Egypt may find that orderly transitions are sometimes disorderly | Michael White
By virtue of its size, its sense of itself and its extraordinary past, Egypt is different. So it's hard to know how things will work out
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I saw Hosni Mubarak once. Tony Blair had dropped by for a brief chat on the way home from a flying visit to Iraq and they staged a joint quasi-press conference in one of the Egyptian president's Cairo palaces. Built like a brick loo, Mubarak exuded that strutting, invulnerable sense of power that dictators acquire over time. Blair looked flimsy and transient by comparison, as indeed he was.
That's the point, isn't it? The circumstances in which a politician acquires power often dictates the way he or she loses power. Seize it without legitimacy and it immediately becomes difficult to relinquish it. Get elected and it's easier to be un-elected by party or the electorate.
In fairness to Egypt, one of history's great dramas, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who overthrew the monarchy (1952) and ejected the British from the Suez canal zone, did offer to resign after his military's humiliation in the 1967 six-day war with Israel. The masses wouldn't have it.
That's rare, but Colonel Nasser was a charismatic leader, whose failure to ease the poverty of those same masses the Egyptian middle class he so despised did quite well did not prevent 4 million people turning out for his funeral when he died of a heart attack three years later at 52.
Would that Mubarak had acquired such a popularity, he must be thinking now when it is too late. The former fighter pilot turned air force commander was Egypt's vice president when a 24-year-old army lieutenant called Khalid Islamibouli and co-conspirators gunned down Anwar Sadat at a military parade in October 1981.
Mubarak inherited the presidency and ran the country as Nasser, Sadat and before them King Farouk, the British puppet, did. When pres! sure ros e for reform, from intellectuals, from the middle class, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood or the long-suffering masses, he pulled the levers of repression.
Enraged by Sadat's peace deal with Egypt's Islambouli acted in the name of an Islamist group, and among the 24 people tried for the murder was the blind cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. He was accused (and acquitted) of issuing the fatwah which incited the young men to their crime. When he got out of jail and torture three years later the "blind sheikh" was expelled and ended up in Peshawar, organising the anti-Soviet mujahideen.
Where is he now? Glad you asked. Being anti-Soviet allowed him into the US, few questions asked, and he used the opportunity to incite Muslims to acts of violence against their hosts. I have a vague notion that this sort of conduct breaches basic principles of Islam, but what do I know?
When the Yanks wised up and got Arabic-speakers on his case, the first, failed attempt to blow up the World Trade Centre in 1993 was only one of the jihadi incitements on 78-year-old Rahman's file. He ended up with a life sentence, which he is currently serving in a medical facility at the Butner federal slammer in North Carolina. When and if Mubarak (even older at 82) heads for exile in Saudi Arabia, Rahman will probably raise a celebratory glass of water.
I mention this because it may help explain the cack-handed caution of the Obama administration in response to the street violence since Tuesday, despite the reassuring presence as transitional-leader-on-offer, of Nobel peace prize winner, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the "it's going to be OK" remarks of wholesome Egyptians with perfect English who can be heard on the BBC.
We just don't know how it will work out. By virtue of its size (80 million), sense of itself and its extraordinary past, Egypt is different. But there's no guarantee that secular forces will prevail, let alone without a fresh wave of repression which snuffs out hope again, or that the Muslim Bro! therhood increasingly moderate and not behind the current unrest, we keep being told would behave, let alone be able to control more radical forces.
Hillary Clinton initially called Mubarak's regime "stable", but that line didn't hold. America has pumped billions into Egypt as Israel's key partner for peace and stability in the Middle East and as usual much of the money has been diverted from development to the military and the apparatus of a police state.
We can blame the US for that a reflex response or we can say that Egyptians did it to fellow Egyptians in an independent Egypt, ignoring US advice in the process. It's hard work with few rewards. After all, for all its billions worth of aid the US doesn't have much clout with Israel or other places does it?
So the new line from Washington this weekend speaks of "an orderly transition to democracy", a formula which sidesteps the delicate matter of Mubarak's survival while backing reformist elements which currently appear to have momentum.
Thirty years is a long time without a decent general election and shake-up. As someone once remarked of Jacques Chirac's long survival at the top of French politics: "How would you feel if Harold Wilson and Ted Heath were still in charge instead of Tony Blair?" At least Chirac had to fight elections.
From my armchair this one could go either way, but will probably go towards a regime change, if not now then soon. Orderly transitions are sometimes disorderly and take time. Remember, it may be tempting to dispatch some unsavoury old tyrant off to international court at the Hague or string them up. But an escape route is often the smarter option.
Thus Nasser and General Mohammed Neguib, his front man in 1952, overruled those demanding the execution of King Farouk, the lecherous 32-year-old fat boy whose family had ruled Egypt since the modernising Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769-1849, he was actually an Albanian) effectively expelled the decaying Ottoman empire in the wake of Napoleon's defeat! .
With 65 trunks stuffed with loot Farouk and his famous fez departed for exile in Europe on his yacht. He died in Italy at 45 but not before his sister had married the Shah of Iran, the one expelled by the 1979 revolution. What goes round comes round again. One of Muhammad Ali's projects (Turks prefer to think of him as Mehmet) was a greater Egypt embracing the upper Nile, ie Sudan. Both eventually became British protectorates and Sudan is unravelling via that peaceful referendum this very month.
Two particular factors are encouraging. It looks as if the White House is now supporting change albeit the "orderly" kind which may be concentrating minds inside the Egyptian military and corporate elite, which will want to save as much as they can. Poland, the Philippines, Panama, Uganda, there's always a tipping point where treason prospers and none dare call it treason.
Second, in ElBaradei, the former UN weapons inspector, the reformists have a figurehead with serious standing in the wider outside world, which makes it hard for Mubarak's apparatus to imprison or kill though I heard that they'd water-cannoned him at the weekend, just to make a point.
He's unlikely to be more than a temporary figure international bureaucrats rarely have the skill set for politics . But the space provided by that immunity could matter, as it conspicuously did for Poland after the College of Cardinals in Rome for selfish reasons of their own elected a Polish pope. The Russians couldn't bump off John Paul II, though conspiracy theorists suggest they tried.
As Mubarak urges his new prime minister to embark on reform while sending jet fighters screaming over Cairo, I heard suggestions from Egyptians over the weekend that Britain, Europe and primarily, of course the US are responsible for Egypt's plight.
Well, up to a point. European colonial regimes were often complacent and reactionary, though what came after has often proved worse, not least across north Africa, and it was the French who bui! lt the S uez canal and couldn't pack it in a suitcase to take home.
Egypt was under the control of foreigners from the fall of the pharoahs when Queen Cleopatra cut a deal with the rising power of Rome but was unlucky with her men until Nasser's coup. Historians say it fell so quickly to Islam in the 7th century precisely because the new religion came from anywhere but the hated Graeco-Roman regime in Byzantium. What goes round comes round again.
That goes for WikiLeak's contribution. In his Observer interview yesterday ahead of the Guardian's publication today of its account of the WikiLeaks affair Julian Assange sees himself as making reality of the western doctrine of "universal connectivity" which extols the virtues of openness, but does not always practise what it preaches.
As with the Tunisian popular coup, fingers crossed there too, Assange seems pleased to count the Egyptian upheaval as a win for his campaign. In the Observer he even concedes a "relative honesty and directness" in the US diplomatic cables that the Guardian and others published at the end of last year.
Quite so. Let's hope it all turns out for the best in Cairo and Alexandria this week.
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