Did Obama never read his Burke?

Obama assisted in toppling the edifice of Hosni Mubarak’s government. Declaring "The transition must begin now!", Obama gave a little push and down the Mubarak regime came in a crashing ruin.

And yet, what did Obama imagine would replace it? Obama helped destroy the only central authority that existed in Egypt. And now, he has not a clue what to do as he stands there and surveys the chaos and ruin that he himself helped to create. The regime of Mubarak will be viewed as a Golden Age in comparison to the horrors that will be unleashed by the intensifying civil war in Egypt.

Did the brilliant political scientist Obama never read the writings of Edmund Burke? In Reflections on the Revolution in France Burke wrote, for example:

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. [In other words, Egypt had to move beyond Mubarak.] All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniencies of mutation. This mode will, on the one hand, prevent the unfixing of old interests at once: a thing which is apt to breed a black and sullen discontent in those who are at once dispossessed of all their influence and consideration [the Egyptian army]. This gradual course, on the other hand, will prevent men, long under depression [the Muslim Brotherhood], from being intoxicated with a large draught of new power, which they always abuse with licentious insolence.

Burke taught us never to try to undertake a radical reformation of government. I use the term “radical” advisedly. It implies that you tear out the old government by the roots (radices) and rebuild it from scratch based on abstract political theories. This never works. Once you have destroyed the old government entirely, all the customs, traditions, laws, and usages that bound the society together and prevented it from descending into a state of barbarity are destroyed along with it. Factions that lived in uneasy peace are suddenly at each other's throats. And then, finally, there is nothing left to restrain the mob. Under the ancien regime, people are accustomed to behave towards each other at least with some civility, no matter how imperfect. Muslims and Copts get along, albeit grudgingly. But once the ancien regime has been demolished, all civility disappears and is replaced by spasms of bloodshed.

This is the lesson to be learned from the French Revolution (and from the Russian Revolution, too). This is the lesson that Burke taught us. When the great politician Obama was hounding Mubarak from office, did he never think of Burke’s lessons and stop to ask himself what demons he was unleashing? Liberals always think of revolutions as a positive, cathartic experience, the refreshing breeze of an Arab Spring. They never bother to study the horrors that revolutions have inevitably brought in their trail.

The right approach would have been: gradually, through individual, targeted measures, modify those aspects of the ancien regime that were undesirable and detrimental, maintain stability during the transition, keep the good parts while excising the bad. Instead, Obama decided that radical democracy could be manufactured out of whole cloth in Egypt (of all places), thereby putting on display for all the world to see his utter naivete and complete ignorance of the way revolutions have played out throughout history.