Should the people of a given country be allowed to vote in free and fair elections, even if the people they elect are fundamentally hostile to the United States?
That is the great question which is facing America today, as protests have toppled the leader of Tunisia and now threaten the presidency of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Juan Cole took the gloves off this morning and dug deep to analyze the reasons why seven pro-democracy activists died last night in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Many more will no doubt follow, as Mubarak and Egypt's elites have no intention of allowing Egypt to become a representative democracy any more than Israeli PM Netanyahu intends to allow a Palestinian state to come into existence. Following Netanyahu, yesterday Mubarak gave Obama the bird, apparently knowing that he would wimp out in any confrontation.
To be sure, it is not Obama's fault that the American presidency has become so weak and submissive toward Israel, a pattern Egypt is now following. It has almost become a tradition that goes back at least to Clinton when was browbeaten by Netanyahu in the oval office during his first term.
When Wikileaks published its expose of the phony Israeli-Palestinian peace process a few weeks ago, it merely repeated what skeptics like Cole knew all along.
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"
-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Last night, Rachel Maddow gave a brilliant introduction to her show, dissecting the Mubarak strategy of first alleging, then fomenting violence in order to represent himself as the only possible savior--and presenting it in the context of other similar examples, from Tiananmen Square to the stymied 2009 Iranian Revolution. It was about as incisive and on-point as American network tv ever gets:
But then, of course, she shifted to live coverage of the unfolding street battles around Tahrir Square, and it became heartbreakingly clear that Mubarak had gotten what he was aiming for: his thugs had created a state of escalating chaos that Mubarak could use to argue that he alone could solve the immediate crisis that he alone had caused.
What also became heartbreakingly clear was the utter and thorough incompetence of the Obama Administration, which flows directly out of his Burkean conservative governing philosophy. Just as Obama's first two years were dominated by his somnambulistic choice of an economic team composed almost entirely of those who had caused, enabled or mis-managed the crisis he inherited, it now seems ominously all-but-certain that his next two years will be haunted by an analogous foreign policy disaster--sharply, painfully at odds with the promising picture he painted early on with his historical Cairo speech early in his presidency.
Burkean conservatism is based on the idea that the existing status quo--based on centuries of tradition--is inherently worthy of deference, as are the elites who preside over it, and that any change should be gradual and incemental, undertaken only after a comprehensive consensus has been achieved. This philosophy never made much sense in Burke's time, itself a period of tumultuous change, and makes less sense in our time. But that is clearly Obama's underlying philosophy, as utterly unsuited to reality as it may be.
Because he shunned creative, critical, inquisitive, independent-minded advisors in virtually every area of governance, Obama has virtually assured that he will fail in one area after another. In foreign policy, as we are seeing right now, he has yet to show any evidence of thinking even one silly millimeter outside the disastrous parameters of Bush's "long war"--and because of that, it is axiomatically impossible for him to come up with a coherent policy response to the problems we face--much less come up with pro-active initiative.
[O]fficials at the Pentagon, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House were running various scenarios across the region in an effort to keep up with events.
What would the covert American war in Yemen look like if the supportive Yemeni president were to be forced out? Will Mr. Mubarak's successor duplicate his support of the Middle East peace process? Will the shifts in the region benefit Islamic extremists, who will try to capitalize on unrest, or will it show the Arab street the power of a secular uprising?
The obvious problem here is that no one thought to run such scenarios before the last 24 hours. But the deeper problem is the no one seems to have thought about such scenarios and reached the obvious conclusion that the entire foreign policy approach was delusional, and needed to be scrapped without a trace.
None of this means that Obama won't get re-elected. After all, Bush managed that trick, despite an equally abysmal record of failures. But it does mean that people need to shake off their illusions born of listening to Obama speechify. Instead, they need to focus like a laser on what he actually does--and utterly fails to do. He has inherited deeply failed policies on every front, and has proposed only the most modest, Burkean of changes. It is a recipe for catastrophic disaster. Bad as things may stand now, they are poised to get tragically worse.
