How history will judge Obama on Egypt

Editor's note: Hamid Dabashi is the author of "Iran: A People Interrupted" and the Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His most recent book is "Iran, the Green Movement and the U.S.: The Fox and the Paradox" (Zed Books, 2010).

(CNN) -- A dictator has fallen. A people are freed. The sky is the limit of their dream, and the dream of the rest of the world celebrating with them.

How will history judge President Barack Obama's response to the seismic changes that have happened in Egypt?

Observers around the globe are comparing the extraordinary events unfolding in and around Tahrir Square and the dramatic exit of Hosni Mubarak to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the collapse of the Soviet Union or alternatively to the aspirations of the protesters of Tiananmen Square.

All these metaphors can only hint at the historic magnitude of what we have been seeing unfold in front of our eyes, and not just in Egypt. And we are still coming to terms with the uprising in Tunisia and the Green Movement in Iran that followed the disputed presidential election of 2009.

There is no doubt that when one puts these three events next to each other, all in the short span of 2½ years, the old, clichéd manner in which Washington tries to understand them categorically fails.

The Obama administration's response to the Egypt revolution has been, from beginning to end, indecisive and incoherent, leading one to wonder who really minds the shop at the White House at times of crisis.

Beginning with Vice President Joe Biden supporting President Hosni Mubarak as an ally and "not a dictator," and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially saying the regime was stable down to Obama handing the Egyptian president a laundry list of what he has to do "right now" before finally applauding the cause of the victorious protesters, we are witness to a political culture that's more embarrassing to the U.S. than the WikiLeaks disclosures.

What we are dealing with is not merely a matter of "realist" and "pragmatic" policymakers trying to sustain a status quo that has resulted in catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and an evidently insoluble Arab-Israeli conflict. Far more seriously, the dominant political culture of Washington is the issue. Obama got to the White House by challenging that culture and has now become a captive of it.

The ground is shifting in one of the most vital spots on planet Earth with dizzying speed, and Washington seemed incapable of shifting its gears fast enough to catch up with it. America risks being seen as irrelevant and inconsequential to the rest of the world.

Long before the demise of Mubarak, Obama should have recognized the historic importance of what was happening in Egypt and directly addressed the Egyptian people -- acknowledging their democratic will to be free, sharing their dream for emancipation from a politics of deception and despair and anticipating the spread of that dream to other parts of the region. He should have committed his administration not to wait for the fall of the next dictator before Americans extend their hands in solidarity with a transnational uprising to achieve a better world.

Mubarak is now lost in ignominy in history. But what will American children read in their history books a decade or a century from now? How will Obama, once seen as a visionary statesman, be viewed?

When he received the Nobel Peace Prize at the outset of his presidency, I was among those who said publicly that he deserved it. So early in his career as a president, he had not done anything meaningful to lend credence to that honor. But I thought he had awakened a sense of pride, purpose and dignity among the younger generation of Americans that would commit them to contribute greatly to humanity at large. In the events of the past month in Tunisia and Cairo, he has had a gift from history to justify the prize after the fact -- but alas he did very little to show he deserved it.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Hamid Dabashi.

Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_allpolitics/~3/bOk6XNSJuKw/index.html

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Egyptian Protester Enjoys A Well-Earned Victory

The mass carnival that began Egypt's post-Mubarak era is starting to ease. Many protesters are packing up and going home for some rest after 18 days of nonstop protests. Host Scott Simon talks to Omar Mohamad, who has spent the last few weeks protesting in the streets of Cairo.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/12/133709023/Egyptian-Protester-Enjoys-A-Well-Earned-Victory?ft=1&f=1004

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Pump On: A 'Sublime' Biography Of The Human Heart

Penned by the sibling team of novelist Stephen Amidon and cardiologist Thomas Amidon, The Sublime Engine captures the story of the human heart through the world of science, history, culture and our bodies.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/12/133682160/pump-on-a-sublime-biography-of-the-human-heart?ft=1&f=1007

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Mortgage Interest Tax Break No Longer Sacred?

More economists are calling for an end to the mortgage interest tax deduction as a way to help reduce the federal deficit. But real estate professionals worry the move could put a damper on homeownership. With the housing market still shaky, it's unlikely the government will act right away.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/12/133692504/mortgage-interest-tax-break-no-longer-sacred?ft=1&f=1014

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Speaking In Defense Of Science

Although it may seem like old news, science and the teaching of science remains under attack in many parts of the country. This "anti-scientifism" is costing the United States dearly.

A country that distrusts science is condemned to move straight back to medieval obscurantism.

While many countries are working hard to educate their young about the values of science and of scientific research, in the U.S. countless people are teaching them to mistrust science and scientists, taking every opportunity to politicize and theologize the scientific discourse in ways completely incompatible with the goals and modus operandi of the scientific enterprise.

Now, many will say that they are not anti-science per se, just against the science that clashes with their religious beliefs. So, antibiotics are fine, but the theory of evolution is not. If only they'd take the time to learn about how antibiotics work and about how over-prescribing can result in germ mutations that render some antibiotics ineffective. It's is a real-time illustration of the theory of evolution at work.

 

Or take the statement made by Bill O'Reilly, that my co-blogger Adam Frank posted here yesterday, concerning the tides and the existence of the moon. Can a man living in the 21st century, and with enormous media clout, actually state that God put the moon around the Earth to promote the tides? Apparently, yes.

And worse, O'Reilly called the people that pointed out to him that there are well-understood natural mechanisms that explain the origin of the moon and the solar system, and why there is life here and not on Mars or Venus, as "desperate." He continued:

"It takes more faith to not believe, and to think that this was all luck ... than it does to believe in a deity."

No, it takes an enormous amount of intellectual blindness to actually deny the well-established advances of science in the name of a faith based on an antiquated God of the Gaps theology. Unfortunately, many believe that what O'Reilly says with a straight face is true.

What are scientists and educators to do? First, we must speak out. We cannot let such absurdities go unchallenged. Here is an example on teaching evolution. Fortunately, there are many others. (Go to the National Center for Science Education for more.)

The old position that engaging is beneath our dignity will not help us advance the cause for a scientifically literate population.

Second, we should be honest about what science can and cannot do. We should celebrate and publicize all the wonderful achievements of science, but also be frank about the challenges we still face. Scientists should not use science as a weapon against belief by making it into a belief system. That, too, is a road to nowhere.

The danger of taking science too far, as in stating to the world that science has all the answers and can understand it all, is to lose its credibility when findings are doubted, or when "established" theories are supplanted by new ones. Much better is to explain how science goes about creating knowledge through a process of trial and error and constant verification by independent experimental groups.

Our scientific knowledge of nature grows through a self-correcting accretion process. New theories emerge through the cracks in old ones. There is drama and beauty in this endeavor, as we struggle to make sense of the world around us. To deny what we've learned is to deny one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. Our children deserve better than that.

To not know is fine. To not want to know is disastrous.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/02/09/133591874/speaking-in-defense-of-science?ft=1&f=1007

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