Robert Fisk thinks Russia's Putin and Egypt's Al-Sisi can have a beautiful relationship

Robert Fisk reports on the growing cooperating between Vladimir Putin's Russia and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's Egypt in A meeting of minds in Cairo: Billion-dollar arms deal on table as Putin and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seek closer trade links and alliance against 'terror' The Independent 02/09/2015:

After crushing Muslim fighters in Chechnya, Mr Putin supports Bashar al-Assad’s ferocious war against the "Islamic State" in Syria and will be more than happy to put his arm around the chubby Egyptian whose courts have been sentencing Muslim Brotherhood members to the scaffold by the hundred. Mr Sisi has met Mr Putin before, in Moscow, and a Russian leader known for his cynicism can only enjoy meeting a military autocrat who was elected president after staging a successful coup d’etat against a previously elected president. Even the old Soviet Union could never quite achieve this. ...

The beauty of it all is that both leaders want the same thing – to emerge with a new ally after suffering the slings and arrows of Western criticism for their bloody behaviour. The Egyptian president oversaw the shooting massacre of hundreds of Brotherhood supporters in 2013. The Russian president oversaw the bloody occupation of parts of eastern Ukraine a year later. They will have much to talk about.

This is one of many cynical but pragmatic alliances Russia has made and is making. It's a nuclear power that can thrown its weight around in various places.

The United States and Russia are unofficial but de facto allies in Syria at the moment, with the US discreetly cooperating with Syria and its President Bashar al-Assad in fighting common enemies, ISIS and "Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate." (Patrick Cockburn, War with Isis: Syria's President Assad is overplaying a weak hand – he needs the West to keep militants from Damascus The Independent 02/10/2015)

Fisk notes in closing:

Russia and America have always suffered an addiction to obedient military rulers; and Mr Putin, who only retired from the KGB with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel – against Mr Sisi’s Field Marshal status – understands all too well how a “deep state” works. Patriotism, nationalism and corruption are a potent blood group for autocratic survival in the Arab world.

Joschka Fischer on the Egyptian revolution now

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer writes on the state of affairs in Egypt in Egypt after Morsi Project Syndicate 07/26/2013. As usual, he has some well-informed reflections:

Underlying the contradiction between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood is not only the question of religion, but also all of the social problems, including inequality, that riddle Arab societies. The Brotherhood has effectively assumed a role similar to that of left-wing European political parties in the nineteenth century. Whoever wants to weaken the Brotherhood has to address the urgent social issues that it raises and try to solve them.

This means that whatever solution ultimately prevails will be measured according to whether it can solve the economic crisis (particularly the lack of job opportunities for the young) and deepening mass poverty. The chances of this are slim.

Fischer is not saying that the Muslim Brotherhood is a leftwing party in today's political sense. They are a Muslim fundamentalist group of a definite conservative cast. American Republicans seem weirdly confused on that point.

Fischer describes the risks this way:

No one should deny that what happened in Egypt was a military coup, or that forces from former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime have returned to power. But, unlike in 2011, when the few pro-Western liberals and huge numbers of urban, middle-class youth rallied against Mubarak, now the same groups support the coup, lending it a certain (democratic?) legitimacy. Nonetheless, the overthrow of a democratically elected government by the military cannot be glossed over.

So what options does Egypt now have? Will it repeat the Algerian tragedy, in which the military canceled an election to prevent Islamists from assuming power, leading to an eight-year civil war that claimed up to 200,000 lives? Will the country return to military dictatorship? Or will Egypt end up with something like a Kemalist "democracy" of the type that long prevailed in Turkey, with a civilian government but the military pulling the strings? All three alternatives are possible, though it is impossible to predict which one will come to pass.

But one thing already can be said for certain: the basic distribution of power within Egyptian society has not changed. The military and the Muslim Brotherhood divide power between themselves. The Western-oriented liberals do not have any real power and stand, as we are seeing now, on the army’s shoulders. We should not forget that Morsi’s opponent in the presidential election in 2012 was Ahmed Shafik, a former general and the last Mubarak-era prime minister – certainly no liberal. [my emphasis]

The German version of Fischer's article is here, Die Rätsel der Sphinx.

Tags: egypt, joschka fischer

State of the revolution in Egypt

Richard Falk has a "long read" on the revolution in Egypt, Tears for ‘The Arab Spring’?: Recalling the Orientalist overview Aljazeera English 07/22/2013. Here's how he sees the current predicament:

There are two principal battlegrounds at stake in Egypt: (1) Whose legitimacy? The procedural legitimacy of the electoral process or the political legitimacy of demands of an overwhelming number of the people in the streets. Both can be manipulated to the detriment of the public good. Neither provides assurance of decent and effective leadership. Neither should be viewed as an absolute.

Interpretation is indispensable. (2) Whose mandate? The majoritarian mandate of the winners in the political contest however it is conducted or the inclusive agendas of winners and losers, bolstered by respect for minority rights and sensitivities to the needs, aspirations, and above all, fears of the losers.

The good news in Egypt is that the new subjectivity of political fearlessness that was born in January 25 on Tahrir Square persists; deference to the state is more dependent on the performance of the government than in the past, and this reminds the leaders that public accountability is about more than elections.

The bad news is that the Egyptian people in their new mobilisation had to turn to the military to attain their political goals, and many anti-Morsi protestors seemed oblivious to the dangers of doing so. The further bad news is that the new leadership - like the Morsi leadership and the Mubarak leadership before it - is likely to turn the country over to neoliberal taskmasters, internally and internationally, in their indispensable quest for economic normalcy.

Whether this quest will include a significant dedication to equity and the ordeal of the impoverished masses remains an unknown at stage, but without such a commitment there is no prospect of durable political success, no matter how other issues are addressed. [my emphasis]

Javier Salano warns in The Middle East Turmoil Trap Project Syndicate 07/22/2013, "The Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist government, led by Mohamed Morsi, demonstrated all too well its incompetence and incapacity to ensure an inclusive democratic transition. But the solution offered by Egypt’s military is far from ideal. Coups always tend to exacerbate problems, not solve them, and this one is no exception."

He also points out a complication with neighborhing Ethiopia:

Aside from the domestic situation, Egypt has another urgent problem. Egyptians depend on the Nile River, and Ethiopia has begun construction upstream of what will be Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam. The project is being pursued in the face of strong Egyptian objections – military intervention has been threatened – yet it continues apace. If the dam is built as planned, the volume of water flowing northward could be reduced by 20%, jeopardizing Egyptian agriculture and the livelihood of millions of people.

Falk notes some implications worth remembering about the US-NATO intervention in Libya in the region:

Each national situation needs to be treated as distinct, with its own historical and cultural characteristics, and particular political context. Only in Libya, once NATO had driven Qaddafi from power, did it seem as though there was almost a governance vacuum, allowing a successor leadership to engage in a state-building enterprise or, failing that, to live with an alarming dispersal of power to tribalised communities run by militias that has dragged human security below tolerance levels.

Early on in Libya and Syria, what started as nonviolent popular demonstrations, mimicking what had seemed to succeed so dramatically in Tunisia and Egypt, encountered violent responses determined to suppress rather than to give ground. There was certainly no willingness by these governments, and others, to go with the flow. If anything, the eerie calm of Algeria amid the tumult was the success model that influenced several regimes to uphold the established order with every instrument of control at their disposal.

In mid-2013 there seem to be different tales of disappointment, but no clear story of fulfillment. Repression had worked in several countries. A NATO intervention with UN sponsorship had produced regime-change in Libya, but post-Qaddafi Libya achieved neither stability nor democracy. [my emphasis]

Falk also sees a refutation of the colonialist viewpoint of "Orientalists" like Bernard Lewis in the events of the Arab Awakening:

Whatever else, the central Orientalist claim posited so dogmatically by Bernard Lewis and his acolytes that the Arab world lacked the capacity to make history relevant to the modern world has been forever refuted. It may not be the history we or many Arabs wish for, but this second Egyptian popular mobilisation, although lacking the inspirational unity of Tahrir Square, bears witness to the insistence by the Egyptian people to claim control over their own destiny, and this is by itself quintessentially modern, whether Orientalists like it or not. [my emphasis]

Crispian Balmer and Asma Alsharif report for Reuters in Egypt's Mursi accused of murder, kidnapping before rallies 07/26/2013 on the popular mobilization that the military government is promoting in support of itself:

Army helicopters buzzed low over Cairo shortly after noon prayers ended, and both sides warned of possible bloodshed. There were no reports of major violence by mid-afternoon.

