Some years ago, after a particularly heated exchange with US diplomats stationed in Cairo (I thought Egypt, a particularly corrupt, impoverished, and failing state, needed democracy; the US diplomats emphatically did not—precisely because they considered Egypt a particularly corrupt and failing state that was, besides, amenable to US interests), I ran across an Egyptian acquaintance. Was democracy just possibly in the works, I wondered? For instance, were there multiple candidates, ones I had never heard mentioned, that he could vote for?

His reply was accompanied a light chuckle: “Yes of course there is a choice of candidates I can vote for. I can vote for Hosni. Or I can vote for Mubarak.”

He didn’t seem at all perturbed. That was just the way things were. Then. Egypt was Egypt, the acquaintance added. It would never become a democracy, or if it did it would be a disaster. Nothing about it would really change, except the name of the head of state.

I am certain that under the regime of Syria’s late president, Hafez al-Assad, father of the Assad the US no longer supports, most of his countrymen thought much the same: nothing there would ever change. This because in 1982 Assad père effectively crushed a Sunni rebellion: at least 20,000 people were slaughtered in the city of Hama, although the president’s brother, Rifaat al-Assad, boasted that the actual death total was 38,000. Surviving rebels were killed, and the massacre took its place in history—in part because of strong rumors that hydrogen cyanide, a poison gas, had been used by government forces.

Arab strongmen, the thinking went both in the nations they ruled and abroad, are not easily dislodged. And even when they die or get dislodged, they are all too easily replaced by equally venomous and incompetent leaders: Bashar al-Assad, say, or the pusillanimous and recently deposed Mohamed Morsi. In other words, in retrospect I believe those US diplomats I once confronted in Cairo were right: democracy is not necessarily exportable across the globe. Not now, maybe not ever.

However, for some reason during the very time when democracy has consistently failed to supplant tyranny, nobody in the Obama administrations seems to realize this. From the Wall Street Journal comes word that over the last two years the US, never a country to ply the history books too much, has been desperately looking for ways to help Syrian rebels. To that end, a collection of administration attorneys known as the Lawyers Group have been advising the Obama administration on how to provide what the newspaper amusingly calls “nonlethal military equipment” to the rebel army of General Salim Idris, a person the US likes. Today.

Somehow or other, the idea of shoveling nonlethal military equipment to Idris bit the dust, supplanted by yet another bright idea. How about, said the US State Department, giving food rations and medical kits to the general?

But—and this is probably the best part of the tale—the lawyers, as lawyers will, got worried about that part too. Don’t give the medical kits to General Idris, they advised—unless his men pass them all out to unarmed civilians.

I am sure that will work.

Photo Credit: James Gordon