“Democracy is not something you can buy in a shop” – US military strategist

US military strategist and historian Edward Luttwak has given RT his insight into the continuing unrest across the Arab world.

Edward Luttwak has published works on military strategy, history and international relations. He recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “If Mubarak leaves now, the result is likely to be an anarchical or Islamist Egypt, or some of both until another dictatorship emerges.” The strategist told RT it is because democracy takes centuries to develop.“You cannot create it, you cannot jump ahead,” he said.Edward Luttwak added that the US government is always in a state of embarrassment when its friends “are not democratic.”“On the one hand, Mubarak is a friend. On the other hand, he is a dictator. And the rule is that once America is your patron, you can not shoot at the crowd,” Luttwak said.“The US has always to manage a contradiction. On the one hand, we are normal American people, we like friends and we don’t like enemies. On the other [hand], we also want democracy, so when you become a friend of the United States and you are not democratic, you are in a difficult situation.”The strategist told RT that the uprisings in the Arab world are “popular insurrections” and nobody is pulling the strings.“This is a crowd action, a popular insurrection. It’s not a revolution, it is not a coup,” he said. “People are living under a government, and one day they all get up, because of an incident. This is a true popular uprising – quite a special event.”Edward Luttwak also claims that the center of real world politics is far from the Middle East.“The Middle East lost its importance with the end of the Cold War. It generates a lot of headlines, but the real politics now is in the Pacific, and it is China and anti-China. That’s where the world politics is,” he said. “The Middle East is just pictures – the pictures of shouting people. But what’s going on there? Nothing. You talk about the countries that don’t really produce anything, they don’t invent anything, don’t develop anything. They are not important. Some of them have oil. That’s it.”