Mursi has not been seen in public since his downfall and the army has said he is being held for his own safety. But Mena news agency said the former president would now be detained for 15 days as a judge investigated a raft of allegations.

The probe centers on charges that he conspired with Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to flee jail during the 2011 uprising against veteran autocrat Hosni Mubarak, killing some prisoners and officers, kidnapping soldiers and torching buildings.

Mursi has previously said locals helped him escape from prison during the 2011 upheavals and the Muslim Brotherhood denounced the series of accusations leveled against him.

Juan Cole says, "I have a bad feeling about this," in a post titled Egypt: Military announces ‘War on Terror,’ Calls for Massive Demos Against Muslim Brotherhood Informed Comment 07/26/2013.

He also comments, "I tweeted that when activists call for demonstrations, that is activism; when generals do, that is Peronism." He obviously sees "Peronism" as self-evidently bad. But Peronism has always been a very complicated political phenomenon in Argentina, with a left-leaning social-democratic aspect that has been very strongly represented in the kirchnerismo of current Argentine President Christina Fernández and her late husband and predecessor as president, Néstor Kirchner.

But presumably what Cole means is that what is happening in Egypt looks like a faux-populist mobilization in support of an authoritarian-oriented military government. He notes that the military has given the Muslim Brotherhood, the elected government that the military under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi deposed, a 48-hour deadline "to sign on to the national road map to the future (new constitution, new elections)." And he observes, "that in history, giving the opposing side a 48 hour ultimatum is often a prelude to war."

Tags: arab awakening, egypt

Real-time revolution in Egypt

We're celebrating the birthday of our American Revolution today. In Egypt, they're experiencing one real-time.

Tamarrud is the movement, often referred to as a youth movement, that was the main organizer of the massive protests against now-ousted elected Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi. Juan Cole uses "Rebellion" as the English translation for the name Tamarrud. Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was a high-profile player in the ousting of the elected government, which was headed by the Muslim Brotherhood. (The spelling of Anglicized Arabic names often varies depending on the English-language source, especially with relatively new figures in the news, e.g., Tamarrud/Tamarod.)

Coup in Egypt generate mixed reactions Aljazeera English 07/04/2013:

Stephen Walt posts this message dated 06/30/2013 (last Friday) from "a friend in Cairo who prefers to remain anonymous" who identifies himself as a political scientist (Letter from Cairo Foreign Policy 07/02/2013), who wrote before the coup:

The stated scenario (some might call fantasy) of many opposing the current government is a temporary military takeover that cleans out the Muslim Brotherhood leadership and sets the stage for a temporary caretaker government (the media has reported on a council of three), a rewriting of the Constitution, the election of a house of representatives (their lower house of parliament), and then the presidential election. This scenario has enormous support among the population that opposes the current government. For them, this is not a coup d'etat -- it is how Egypt can save itself. For the rest of Egypt, who voted for and still support President Morsy (slightly dwindling in the delta area but still at around 43 percent overall), this would be an undoing of a legitimate political process of elections -- and one that those in the United States and Europe endorse and hold as the standard for the transfer of power.

This is the broad public posture being taken by the coup leaders immediately after Morsi's ouster.

The invaluable Robert Fisk gives his crusty take on the supposed non-coup coup in When is a military coup not a military coup? When it happens in Egypt, apparently The Independent 07/04/2013:

For the first time in the history of the world, a coup is not a coup. The army take over, depose and imprison the democratically elected president, suspend the constitution, arrest the usual suspects, close down television stations and mass their armour in the streets of the capital. But the word 'coup' does not – and cannot – cross the lips of the Blessed Barack Obama. Nor does the hopeless UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon dare to utter such an offensive word. It’s not as if Obama doesn't know what's going on. Snipers in Cairo killed 15 Egyptians this week from a rooftop of the very university in which Obama made his 'reach-out' speech to the Muslim world in 2009.

Is this reticence because millions of Egyptians demanded just such a coup – they didn’t call it that, of course – and thus became the first massed people in the world to demand a coup prior to the actual coup taking place? Is it because Obama fears that to acknowledge it's a coup would force the US to impose sanctions on the most important Arab nation at peace with Israel? Or because the men who staged the coup might forever lose their 1.5 billion subvention from the US – rather than suffer a mere delay -- if they were told they'd actually carried out a coup.

He also makes these useful comparisons:

... Morsi was indeed elected in a real, Western-approved election. Sure, he won only 51 per cent -- or 52 per cent -- of the vote.

But did George W. Bush really win his first presidential election? Morsi certainly won a greater share of the popular vote than David Cameron. We can say that Morsi lost his mandate when he no longer honoured his majority vote by serving the majority of Egyptians. But does that mean that European armies must take over their countries whenever European prime ministers fall below 50 per cent in their public opinion polls? And by the way, are the Muslim Brotherhood to be allowed to participate in the next Egyptian presidential elections? Or will they be banned? And if they participate, what will happen if their candidate wins again?

As Fisk makes clear in that column itself, he's not defending the approach of Morsi and the Brothers (as the Muslim Brotherhood is known for short). "He treated his Muslim Brotherhood mates as masters rather than servants of the people, showed no interest in protecting Egypt’s Christian minority, and then enraged the Egyptian army by attending a Brotherhood meeting at which Egyptians were asked to join the holy war in Syria to kill Shiites and overthrow Bashar al-Assad's regime." So the latest turn in the Egyptian revolution is in part a spillover effect of the Syrian civil war.

Juan Cole in Egypt's "Revocouption" and the future of Democracy on the Nile Informed Comment 07/04/2013 reminds us how risky the current situation in Egypt is. Revolutions are very messy events, messier than normal politics. If the only legitimate goal of war is to establish a better peace, a revolution is a means to establish a new and hopefully better boring normal routine. (We'll talk about "permanent revolution" another time.) And Cole notes that the coup in Egypt does have some striking features not present in your run-of-the-mill coup d'tat:

In fact, there certainly was a popular revolutionary element to the events, with literally millions of protesters coming out on Sunday and after, in the biggest demonstrations in Egyptian history. You can’t dismiss that as merely a coup d’etat from on top by a handful of officers.

But on Wednesday there was also a military coup, provoked by the officer corps’ increasing dissatisfaction with President Muhammad Morsi as well as a determination not to stand by as the country threatened to devolve into chaos, as rival street crowds confronted one another.

The Minister of Defense and de facto head of the military establishment, Brig Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, was the one who set forward the framework for the change in government. ...

The interim president is Adly Mansour, the acting chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court.

And both revolutions and coups can turn out badly:

The mass arrests and the resurrection of Mubarak-era phony prosecutions are both extremely troubling, since they have the effect of criminalizing the Muslim Brotherhood and creating again the category of thought crimes in Egypt, the abolition of which was one of the gains of 2011.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters maintain that Wednesday’s events were nothing more than a seedy military coup against a legitimate, freely elected president. They are angry and despondent about having the military steal from them the fruits of their victory at the polls. Some more radical elements of the Brotherhood have threatened to turn to terrorism as a result of Morsi being deposed.

What Rebellion and al-Sisi have done is extremely dangerous. Not only does it risk undermining the legitimacy of democratic elections, it risks discouraging Muslim religious groups from participating in democratic politics. The danger is real. A similar revocation of the results of a revolution in Algeria late in 1991 threw the country into a decade and a half of civil war that left over 150,000 dead. The 'debaathification' program of the post-2003 Iraqi government, which was vindictive toward former members of the Baath Party, probably helped throw that country into a low-grade guerrilla struggle that continues to this day. Egyptians who think their country is immune from such phenomena are fooling themselves. [my emphasis]

During the Cold War, the US and Israel actively promoted Islamist political movement as an alternative to anti-capitalist, left-leaning movements that would be less friendly to the West and more supportive of Soviet positions. Robert Dreyfuss describes this process in his book Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005), which also gives an account of the development of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the diverse evolution of its international influence. The Osama bin Laden brand of jihadist ideology was one of those influences, most of which have been less obviously malign. We're seeing in Egypt and in Turkey the playing out of the contradictions of a party with theocratic inclinations (Marsi's Brothers in Egypt, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party in Turkey) working within democratic institutions. Those democratic institutions are far better established in Turkey than Egypt, of course.

