Are we looking to go back to the Cold War era policy of backing pro-US tyrants? I hope not, but that seems to be the logical extension of folks wondering who lost Egypt.
The early returns have about a 60% vote for Islamic-centric parties, with the semi-moderate Islamic Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party getting 37% and a more hard-core Nour party getting 24%. That could lead to, depending on whether F&J looks for secular allies or not, something akin to Iran's bounded democracy.
However, could we also see the F&J turn into, if I can borrow from European politics, Islamic Democrats, analoging from the Christian Democratic parties that litter the mainland European center-right. One can only hope that can happen, for if we have countries that are majority anti-western Islamic, geopolitics gets very strained very quickly.
I don't think there is a lot that the US could have done to reverse this result. Given that the were no solid political movements to back here, the Brotherhood filled that vacuum. The more secular groups didn't have the social services network of the Brotherhood to give them street cred.
Stateside, liberals might not like the Salvation Army for their old-school stance on sexuality, but there aren't too many secular alternatives to the more evangelically-inclined soup kitchens and homeless shelters. The same applies somewhat well in Egypt, where the schools and hospitals that the IB have set up gave them a big heads-up. It would have taken decades of effort for secular outsiders have set up a parallel network, even if the Mubarak regime would have allowed such a fifth column to be created.
The only good alternative to having some Islamic-flavored presence in the governments of places like Tunisia and Egypt is to have the old secular strong-men still in charge. That smacks a bit too much of the "he's an SOB, but he's our SOB" strategy we saw in the Cold War; in a way, Mubarak was a throwback to that era, where he and his predecessor Anwar Sadat opted to cast their lot with the US in the Cold War after first being in the Soviet sphere until the early 70s.
We might get some new Irans, but we might get some Islamic Democratic parties. It's worth taking a stab and seeing if we can see some sort of Islamic equivalent of "Judeo-Christian values" in Arab countries.
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