issandr el amrani

Issandr El Amrani
is a writer living
in Cairo [...]

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Al Ahram Weekly just published this article on Hi! magazine, the latest attempt by public diplomacy folks to woo the “hearts and minds” of the Arab world. They appropriately titled it “Hi! is not enough”:

In an introductory paragraph to the magazine’s first edition, Hi’s editors explained that Arabs usually perceive American lifestyle via popular stars like Michael Jordan and Madonna, who present only a fraction of the large, diverse, multi-race social fabric of the United States. By presenting the real stories of “other Americans who live an ordinary simple life away from the lights of Hollywood”, the editors hoped to “introduce the real face of America”.

Ross said that, “anyone watching American movies and thinking that America is nothing but violence and sex is wrong. And so we thought of explaining American life in a more accurate way, indicating points of common ground where the American experience might be useful to young people in the Arab world.”

That, Ross insisted, does not necessarily mean Hi is all about “US propaganda”.

According to Ross, “we’re trying to show a more balanced picture by accentuating the positive in the face of all the negative that appears on television and in the movies. We leave it up to the individual to form their own balances of the good and the bad, by getting exposed to all different kinds of mass media. But we also don’t shy away from discussing bad sides as well as good ones.”

…

Although many critics think the magazine is too naive to “be anything other then an exercise in brainwashing”, Toensing would not dismiss the magazine as “simply mindless happy talk”,

Salama agreed, saying, “the US media campaign may still be premature but the Americans are not giving up. Knowing that the campaign is geared towards immature youngsters, we have to at least study the effects of that campaign before we let the US mess with the minds of our youths.”

Ross had previously been quoted in the Washington Post as saying that Hi was “a long-term way to build a relationship with people who will be the future leaders of the Arab world”, and that “it’s good to get them in a dialogue while their opinions are not fully formed on matters large and small.”

By saying this, Toensing said, “Ross has unscrambled the inner voice of Hi. “ According to Toensing, “it is that of an adult setting the ground rules for an adolescent. The Hi editors are saying ‘Why have a dialogue on such issues as US Middle East policy, which, after all, is not up for discussion? We’ve had plenty of dialogue with Arabs about the subject, anyway. Learn to accept what you cannot change.’”

This “subtext beneath a smiling face” is why Toensing speculated that Hi magazine would not be successful in the Middle East.

According to Toensing, “only the State Department could have [come up with] a magazine so purportedly apolitical, and yet whose message is so essentially political” at the same time.

There really is something truly sinister about this refusal to talk about politics — completely avoiding the most salient issue about America in the Arab world. The article is right to point out that there is plenty of exposure to American culture in the Arab world — in the form of entertainment, Nike, McDonald’s and others. This especially true in Egypt, where American lifestyles have been embraced more than in any other Arab country I’ve been to. (I suspect it’s because Egyptians, like Americans, are natural born consumers.)

My guess is that there’s a good reason they don’t want to talk about politics. It’s because US politics, particularly with regards to Israel, is so irrationally biased that they wouldn’t be able to have a coherent argument (how can you when even when Howard Dean says that the US should be more “even-handed” in the Middle East, he gets booed down?)

Remember, $4.3 million of American taxpayers’ money is being spent on this garbage. What a waste.

10:38 | / media | link

Thu, 25 Sep 2003

Berlusconi toasted by ADL

As if we needed any more confirmation of the moral vacuum in the American Jewish right, the Anti-Defamation League — an organization that poses as a defender of human rights and dignity but mostly seems to serve as an attack dog against those critical of Israel — has awarded Sylvio Berlusconi its �distinguished statesman award this week. The Forward reports:

The ceremony for the fast-talking prime minister, just weeks after he made comments sympathetic toward World War II fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, has generated a roiling debate about whether the ADL is compromising its self-proclaimed role as the “nation’s premier civil rights/human rights agency” in deference to the interests of the United States and Israel.

