But not every replacement lining up to succeed Mubarak deserves to win (tip to Instapundit):
[Over] a million Egyptians turned out in Tahrir Square last Friday to cheer the vile anti-Semitic Sunni cleric Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had been exiled by Mubarek, and who espouses the fundamentalist Islamic view that Jews must live as Dhimmis under Islamic control.
America and the West needs to stay engaged to help guide Egyptians to elect good men. Remember, the desire for freedom is surely genuine. But after living their whole lives under autocracy, they need our help to teach them what freedom really means:
Yes, some protesters--the members of the Twittering Class that we identify with--want something called "democracy." Others don't want that. Those anti-democratic protesters simply want Mubarak out and we have no obligation to include these people in the new order that is being created before our eyes in the mistaken notion that freedom requires all opposition forces to replace the existing government. ...
And even for those who want democracy, not having lived under it they may have no idea what that aspiration really means as a practical matter.
We still have a lot of work to do. With Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tunisia, and Egypt already on our plate with other candidates teetering in the wings, we need the help of our democratic friends to achieve anything that lasts.
UPDATE: A useful reminder from Stratfor that the unrest in the Arab world is not a jihadi plot. Jihadis will try to exploit the problem, naturally. But that doesn't mean they will succeed. We should try to exploit the unrest to achieve better governments in the region, too:
We do not see these revolutions as a vast conspiracy by radical Islamists to take control of the region. A conspiracy that vast is easily detected, and the security forces of the individual countries would have destroyed the conspiracies quickly. No one organized the previous waves, although there have been conspiracy theories about them as well. They arose from certain conditions, following the example of one incident. But particular groups certainly tried, with greater and lesser success, to take advantage of them.
In this case, whatever the cause of the risings, there is no question that radical Islamists will attempt to take advantage and control of them. Why wouldn’t they? It is a rational and logical course for them. Whether they will be able to do so is a more complex and important question, but that they would want to and are trying to do so is obvious. They are a broad, transnational and disparate group brought up in conspiratorial methods. This is their opportunity to create a broad international coalition. Thus, as with traditional communists and the New Left in the 1960s, they did not create the rising but they would be fools not to try to take advantage of it. I would add that there is little question but that the United States and other Western countries are trying to influence the direction of the uprisings. For both sides, this is a difficult game to play, but it is particularly difficult for the United States as outsiders to play this game compared to native Islamists who know their country.
But while there is no question that Islamists would like to take control of the revolution, that does not mean that they will, nor does it mean that these revolutions will be successful.
The revolts aren't some gift from the democracy gods. They are opportunities to make things better or worse.
Work the problems, people. Don't get giddy or fatalistic.