Where is the Obama people thought they were voting for? Surely, he could save us. If only he actually existed.
On Wednesday, the Mubarak regime showed its fangs, mounting a massive and violent repressive attack on the peaceful crowds in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. People worrying about Egypt becoming like Iran (scroll down) should worry about Egypt already being way too much like Iran as it is. That is, Hillary Clinton and others expressed anxiety in public about increasing militarization of the Iranian regime and use of military and paramilitaries to repress popular protests. But Egypt is far more militarized and now is using exactly the same tactics.
The outlines of Hosni Mubarak's efforts to maintain regime stability and continuity have now become clear. In response to the mass demonstrations of the past week, he has done the following:
1. Late last week, he first tried to use the uniformed police and secret police to repress the crowds, killing perhaps 200-300 and wounding hundreds.
2. This effort failed to quell the protests, and the police were then withdrawn altogether, leaving the country defenseless.... The public dealt with this threat of lawlessness by organizing self-defense neighborhood patrols, and continued to refuse to stop demonstrating.
3. Mubarak appointed military intelligence ogre Omar Suleiman vice president.....
4. Mubarak mobilized the army to keep a semblance of order, but failed to convince the regular army officers to intervene against the protesters....
5. When the protests continued Tuesday, Mubarak came on television and announced that he would not run for yet another term and would step down in September. His refusal to step down immediately and his other maneuvers indicated his determination, and probably that of a significant section of the officer corps, to maintain the military dictatorship in Egypt....
6. When this pledge of transition to a new military dictator did not, predictably enough, placate the public either, Mubarak on Wednesday sent several thousand secret police and paid enforcers in civilian clothing into Tahrir Square to attack the protesters with stones, knouts, and molotov cocktails, in hopes of transforming a sympathetic peaceful crowd into a menacing violent mob. This strategy is similar to the one used in summer of 2009 by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to raise the cost of protesting in the streets of Tehran, when they sent in basij (volunteer pro-regime militias). Used consistently and brutally, this show of force can raise the cost of urban protesting and gradually thin out the crowds.
Note that this step number 6 required that the army agree to remain neutral and not to actively protect the crowds. The secret police goons were allowed through army checkpoints with their staves, and some even rode through on horses and camels. Aljazeera English's correspondent suggests that the military was willing to allow the protests to the point where Mubarak would agree to stand down, but the army wants the crowd to accept that concession and go home now.
It may just be wishful thinking on my part, but I think that the army has made a grave miscalculation, potentially destroying its heretofore unparalleled positive stature in Egyptian society. Mubarak has nihilistically shown himself to be willing to destroy Egyptian society rather than leave in peace. The army appears to be tacitly backing this nihilistic play.
As Cole has explained in his immediately previous post, "Why Egypt 2011 is not Iran 1979", the fear of a fundamentalist takeover is entirely misplaced in today's Egypt. But if the army blocks this unprecedented broad concensus of the Egyptian people, there is simply no telling what sort of future havoc they are sowing, be it five years in the future or a full generation.
I do not expect any sort of benevolence or far-sightedness from the Egyptian military. Military organizations are not known for such things. But I do hope, simply, that strong enough elements in the Egyptian army value their unique status in Egyptian society to do the right thing, and thus reaffirm that that status has been justly earned, and should live on through history.
The question, really, is whether they warriors--men of honor--or merely good soldiers who do as they are told. We forever hear so much about warriors, and forever see so little.
All the more reason that Egypt's army should surprise us all, and cover themselves in glory.
As Sun Tzu says, the greatest victory is won without firing a shot.
