I’ll bet you all think I’m about to talk about the U.S. government, don’tcha? Well, you’d be wrong.

On the heels of reading the depressing news out of Iran that I saw earlier (scroll down; I’m too lazy to look up the link right now) and the even more depressing response to it in the comments section of the blogs that have covered it (lots of blanket statements from people who are justifiably upset but directing their anger to the wrong place), I ran across the following article in the New York Times:

Silence and Fury in Cairo After Sexual Attacks on Women.

This caught my eye for obvious reasons – after all, if you know me, you know how I feel about the time that I’ve spent in Egypt and my general affinity for the Egyptians.

In the midst of downtown Cairo — in the same neighborhood where many of the government ministries are located, along with the parliament building — a story has emerged via the blogsphere that illustrates the problem that I think many people in the west just don’t grasp: namely, that most of the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East don’t give a whit about their own populations.

It seems that during the recent celebrations during the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan, when the streets are filled with revelers and there’s a general party atmosphere, there were a few groups of sexually frustrated young men who chose to express their sexual frustration by chasing down young women in packs and groping and fondling them in public. Consider that this is a conservative society where most people are virgins until they get married and holding hands in public is frowned upon. Since this is also an honor-based society, there were several witnessed who decided to get involved and try to help these women — mostly shopkeepers who were working, since Eid is one of the busiest times of the year.

There was something of a public outcry: where were the police? Why didn’t the state security forces step in to help out? They were in the streets in force to keep order, but somehow they just vanished while all of this was going on. Instead of investigating what went wrong, however, the government response has been to discredit and intimidate the witnesses. After all, you can’t investigate mistakes if they were never made, right?

This has caused an even bigger stink, with the usual sorts of denunciations coming from the state-controlled press — denunciations of the “subversive elements” who are trying to “discredit the state,” that is. The blogger who broke the story on his Web site “The Egyptian Conscience” (الوعي المصري — only in Arabic, but there are pictures and some video), was forced into hiding for a couple of days, and has been denounced in some of the pro-government newspapers for propagating “lies.”

The basic theme coming out of all of this is that the state is trying to protect its own reputation rather than protect its citizens from raving bands of hooligans. Egyptians have grown tired of their government’s inability to provide them with basic services and human rights — fortunately, they happen to live in a state that’s closely watched by the West, so they have some ability to protest and raise their voices in opposition. Some. That’s not to say that human rights violations don’t occur, but they’re not on the scale of some other countries in the region (*cough*iraniraqsaudiarabia*cough*).

If I may be permitted a moment on my soapbox, allow me to ‘splain something that needs ‘splaining. As an American citizen, I have never really had any problems traveling in the Middle East. Arabs are well-known for their hospitality, and I have enjoyed the fruits of that reputation. I was in Cairo while bombs were falling on Baghdad in 2003, the opening salvos of a war that was — and is — extremely unpopular in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. When I was in Egypt in 2005, I got into a cab one day while a massive anti-war protest was taking place in another part of the city, and the driver asked me where I was from, and then just as casually asked if I was going to the protest. I’ve never experienced a problem because of my nationality because people in that part of the world are perfectly happy to disassociate people from their governments. The simple reason for this is that their governments don’t represent them in any way, shape, or form, and they don’t assume that anyone else’s government does, either.

As much as I get tired of the whole “we’re better than they are” rants that others seem to be inspired to write when, say, Iran hangs someone for being gay — in this case, we ARE better than they are. We have a government that remembers that it’s supposed to provide us with basic services and protect us. Our system ain’t perfect — no system is. Sometimes our government wants to protect us a little too much from tubes of lipstick on airplanes, but would I rather be faced with the alternative described above?

The problem is the lack of popular expression in the Middle East. People are frustrated because their governments don’t give them what they need or want. The gap between rich and poor is growing. And most of the dialogue about change is taking place between governments — governments that don’t have the concerns of the people at heart.

Real change in the Middle East isn’t going to come from the top down, it’s going to come from the ground up, and we would do well to remember that. Otherwise, when the change finally comes, we’re not going to be too happy with the results.