Walt's Anonymous friend gives this perspective on the Egyptian context of the non-coup coup idea:

One of the two core challenges in this current dynamic is the fact that there are only two institutions that its people trust. While Americans have trust and confidence (at various times) in the media, the president, elections, the Supreme Court, local elected officials, and maybe even their police, Egyptians really only have two: the Egyptian Armed Forces (EAF -- often just referred to as the Army for shorthand, but it includes a navy and an air force among a few other services) and their devout faith for Islam. This is not a political Islam for a majority but a spirituality that, at most, imbues their every action in life and, at least, encourages a sense of surrender and acceptance -- the idea that there are many things beyond one's control and the best you can do is to do your best. ...

The second challenge of the current dynamic is Egyptians' perception that the only way they have been able to achieve any real change in their system -- and in their elected government's behavior -- has been through street protests and demonstrations. Hosni Mubarak fell due to 18 days of protest. Morsy changed his stance on extensive presidential oversight and power in the draft of the Egyptian Constitution only after massive street protests last November and early December. The decision to call for earlier parliamentary elections (which later was undone) was achieved after the Jan. 25 protests this year. Hence, Egyptians' almost supernatural belief in the ability of the demonstrations -- starting June 28 -- to force a change in the government.

Tags: egypt, muslim brotherhood

Varying versions of embassy-attack crisis incidents

I'm struck by a couple of variances in major parts of the story last week about the embassy attacks. One is that it seems to have become a general meme the President Obama's comment about Egypt not being an ally but not being an enemy either was a "gaffe".

Juan Cole has a different and realistic view in Obama Plays Hardball and Egypt’s Morsi Folds Informed Comment 09/14/2012:

Egypt is among about 14 countries designated at “major non-NATO allies” by US presidents. This status recognizes that they do joint military exercises with the US, and gives them special access to advanced US weaponry. However, some of them are not allies in the precise legal sense. That is, there is no obligation of mutual defense. A true ally, as with NATO states, is one that the allied country is pledged to defend from attack. Still, US officials typically have referred to Egypt as an ally, and the State Department made clear that it continues to do so.

So Obama was technically correct that Egypt is not an ally in the sense that Britain or even Turkey is. But unlike what some media outlets wrote, this statement was no gaffe. Rather, Obama was playing hardball with Morsi, trying to impress upon him that the status of ‘major non-NATO ally’ is not automatic now that the Muslim Brotherhood is in control. It will have to be re-earned, at least from Obama’s point of view. And the lack of response on the embassy attack is not consistent with ally status. Non-NATO ally status is bestowed by a stroke of the presidential pen, so Obama could take it away.

... Obama has enough assets in his contest with Morsi to influence the Egypt situation– loan reduction, civilian and military aid, and the danger that a US State Department travel warning could devastate Egypt’s tourist industry, which is worth billions a year. Even Obama’s willingness to play a politics of reputation with Morsi’s Egypt seems to have had some effect. It wasn’t a 'gaffe.' [emphasis in original]

The Obama Administration is going with the story that the Libya consulate attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens was an outgrowth of a protest of the Innocence of Muslims YouTube trailer and (alleged) film. Our UN Ambassador Susan Rice reiterated that position Sunday. (Ambassador Rice: Benghazi attack began spontaneously NBC News US 09/16/2012) The Libyan government is taking a different position, as Brad Knickerbocker reports in Libya attack: US doubts that Al Qaeda planned ahead 09/16/2012:

Rice’s comments put her at odds with Libyan officials, who continue to insist that the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens and the other Americans was planned well in advance of the protests that began on the anniversary of 9/11 and spread around the world.

"It was planned, definitely, it was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their arrival," Libyan President Mohammed Magarief said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday.

So far, Libyan authorities have arrested some 50 individuals suspected of being connected to last week’s attack. President Magarief told CBS the suspects are connected to Al Qaeda, or are affiliates and sympathizers.

"We don't know what are the real intentions of these perpetrators," he said. "They entered Libya from different directions. Some of them definitely from Mali and Algeria."

Nancy Youssef and Amina Ismail report for McClatchy Newspapers (Anti-U.S. outrage over video began with Christian activist’s phone call to a reporter 09/15/20012):

Whether the Benghazi attack was linked to anger over the video remains uncertain – witnesses have said there was no protest preceding the attack – but the trauma of those deaths will likely scar U.S. perceptions for years, and while Saturday seemed calm across the region, the U.S. State Department made clear it fears the violence has not ended.

Tags: egypt, embassy attacks, libya

Egypt, Argentina, Brazil and the present and future of revolutions

The news about the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi winning the Egyptian Presidency made me think about Joschka Fischer's notion of the post-communist Eastern European revolutions as "revolution by implosion". There's good reason to think that this is what happened in the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt. I'm not sure it so much fits the Libyan or Syrian experience, where the civil war aspect seem more prominent.

This is brief video sketch of Morsi from Aljazeera English, Who is Mohamed Morsi? 06/24/2012:

Here is one on the results of the election, Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros reports from Cairo Aljazeera English 06/24/2012:

On Morsi's victory, see:

Kristen Chick, Muslim Brotherhood's Morsi becomes Egypt's first civilian president Christian Science Monitor 06/24/2012

Celebration in Egypt as Morsi declared winner Aljazeera English 06/24/2012

BBC News, Muslim Brotherhood's Mursi declared Egypt president 06/24/2012

Brotherhood Mursi wins Egyptian presidency Al Akhbar English 06/24/2012

Hatem Maher, 'Don't obey me if I don't fulfill promises': President-elect Mursi tells Egyptians Ahram Online 06/24/2012

Dan Murphy, Egypt has a new president: Let the fear mongering begin! Christian Science Monitor 06/24/2012;

Mark LeVine, Morsi's win is a victory for the revolution Aljazeera English 06/24/2012

Sherif Tarek, Mursi declared Egypt's first civilian president, but military remains in control Ahram Online 06/24/2012

Juan Cole has a useful commentary at his Informed Comment blog, Mursi and the Brotherhood in a Pluralist Egypt 06/24/2012: "despite the Orientalist impulse in Western writing to see everything in the Middle East as black and white, as fundamentalist or libertine, Egypt’s political geography has been revealed by this year’s elections to be diverse. It isn’t just puritans versus belly dancers."

Fischer's concept of "revolution by implosion" recognizes that actual revolutions that deserve the name can occur in even the most advanced countries with complex interlocking institutions, little or no geographically based tribalism, and sophisticated methods of social control that make any kind of mass armed uprising completely unfeasible.

Here it's worth noting events and processes in Latin America that aren't revolutionary in rhetoric or self-understanding but do challenge the dominant neoliberal model of deregulation and "free trade" on terms that overwhelmingly benefit multinational corporations and the One Percent. I have in mind here Argentina and Brazil, in particular. Venezuela is in a different mode of operation in that the Hugo Chávez' dominant political movement understands itself as the Bolivarian Revolution, i.e., explicitly revolutionary. Here I won't try to deal with the question of how much developments in Venezuela actually conform to the hostile image that is the conventional wisdom in the American press.

Argentina experience under its current "kirchnerist" economic model has acquired a new urgency of international attention because it has actually provided a constructive and democratic model of a successful exit from conditions that are currently faced by the "periphery" countries of the eurozone such as Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

(Kirchnerism refers to the policies pursued by Presidents Nestor Kirchner and his wife and successor Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the latter having been even more consequent in pursuing that direction that her late husband. Both are part of the Peronist Partido Justicialista (PJ), and kirchnerism could be described as a social-democratic variant of Peronism as distinguished from the neoliberal variant of Peronism. But Peronism itself is the most complex political movement to explain in ideological terms that I've even encountered, so I'm not sure how clarifying such a clarification is.)

Jamie Galbraith discusses Argentina and Brazil in his new book Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (2012):

Argentina and Brazil made similar transition, under similar conditions, from import substitution models to open market economies [as prescribed by neoliberal ideology], and both experienced the instability and stress associated with the neoliberal economic climate. In both cases, following large increases inequality has been made to decline in recent years, as the countries retreated - to a degree - from neoliberal globalization.

