On February 3, after Egyptian anti-government protesters had been out in the streets for more than a week calling for the ouster of Egyptian President and strongman Hosni Mubarak, the United States Senate took strongly bi-partisan action at a time when the rancor in Washington is at a fevered pitch. Sure, one could look back to the lame duck session of the 111th Congress and note all sorts of successful bi-partisan legislation, including the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the extension of tax benefits including those to the super-wealthy. However, where the Congress usually comes together is on foreign policy issues and, indeed, the current Senate has remained consistent on that note.
Senators John Kerry and John McCain sponsored a resolution that calls on Egypt’s now embattled president to hand power over to an interim government. Kerry and McCain are entrenched figures in Senate foreign policy, the former currently serving as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and its Middle East 
subcommittee, the latter as the ranking member on the Armed Services committee. Accordingly, Americans should be astounded that only now do these senators publicly recognize the repressive nature of the Mubarak regime, which has benefitted tremendously from $1.3 billion in annual military aid as a result of its 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
The Kerry-McCain resolution should give pause to Americans as the history of U.S. foreign policy has been ugly across the globe, from Cuba to the Philippines, from Honduras to Guatemala, from Iran to Iraq to Tunisia to Egypt and elsewhere, from the end of the 19th century to the present. U.S. foreign policy has actively supported known dictators, providing them with the funding and military aid that they need to brutally repress their populations at home, with commercial and strategic benefits accruing to the United States in return.
It is truly shocking to hear Congressional and other U.S. leaders express their surprise that local populations are suffering under the weight of brutality from such U.S.-backed regimes. They act surprised that Egyptians, Tunisians, Jordanians, and Yemenis are yearning for freedom, and are ultimately rising up in revolution to overturn regimes that receive varying amounts of U.S. foreign aid, much of it geared to U.S. military interests. These regimes also deny their citizens what President Obama calls basic human rights: freedom of speech and assembly, and ultimately the right to protest against the government. It is U.S. taxpayer dollars that fuel these kleptocratic dictators who keep their populations in a state of arrested development.
Over the past weeks Egyptian protestors have said that they are no longer afraid, that they can finally live, that they have missed out on thirty years of their lives but will now do anything to free themselves from Mubarak’s brutal regime. Casual American observers have been in the dark to these realities, although their tax 
dollars have gone to support a regime that stands in contrast to all of the values that Americans say they hold dear. They then wonder out loud, “why do they hate us?” This question should be put to rest after witnessing the Egyptian and Tunisian people’s burning desire for freedom, and the extent to which they will go to ensure that freedom. It is not our democratic values they hate, it is the fact that we won’t allow them to live by the same values.
Americans often do not gather enough muster to protest when their own government fails them; for example, America is the only industrialized country which doesn’t grant national healthcare to every citizen. So the shock of seeing hundreds of thousands of Egyptians protesting in the streets of Maydan Tahrir, for twelve days straight at the time of writing, has obviously caught them off guard. American 
citizens begin to show their numbers though when American Idol comes to town, as the 10,000 people who came to the Nashville auditions in July 2010 attest. So while many may have no interest in learning about the Egyptian (or Tunisian or other) people and their struggle for freedom, Americans should have enough interest to know where their tax dollars are being spent while their infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, are decaying across the nation.
In all of the time I have spent in the Middle East and North Africa conducting Arabic language training and scholarly research, including a year in Cairo and nine months in Tunis, the one thing I can say with certainty is that Arabs across the region are overwhelmingly more politically sophisticated than their American counterparts. During the 2008 American presidential primaries I was in Tunis, and taxi drivers aired their opinions on either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama (most preferred Obama). Low-level government employees asked about the positions that the U.S. has consistently taken on the Arab-Israeli peace process as well as the ongoing U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One can understand that Americans know little about Egypt or Tunisia and its revolution. Nevertheless, the American government has stepped up aid to Tunisia since 9/11, and that government, in similar fashion to Mubarak’s, agreed to take the 
money and root out Islamic fundamentalists. Even as U.S. leaders continue to tremble over the prospect of rising Islamic fundamentalism, they ignore the fact that their anti-democratic positions in the Arab world contribute to the radicalizing of the population, which has few opportunities beyond an education in their own societies. Meanwhile, Zine al-Abidin Bin Ali, Tunisia’s now-deposed, brutal dictator, is enjoying his Red Sea home under the sponsorship of another close American ally and dictatorship, Saudi Arabia. One wonders if Mubarak may join him there.
Both Tunisia’s former president and Egypt’s soon-to-be former president had brutally oppressed any opposition that came from Muslims promoting a religio-political agenda. The current American obsession, by politicians and even by journalists during the initial protests in Cairo, that sees the only choice as being 
between either brutal dictators or Islamic fundamentalists, is grossly naïve. Journalists have begun to recognize that Egyptian protestors come from a broad cross-section of Egyptian society. That most Americans do not know the difference reflects a lack of interest more than a lack of intellectual sophistication. But what excuse do two of our long-serving and well-respected senators named John have for not seeing the complexity inherent in the people of Egypt?
Kimberly Katz is associate professor of Middle East history at Towson University in Maryland and the author of A Young Palestinian’s Diary, 1941-1945: The Life of Sami ‘Amr and Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces.