Another great US foreign policy triumph

[Quantum Windbag]

I wonder if Egypt in 2011 - 2012 will go down on the list of our other failures were a bad government was replaced with a worse one. Anyone remember Russia in 1917, Cuba in 1959, or Iran in 1979?

In every Arab country where popular uprisings have pushed dictators out of power, Islamist parties have become the most powerful political force. That has caused anxiety among progressive Arabs and a great deal of confusion in the West. After all, the uprisings that were optimistically labeled the "Arab Spring" were supposed to herald a blossoming of freedom, democracy and equality. Do Islamist parties believe in freedom, democracy and equality?
If you ask them, you will hear a symphony of reassurances and contradictions, punctuated by an occasionally jarring declaration, as when Egypt's Salafi Nour Party proclaimed that "democracy is heresy."
If there were a surprise in Egypt's parliamentary elections, it was the strong showing of the ultraconservative Salafis, who would like to turn the social clock back by several centuries and return to the rules that governed Muslim lands in the days of the Prophet Muhammad, about 1300 years ago.
The Salafists have proposed banning women and Christians from holding office, ending alcohol sales and cutting off the hands of thieves. They call Christians and Jews "infidels."
The other electoral surprise, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, is just how badly liberal groups -- the ones who launched the uprisings and embrace the kind of democracy we would recognize in the West -- fared at the polls.

What would an Islamist Egypt mean? - CNN.com