In particular, inequality fell in both countries as the share of income poassing through the financial sector and the riches urban centers declined; in both cases these phenomena between them explain most of the decline in economic inequality. ...

However, the two countries experienced these changes differently. In Argentina, the neoliberal model kept the country in a strong grip through the end of the 1990s, and inequality rose sharply alongside the relative position of the banks (and of Buenos Aires City) compared to the rest of the country. Only after the crisis in 2001 did Argentina begin to reverse these trends, amid a radical reshaping of the government and changed in the ideological climate. In Brazil, the largest increases in inequality had already occurred, beginning in 1982 with the debt crisis. Brazil was able substantially to stabilize its macroeconomic environment beginning in 1993, with the result that the hypertrophy of the financial sector peaked and inequality fell in the following years; a major element of this was a growing role for the public sector.

This pattern was established under the Cardoso government and continued under Lula, despite the change in party control and ideology. However, it was under Lula - operating under the vastly more favorable commodity and credit conditions of the 2000s - that poverty in Brazil moved dramatically downward.

This may seem far afield from the Arab Awakening and the Egyptian Presidential contest. And Galbraith's concern in his book is focused on the economics of inequality, his career specialty, than on political change as such. But he proceeds directly from the above quote to observe, "To the extent that a bilateral comparison can lead to valid generalization, we suggest that major political changes are triggered not so much by the direction of economic change but by its speed and abruptness." He suggests that Brazil's more gradual adoption of policies deviated from the neoliberal/Washington Consensus approach produced less dramatic political changes than those in Argentina, where the more constructive policies "were resisted ... until crisis and rebellion imposed them" in 2001-2.

Galbraith concludes his chapter on Argentina and Brazil with a somewhat enigmatic comment, "The result was an ideological overshoot in Argentina, compared to Brazil." I would be curious to know what he sees as the "ideological overshoot" of kircherismo. If I had to guess, it probably has something to do with the checkered history of Peronism. But he doesn't elaborate on the point in his book.

The Egyptian Revolution is still in an early stage, as the news reports and analyses linked above emphasize. The armed forces don't currently recognize the authority of the civilian President over them, for instance, so Egypt certainly cannot be said to have a secure democratic government. And though the Muslim Brotherhood is still treading carefully and Mohamed Morsi was generally seen by supporters of the democratic revolution and being more in their cause's interest than the military's candidate who lost, many supporters of secular democracy both inside and outside Egypt remain wary of the Brothers' intentions. And to our Christianist theocratic Republicans, any kind of Islamist party is the incarnation of the Devil.

What strikes me about the current Egyptian revolution in the context of Fischer's idea of "revolution by implosion" is that the fall of the old regime seems to fit that model. The Egyptian public didn't stage an armed uprising or conduct a civil war. Hosni Mubarak's regime certainly seemed to have had the physical force at its disposal to crush the popular protests by force, just as the East German Communist regime did in 1989, the year in which the People's Power movement there achieved its most dramatic breakthroughs. But the moment was such that the old regimes in both cases didn't see their way open with the political support that they perceived themselves having to hold back the popular upsurge. And the regimes that looked so formidable a few months earlier seemed to fold like a house of cards. Revolution By Implosion is a fitting concept to describe those events.

But as subsequent events in both cases showed, organization counts. A lot. In the East German case, those who had spearheaded the democratic revolution for years, often at great personal cost to themselves, for the most part found themselves sidelined politically in the elections of 1990. Those like Angela Merkel who linked up immediately with the established Western parties, which still had the formal trappings of an existence in East Germany even under the Communist regime, prospered far more than the dedicated reform-Communist activists who most actively promoted the anti-regime protests.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has led a long existence, spawning the jihadist ideology of Osama bin Laden's Al Qa'ida along the way. But in recent years it has moderated its goals and tactics, and has lead a strange, public and visible though unofficial existence. It was formally banned by Egyptian law, but was still able to run and elect candidates to the largely powerless Egyptian parliament. (In this, their situation was partially reminiscent of the German Social Democratic Party under Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law of 1878-90.) And even though the Brothers didn't take a leading role in starting off the Arab Awakening movement in Egypt, their organization allowed them to take the leading position in the new institutional arrangements produced by the reform movement, as the Presidential election just dramatically illustrated.

In the cases of Argentina and Brazil, a dramatic divergence from the neoliberal consensus took place within the framework of established political parties reacting to the economic and political problems caused by the failures evident in the reality of neoliberal economics. Dramatic transformations took place within parties that were flexible and open enough for serious democratic reform: if "reform" is the right word for a rejection of the One Percenter international economic framework of neoliberalism.

Tags: argentina, brazil, egypt, james galbraith, joschka fischer

Obama and the Egyptian democratic movement: there's something to be said for caution

David Bromwich has followed the Obama Administration closely. And his analyses of Obama's style of leadership have struck me as being very perceptive.

In The Embarrassments of Empire: Washington Wonders What to Say about Arab Freedom TomDispatch 03/10/2011, he assesses the Administration's response so far to the dramatic wave of democratic protest in the Arab world in recent weeks, with particular reference to Egypt. These two paragraphs give a good sense of his take on the experience:

Throughout the 18 days of upheaval, Washington spoke of the need for an "orderly transition." President Obama and his advisers seemed to side with the Egyptian demonstrators vaguely and sentimentally, yet they never sought a connection with them, not even through a figure of international renown like Mohamed ElBaradei, the former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency who earned a Nobel peace prize in 2005. The U.S. took extreme care not to offend Mubarak. There was a period of perhaps three days after Obama dispatched Frank Wisner (a former ambassador and personal friend of Mubarak) as special envoy to consult with the dictator when the world was given to understand that America was planning the longest of farewells.

Such was the American response to an expression of popular will that had no precedent. For in the end, the protest swept up millions of demonstrators: by some estimates nearly a quarter of Egypt's population of 81 million, in a mass action whose exhilaration could be shared by all who watched. The crowd in Tahrir Square had none of the poisonous quality of a mob. Even the most respectable citizens -- doctors, lawyers, teachers, shopkeepers, women as well as men -- were drawn in little by little, visiting the demonstrations after work, throwing in their lot, and finally staying overnight in the square.

I'm not actually so inclined to criticize the Administration for their cautious response to the unrest in Egypt. The United States needs to be able to deal with regimes in power, even nasty ones. Thirty years of no diplomatic relations with Iran and half a century of none with Cuba don't seem to have produced any sterling results. Egypt's peace treaty with Israel didn't lead to a solution of the Palestinian problem. But it has preserved peace between Israel and Egypt for three decades. And that in itself is a benefit to the United States, even if primarily in a secondary way through our close relationship with Israel.

Revolutions are unpredictable. And the outcome in Egypt is still unknown. Any overt identification of the US with the opposition could well have done them more harm than good. Bromwich implicitly criticizes Obama for not being more forceful in pushing Obama out. When we someday know more about the details than we do now, I may agree. But based on what I've heard so far, I'm inclined to think restraint was appropriate when it comes to ordering a friendly government to step down because street demonstrations had suddenly made his regime look shaky.

Once the United States makes itself that much of a direct player in an internal conflict in another country, the consequences can be tricky. Bromwich writes:

Right to the end, Obama limited himself to comforting generalities whose practical significance was obscure. On day 13, for example, he allowed that Egypt was "not going to go back to what it was." Meanwhile, the administration that went on the record in favor of "real, concrete" reforms never named one.

It wasn't "Ich bin ein Berliner" drama. But sometimes diplomatic hot air is the thing the moment requires.

Bromwich indulges in some speculation that runs ahead of available facts in guessing what kind of private assurances Obama was giving to Egyptian President Mubarak. His reasoning is interesting. But the speculation seems a real reach. But the perspective from which he starts on it is based on his observations of Obama's style:

To say it another way, Obama visibly hates crisis. He is so averse to the very idea of instability that he seems unable to use a crisis to his advantage. Seldom, to judge by the evidence thus far, is he the first, second, or third person in the room to recognize that a state of crisis exists. The hesitation that looked like apathy and the hyper-managerial tone of his response to the BP oil spill offered a vivid illustration of this trait. Egypt brought out the same pattern. [my emphasis]

Bromwich has been a careful observer of this Administration. And what he has to say on the topic is consistently worth reading. Even if in this case he let speculation run away with him a bit.

