In Jules Dassin’s 1960 comedy Never on Sunday Melina Mercouri’s Piraeus demimondaine weeps at the awful denouement of “Medea,” but cheers up when the actors take their curtain call. They didn’t die after all, Mercouri exclaims, adding, “And they all went to the seashore.” Former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has written a report, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, on the tragic failure of democratic movements in the Middle East, Russia, and elsewhere, but with the sad bits left out. So convinced is she of democracy’s inevitable triumph that every story has a happy ending.
Iran’s regime “may for a time prevent the Iranian people from rising against their government, but it almost ensures that when they do, the landing will not be a soft one for the regime or the country.” Rice reports her “shock” when Hamas terrorists won the 2006 Palestinian elections urged by the State Department (so shocked, she says, that she called the State Department watch officer from her elliptical workout to confirm the news). She learned, she tells us, that “armed groups should not participate in the electoral process.” The remedy lies in “nurturing a diverse set of institutions…empowering entrepreneurs and businessmen, educating and empowering women, and encouraging social entrepreneurs and local civic organizations.” She praises former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who told her that the P.A.’s security services were “a bunch of gangsters,” but does not bother to mention that Fayyad was fired in 2013 after he failed to make a dent in the P.A.’s kleptocracy.
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Of Hosni Mubarak’s fall and the Egyptian military’s return to power she declares that “the Egyptian people were calling for [Mubarak’s] immediate ouster” in February 2011. By the people, she means the fraction of Egypt’s population that fit into Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Then the Muslim Brotherhood “won an impressive victory in peaceful elections.” Unfortunately, the Brotherhood’s president, Mohamed Morsi, had an “Islamic and autocratic tilt” and “was blamed, whether fairly or not, for attacks on religious minorities.” In July 2013 the military overthrew him, after “violent protests swept the country, with millions of Morsi supporters and millions of his critics facing off.”
This involves an improper use of the plural. The Cairo-based International Development Center’s report on the demonstrations counted fewer than one million pro-Morsi and 30 million anti-Morsi demonstrators in July 2013—a majority of Egypt’s total adult population. Never before or after did the “Egyptian people” proclaim their views with such unanimity. To Rice, the “Egyptian people” were present to topple Mubarak but not to expel Morsi. It happens that Egypt had less than a month’s supply of wheat on hand when General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took the country back from the Muslim Brotherhood with the manifest support of a supermajority of Egyptians. Mass popular support for a return to military rule does not fit Rice’s narrative, so she simply leaves out the unpleasant facts.