Until he invited Dylan Ratigan on to muddy the waters, this segment on the Ed Show last night was a rare and extremely edifying look at the role that commodity speculation played in driving up food prices, and helping to spark the unrest that eventually toppled the regime in Tunisia, and appears to be on the verge of doing the same in Egypt. It's actually not that strong on the immediate specifics--its strength lies more in the fact that it tells the longer story--of how FDR set up a system that limited speculation, and how that system was taken apart, beginning in 1991, under the lead of Goldman Sachs. Take a look:
Instead of Dylan Ratigan's Ron Paul-style paranoia about quantitive easing, Ed's reporting would have been better supplemented by stressing how IMF neoliberal policies have helped contribute to this situation in at least three major ways. Starting around 1980, the IMF began conditioning loans on the adoption of "structural adjustment policies" (SAPs). Guiding principles involved in this strategy included:
(1) Cutting public subsidies for food, along with other basics, such as public education, thus making food prices more volatile.
(2) In addition to weakening farm sectors by reducing subsides, the IMF required weakening, if not complete abolition of protective tariffs, which had the effect of destroying most country's ability to feed themselves.
(3) The IMF's focus on loan repayment and "economic development" as the IMF defined it put a high priority on replacing food staples with cash crop production--crops which were, by their very nature, particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations, and thus to speculative manipulation.
Ironally, the reality is that countries like Tunisia and Egypt actually beat the bad odds of the IMF's neoliberal game in one particularly noteworthy way: Despite the incentive structure imposed by neoliberal policies, both countries managed to continue educating a significant fraction of their youth--educating them for jobs that the IMF's neoliberal prescriptions prevented those economies from ever creating in substantial numbers.
It was the enormous gap between youth's work capacity and the lack of suitable employment that created a chronic and widespread social problem that no neoliberal regime could possibly solve. This was the pervasive background settin g the stage for the acute problem of food price spikes. The latter was indeed the detonator. But the former was the bomb.
On Sunday, Juan Cole wrote a very concise backgrounder to peaceful revolution going on in Egypt, "Egypt's Class Conflict". It's not only about class conflict, of course, but also about the shifts in political ideology and foundations of legitimacy from Nasser's time to today. As such, one of the most valuable things it does is to highlight the role played by failed neo-liberal policies--which are hardly unique to Egypt, of course. Last August, for example, in my diary "The neoliberal failure", I called attention to a five year old report from the Center on Economic Policy Research (CEPR) "Scorecard on Development: 25 Years of Diminished Progress" by Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker and David Rosnick, a broad survey of results in over 100 developing countries. From its executive summary, here is what it found:
This paper looks at the available data on economic growth and various social indicators - including health outcomes and education - and compares the last 25 years (1980-2005)1 with the prior two decades (1960-1980). The paper finds that, contrary to popular belief, the past 25 years (1980-2005) have seen a sharply slower rate of economic growth and reduced progress on social indicators for the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries.
The picture of Egypt that Cole paints--powerful enough in its own right--is thus but one example of many. And the failure being underscored by the unfolding revolution is likewise but one example among many.
As hundreds of thousands (then, now millions) had ignored government-called curfews, that was a clear sign the government had lost authority, Cole noted, then wrote:
Authority is rooted in legitimacy. Leaders are acknowledged because the people agree that there is some legitimate basis for their authority and power. In democratic countries, that legitimacy comes from the ballot box. In Egypt, it derived 1952-1970 from the leading role of the Egyptian military and security forces in freeing Egypt from Western hegemony. That struggle included grappling with Britain to gain control over the Suez Canal (originally built by the Egyptian government and opened in 1869, but bought for a song by the British in 1875 when sharp Western banking practices brought the indebted Egyptian government to the brink of bankruptcy). It also involved fending off aggressive Israeli attempts to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and to assert Israeli interests in the Suez Canal. Revolutionary Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) conducted extensive land reform, breaking up the huge Central America-style haciendas and creating a rural middle class. Leonard Binder argued in the late 1960s that that rural middle class was the backbone of the regime. Abdul Nasser's state-led industrialization also created a new class of urban contractors who benefited from the building works commissioned by the government.
