Hey Obama, Read WikiLeaks
Robert Scheer
Truthdig: February 9, 2011
After a good start, the Obama administration's response to the democratic
revolution in Egypt has begun to exude the odor of betrayal. Now distancing
itself from the essential demand of the protesters that the dictator must
go, the administration has fallen back on the sordid option of backing a new
and improved dictatorship. Predictably, it is one guided by a local
strongman long entrusted by the CIA, Vice President Omar Suleiman, described
by U.S. officials in the WikiLeaks cables as a "Mubarak consigliere." The
script is out of an all-too-familiar playbook: Pick this longtime chief of
Egyptian intelligence who has consistently done our bidding in matters of
torture and retrofit him as a modern democratic leader. But this time the
Egyptian street will not meekly go along.
The first test was on Tuesday, after the weekend theatrics of Suleiman
making a show of meeting with the opposition but rejecting its demands. A
huge crowd-inspired by a most modern protest figure, a Google
executive-showed up to reject defeat as a compromise. Defeat, because under
Suleiman's plan all of the levers of oppressive power would remain,
including Hosni Mubarak as president and a state of emergency denying
fundamental freedoms that dates back four decades. Conning the masses with
fears of a foreign enemy is a political art form in Egypt going back to the
pharaohs, but this time, perhaps thanks to new empowering technology, or
just too much suffering, it is not working.
The scenes of the demonstrators in recent weeks have in some ways been
reminiscent of those I witnessed in Cairo back in 1967, but their
significance is exactly the opposite. Back then, when huge crowds took to
the streets their anger got perversely twisted by nationalist rage into the
demand that Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had presided over a humiliating defeat
in the Six-Day War, not make good on his threat to resign. The failure of
the Egyptian street to hold Nasser accountable for the stark failures of his
dictatorship ushered in a 44-year reign of tyranny, corruption and
stagnation at the heart of the Arab world.
Mubarak is the final inheritor of that era, the heir to the military rebels
who toppled King Farouk and, instead of implementing a too-long-promised
enlightened view of pan-Arab nationalism, turned vile bureaucratic
corruption into an Egyptian way of life. A corruption that the U.S., Israel
and the oil-rich Arab monarchies found very much to their liking. That
attitude continues, as The New York Times reported on Tuesday: "Israel,
Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have each repeatedly
pressed the United States not to cut loose Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak,
too hastily, or to throw its weight behind the democracy movement. ." Once
again, as in 1967, the argument is being made that the secular military
dictatorship in Egypt is needed to combat radical Islam, as represented by
the Muslim Brotherhood, and that democracy might be "hijacked," as U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned.
The U.S. presidents whose military aid purchased the Egyptian government as
America's lackey have known the cost to Egyptians in omnipresent corruption,
bribes, torture and political oppression. On the surface it seemed like a
good deal: For a couple of billion dollars per year in military and other
assistance, Egypt lined up with Israel in making the post-Six-Day-War
occupation of Palestine permanent, and pan-Arab nationalism descended into a
bargain between the oil sheikdoms and those without petrol to preserve the
bizarrely skewed class divisions in the region. That the suffering of
ordinary folks was well known to American policymakers right up to the
moment of the current explosion is documented in the WikiLeaks cables and
stands as an exposé of our foreign policy cynicism. But it was blithely
assumed that the dictatorship would continue in the person of Mubarak's son
Gamal because, as one cable said, "due to the paranoia of the Egyptian
dictatorship, no other name can safely or respectfully be bruited as a
candidate."
In the cables there is no sense of alarm that something might be awry with
this planned succession in the Mubarak dictatorship from father to son
because the Egyptian elite was quite happy with the arrangement: "Many in
the Egyptian elite see his [Gamal's] succession as positive, as his likely
continuation of the current status quo would serve their business and
political interests." That the young-many of them overeducated for the
stagnant job market-and the Egyptian majority that lives in abject poverty,
along with all those fed up with life in a police state endured for half a
century, might complicate the U.S. alliance with the Egyptian dictatorship
was dismissed by the deep cynics who run our foreign policy. A key cable
discussing the enormous unpopularity of both Anwar Sadat and Mubarak, who
replaced him 30 years ago, states: "Mubarak seems to have managed the
dilemma better in at least one key area: he has systematically and 'legally'
eliminated virtually all political opposition." Our kind of guy?
