Why are right wingers and conservatives silent on the uprisings across the Middle East?

Enjoyed this piece by Guy Rundle in Crikey on the silence of the right wingers and conservatives on the Arab uprisings.

"The Right’s gradual and encroaching silence about the Arab uprisings is a wonder to behold. On National Review, the US conservative website, which ran wall-to-wall coverage of the Iranian protests in 2009, and berated the left for not praising the brave Iranians, there is barely a word — just as there has been barely a word on Bahrain. In The Spectator, Melanie Phillips focused on the attack on US reporter Lara Logan, taking her attackers to be representative of the whole crowd — and not the women protesters and soldiers who rescued Logan. In Oz, the Bolter has a straight news rundown on his blog, and manages to use the Libyan thing to attack … the United Nations. Nothing at all on Quadrant. The News Ltd Blogger Who Cannot Be Named because S/he Will Sue (TNLBWCBNBS/HWS) confines self to a side issue. And at the Oz, a contribution from the opinion page is confined to … Strewth.

Why such reticence? The bravery of the Libyans is immense, inspiring. And they appear to be winning against a heavily armed regime whose fearsome power is crumbling …
Ah, of course. It is precisely because the Libyan uprising has occurred at all that it makes so little appearance on right-wing radar. For it kicks away another prop from the neocon argument about the Iraq invasion, and intervention more generally — that some regimes are so heavily armed that a people’s liberation must be done on their behalf. This was fall-back position No.2 in the war, as I recall, after the WMDs thing. For a giddy while there in 2003-4, the debate was mainly around who we’d invade next — Zimbabwe? North Korea, with nukes (Johann Hari’s choice)? Eventually we settled on the Northern Territory.

The “proxy liberation” defence survived for quite a while. Desperate members of the British Labour Party adopted the mantra — “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein” — although they didn’t mention the 200,000 or so other people the world was deprived of in the ensuing years.

The Libyan revolution makes it clear that the Iraqi people could have, and almost certainly would have, stood up to Saddam in this current wave of uprisings — taking upon themselves the responsibility for their own liberation, and the sacrifice of it. It’s a process whose importance lies as much in the meaning it gives to death — chosen, willed, as opposed to getting shot at a checkpoint or bombed — as it does to life. Furthermore, as the other uprisings have shown, it would have generated genuine solidarity among people, rather than the seemingly permanent divisions created by the US’s clientalism.
That’s a clue to the second reason why the Right has lost any ability to speak — the argument that there were anti-American ultra-dictators made it possible to defend dictators such as Hosni  Mubarak. Thus Melanie Phillips in one of her 50,000 jeremiads bemoaned the simple abandonment of America’s allies in a process that would not challenge America’s enemies.