This was the social democratic foundations of the modern Egyptian state's legitimacy. And just as the Democratic Party in America is living off of its social democratic past, so, too, the Egyptian regime, which has abandoned that past with even more abandon:
From 1970, Anwar El Sadat took Egyptian in a new direction, opening up the economy and openly siding with the new multi-millionaire contracting class. It in turn was eager for European and American investment. Tired of the fruitless Arab-Israeli wars, the Egyptian public was largely supportive of Sadat's 1978 peace deal with Israel, which ended the cycle of wars with that country and opened the way for the building up of the Egyptian tourist industy and Western investment in it, as well as American and European aid. Egypt was moving to the Right.
But whereas Abdel Nasser's socialist policies had led to a doubling of the average real wage in Egypt 1960-1970, from 1970 to 2000 there was no real development in the country. Part of the problem was demographic. If the population grows 3 percent a year and the economy grows 3 percent a year, the per capita increase is zero. Since about 1850, Egypt and most other Middle Eastern countries have been having a (mysterious) population boom. The ever-increasing population also increasingly crowded into the cities, which typically offer high wages than rural work does, even in the marginal economy (e.g. selling matches). Nearly half the country now lives in cities, and even many villages have become 'suburbs' of vast metropolises.
So the rural middle class, while still important, is no longer such a weighty support for the regime. A successful government would need to have the ever-increasing numbers of city people on its side. But there, the Neoliberal policies pressed on Hosni Mubarak by the US since 1981 were unhelpful. Egyptian cities suffer from high unemployment and relatively high inflation. The urban sector has thrown up a few multi-millionaires, but many laborers fell left behind. The enormous number of high school and college graduates produced by the system can seldom find employment suited to their skills, and many cannot get jobs at all. Urban Egypt has rich and poor but only a small "middle class." The state carefully tries to control labor unions, who could seldom act independently.
The state was thus increasingly seen to be a state for the few. Its old base in the rural middle classes was rapidly declining as young people moved to the cities. It was doing little for the urban working and middle classes. An ostentatious state business class emerged, deeply dependent on government contracts and state good will, and meeting in the fancy tourist hotels. But the masses of high school and college graduates reduced to driving taxis or selling rugs (if they could even get those gigs) were not benefiting from the on-paper growth rates of the past decade.
From the CEPR paper, here is how economic development has stagnated worldwide under neoliberal policies:
The developing world is full of Egypts, ready to explode.
We're a week into the Egyptian uprising now, and it's time to reassess what has taken place so far and what might come next.
We know a few things, and we don't know a lot-and from what we can tell, the folks on the ground are also not sure what might happen. That said, we do know enough to begin to figure out the right questions to be asking.
As was true Friday, things are moving fast, so let's jump right in.
[Update: 12:35]: El Baradei to demonstrators in Tahrir Square: "We have a key demand for the regime to step down and a new era to start."
(1) Negotiated transition. The Muslim Brotherhood has announced its support for Mohamed ElBaradei as head of a transition government. This pretty much completes the process of ElBaradei's emergence as temporary leader of the opposition, a position he's solidified in large part by not claiming a more sweeping authority and announcing a greater ambition. US statements are now trending in this direction, with talk about fair elections.
(2) An armed counter-revolution. There has been some discussion of this possibility on Al Jazeera. There are troubling signs on the street--including the low-level buzzing of crowds by military jets, a meeting of Mubarak with top military leaders, the pattern of using security forces to engage in looting yesterday, and the closing of Al Jazeera's Cairo bureau, which helps limit the ability of negative imagery to get out if a military crackdown comes.
(3) Muddling through. US statements still have wiggle room in them, and the army--particularly on the front-line level--is reluctant to turn on the people. So both the above alternatives could fail, and the government could try to rely on a war of attrition, wearing down the protest movement's resolve, and making vague promises for elections later this year.
As Mubarak is furiously pursuing a multi-track strategy to try to divide the tidal wave of opposition that has suddenly arisen against him--including a reshuffling of tired old faces, and a combination of police neglect and agent provocateurs on the street, Mohamed ElBaradei is cautiously but firmly moving into a leadership void--careful to limit himself, not claiming to speak for the demonstrators while speaking strongly on behalf of their moral authority--and criticizing the US for not doing more:
Egyptian dissident Mohamed ElBaradei called the U.S. position on the Egyptian crisis a disappointment and condemned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's early Satruday morning speech as "almost an insult to the intelligence of the Egyptian people."