***
From: "Sid Shniad" <shniad@gmail.com>
*Who's afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood?*
*There's zero chance of Egypt's uprising turning into the 1979 Iranian
revolution or the terrorist violence of Hamas; there are no parties, and no
Egyptian constituency of any size, seeking a theocracy.*
Doug Saunders
Globe and Mail: Feb. 05, 2011
It was not until the fourth day of Egypt's mass protests, long after the
then-peaceful crowds had swelled into the hundreds of thousands, that the
Brothers marched into Cairo's Tahrir Square. They kept to themselves, taking
over an otherwise empty corner. You could distinguish them, those in the
square told me, by their propensity toward beards and head scarves, and by
their chants of "Allahu Akbar."
Here was the physical manifestation of the threat we'd been warned about for
decades by defenders of Arab authoritarianism, the mother of all Islamic
fundamentalist parties literally "stepping in to fill the vacuum" as a
Western-supported dictatorship crumbled.
The Muslim Brotherhood, surprisingly sluggish and inarticulate, had finally
moved, and here they were. Not exactly a formidable bunch, but soon that
vacuum in the pavement would become a vacuum in the presidential palace,
wouldn't it?
Or so we were told. The threat of the long-outlawed Brotherhood, the
great-grandfather of every jihadist and Islamic fundamentalist movement in
the Middle East, is the key reason why the United States and most European
countries have continued to support Hosni Mubarak and his kind for decades.
It's the reason, according to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's spokesman, why
Canada rather shockingly continued to support Mr. Mubarak this week. Mr.
Mubarak himself continues to warn that, after his demise, a deluge of
Islamist "chaos" will follow, somehow worse than the chaos he'd unleashed.
What happens when Islamist parties gain power? First, we should ask what
happens when they're explicitly denied power. And we know that outcome. When
these popular movements are repressed, as Egypt has done brutally for six
decades, the frustrated adherents have switched to non-political, violent
means: All jihadist movements, including al-Qaeda, were born as responses to
this frustration. You can draw a direct line between the crushing of the
Brotherhood and the attacks of 9/11.
When these parties are allowed a role in democratic government, there's a
pattern. Remember, however alarming their ideas about women and Israel, the
Muslim Brotherhood and its neighbouring parties represent the people who
explicitly rejected the violent option (and were shunned and sometimes
attacked for this by the jihadists) because they wanted a place in a
legitimate government. There's zero chance of Egypt's uprising turning into
the 1979 Iranian revolution or the terrorist violence of Hamas; there are no
parties, and no Egyptian constituency of any size, seeking a theocracy.
"These parties definitely reject the Iranian model," George Washington
University political scientist Nathan Brown told me. "First, the Muslim
Brotherhood is against a theocratic state or any role for clerics - it's led
by a university professor of veterinary medicine. And second, they prefer to
work within a pluralist system. Their slogan is, 'We seek participation, not
domination.' The idea of creating an Islamic state does not seem to be
anywhere near their agenda."
In Arab states such as Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco, Islamist movements
don't command the support to gain a majority and would have to share power
with secular parties. Would the Muslim Brotherhood participate in a
government that recognizes Israel and works with Western governments? Their
leaders, and informed observers, say yes.
And the experience of fighting for an electoral share generally has a
galvanizing effect on these parties. In Algeria, the Movement of Society for
Peace, a Brotherhood offshoot, plays a leading role in condemning violence
and helping denounce the region's jihadist groups. Leading Islamist parties
in Morocco, Kuwait and Bahrain have abandoned sharia law as a principle and
replaced it with a loose notion of "Islamic policy guidelines."
The most prominent example is Turkey, whose governing Justice and
Development Party (AKP) began as an illegal Islamist movement but then,
seeking electoral credibility, purged its sharia faction and won a majority.
It has ruled for nearly a decade as an aggressively pro-European government
that has co-operated with Israel and has done more for women's rights than
its secularist predecessors. Its leaders tell me they are "Islamic in the
same way that Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Party is Christian."
It was heartening this week to hear some Muslim Brotherhood grandees citing
the AKP as their role model. They may represent religious and social views
that are abhorrent. But those views are far more dangerous if they're kept
outside and left to fester in the darkness.
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