Berlusconi uttered his controversial remarks just three weeks before the ADL dinner. Defending the regime of Mussolini against comparisons to Saddam Hussein, Berlusconi said Mussolini — Adolf Hitler’s chief ally and ideological mentor — had been a “benign” dictator. “Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday in internal exile.”

The “holiday” that he sent people to included places such as Auschwitz. Perhaps the most famous Italian to survive Auschwitz is Primo Levi, who wrote some of the most moving literature and poetry on the Holocaust. In addition to Jews and political prisoners that were sent to death camps, many were imprisoned and tortured during his reign.

But ADL head Abraham Foxman (one of the most shameless men I’ve had the displeasure of interviewing) defended his toasting of Berlusconi with these sickening words:

In a conversation with the Forward, Foxman accused Berlusconi’s and the ADL’s critics as using the scandal as an opportunity to grind their political axes: “The criticism is political. There are a lot of people who have the luxury to be political. I respect their political views. That has nothing to do with my decision or our decision. Everybody’s got an agenda. My agenda is America.”

His and the ADL’s agenda is tarnishing the reputation of anyone who is critical of Israel or of US foreign policy in thhe Middle East as anti-semitic. This is the kind of people who go apoplexic when Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean suggests that US policy in the region should be more “even-handed.” Organizations like this are corrupting the political fabric of the country through slander and intimidation. But when it’s convenient for them, they have so problems celebrating one of the most corrupt and racist politicians in Europe. I simply don’t understand why so many American Jews let these opportunists speak in their name.

21:00 | / politics | link

Edward Said, 1935-2003

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and campaigner for Palestinian rights, died this morning in New York after a long fight with pancreatic cancer. He was 67.

I had only seen Said in person a few times and although I frequently didn’t agree with him I admired the resolve he had in defense of a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine. I remember him giving a lecture at Oxford where a women got up and said that by advocating peace with Israelis he was giving up their historical homeland. He was furious and raged against warmongers, saying that the two people had no alternative but to learn how to live together, because the alternative was unthinkable.

It’s an enormous loss for the Palestinian cause, which has few defenders of Said’s stature, as well to the academic world. People who want to read his prolific writing or listen to one of his lectures should turn to The Edward Said Archive.

20:32 | / palestine | link

Chalabi vs. neo-cons?

The New York Times can be quite an educating read. If you just count Monday and Tuesday’s issues, you get three Op-Eds on why the answer to the problems in Iraq is not more troops but more power to the Iraqis.

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism (all things neo, really) writes:

Making the transition to an Iraqi security force is an imperative for the liberation of the country. But it should not be done cavalierly. Washington’s willingness to grab former Baathists and Saddam Hussein’s security thugs and press them back into service is an enormous mistake, as is the selection of a new “interior minister,” Nouri Badran, whose background consists of defending Saddam Hussein’s military. (The Iraqi National Accord, the minister’s original political home, is made up of former Baathists and military nostalgists.)

Clearly, the job in Iraq is not done. But sending in more troops is not the answer. With the number of ground engagements down and the recruitment of Iraqi players up, the solution lies in thinking about the transition from postwar triumph over Saddam Hussein to the empowerment of Iraqis.

Note the denunciation of the Iraqi National Accord, the main opposition group other than Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Now remember that according to most of the historiography of the war and Iraqi opposition movements, the INA was favored by the Dept. of State and the CIA while the Dept. of Defense preferred the INC. The AIE, of course, is close to the Defense crowd such as Perle, Wolfowitz and company.