"I will continue to participate in whatever it takes to make sure that the Mubarak regime should leave," he said. "I think that there is a consensus here in Egypt in every part of society that this is a regime that is dictatorial, that has failed to deliver on economic, social or political fronts and that we need a new beginning, an Egypt that is free, that is democratic and we need to go through a transitional period."
ElBaradei said Egyptians had hoped that Mubarak would have announced his resignation earlier on Saturday, "but at the last minute he came out with an empty statement which was a huge disappointment to the Egyptian people."
Mubarak, he said, doesn't have a clue.
"He obviously did not understand the message from the Egyptian people," ElBaradei said. "It was almost an insult to the intelligence of the Egyptian people to tell them that the only response is that I will have a new government. People know full well that he is in charge of every aspect of running the country. He did not elaborate on one single economic or social reform."
ElBaradei said he expected "more demonstrations and larger demonstrations" especially since the police appeared to have handed control of the streets to the army. "It's the army that has taken over and the army traditionally never really clashes with the Egyptian people, so I hope he will understand the message before things get ugly," he said.
[UPDATE 12:42 PM EST]: Al Jazeera: Mounting accounts that government thugs are involved in looting. Some looters who have subdued by citizens have been found to have government ID, as well government equipment, Al Jazeera English is reporting. This same sort of strategy was used in Tunisia.
50,000 demonstrators have gathered in Tahrir Square alone:
Mubarak's attempt to save himself by sacrificing his puppet cabinet has been soundly rejected by the protesters who continue to swell the streets in defiance of curfew orders, calling for his resignation. The most recent wrinkle is the appointmend of Omar Suleiman as Egypts first vice-president in 30+ years. As several correspondents have put it, no one is chanting for the cabinet to resign, they are all calling for Mubarak to resign.
Following the developments on Al Jazeera English, which includes interviews with US-based commentators, one is struck by the enormous gulf between the framework of assumptions dominating American (and, to a substantial extent, European) thought and the dynamic of ideas in the Arab world generally, and welling up in Egypt today.
In the West, conservative concerns about stability and continuity dominate, with a few niceties about rights sprinkled on top to allow the speakers to delude themselves about their own morality. In the Arab world, liberal social democratic concerns about human rights, political self-determination and economic welfare predominate.
This is not to say that there aren't powerful religious conservative forces throughout the Arab world, but they are not the ones in the foreground of the current wave of mass protests calling for regime change. If the West was anything close to what it still pretends to be, we would be embracing and supporting the bottom-up forces of change without reservation.
So far, the army on the ground has--with a few scattered exceptions--refused to fire on or even threaten demonstrators. Chants of "The people and the army together" have been widely reported. The army is roughly 70% composed of poor conscripts.
The army leadership apparently has yet to declare itself, but it has to be concerned about whether its rank and file would follow orders if they were to fully back Mubarak. If the army leadership puts the preservation of their revered status first, then it seems more likely than not that they will eventually refuse to back Mubarak, and he will be forced to leave. Of course, I'm just another Westerner, like almost all of you. So that, too, has to be taken with more than just one grain of salt.
p.s. A government spokesman, Magrid Boutrous, attempting to defend the administration on Al Jazeera English, was challenged repeatledly, particularly when attempting to characterize the protesters as "mobs" and "looters", and Mubarak as "democratically elected president". This is the first indication I've heard about how Mubarak intends to justify himself. It is all absurdity on the level of the Tea Party here in the US.
John Bolton was on Fox earlier pimping the idea that this is the work of the Muslim Brotherhood or radical extremists and fretting over the toppling of this "secular" government. If he's any gauge, the Right is reverting to its natural impulse: supporting dictators. They aren't "pro-life" when it comes to the "birth" of democracy after all.