Bromwich also spends some time on the Raymond Davis incident that has caused a ruckus in US relations to Pakistan. It's kind of awkwardly tacked on to the discussion of Egypt. But this is a memorable comment:

In obeying a White House request to keep them out of the American press, the Times (along with the Washington Post and Associated Press) was protecting not Davis himself but a government definition of "tact," while fostering the ignorance of American citizens about the actions of our own government. The protocol of the press under imperial rules -- as the British discovered in the Boer War and Americans have come to know in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan -- is simple and endlessly repeatable: power comes before truth except in cases where the truth is conspicuous. [my emphasis]

Tags: david bromwich, egypt, obama administration

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan)

Zaid Hassan argues in The Strategic Caution of the Muslim Brotherhood Religion Dispatches 02/10/2011 that "to dismiss the Brotherhood as incompetent or irrelevant ignore both the historical and current reality of the Brotherhood as virtuoso political actors and survivors." To treat the Brothers - the Ikhwan, in the Anglicized version of its Arabic name - as the equivalent of "Al Qa'ida" is foolish. Even though Sayyid Qutb, an Ikhwan leader during his lifetime, is considered the main spiritual godfather of the kind of violent, extreme Salafi thinking which Osama bin Laden adopted, the Ikhwan has gone a very different way. (I guess "godfather" is kind of an awkward term to use in an Islamic context.)

Hassan quotes Abdelwahab El-Affendi describing the Ikhwan's approach as "tactical carefulness and strategic modesty." Any supporter of secular democracy will have concerns about Ikhwan's longer-term goals in terms of imposing their conservative religious views on others through state power. But it's important to try to be genuinely realistic in assessing what the Ikhwan actually is without swallowing propaganda fear-mongering from Christianists like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.

Robert Dreyfuss provides more background on Ikhwan in What Is the Muslim Brotherhood, and Will It Take Over Egypt? Mother Jones 02/11/2011. His book Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005) deals extensively with the Ikhwan. Dreyfuss' book puts the development of political Islam as we know it today into the anti-Communist context of the Cold War, when the United States and Israel viewed Islamist groups and movements as useful and desirable competition to left-leaning, pro-Soviet parties and governments.

Recent superficial discussions of Egyptian politics on American TV might lead one to believe that the Egyptian regime was a bitter opponent of Ikhwan and Islamism. Which is a half-truth. Mubarak hated and feared the Muslim Brotherhood. But his predecessor Anwar Sadat promoted an Islamicizing trend as part of his approach to governance, as Dreyfuss describes in Mother Jones:

Guided by Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, Anwar Sadat — who'd been a member of the Brotherhood in the 1940s — reintroduced the Ikhwan to Egypt. At the time, Sadat had no political base, and he wanted to undermine the influence of the Nasserites and the communists. To that end, he calculatedly unleashed the power of right-wing political Islam. The Brotherhood's youth wing, often using physical force to intimidate its opponents, helped Sadat recapture ideological control of Egypt's universities. The Brotherhood also took the reins of Egypt's professional societies—doctors', engineers', and lawyers' groups. But because Sadat did not formally allow the Ikhwan to set up a political party, it fragmented into various components, some of which—inspired by Sayyid Qutb, a violent Salafi theoretician who was hanged by Nasser—turned to nihilist violence. One of these offshoots murdered Sadat in 1981, and then Vice President Mubarak took over. [my emphasis]

Karen Armstrong describes the Islamicizing trend under Sadat in her book, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (1991).

This trend continued under Mubarak, as Paul Amar explains in Why Egypt's Progressives Win Jadaliyya - h/t Russ Wellen, Egypt Has Already Experienced Islamic Rule -- and Found It Wanting FPIP Blog 02/14/2011:

In the past ten years this political force of this particular wing of the Brothers has been partially coopted by Mubarak’s government from two angles. First, Brothers were allowed to enter parliament as independent candidates and have been allowed to participate in the recent economic boom. The senior Brothers now own major cell phone companies and real estate developments, and have been absorbed into the NDP machine and upper-middle class establishment for years. Second, the government wholly appropriated the Brothers’ moral discourse. For the last ten or fifteen years Mubarak’s police-state has stirred moral panics and waved the banner of Islam, attacking single working women, homosexuals, devil-worshipping internet users, trash-recycling pig farmers, rent-control squatters, as well as Baha’i, Christian and Shi’i minorities. In its morality crusades, the Mubarak government burned books, harassed women, and excommunicated college professors. Thus, we can say that Egypt has already experienced rule by an extremely narrow Islamist state – Mubarak’s! Egyptians tried out that kind of regime. And they hated it. [my emphasis]

Dreyfuss offers this cautious observation about the state of Ikhwan today:

In 2007, the Brotherhood released a draft political program that included several very troubling proposals, including the idea that Egypt's government be overseen by an unelected council of Islamic scholars who would measure the country's laws against the Koran and sharia to make sure governance would "conform to Islamic law." Since then, various Muslim Brotherhood officials have also made conflicting statements about anything from the role of women to the treatment of non-Muslim minorities.

In the end, there's no getting around the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is, if not an anachronism, a profoundly reactionary force. Its views on marriage, the family, homosexuality, and the like are distasteful to most Western minds and many Egyptian ones. And it harbors a strong current of overt anti-Semitism, along with a penchant for conspiracy theories. Despite Egypt's drift toward a more conservative Islamic outlook since the 1970s—which paralleled similar trends across the Muslim world—the Egyptian people, especially the middle class, may in the end not be receptive to the Brotherhood's message.

Juan Cole also provides an update on the Ikhwan in Fear Not the Muslim Brotherhood Boogeyman Truthdig 02/15/2011. He reminds us that some American demagogues are perfectly happy to flat-out lie about the group:

Someone named Andy McCarthy, identified as a "former federal prosecutor," has been everywhere in the media making the most grossly inaccurate claims about the Muslim Brotherhood and demonstrating a profundity of ignorance about Egypt unmatched since Pope Innocent III launched the disastrous Fifth Crusade in 1213. McCarthy alleged that the Brotherhood assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, that Ayman al-Zawahri of al-Qaida is in this group, and that the fundamentalist party Hamas in the Gaza Strip is under the control of the Egyptian Brotherhood. Everything he said to millions of Americans was a laughable falsehood.

He also reinforces the role that Islamist politics played in the ruling style of Anwar Sadat:

In the 1970s, Sadat rehabilitated the Brotherhood and stipulated that if it would eschew violence and become a civil society association, the government would let its members out of jail and allow them relative freedom. It was this bargain, to which the Brotherhood has faithfully adhered, that drove radicals such as al-Zawahri, now al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader, to break with the Brotherhood and to denounce it virulently. Sadat was not assassinated by the Brotherhood, contrary to what was alleged to the great Mideast expert Sean Hannity by the great Mideast expert McCarthy. The president was felled by militants who rejected both him and his ally, the Muslim Brotherhood.

He also reminds us that while it's ridiculous to imagine the Ikhwan as some super-menace, foreign policy makers need to be realistic in thinking about what it is:

The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist organization. It is relatively hostile to women's rights, and its vision of moving Egypt even further from civil, secular law to a conservative and literalist interpretation of medieval Muslim traditions is reactionary. Its literature is tainted with the worst sort of anti-Semitism. But decades of repression have not destroyed the movement, and there is no reason to believe that more repression would be more effective now.

There is another, proven, way to deal with this problem. The political success stories of the past decade in the Muslim world with regard to democratization are Turkey and Indonesia. In both countries the fundamentalist religious tendency has been liberalized and domesticated by its participation in the parliamentary process. Mubarak’s regime did not work. Democracy in Turkey and Indonesia has. Let us go with a winner for once. [my emphasis]

Tags: egypt, second subject, ikhwan, islamic fundamentalism, muslim brotherhood

Reasons dictatorships can fall

Moisés Naím provides an unusually decent summary of a complex subject, ¿Cómo muere una dictadura? (How does a dictatorship die?) El País 13.02.2011.

He points out that some dictatorships are more dictatorial than others. Some rule with an iron hand, others rule with some pretence at democratic legitimacy.

