On January 28th, MSNBC’s Richard Engel and Rachel Maddow had a surprisingly frank [...]]]>
On January 28th, MSNBC’s Richard Engel and Rachel Maddow had a surprisingly frank discussion about the U.S. role in backing Mubarak. Engel told Maddow that “many Egyptians see the U.S. having stood solidly by President Mubarak while the government grew more and more corrupt.” Engel held up to the camera a teargas canister which had been fired at protesters and read the writing on the side:
‘Made in the USA by Combined Tactical Systems from Jamestown, Pennsylvania.’ And [the protesters] say this is the kind of support that the United States has been giving to the Egyptian government.
This public questioning of U.S. foreign policy for the past thirty years occurred not on Al Jazeera (which continues to have some of the best coverage out of Cairo) or on liberal blogs, but as part of a major network’s programming.
The shift in tone from the U.S. news media continued through the weekend. On Monday, CNN’s John King asked Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) how the Congressman’s support of Hosni Mubarak fit in with the U.S.’s interest in promoting democracy in the Middle East.
King started by questioning McCotter’s representation of the protesters as subversive elements [see the transcript here].
KING: Your initial statement as the crisis unfolded from Friday, said, “Right now freedoms radicalized enemies are subverting Egypt and our other allies.”
We have correspondents who have been out in the streets in these demonstrations, and they say, yes, there are some members of the Muslim Brotherhood there, but by and large it is middle class Egyptians, young and old, who are frustrated with their government. Who have had no political rights. The elections have been a sham. They want Mubarak to go. What’s wrong with that?
MCCOTTER: Well, it’s the same thing we saw in 1979 with the Shah, where you had a very broad-based popular coalition that was subverted by the Khomeinis of the world, and the radical Islamic factions within there. So what you have to do is find a way to separate the movement of the young people and of the middle class and others-separate them from the radical elements within the Muslim Brotherhood, who have not renounced the goal of Sharia law on a global basis, or the return of the Caliphate, which would be a disastrous not only for the Egyptian people but for the peace process in the Middle East, the Suez Canal and international commerce, and the interest of the United States.
King went on to press McCotter on the U.S.’s inconsistent record of promoting democracy:
KING: President Bush pushed for elections in the Palestinian Territories, as you know, and Hamas won those elections. Some said it was a big mistake on the president’s part, President Bush’s part to do that, when they weren’t ready. And Hamas won that election. An others have said, you know what, not it’s not. It’s not a mistake. The United States should stand for democracy, let the people have their will and Hamas will prove it can either deliver services or it can’t. Again, why not do the same in Egypt? If somebody is maybe not friendly to the United States in the first round, we take our chances the second round.
MCCOTTER: Because if the individuals come in, as we saw in Iran, as we could see with the potential takeover from the Muslim Brotherhood, not only is it not in the best interest of the United States, it is not in the best interest of the people of Egypt, any more than it was in the best interest of the people of Iran.
King again challenged McCotter’s talking point that the Muslim Brotherhood would take over a future government, saying, “Most of our people who have been there for a long time, and have reported on the region, said maybe they would get 25 or 30 percent.”
The major network news outlets are way behind in reporting on the tangled U.S. Middle East policy which, thirty years after the Camp David Accords, continues to hinge on backing authoritarian Arab governments and unconditionally defending Israel against accusations of human rights abuses. But the scenes of Egyptian security services attacking protesters with U.S.-supplied equipment and the administration’s unwillingness to openly take sides against Mubarak is clearly making many Americans take note and ask questions.
That frustration, along with the questioning of U.S. policy, has long been kept under a lid by those who warn that changes of government in U.S.-aligned Arab states would bring the rise of radical Islamists who would work against U.S. and Israeli interests. The protesters on the streets of Egypt don’t look like radicals to U.S. viewers. A-list talking heads are starting to ask real questions about the assumptions and strategies used to justify U.S. support for rulers like Hosni Mubarak.
]]>The anti-Mubarak revolution won’t only topple an authoritarian regime. It will also topple 40-plus years of wrong-headed thinking about the causes of Middle East instability among the world’s foreign-policy cognoscenti.
In that view, the horrible relationship between Israel and the Arabs is the dominant issue for the Near East’s 20-plus nations and its 250-million-plus people — and the root cause of the region’s tempestuousness.
And poses the question:
If there were a Palestinian embassy in Washington today, would Hosni Mubarak have been any more mindful of the eventual consequences of his iron-fisted fecklessness in refusing a transition to a more representative Egypt because there was an ambassador from Palestine in Washington?
While Podhoretz considers this to be a rhetorical question, a slightly nuanced reading of the situation would respond affirmatively to that question.
