Given the disastrous course of Egypt's transition since President Mubarak stepped down from office in February 2011, many commentators are quick to claim 20/20 hindsight.
In a recent Washington Post article, David Ignatius makes a tenuous case for how Hillary Clinton "was right on Egypt" by urging caution at the beginning of the Tahrir protests and suggesting that President Mubarak be allowed to remain in office to oversee a peaceful transition. Never mind whether the millions of protesters and the Egyptian military would have gone for that.
The truth is, by the time the 2011 protests rolled around, the window for the kind of "orderly transition" Ignatius champions in Hillary's name had closed. Ignatius quotes from an interview with Frank Wisner, a former U.S. Ambassador now closely associated with authoritarian Arab governments, saying that five years ago, "We ought to have been calling for an orderly transition, rather than telling Mubarak to 'get out of town, get out of government' ... We need a responsible path to stability and evolution, not revolution."
This might have been a real possibility if U.S. officials had acted much sooner, long before the first months of 2011, to encourage President Mubarak to set in motion a responsible path to transition. For example, Secretary Clinton and the Obama Administration could have urged President Mubarak to use the 2010 parliamentary elections as a way to allow responsible opposition political forces to organize and even exercise some power. In reality, the United States was silent and those elections turned out to be some of the most brazenly rigged of the Mubarak era, setting the stage for his downfall.
The Bush administration had arguably an even better opportunity to persuade President Mubarak to step down and oversee an orderly transition in 2005 at the height of the Freedom of Agenda, when President Bush and Secretary Condoleezza Rice were strongly calling on Egypt to implement political reform. At the time, authoritarian Arab leaders were taking notice after the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It's not hard to imagine how the Bush Administration could have flattered and inveigled Mubarak to stand down in 2005, anointing him as the U.S.-blessed father of democracy in the Arab world, ensuring him a glittering retirement as an elder statesman -- he could have been awarded a Nobel Prize. But no such effort was made.
The sad truth is that U.S. administrations from Reagan to Obama have been wrong on Egypt. The prevailing protocol has been to make deals with authoritarian leaders in Cairo who cooperate on certain U.S. interests in return for lax pressure for democratic change. This trade-off of human rights for stability has not worked: Egypt's repression has led to extremism, destabilizing the country, the rest of the region, and the world.
Pretending that U.S interests are well served by continuing the failed practice of making amoral deals with dictators is dangerous. Rewriting history, as Ignatius and others seem to want to, should not obscure this vital, hard-earned lesson.