All dictatorships depend on the support of the military. If the military stops supporting the regime and specifically refuses to fire on their fellow citizens to defend the regime: "Cuando se niegan a hacerlo, nace la libertad." (When they refuse to do that, liberty is born.)

One factor much discussed in the Egyptian case is the emergence of new information/communications technologies. Jay Rosen discusses this idea in The "Twitter Can't Topple Dictators" Article Press Think 02/13/2011. He tweeted a day earlier, "I found it! The generic "Twitter doesn't topple dictators" article. It has everything. All debunking cliches in one place." One of the articles to which he refers at Press Think is People, Not Things, Are The Tools Of Revolution by Devin Coldewey TechCrunch 02/11/2011. Rosen calls "Twitter doesn't topple dictators" a "genre that is starting to get a swelled head about itself." He describes several problems of the genre of such articles with special reference to Coldewey's, including:

By ranting about the absuridty [sic] of maximalist claims, the author takes a pass on the really hard and really interesting question: how does the Internet affect the balance of forces in a contest between the state and people fed up with the state?

He summarizes his beef with this particular popular but superficial commentary, "Twitter brings down governments is not a serious idea about the Internet and social change. Refuting it is not a serious activity. It just feels good ... for a moment."

Moisés Naím makes a different point about information. He mentions that new information technologies are clearly "a new headache for autocrats." But what he emphasizes is the spread of information among the population about corruption in their government - corruption is a chronic problem of dictatorships - and information about alternatives forms of rule being practiced in other countries. Just as an odd break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972 wound up being a massively revealing scandal in the United States, new information can shift the conception of a public toward a ruling dictatorship.

Naím notes that dictatorships can have difficulty managing change, at least after the initial period of changes they want to impose when taking power. This isn't always true. He uses China as a country with a dictatorial government that nevertheless has been very good at adjusting to economic changes in the world.

Dictatorships can get old and decrepit, just like individual dictators. Despite the massive domestic intelligence operations the East German regime was famous for running, that regime fell along with other former Warsaw Pact governments in eastern Europe in what Joschka Fischer calls revolution by implosion.

Internal fights between groups that are part of the dictatorship or its key supporters can wind up fatally wounding the government itself. Given the comic-book way in which democracy and dictatorship is so commonly discussed in the American media, especially TV, it's easy to forget that even dictatorships have to have some kind of constituency among the population and have to pay attention in some way or another to actual public opinion. And they can really screw it up.

Sometimes a dictatorship commits a fatal error or series of them that sets of a chain of events it can't control. He uses a very appropriate example, that of the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-83, whose public support largely evaporated in the wake of their loss in the 1982 war with England over the Malvinas/Falklands Islands. It was really a fatal error for their nasty regime.

Naím also mentions "contagion" as a factor. This is part of what terrified American policymakers during the Cold War in the form of the infamous Domino Theory, the fear that revolutions would spread from one country to the next. Ché Guevara's concept of creating "two, three, many Vietnams" in the form of national liberation wars against the US and European powers assumed that "contagion" would play a role in that process. In practice, both hopes and fears of revolution being contagious are rarely fulfilled. In the case of Tunisia and Egypt, though, contagion clearly played some role.

Jay Rosen ends his article cited above with "a plea for mystery. Factors are not causes. It is a mystery why uprisings occur when they do. The grievances are usually old ones, and yet for a very long time the population suffered them rather than overturn the system."

I'm not quite so pessimistic. At least in retrospect, reasons for the outbreak of a revolution can be described and understood. But the mystery of the timing is always worth keeping in mind.

Tags: egypt, jay rosen, mosés naím

Stephen Walt on the Egyptian revolution and American policy toward it

Über-Realist foreign policy expert Stephen Walt looks at US policy toward Egypt in Is Obama wobbling on democracy for Egypt? Foreign Affairs 02/06/2011. Some of the content has been overtaken by events. But he gives a useful and timely explanation about why revolutions seem (especially) from the outside to break out suddenly:

President Obama is reportedly angry with the U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to anticipate the upheavals in Tunisia or Egypt. His irritation is silly, because there's a well-founded social science literature (by Timur Kuran, Susanne Lohmann, and Marc Granovetter, among others) explaining why it is nearly impossible to predict the onset of a revolutionary upheaval. You can identify countries where the government is unpopular or illegitimate, and thus were a rebellion might occur, but that doesn't tell you if or when a popular uprising of the sort we have been watching will occur.

As I explained before, the reason is because an individual's willingness to rebel is essentially private information, and nobody is going to tell you what they really think in an authoritarian society. Furthermore, an individual's willingness to march openly against the regime depends on what he or she thinks others will do, and that cannot be ascertained in advance either. But when conditions are right and some triggering event occurs (which can be almost anything), then you can get a rapid and unexpected revolutionary cascade, as more and more people decide that it is safe to express their previously-concealed resentment and that doing so is likely to succeed. [my emphasis]

It's been a long-time fault of American foreign policy that it has dealt clumsily and often very badly with revolutionary situations affecting American policy in significant ways, the Vietnam War being the most spectacular of those failures.

Walt cautions the Obama Administration of repeating a mistake like that of the Cheney-Bush Administration in pushing for elections in Gaza in 2006 and then completely rejecting the legitimacy of the results when Hamas unexpectedly won:

Are we now going to keep our thumb discreetly on the scale in Egypt, to make sure that a post-Mubarak government continues to dance to Washington's tune? When will Washington learn that you cannot simultaneously proclaim your commitment to democracy and freedom and then insist on dictating who is allowed to win?

Tags: egypt, stephen walt

Egypt and Israel going forward

As Jerry Brown said on Friday, we don't know if the results of the Egyptian democratic moment and the resignation of the dictator Mubarak will be more good that bad. It will take a while to tell. The Egyptian military has announced the suspension of the Constitution and a six-month transition period to democracy. For ruling militaries, those transition periods have been known to be extended again and again, sometimes indefinitely.

Daniel Levy comments on the implications for Israeli-Egyptian relations in Egypt unrest could improve Israel ties Haaretz 02/11/2011. He observes that because even a military regime is likely to be more responsive to popular demands in Egypt, "Israel's strategic environment - notably the capacity it provides to avoid making choices and to disguise the status quo as progress - is about to change." While he explains that the Israel-Egypt peace treaty remains in the interests of both countries, some of Egypt's policies that pleased Israeli governments are not so likely to continue:

The package of regional policies pursued by the Mubarak regime lacked popular legitimacy. This included the closure imposed on Gaza, support for the Iraq war and for heightened bellicosity toward Iran, and playing ceremonial chaperone to a peace process that became farcical and discredited. Part of the democracy deficit is also a dignity deficit, as these policies appeared undignified to the Egyptian public.

Aluf Benn argues that Mubarak's departure thwarted Israeli strike on Iran Haaretz 02/13/2011. He expects that Mubarak's successors will be opposed to an attack on Iran:

The revolutionaries at Tahrir Square were motivated by Egyptian national pride and not by their adoration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Whoever succeeds Mubarak will want to follow this line, even bolster Egyptian nationalism, and not transform Egypt into an Iranian satellite. This does not mean that Mubarak's successor will encourage Israel to strike the Iranian nuclear installations.

On the contrary: they will listen to Arab public opinion, which opposes a preemptive war against Iran. Israel will find it difficult to take action far to the east when it cannot rely on the tacit agreement to its actions on its western border. Without Mubarak there is no Israeli attack on Iran. His replacement will be concerned about the rage of the masses, if they see him as a collaborator in such operation.

It's good news if the Egyptian revolution decreases the chances of war with Israel. But that doesn't mean American neocons will stop pressing for a war with Iran. The idea of Israel attacking Iran on its own was always far-fetched. Leaders operating from an extreme ideology like those of the current Israeli government are more likely than others to make irrational decisions. But, in any case, the likelihood of a direct Israeli attack on Iran now appears to be even less.

Tags: egypt,
iran, iran war,
israel

A sketch of the Egyptian events just before Mubarak's resignation

This is an Aljazeera English report on the situation in Egypt just before Mubarak's resignation was announced Friday. It was posted to YouTube on 02/13/2011, but apparently was done early on 02/11/2011 or late 02/10/2011.