Bolton, of course, is from the Pure Id party, but an awful lot of US foreign policy is run by Pure Id. But somehow, I think that Juan Cole on Democracy Now! this morning was a more reliable guide:
JUAN COLE: Well, Vice President Biden seems to be wanting to define a dictator not with regard to domestic policy, but with regard to the responsible role the regime plays in the international world system, you know, from Washington's point of view. But certainly, from the point of view of human rights activists in Egypt, there are strong dictatorial tendencies in the Egyptian government. It's seen a lot of phony elections. It's used repressive techniques.
In some instances, those repressive techniques have been directed against radical movements. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad of Ayman al-Zawahiri was active in Egypt in the 1980s and '90s, blowing up things, shooting down tourists and others. And these same secret police were deployed at that time to track them down, arrest them, and really to eradicate them from the scene in Egypt.
And this is one of the things that drives this regime's repressiveness, is that it is afraid of Muslim fundamentalist movements. Whether they are radical-and there have been a number of important radical movements in Egypt that have resorted to violence-or whether they are social and political, as with the large and important Muslim Brotherhood movement, the regime is very afraid-and this comes out from U.S. cables that have been released by WikiLeaks-that the Muslim Brotherhood will find a way to take over. And, you know, when Khomeini overthrew the Shah in Iran in 1979, the first thing they did was execute a lot of the generals. And the generals in Egypt are bound and determined that a similar fate does not await them.
What this suggests to me now, with the army currently in the streets, being warmly greeted by the protesters, is that there's a real opening here for the establishment of a multi-party democracy. The old regime could well be gone as soon as tomorrow--and right now it would look to be a miracle if it lasted a week. As Juan notes, the generals have a strong interest in preserving secular stability, and civil society as a whole has relative trust in the army, as opposed to the regimes repressive police and intelligence agencies. These demonstrations grew on their own, without any outside leadership, they are not the creature of the Muslim Brotherhood, and no secular political leader has a significant claim on them either--which is a perfect set-up for creating a temporary transition government to run the country until elections can be held.
The biggest problem, from the US point of view, is actually the US itself--though of course we cannot admit this. After all, we have been the ultimate guarantors of the regime for over 30 years now. And, indeed, we have been the ultimate guarantors of all the Arab and Muslim dictatorships.
If Obama actually were who he pretended to be in the 2008 campaign--an agent of hope and change, who reached out easily and openly to partner with others--then this would be a remarkable opening opportunity, since the transition of Egypt to a multi-party democracy could be a model the rest of the region could embrace--and once adopted, that model would hold out the highest of hopes for working our way beyond the current threats of extremist religious terrorism. But since Obama is the exact opposite of this--a top-down, risk-averse neo-liberal constantly looking over his shoulder at the neo-cons and the military--there is simply no telling how badly we will botch things up--though it's at least a minimally good sign that we had the good sense not to offer any support in the press briefing Gibbs gave a little while ago.
It should now be clearer than ever that if only Obama had been who people mistook him to be--the Peace Prize-worthy leader, whose seemingly historical Cairo speech was backed up by actions that supported it, rather than drone attacks, continued escalation and black ops--then the US would now be in an incredible international position.
Had Obama taken the path that many mistakenly believed he intended, then the unfolding events in Egypt today might well be harbingers of the endgame of a relatively smooth and peaceful democratic revolution that would leave al Qaeda and its allies in a totally marginalized position. But because Obama let himself be spooked by Cheney and the rest of the neo-cons, rather than having them investigated for war crimes, he--and America--are in almost as awkward a state right now as Bush & Cheney would have been if these same events had unfolded on their watch.
And that's about as damning a thing I can think of to say. Which is not what I set out to do. It just happened as a result of trying to be as blunt and no-nonsense as possible.
The question now is how well and how quickly Obama can recover.... because the rest of the Arab dictatorships are all significantly more at risk than anyone could have imagined just one month ago. After Egypt,there are bound to be more. The only questions are "How many?" "How soon?" and "Which ones...first?"
