Thomas Sowell on Egypt

The Deseret News carried this op-ed from Thomas Sowell which raises some important considerations when looking at the problems in the Middle-East:

Egypt existed for thousands of years before there was a United States of America. In all those millennia, Egypt has never had a free or democratic society. Nor is Egypt unique in that. 

Of all the different nations that have existed at various times and places throughout recorded history, it is doubtful that even ten percent were free or democratic. 

Even free and democratic nations existing today took centuries to achieve freedom and democracy. Barack Obama may have enough ego to imagine that he could accomplish, during his White House years, what took centuries to accomplish elsewhere. But do others, including some conservatives, need to share that delusion? 

Yet Obama is only the latest in a long line of American officials, including presidents, who have thought that a universal human desire for freedom meant that freedom and democracy could be exported, even to countries where they have never existed before.
However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free. Nowhere is such tolerance harder to find than in the Middle East.

The United States was the result of centuries of political development in England and Western Europe. But, it should be remembered, that even the Puritans who fled to New England for religious freedom came for their own religious freedom, not those of other peoples. Political and religious tolerance is something that must be learned again and again.