If Mohamed ElBaradei thinks that he can trust the Muslim Brotherhood, he isn’t the right guy to transition Egypt to democracy – Nobel Prize and all. Moderates are always the losers in revolutions.
Who can remember the names of the moderates who led during the early days of the Iranian revolution? Who remembers Karim Sanjabi, who flow to Paris and emerged from his meeting with the Ayatollah Khomeini "with a declaration that spoke of both Islam and democracy as basic principles.” Khomeini used Sanjabi to secure his return to Tehran and then after two long months exiled him to Los Angeles.
Who can remember the names of the leaders of the French Revolution during its ‘moderate’ phase from 1789 to 1792? Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud, Marguerite Élie Guadet, Armand Gensonné, Jean Antoine Laffargue de Grangeneuve, Jean Jay, Jean François Ducos, Marquis de Condorcet, Claude Fauchet, M. D. A. Lasource, Maximin Isnard, the Comte de Kersaint, Henri Larivière, Jacques Pierre Brissot, Jean Marie Roland, Jérôme Pétion and Jean Sylvain Bailly. No one. But everyone has heard of Danton and Robespierre, the Jacobin radicals who beheaded Louis XVI and Marie Therese.
Some people can name one moderate leader of the Russian Revolution, Alexander Kerensky, but very few can remember the first leader of the Provincial Government, Prince Georgy L’vov. Most people recognize the names of the Bolsheviks and the victors, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, who beheaded the Tzar and his family.
Read The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton if you have the time, it is the definitive work on the subject. Shockingly, Zbigniew Brzezinski gave the book to Jimmy Carter during the Iranian Revolution, but Jimmy didn’t either read it or understand it.
If you want to see a model for a transition to democracy, look to Germany after World War II and the great American diplomat, John J. McCloy.
Luckily, it doesn’t look like Barack Obama is going to pull a Jimmy Carter, his Cairo speech, notwithstanding.