Egypt Through The Rearview Mirror

One of the rituals associated with being a staffer for the president of the United States or a cabinet officer is briefing your boss to be prepared to answer any question the press is likely to ask.

Lots of smart people participate in these briefings. And if some upstart reporter asks a question no one anticipated, staffers have egg on their faces, big time.

That's what occurred to me as I listened to our top government officials, from the president on down, delivering their shaky, unconvincing and intentionally neutral responses to the most powerful calls for political change in Egypt's history.

It was as if the notion of change had been invented yesterday and came as a complete surprise to the White House.

This in itself is pretty weird in a government that expends endless energy developing contingency plans for every eventuality imaginable to thinking people.

But evidently there was no "Plan B" for the Democracy Contingency. Judging by the administration's anemic responses, the possibility that demands for freedom of speech and assembly, a free press and economic opportunity would ever develop to a point where they would have to be seriously addressed never occurred to our leaders.

I find this astonishing. It is not as if the dictatorial and cruel policies and practices of Hosni Mubarak's security apparatus were new or unknown to official Washington. They have been a big part of the Egyptian political landscape for 30 years!

Occasionally, our government has even been obliged to respond publicly to some particularly egregious transgression of somebody's human rights in the Land of the Pharaohs.

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