With Egypt as the recipient of an enormous amount of aid from the United States, year in and year out, Mubarak owes Bush big time. That had to be what motivated the Egyptian President when he took what appeared to be a huge step toward democracy. He proposed revising Egypt’s constitution to allow more than one person to run for the presidency. What an incredibly novel and ground breaking idea! He also announced that there would be further democratic reforms in advance of next fall’s presidential and parliamentary elections.

The state run newspapers heralded this as a “bombshell.” Opposition politicians dared to hope for a chance to participate in the electoral process. Even the usually cynical and skeptical Egyptian public wondered if change was in the air.

However, this is the Middle East. Nothing ever is what it seems to be.

Cold water quickly doused the sparks of reform when the draft legislation was released last week. The law requires prospective candidates to be endorsed by 250 “elected officials” before their names can appear on the ballot. As a practical matter, this is an impossible barrier to scale because Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) controls all of the institutions of government. More than 90% of the members of parliament come from the NDP. In addition, the law requires parties to be at least five years old in order to put forth candidates. One liberal party newspaper referred to the legislation as “the death of political life in Egypt.”

If anyone had any doubts about whether the seventy-seven year old Mubarak intended to release his grip on power, he settled that issue in a long television interview. For eight hours, he boasted about his remarkable record in his twenty four years as President and why he was uniquely qualified to continue in office.

Then as an insurance policy against unrest, the government began its usual pre-election crackdown. The police arrested more than a thousand members of the Muslim brotherhood, an outlawed opposition group. This has been a frequent pattern in Mubarak’s rule. The jails are filled with dissidents in the months before voting. Then emptied after the elections. In case anyone didn’t get the message, thugs attacked busloads of the supporters of Ayman Nour, a moderate politician trying to run against Mubarak.

The Egyptian president has moved with confidence. He knows that the pro democracy movement has failed to garner support among the middle and upper classes, whose opposition would be the subject of concern. For them, the Egyptian economy is relatively prosperous these days, and stability is their top priority. They deduced, quite properly, that democracy might be good as a general concept but if it comes with chaos and economic uncertainty the price will be too steep.

This brings us back to President Bush and the American government. Hosni Mubarak may be an autocrat and no great supporter of human rights. However, he is perceived as a loyal ally of the American government in a part of the world where other than Israel, we don’t have many allies these days. If there were a truly democratic election in Egypt, there’s no telling who would prevail. They could be militant Islamists, Egyptian nationalists or any of a number of other groups who will be anti American. Let’s not forget that Egypt gave the world Gamal Abdul Nasser and all the mischief he created.

That’s the trouble with democracy. You can never be certain who will win.

With a country as pivotal as Egypt at stake, it’s not surprising that the Bush administration isn’t criticizing Mubarak for making a sham of democracy. Lofty democratic ideals are clashing with political realities. The issue is joined. You can be certain that political realities will prevail.

The larger question is what impact Egypt’s flaunting of democracy will have for other countries in the region. To the extent that Saudi Arabia, for example, has been seriously considering even a small movement toward democratic reform, in the interest of pacifying President Bush, will they now pull back and continue on a business as usual mode? Other than Iraq, where the United States has the guns or the ground to secure a semblance of the electoral process, is Bush’s call for democracy in the Arab world destined to become another example of worthwhile, but empty American rhetoric.