.
Obama threw Mubarak under the bus when he denounced his legitimacy as the leader of Egypt, and from then on, he lost the will to fight. The ones he thought he could always trust had abandoned him. It reminds me of what the British did to Augusto Pinochet after he helped them in the Falklands War with Argentina. Total betrayal.
Mubarak was a dictator. He inherited his presidency from Anwar Sadat, and Egypt had never had democracy at any point during its history. Despite this, he has been unfairly smeared by our Lame-Stream media as the equivalent of Saddam Hussein. Far from it, Mubarak saved his nation from itself. He saw the radical elements within Egypt and he knew that they were powerful. If they managed to seize control, they would destroy the country. They would govern as the Taliban had in Afghanistan, smashing women’s rights, and persecuting the minority Coptic Christians. They would also likely plunge Egypt into another war with Israel (who would have guessed?). He didn’t want that for his country, so he was forced to rule with an iron fist. He exiled, imprisoned and killed radical Muslims, but he didn’t try to ethnically cleanse a particular group like Saddam did, and he never created special prisons for torturing children. He may have enjoyed perks as president, as all dictators do, but he was not especially brutal or unfair in his rule. This being said, his economic policies were disastrous and could not survive the ravages of the global recession and the effect it had on the world markets.
He’s gone now, and we have the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leader has granted himself greater powers than Mubarak had, and is engaging in all of the things Mubarak feared.
Whether or not it would have changed the outcome of the revolution is secondary. As a matter of principle, for the good of the world, our own interests, and looking to the future, the interests of Egypt, Obama should not have asked Mubarak to step down.
I agree with most of what you said. Well written. As far as asking him to step down, I believe that was inconsequential since the momentum was already going that way. You have to work with what you have.