The company we keep

There are some jobs that are so difficult and stressful that I wouldn’t want to have them no matter how much they paid. College football coach would be one such job. President of the United States would be another. And frankly I wouldn’t want to be in Hilary Clinton’s shoes right now, either. Imagine sitting in the Oval Office this morning while President Obama looks across his desk at you with a furrowed brow and asks, “okay Hil, what should we do about this Egypt business?”

Once again, we find ourselves in an awkward position because we have chosen to play ball with a government that does not share our views on human rights and democratic principles because it suited our purposes at the time. The Mubarak government has been critical to what we consider stability in the Middle East with its hard line stance against terrorist groups and its relatively cordial relationship with Israel, so we in the past we chose to look the other way when they behaved badly.

It’s not the first time we’ve compromised our principles for pragmatic reasons (Saddam Hussein was on our “friends list” before we later declared him to be part of the Axis of Evil) and I fear that it won’t be the last. And now there are thousands of Egyptians marching in the streets demanding a voice in their own government and we are standing on the sidelines with our hands in our pockets not sure what to say or do.

Actually, Hilary’s job may not be that difficult. Her answer to the “what should we do?” question is probably a shrug of the shoulders, because there probably isn’t much we can do now except hope for the best. The best in this case would be a transition to a new, less autocratic government that doesn’t hate us and doesn’t want to wipe Israel off the map. A fire-breathing Muslim theocracy in Egypt would make the world a much more dangerous place for Israel and (by association) for the United States.

So how should the average American, who doesn’t live and breathe world events, feel about what’s going on in Cairo, and the part we’ve played in it? For me, the short answer is “not too good.”

I’m no expert on foreign policy, but I do understand that we have to engage all sorts of governments and that most of them aren’t representative democracies, much as we would like for them all to be. We can’t realistically have an antagonistic relationship with every “bad” government without regard to numerous extenuating circumstances.

And yet I can’t help feeling that we are not measuring up to our own standards somehow. It seems to me that in the decision matrix that we use to separate or friends from our enemies on the world stage, the fact that a government imprisons and tortures its political opponents or executes people for practicing their chosen religion ought to figure more prominently than it does right now.

It’s like if you were looking for a good mechanic to fix your car, and you found a guy that knows his way around a transmission but you also found out that he regularly beats his wife and kids. Would you do business with that guy? And if you did, would you sleep well at night?

Whether you’re talking about a person, a business, or a government, you are to some extent known for the company you keep. Our cozy relationship with the dictatorships in places like Egypt, China, and Saudi Arabia says something about our national values. It says, I think, that we often put practicality ahead of our principles.

Maybe that is something you have to do to get along in this world. Or maybe that is just what we like to tell ourselves.