(mis)logic of autocracy

i hope now that the old 'logic' (read: delusion) that autocratic stability is our best hope against Islamist power is thrown in the dumpster of history.

for one, political Islam was always overrated, both as a threat to the US, and as a political force. it grew gigantic in people's paranoid imaginations. and one reason people had to rely on their imaginations to conceive of it was because of the autocracies within which it first flourished: without free press, or democracy, no one really knew how strong they were. and so -- enter the paranoid imagination of our national 'security' apparatus. our very expensive Keystone Kops.

secondly, political Islam was not eradicated by autocracy -- on the contrary, it flourished in its fertile soil of stagnation, humiliation, and corruption! after all this time, maybe our national 'security' fools will recognize this elementary fact: that freedom is like sunlight, working to scour away dark things like appeals to violence. let freedom ring in Egypt, and in all of our autocratic 'allies' -- and see the 'threat' of Islam collapse as the hallucination it was all along.