Perhaps Podhoretz should answer this question: Could Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian rule in Egypt have lasted for thirty years had Egypt not enjoyed the benefits—largely in the form of U.S. aid and military assistance—of a peace deal with Israel?
Podhoretz writes:
Cure the Israeli-Palestinian problem, they tell us, and you cure regional instability. But the problem for the overwhelming majority of countries in the Middle East hasn’t been instability. The problem has, rather, been an excess of stability — the result of sclerotic regimes of preposterously long duration.
Mubarak has been in power since 1981, as part of a movement in charge of Egypt for nearly 60 years. The al-Saud family has run Saudi Arabia since 1903; the al-Sabahs have been Kuwait’s poohbahs since 1913. The Jordanian royal family has held sway for eight decades; the Assads, father and son, have bossed Syria since 1970.
Is it any coincidence that these governments all benefit from close relationships with the U.S.? Are we to believe that Washington’s support of these governments is totally independent from its concern over Israel’s security?
A June 15, 2010 Congressional Research Service report (PDF) spelled out the U.S.’s aid strategy in the Middle East (my emphasis):
The degree to which foreign assistance has contributed to the achievement of U.S. objectives in the Middle East is difficult to measure, but the consensus among most analysts seems to be that
U.S. economic and security aid has contributed significantly to Israel’s security, Egypt’s stability, and Jordan’s friendship with the United States. The promise of U.S. assistance to Israel and Egypt during peace negotiations in the late 1970s helped to enable both countries to take the risks needed for peace, and may have helped convince both countries that the United States was committed to supporting their peace efforts. Excluding Iraq, Israel and Egypt are the largest two recipients of U.S. aid respectively.
While Podhoretz would like to have his readers believe that Israel is a totally independent variable in the region’s stability, the reality is that U.S. aid and support for authoritarian regimes who maintain peace with Israel is a real side effect of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
]]>The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power. The incipient loss of the U.S. client regime in [...]]]>
The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power. The incipient loss of the U.S. client regime in Egypt is an obvious moment for a fundamental adjustment in that strategy.
But those moments have been coming with increasing regularity in recent years, and the U.S. national security bureaucracy has shown itself to be remarkably resistant to giving it up. The troubled history of that strategy suggests that it is an expression of some powerful political forces at work in this society, as former NSC official Gary Sick hinted in a commentary on the crisis.
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.
And now the Mubarak regime is in its final days. As one talking head after another has pointed out in recent days, it has been the lynchpin of the U.S. strategy. The main function of the U.S. client state relationship with Egypt was to allow Israel to avoid coming to terms with Palestinian demands.
The costs of the illusory quest for dominance in the Middle East have been incalculable. By continuing to support Israeli extremist refusal to seek a peaceful settlement, trying to prop up Arab authoritarian regimes that are friendly with Israel and seeking to project military power in the region through both airbases in the Gulf States and a semi-permanent bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the strategy has assiduously built up long-term antagonism toward the United States and pushed many throughout the Islamic world to sympathize with Al Qaeda-style jihadism. It has also fed Sunni-Shi’a tensions in the region and created a crisis over Iran’s nuclear program.
Although this is clearly the time to scrap that Middle East strategy, the nature of U.S. national security policymaking poses formidable obstacles to such an adjustment Bureaucrats and bureaucracies always want to hold on to policies and programs that have given them power and prestige, even if those policies and programs have been costly failures. Above all, in fact, they want to avoid having to admit the failure and the costs involved. So they go on defending and pursuing strategies long after the costs and failure have become clear.
An historical parallel to the present strategy in the Middle East is the Cold War strategy in East Asia, including the policy of surrounding, isolating and pressuring the Communist Chinese regime. As documented in my own history of the U.S. path to war in Vietnam, Perils of Dominance, the national security bureaucracy was so committed to that strategy that it resisted any alternative to war in South Vietnam in 1964-65, because it believed the loss of South Vietnam would mean the end of Cold War strategy, with its military alliances, client regimes and network of military bases surrounding China. It was only during the Nixon administration that the White House wrested control of national security policy from the bureaucracy sufficiently to scrap that Cold War strategy in East Asia and reach an historic accommodation with China.
The present strategic crisis can only be resolved by a similar political decision to reach another historical accommodation – this time with the “resistance bloc” in the Middle East. Despite the demonization of Iran and the rest of the “resistance bloc”, their interests on the primary issue of al Qaeda-like global terrorism have long been more aligned with the objective security interests of the United States than those of some regimes with which the United States has been allied (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan).
