I asked it because I thought I detected a tone of I-told-you-so in your post. I was obviously mistaken. That’s what happens when you read the transcript and don’t actually hear the person speaking, you miss the nuance of the communication.
As for your other remarks, I am also in total agreement. That was what my original Yogi Berra comment was all about.

Last paragraph? No, I don’t think the elections would have turned out differently, assuming Mubarak had still fallen. Most of us have a pretty good idea now that in those Middle Eastern nations where a strong government takes its hand off the wheel, the radical Islamists will pop up like mushrooms and attempt to institute a much stronger government.

Bush’s biggest mistake in the wars was assuming democracy was a natural “ground state” for people freed from oppression. The “all people want to be free” thing. I used to think the same thing, but maybe I’ve gotten more cynical. Or maybe I just have more information now.

A nation of individual liberty and human rights isn’t the oxygen molecule of politics. It’s the ozone. In human history, totalitarianism is practically helium.

To switch metaphors, looking through history I’m paying less attention now to the seeds of liberty, and more attention to the soil.

The debate still rages whether history is driven by gradual evolutionary processes, or by sudden breakthroughs realized by Great Men. As you might expect from me, I tend to think its a combination of the two.

So tell me, if Obama hadn’t been President of the US, do you think the Egyptian elections might have turned out differently?

Wanna bet?

If the people don’t want a secular democracy, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.