Tags: egypt

Egypt, FOX News and the neocons

It's not news that Glenn Beck promotes loony rightwing theories. You have to wonder if his raving on the Egypt situation is cynical, or if it's coming from an actual clinical condition. John Amato reports on this in Bill Kristol smacks Glenn Beck with John Bircher label over his insane 'Egypt-Muslim Caliphate' Theory C&L 02/06/2011.

Beck's new world-conspiracy theories are negligible in terms of their truth-value. It is a sad example of a classical political-paranoid conspiracy theory, more unhinged from reality than a lot of them.

But FOX News has been generally hostile to the democratic movement in Egypt in its propaganda "reporting". This is notably different from the position a lot of the hawkish neoconservatives have been taking, a difference referenced in Amato's post title. Sen. John McCain and star pundit David "Bobo" Brooks are two examples of people who follow the neocon line of thinking who are being cautiously supportive of the Egyptian democratic movement in their statements.

Daniel Luban has a good discussion of the neoconservatives' departing from the usual positions they taking closely conforming to the hard-right line of the Israeli Likud Party: Whither the Neocons? LobeLog Foreign Policy 02/01/2011. He frames the matter this way:

Neoconservative claims to be ardent democracy promoters have always been met with well-deserved skepticism. Despite a great deal of high-flown rhetoric to the contrary, the movement has largely continued to abide by the framework set forth in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards”: hostile dictators bad, friendly dictators good, and democratization worthwhile only so far as it replaces rivals with allies. Egypt itself has served as a good example of this tendency, as the Bush administration quickly abandoned its “freedom agenda” in 2005-6 once it became clear that free and fair elections might very well bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. (Palestine was an even more striking example, as that pious democracy promoter Elliott Abrams helped launch a failed coup against Hamas after they won elections in 2006.) Still, it may be unfair to see the neocons’ support for democracy promotion as purely a cynical cover for other geopolitical goals. It is far from inconceivable that after reciting the pro-democracy script for so long, some neocons have genuinely come to believe it. [my emphasis]

But he advises not putting great hopes on the neocons' reverence for democracy:

In fact, many of the neocons appear unable even to deal with the possibility of a government led by Mohamed ElBaradei, who is about as much of a liberal secularist as the US could realistically hope for. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer is suggesting that the US's "ultimate objective" should be keeping the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, and that "arranging for a transition to a secular moderate regime" — note the absence of the qualifier "democratic" — "is our number one priority." One can easily anticipate a scenario in which US support for Egyptian democracy proves to be largely empty rhetoric, as it did during Bush's second term. [my emphasis]

It's also important to keep in mind that the neocons are used to playing the long game. Every since the Gulf War of 1991, the neocons wanted to have another war against Iraq. It took them until 2003 to get it. In the interim, they supported the US intervention in the Balkans and the humanitarian, pro-democracy justifications that were used for it. John McCain was one of them, while a number of Republicans in Congress, including then-Majority Leader of the Senate Republicans, Trent Lott, opposed the Clinton Administration's war policy. For better or worse, the neocons support of the US/NATO interventions in the Balkan Wars helped create the climate for what support was there later for invading Iraq.

Iran is the next war on which most of the neocons are focusing. And I suspect that's part of what is at work here. Seeing some kind of change in Egypt as inevitable - and is already taking place for the short run - the neocons surely must realize that encouraging "regime change" in Egypt can help lay the groundwork for promoting regime change in Iran, both by subversion and sabotage and eventually by an American invasion.

Not all the neocons are in agreement over the current revolutionary situation in Egypt. Jack Ross at the Old Right isolationist site Right Web writes on the differences in Whither the Party Line on Egypt? 02/01/2011. Frank Gaffney, Caroline Glick, Thomas Joscelyn and Clifford May, Ron Radosh are instances of neocons who have reflected the main FOX News position of worrying about the takeover of the supposedly very, very scary Muslim Brotherhood.

I'm just very wary of neocons talking about their support for democracy abroad. Their basic outlook is essentially on of raw power politics, and their intellectual guru Leo Strauss famously urged deception on the part of enlightened elite - which is how the neocons see themselves - in promoting their more unpopular policies. I have big reservations about some of the "democracy promotion" programs that even some genuine liberals favor in the name of strengthening civil society. When a country like the United States funds an opposition movement in another country, they expect a return on their investment. And such subsidies not only put the beneficiaries at risk of being nailed for subversion. In many countries, having financial ties to the US revealed can greatly discredit pro-democracy organizations.

As the Egyptian upheaval is reminding us right now, the ability of the United States to steer political events in other countries is actually very limited. But efforts to do so by subsidizing or arming opposition groups have the potential to set off far-reaching reactions against the United States.

Tags: egypt, neoconservatives

Commentary on Egypt

Here I just wanted to excerpt some of the most substantial commentary I've seen on the situation in Egypt. For ongoing news, among others I would recommend Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog, Helena Cobban's Just World News, and the excellent reporting of The Independent's Robert Fisk.

Gareth Porter, Why Washington Clings to a Failed Middle East Strategy LobeLog Foreign Policy 01/31/2011:

Ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, every U.S. administration has operated on the assumption that the United States, with Israel and Egypt as key client states, occupies a power position in the Middle East that allows it to pursue an aggressive strategy of unrelenting pressure on all those "rogue" regimes and parties in the region which have resisted dominance by the U.S.-Israeli tandem: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was only the most extreme expression of that broader strategic concept. It assumed that the United States and Israel could establish pro-Western regime in Iraq as the base from which it would press for the elimination of resistance from any of their remaining adversaries in the region.

But since that more aggressive version of the strategy was launched, the illusory nature of the regional dominance strategy has been laid bare in one country after another.

Stephen Walt, A realist policy for Egypt Foreign Policy 01/31/2011:

In fact, this is one of those fortunate moments when the United States does not face a clear tradeoff between its moral sympathies and its strategic imperatives. For starters, Egypt is not a major oil producer like Saudi Arabia, so a shift in regime in Cairo will not imperil our vital interest in ensuring that Middle East oil continues to flow to world markets. By itself, in fact, Egypt isn't a critical strategic partner. Yes, military bases there can be useful transit points when we intervene in the region, but the United States has other alternatives and military intervention isn't something we should be eager to do anyway (remember Iraq?). Egypt is not as influential in the Arab world as it once was, in part due to the social and economic stagnation that has characterized the Mubarak era, and its recent efforts to mediate several on-going disputes have been unsuccessful. Furthermore, U.S. support for dictators like Mubarak has been one of al Qaeda's major reasons for targeting the United States, as well as a useful recruiting tool (along with our unstinting support for Israel and our military presence in the Gulf). It is also one of the main reasons why many Arabs have a negative view of the United States. Viewed strictly on its own, the U.S. alliance with Egypt has become a strategic liability.

Gary Sick, The Worst of Both Worlds Foreign Policy 01/29/2011:

There is no need to strain the analogy. Iran and Egypt were and are very different places, with very different political dynamics. But the fundamental nature of the decision that is required today by the United States is not very different from the dilemma faced by the Carter administration three decades ago. Should you back the regime to the hilt, in the conviction that a change of leadership would likely endanger your most precious security interests? Or should you side with the opposition -- either because you agree with its goals or simply because you want to be on the "right side of history" (and in a better position to pursue your policy objectives) once the dust has settled? ...

Revolutions are inherently unpredictable. They may fizzle or subside in the face of sustained regime oppression. They may inspire a hard line military man to "restore order" and perhaps thereby elevate himself into a position of political authority that he is later loathe to relinquish. They may propel a determined radical fringe into power and thereby impose an ideology that has nothing to do with what people thought they were fighting for. They may go on far longer than anyone imagined at the start.

Bob Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005) and no fan of the Muslim Brotherhood (to put it mildly!) Who's Behind Egypt's Revolt? The Nation 01/31/2011:

Let's look at the emerging coalition, in its parts.

First, by all accounts, is the April 6 Youth Movement. Leftists, socialists and pro-labor people know that the movement takes its name from April 6, 2008, when a series of strikes and labor actions by textile workers in Mahalla led to a growing general strike by workers and residents and then, on April 6, faced a brutal crackdown by security forces. A second, allied movement of young Egyptians developed in response to the killing by police of Khaled Said, a university graduate, in Alexandria. Both the April 6 group and another group, called We Are All Khaled Said, built networks through Facebook, and according to one account the April 6 group has more than 80,000 members on Facebook. The two groups, which work together, are nearly entirely secular, pro-labor and support the overthrow of Mubarak and the creation of a democratic republic.

