I've been at CPAC all day, but my mind has been preoccupied with events in Egypt. There's no guarantee that the military, now that Hosni Mubarak has stepped down, will be willing to relinquish its own power when the time comes. At the same time, what happened today is nothing short of historic--the most populous Arab country in the world overthrew the 30 year reign of a dictator through strategic nonviolence. This was not lost on the president in his statement:
This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have inspired us, and they've done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence -- not terrorism, not mindless killing -- but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more. And while the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can't help but hear the echoes of history -- echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice. As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana while trying to perfect his own, "There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom." Those were the cries that came from Tahrir Square, and the entire world has taken note.
These aren't just words. When DNI James Clapper said that Egypt was an opportunity to "change the narrative," he was referring specifically to the idea at the center of the jihad declared by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, that the only way to topple the oppressive dictators of the Muslim world was through violence and terrorism. Egyptians proved the extremists wrong today, and while it's only the first battle in a longer war for democracy, there can be no question that the world knows again the power of strategic nonviolence as a tool for freedom.
In its decades of murder, terrorism and violence against the West and against Muslims, al-Qaeda and their allies have achieved nothing even distantly resembling the triumph the Egyptian people have secured in the past few weeks, and the Tunisian people before them. Because of what happened today, they are closer to the brink of annihilation than ever before.
(Flickr/AJE)