Scrapping the failed strategy in favor of an historic accommodation in the region would:
It will be far more difficult, however, for the United States to make this strategic adjustment than it was for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to secretly set in motion their accommodation with China. Unconditional support for Israel, the search for client states and determination to project military power into the Middle East, which are central to the failed strategy, have long reflected the interests of the two most powerful domestic U.S. political power blocs bearing on national security policy: the pro-Israel bloc and the militarist bloc. Whereas Nixon and Kissinger were not immobilized by fealty to any such power bloc, both the pro-Israel and militarist power blocs now dominate both parties in the White House as well as in Congress.
One looks in vain for a political force in this country that is free to press for fundamental change in Middle East strategy. And without a push for such a change from outside, we face the distinct possibility of a national security bureaucracy and White House continuing to deny the strategy’s utter failure and disastrous consequences.
]]>House Foreign Affairs chief Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) was wondering about the “nefarious ends” of some “elements” there, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, with shifting views, expressed apprehension about the Muslim Brotherhood (giving space to FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who [...]]]>
House Foreign Affairs chief Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) was wondering about the “nefarious ends” of some “elements” there, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, with shifting views, expressed apprehension about the Muslim Brotherhood (giving space to FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who seems open to Islamism, apparently, and Eli Lake, who doesn’t think Egypt’s peace deal with Israel will collapse).
Goldberg, to his credit, is asking big questions. And one of the biggest right now is about Islamism, and it’s role in the future of the Middle East. It’s playing out most acutely today in Tunisia and Egypt, but has been simmering all over the region, from Gaza to Qom.
Opinion makers in the U.S. seem to be divided along the lines that define what M.J. Rosenberg has called the “status quo lobby” (SQL), those whose actions — or key inactions — have thwarted a robust role for the U.S. in Middle East peacemaking. Goldberg and Ros-Lehtinen fit the paradigm: Both unflinching SQLers, they wear their hesitance for the long-awaited Arab democratic uprising on their sleeves.
The tepid support for Egyptians is about fear of Islamists, and no totalitarian strain, but one that has transitioned to seeking democratic legitimacy and inclusion. Yet events unfold in Egypt that drown out that narrative of what Phil Weiss, in an eloquent, must-read essay, called the “false choice of secular dictator-or-crazy Islamists.”
A bearded, angry young Arab shouted into a camera that “whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights.” Police held their fire, and protesters their stones, to break for prayers. On Twitter, Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University, wrote that a key day of demonstrations went forward even without the internet because people already knew where to meet up: “[O]n Friday everybody knew mosques would be focal points, didn’t need to coordinate.”
But the “false choice” clings to life among adherents of the SQL, where it is considered infallible wisdom.
The New York Times gave us a pretty even handed account a few weeks back about Tunisia’s relatively moderate Islamist party, then hauled out WINEP‘s Martin Kramer to unthinkingly denounce Islamism. (The Times also carried a pro-inclusion analyst.) Kramer, you see, hasn’t honestly answered or asked this question for decades.
Even Ben Birnbaum, a young reporter with the right-wing Washington Times, where he works with Lake, was asking himself some serious questions, too, on Twitter:
Do my mixed feelings about democracy in #Egypt make me a bad person? #Jan25
You get the feeling that Steve Coll had just the SQL in mind when he wrote, in the New Yorker, that the Tunisian Islamist party — the one that’s cool with “tourists sipping French wine in their bikinis” – is “raising anxieties in some quarters.”
In other quarters, however, questions are being asked. Take Coll himself:
[T]he corrosive effects of political and economic exclusion in the region cannot be sustained—among them the legions of pent-up, angry young men, Islamist and otherwise.
Yes, he calls for Obama to “thwart” Islamists in Tunisia. But the New Yorker‘s Comment is a column that important people read, and they’re reading about important questions.
]]>There’s constant action at [...]]]>
There’s constant action at #jan25 on Twitter, where I’ve been working away @LobeLog. And there’re many more amazing places to be getting reporting, information, and analysis.
Below this post is Emad Mekay’s dictated dispatch from Cairo by phone, which I worked into an IPS piece that included the big speeches from teetering (with one hand behind his back?) Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and, after a 30 minute delay, during which the two had their own phone chat, U.S. President Barack Obama.
For a focus on how U.S. officialdom is reaction — playing catch up, basically — check out the other IPS piece I co-authored, this one with Jim Lobe. Me? I’m going to get some sleep. But expect more soon.
]]>No internet for quite some while.
The mobile phone networks are down. These are private companies; Vodaphone is British.
I didn’t imagine that [...]]]>
No internet for quite some while.
The mobile phone networks are down. These are private companies; Vodaphone is British.
I didn’t imagine that they would go that far and cut the phones.
More than 60 million Egyptians have cell phones. Imagine if people need to call an ambulance.
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