They say that if failure is an orphan, then success has many fathers and Egypt's revolution has proved the truth of that wisdom again. The latest to file a paternity claim is Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary to former US president George W. Bush.
Out hawking his new memoir Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld reckons it was Bush's "freedom agenda" that paved the way for the current revolutionary spirit sweeping the Arab world.
"What president Bush has done in Iraq and Afghanistan is to give the people in those countries a chance to have freer political systems and freer economic systems. There's no question that the example is helpful in the region."
Rumsfeld's neoconservative outriders had already been making the case even more forcefully. In the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer took the near-universal admiration for the crowds in Tahrir Square as belated endorsement of the Bush programme.
In Britain, Melanie Phillips expressed astonishment at the sight of progressives backing the Egyptian demands for regime change: hadn't these same "bien-pensants" denounced the Bush-Blair pursuit of regime change in Iraq?
There could only be one explanation for this sudden change of heart: the left opposed the removal of Saddam because he was anti-western, but supported the ejection of Hosni Mubarak because he was pro-western.
Er, no. That's not quite it. Those who cheered the upheaval in Cairo did so because it was a revolution from within, driven entirely by the Egyptian people, and because it was conducted by peaceful means.
To put it too mildly, neither of those two conditions applied in Baghdad in 2003. A foreign invasion and an internal, grassroots uprising are not the same thing: it is perfectly possible to oppose one and support the other.
What's more, the ‘freedom agenda' was always damagingly selective. While Bush urged democracy in, say, Iran, Dick Cheney was lavishing praise on the dictator of Kazakhstan.
Hypocrisy
Indeed, some of us were arguing in the Guardian in February 2003 that if Bush were serious about spreading democracy to the Middle East, he needn't go to the trouble of invading Iraq: he could start with Egypt, tying America's billion-dollar handouts to the country to ‘democratic performance', making the cash conditional on Cairo allowing a free press, independent judiciary and real elections.
Besides, the Bush team itself didn't truly believe in the "freedom agenda". They gave it up once they saw where democracy could lead: having called for Palestinian elections in 2006, they recoiled at the sight of a Hamas victory. We heard a little less about freedom and democracy after that.
All of which makes it a little rich for Rumsfeld and friends to claim that Tahrir Square provides them with delayed vindication.
Who then has a better paternity claim for the change in Cairo and beyond, besides, of course, the people in the streets themselves? Julian Assange could make a decent case, arguing that it was his WikiLeaks revelations of the Tunisian first couple's corruption and luxury lifestyle that inspired revolution in that country.
The most starry-eyed Democrats will want to notch this up as a win for President Barack Obama, pointing to his landmark 2009 speech in Cairo and to the simple chronological fact that these revolutions have taken place on his watch.
More neutral participants give him credit for making it as clear as he could that Hosni Mubarak had to go — even over the opposition of some of his own team, including the US special envoy to Egypt. Still, those mixed signals alone ensure that few will recall last Tahrir Square as the Obama revolution.
More pressing than the allocation of credit is the question of what those outside the region can do if they want to see reform entrenched in Tunisia and Egypt and spread beyond. We know that bombing doesn't work too well but nor does love-bombing.
If the West, especially the US, backs dissenters too loudly, that allows a regime to cast them as foreign agents and traitors. That was one lesson of the crushed uprising in Iran in the summer of 2009. Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, told me he has reached the glum conclusion that if western governments want to help the Iranian opposition, the best they can do is stay well away. "I wouldn't even touch Iran. All you do is strengthen the regime."
Instead, the West should look to enable, rather than to do, exercising what foreign policy circles think of as soft or smart power, rather than hard, military might. The aim should be to nurture what Niblett calls "the infrastructure of representative government" the rule of law, a free press and judiciary, parliament in countries that currently lack the democratic basics. That way, if and when revolution comes, it will have a chance to dig in, take root and survive.
This can't be a task for the US alone. The European Union can contribute too: after all, soft power is what we're meant to be good at. Right now, it is the peoples themselves who are rising up and demanding freedom. Our job is to stop backing the tyrants who have oppressed them and to lend a hand where we can help. That would be a freedom agenda worthy of the name.