As a commentator on Al Jazeera explained, the people experience the police as agents of repression and harassment on a daily basis, but the army is distant, professional, and a symbol of the nation beyond politics. And the army also sees itself this way, making it reluctant to take part in a political intervention against the people. So there's a cultural logic on both sides for them to feel trust and respect for one another: A very hopeful sign.
Coverage from Al Jazeera English live stream paints a picture of a country possibly on the brink of regime change from below. Currently, protesters control the streets, and no one knows what will happen next. What we've already seen would have been inconceivable kust four days ago.
This split-screen shot contrasts Jazeera's coverage with official Egyptian TV:
The two cameras are located only a few hundred meters apart, according to Al Jazeera.
The police have apparently been routed, and the Army has been greeted with cheers, so far taking no action. Things are very much in flux.
JUAN COLE: The Arab world has seen, in the last three decades, a series of Arab nationalist regimes, relatively secular, which have become increasingly sclerotic. These were postcolonial societies, societies that had been under Western dominance often, which-and that dominance was opposed by nationalist movements, led by legends like Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia or Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. And they were wildly popular in their day, because they were throwing off the West. But as time went on, the regimes that were set up became dominated by a kind of state elite, a relatively small group of people that benefited from state power, from the large public sector, from the throwing of contracts to particular individuals in the private sector. And they proved themselves unable to adapt over time to a globalizing world.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: One correction, it's just Ayman Nour who was struck in the back of the head. His son reported to Al Jazeera what happened. His son has not been injured. But, Juan Cole, can you talk about the Mubarak regime, who is Hosni Mubarak, how did he come to power, and his reign for-well, this year marks the 30th anniversary of his coming to power?
JUAN COLE: Hosni Mubarak is a former air force chief of staff and general. He was trained in Moscow. He speaks good Russian. And he is the third in the series of military leaders of Egypt since 1952, or you could say the fourth, in some ways. In any case, they've all been military men. They've all come out of the military. They're backed by the existing military. And that's-so Egypt is a Praetorian regime, and this is sometimes forgotten now because Mubarak wears business suits and there's an elected parliament, although the elections are widely believed not to be on the up and up.
It has been a couple of years since we first started writing about Egypt; at that time we did a series of stories that described how the country's Constitution is designed to ensure that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) remains the ruling party, how corruption and torture and rape are part of the justice system, how there's a looming Presidential succession crisis, and how we better pay attention, because one day all of this was going to blow up into a national emergency, with the potential for disastrous consequences that ripple all the way from Turkey to Morocco to Pakistan.
And now...that day has arrived.
After protests that led to a change of government (sort of) in Tunisia, rioting is spreading across Egypt, quickly, the ISI (Egypt's internal security police) is out grabbing citizens and doing what they do (we'll talk more about that later), and the question of Presidential succession, which many people thought was headed in one direction, may now be headed off to a place that outside observers might not have previously considered.
Lucky for you, I have some reach inside Egypt, and we're going to get a peek inside the story that you might not have seen otherwise.
I'm following this on twitter, and since I have access to a slightly louder megaphone than some, let's take a second at least to remember that the fate of a nation hangs in the balance right now. At least we can pay attention if nothing else.
Lots of stories flying:
- It appears the government has taken down the Internet in Egypt. This is a country of 80M, a $500B economy, #26 in the world. That's a pretty big deal.
- claims that the government is spreading flammable liquids in potential protest areas of Cairo. If true that would be a new low in gruesome counter-protest violence.
- claims that the regular Police have left Cairo and fears that this means the Army will move in
Also, as I noted in Quick hits, Joe Biden put himself on the wrong side of history with a quote I truly hope haunts him for a long time. Really wasn't expecting that Stephen Harper would prove a better democrat than the Obama admin.
Are you following this? What are you hearing? What do you believe?
Update: Something of a Tiananmen square moment in this video about 1:30 in. Such amazing courage.
While it was encouraging to see Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner continuing to call for political reform in Egypt in Saturday's Washington Post it seems reasonable to ask whether Posner's piece might not be too little too late as the administration's response to the sham parliamentary elections conducted in Egypt at the end of November.
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