The leader of the April 6 movement is Ahmad Maher, a 28-year-old construction engineer who was profiled last week in the Los Angeles Times. Well-wired and Internet-connected, Maher told the paper: "After the revolution in Tunisia, we are able to market the idea of change in Egypt. People now want to seize something." A year ago, when ElBaradei returned to Egypt, Maher was inspired to organize a movement of young, secular, and pro-labor Egyptians. "Maher began reaching out to secular grass-roots and student movements emerging to reform a nation they believed had substituted oppression for vision," reported the LA Times. "Momentum was slow to build, particularly enlisting Egypt's increasing band of labor activists representing millions of underpaid workers."

Tags: egypt

Aljazeera English documentary on Egypt: "A Nation in Waiting"

The documentary titles say this was made before the current outbreak of mass dissent in Egypt. Because American media do such a spotty job reporting on foreign news, this kind of longer background report is almost unseen on American TV. And when something like the current events in Egypt breaks out, to hear the American news you would think it suddenly sprang out of nowhere.



Tags: establishment press

Upheaval in Egypt

Egyptian protest leaflet: "The police and the people against repression"

Robert Fisk, a reporter who actually knows a lot about Egypt and the rest of the Middle East reports on the current unrest and pro-democracy protests there in Egypt's day of reckoning The Independent 01/28/2011:

The barren, horrible truth, however, is that save for its brutal police force and its ominously docile army – which, by the way, does not look favourably upon Mubarak's son Gamal – the government is powerless. This is revolution by Twitter and revolution by Facebook, and technology long ago took away the dismal rules of censorship.

Mubarak's men seem to have lost all sense of initiative. Their party newspapers are filled with self-delusion, pushing the massive demonstrations to the foot of front pages as if this will keep the crowds from the streets – as if, indeed, by belittling the story, the demonstrations never happened.

But you don't need to read the papers to see what has gone wrong. The filth and the slums, the open sewers and the corruption of every government official, the bulging prisons, the laughable elections, the whole vast, sclerotic edifice of power has at last brought Egyptians on to their streets.

In general, Fisk is not sanguine about democracy coming to the Arab world any time soon, as he explains in The brutal truth about Tunisia The Independent 01/17/2011.

Helena Cobban in Obama's know-nothings discuss Egypt Just World News 01/28/2011 makes an important point: the US government is short of expertise on the Arab world. Commenting on a news photo of President Obama conferring with his advisers on Egypt, she writes:

What is notable is the absence of anyone in the group who has any serious knowledge about either Egypt or the broader region. ...

So now, in the Oval Office, we have the blind leading the blind and the blind advising the blind. No Chas Freeman, no Bill Quandt, no Rob Malley... (The list of those excluded on ideological grounds is pretty long, too.) No-one, in short, who can integrate into the advice the President desperately needs to hear any real understanding of how the peoples of the region think and how the regional system actually works. God save us all from their self-inflicted ignorance.

Von Gil Yaron reports on Israel's concern at the possible fall of Egyptian President Mubarak in Reaktion auf Unruhen: Israel hält Ägyptens Diktator die Treue Spiegel Online 27.01/2011. (English version of 28.01.2011: Concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood: Israel Fears Regime Change in Egypt) Israel has had peaceful relations with Egypt since the Sadat-Begin agreements of 1979. A more democratic regime in Egypt would almost certainly be more anti-Israel. Especially one headed by the Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Tags: egypt, robert fisk

Egyptian officialdom and Coptic Christians: a mixed record

The anti-Muslim hate-mongering that rightwingers in America and Europe are currently promoting is largely fact-free. But that shouldn't stop the rest of us from looking realistically at the variety of relationships between Christians and Muslims in Muslim-majority countries.

In the face of a bomb attack on a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria on January 1, the Egyptian government has prominently defended the Christian and condemned the attack, as Juan Cole explains in Mubarak: We will Cut off the Head of the Snake; Al-Azhar: This was an Attack on all Egyptian Informed Comment 01/02/2010:

The foremost seat of Islamic learning in Egypt, Al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, issued a plea for Egyptians to maintain their national unity the face of this bombing. In a statement, al-Azhar urged all Egyptians to rise above their anguish and perceive that the criminal hand that attacked the church in Alexandria is not an Egyptian hand. It added that "The brotherhood that has united them across centuries cannot be affected by a cowardly, criminal act perpetrated by enemies of the nation and of the [Muslim] community."

The invocation of both watan (the secular nation-state) and umma (the Muslim community or nation) refers to the two major political identities of Egypt. It is the secular nation-state or watan to which the Coptic Christians belong, and which was sinned against by the bombing of the church, but the al-Azhar is going further, and saying that the Muslim community was also harmed by this attack.

His Excellency the Rector of al-Azhar, Dr. Ahmad al-Tayyib, expressed his utmost regret and pain at the criminal incident and sent his condolences to the families of the victims. Al-Tayyib said in his official statement that the criminal action is prohibited in Islamic law, since Islam obliges Muslims to protect churches the same way they protect mosques. He said, "The targets of this attack are not the Christians alone, but rather all Egyptians." He said that the bombers were seeking to destabilize Egypt by dividing it.

The Rector of al-Azhar is among the most respected Sunni Muslim leaders in the world, and many Egyptian believers take his rulings or fatwas very seriously.

This is a 24-minute video on the attack and the aftermath from Al Jazeera English 01/02/2011. Note that the Al Jazerra interviewer makes it a point to report on instances of official discrimination against Christians by the Egyptian government. He also does something that may seem exotic to American TV news viewers: he actually corrects a mention of an event by one guest to make sure viewers understand that it's an unsubstantiaed rumor.



As this Al Jazeera report makes clear, Egypt is scarcely an ecumenical paradise for Christians. But it's important to note the real nature of incidents like this.

Al-Ahram, which Cole describes as a "semi-official Egyptian newspaper", has numerous articles and features on the attack at its English-language site:

Ekram Ibrahim, Citizen initiatives against anti-Coptic attacks 01/03/2011: "One of the main initiatives is a call for Muslims to attend the Orthodox Christmas Eve mass on January 6 as a sign of solidarity."

Ekram Ibrahim, More Egypt pro-Coptic protests today 01/03/2011: "Yesterday, thousands of outraged Copts conducted at least five protests throughout Cairo. Fifty seven were reported injured and Cairo traffic was jammed as a result of the protests."

Gamal Essam El-Din, Egypt MPs urge Coptic restraint after church attack 01/03/2011: "Fathi Sorour, speaker of the People's Assembly, said 'the attack against the Alexandria church of Al-Qiddisin is a cowardly act, and is by no means aimed to strike at Copts only, but all Egyptians, Copts and Muslims, in order to spark a civil war.'"

Ekram Ibrahim, Cairo boils as Copts protest 01/02/2011: "Friday night's explosion outside Saints Church in Alexandria during New Year's midnight mass killed 21 and left more than 96 injured and stirred Copts out of their docile 'pigeon attitude.'"

Hani Shukralla, J’accuse 01/01/2011. He argues that general social intolerance against Christians in Egypt has been increasing. This is an important point: "I accuse those state bodies who believe that by bolstering the Salafi trend they are undermining the Muslim Brotherhood, and who like to occasionally play to bigoted anti-Coptic sentiments, presumably as an excellent distraction from other more serious issues of government."

Abdel Moneim Said, Our national unity 01/02/2011: "What appears obvious is that a malicious campaign is afoot to stir sectarian strife in the country using terrorism, hate-mongering and other expressions of fanaticism, and generally trying to reproduce conditions that prevail in certain other nearby countries."

Sadly, this diversity of response reflected in the above reports finds little echo in this Los Angeles Times story on the event: Amro Hassan and Borzou Daragahi, Egypt calls for calm as church bombing toll rises to 25 01/03/2011. The second-to-last paragraph mentions, for the readers who get that far into the story: "The bombing drew widespread condemnation across the Middle East, including from Islamist political groups such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon." But then the story concludes with a clash-of-civilizations spin: "It was the latest in a series of violent attacks in the Muslim world targeting Christian communities, already shrinking because of emigration."

Tags: egypt, islam, islamic fundamentalism, terrorism