“Yes, we can”/No we won’t: The end of Pax Hillary

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/11/11

Mohamed Elbaradei, who has spent almost all of his waking life on American soil and sees New York, where he taught and worked, as the center of the world, has finally come up with a slogan to unite the Egyptian masses: “Yes, we can.” It does have a catchy ring. The Tunisian revolution, we writes this morning in the New York Times, “sent a powerful psychological message, ‘Yes, we can.’” It is clear to Elbaradei who the true leader of Egypt is, American President Barack Obama. But things took a turn yesterday when Hosni Mubarak, who actually lives in Egypt, refused to yield to his demands. President Obama virtually ordered him to step down. Leon Panetta, chief of the CIA, announced that Mubarak would follow the directive without hesitation last night. But he did not. Mubarak’s slogan might be, “No, we won’t.”

Elbaradei accepts American cultural dominance of the world. He wants to be America’s regent in Egypt. Mubarak does not. What is interesting from a cultural and diplomatic point of view right now is that Mubarak’s Egypt joins a list of countries that have sent messages that they do not consider themselves to be pseudo-Americans; secondary appendages of American will: Israel, China, Germany, France and any number of rising economies throughout the world in the past year. What we see in Egypt could well be a continuing unraveling of American influence in the world.

The horde plays to the camera and the vast American/global audience. It is a model designed by General Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam and has been used successfully since almost everywhere. What could be unraveling here is not so much Egypt as Hillaryworld, the one-world awakening in the early 1990s; a world not of actual places made of earth, but in Elbaradei’s phrase, “virtual space” where Bill is the new celestial Suleiman, hovering in the stratosphere up there with Mistress Andromeda. It is George Soro’s world; a world in which everyone is a kind of American; an American by degree. Nothing else exists.

I would like to see Mubarak or whoever takes his place, send Omar Suleiman direct to Israel first off and begin discussions there. It would advance that great, historic moment in 1979 when Anwar Sadat first signed a peace treaty with Israel. There is more to be done with that although there is no braver man today yet to do it. It should seek to find that eternal world of places that existed before Obama, before T.E. Lawrence, before the United Nations made Egypt a marker on an American chess board. There are holy and historic places that still exist underneath. Because nothing in human consciousness runs deeper that the relationship between Egypt and Israel. And nothing is as ephemeral as the Pax Hillary.