Then you have Noah Feldman, the one-time writer of Iraq’s new constitution (before they decided that Iraqis should be seen as being the authors of their own constitution), who argues that Iraqi peace-keeping institutions should quickly be formed but that more time should be given for self-rule:

Still, the answer to this threat isn’t bringing in foreign troops or putting more Americans on the ground, but creating an effective Iraqi security force — fast. Only Iraqi police officers and soldiers, knowledgeable about local conditions and populations, and with access to high-quality local intelligence, stand a chance of breaking Sunni resistance cells and identifying foreign agents. The call by Democrats (and, lately, many Republicans) to internationalize the coalition forces is well taken in terms of saving money and patching up diplomatic relations. But Indian and French troops would have no better luck combating terrorists than the Americans.

As for French and German suggestions that we speed up the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government, it would be just as unlikely to aid security. The violence is not coming from people who would be sympathetic to any such interim government. Worse, unless the police and military have been truly reconstituted, an interim body would be a travesty of a sovereign government. Actual control is the indispensable hallmark of sovereignty. Nothing could be worse for the future of democracy in Iraq than the creation of a puppet government unable to keep the peace.

Then the NYT’s own David Brooks — a conservative columnist who is also an editor at the neo-con magazine The Weekly Standard — adds his own two cents about why all the debate taking place at the UN and in Washington is irrelevant:

It’s time to acknowledge that the reconstruction of Iraq is too important to be left to the foreign policy types, who are trained to think too abstractly to grapple with the problems that matter.

Ah, those foreign policy types! Isn’t it outrageous that decision-making about foreign policy is left to foreign policy professionals!? I tell you, I don’t know where the world is coming to these days…

But luckily, Brooks knows what we really need:

Over the long term, we need to create an apolitical reservist force, made up of of businesspeople, administrators and police officers who have concrete experience in moving societies from dictatorship to democracy. In the meantime, we need to focus on serving the Iraqis first, second and last. We don’t need to get caught up in a distracting round of lofty debates among the world’s Walter Mitty Metternichs, who treat the Iraqi people as pawns in their great game-power struggles.��

What’s interesting here is that is these three opinions — which exclude the view among some traditional conservatives, many centrists and some of the left that a stronger military presence is needed to control the violence — is that while they go in the general direction of what Chalabi and his INC allies want, they don’t go quite fast enough.

Here’s what the NYT’s UN correspondents report about the new Chalabi:

Ahmad Chalabi, the president of Iraq’s interim government, is in New York this week to press alternatives to the Bush administration’s occupation policy in postwar Iraq, he and his aides say. In the process, he may complete a personal transformation from protégé of Pentagon conservatives to Iraqi nationalist with a loud, independent voice.

In an interview today in New York, Mr. Chalabi professed gratitude to the Bush administration for toppling Saddam Hussein’s government, but his specific proposals were directly at odds with the policies Washington is pursuing in Baghdad and at the United Nations. He demanded that the Iraqi Governing Council be given at least partial control of the powerful finance and security ministries, and rejected the idea of more foreign troops coming to Iraq.

Mr. Chalabi’s strategy, he says, is to get from the United Nations General Assembly sovereign status for the unelected 25-member Governing Council. This move to lobby other nations for a swift transfer of some sovereignty is going down poorly in Washington, according to the Iraqi leader’s aides.

And then at the end of the piece:

“We don’t want to come out in the open and pick a fight with Bremer,” [an aide to Chalabi] said, “but the sovereignty issue is coming to a head, and it is pretty clear that a breach is coming pretty soon between the Governing Council and Bremer.”

Another aide was more blunt: “We are going to find a place where we can pick a fight.”

Is Chalabi getting impatient? It would seem logical that, considering his greatest asset is the support of key administration figures, a transition to self-rule sooner than later would benefit him the most. Parties with a stronger local anchor — whether Sunni, Shia or Kurdish — have more potential in the long-term. But while he and his patrons seem to agree on the general plan — no more troops, more devolvement to the Iraqis, strengthening the Iraqis’ own police and military capability (remember the INC has its own militia) and bringing in the corporate world “to the rescue” — they disagree on the timetable. Watch Chalabi morph from Washington’s man into nationalist-populist hero in the next few months.

13:08 | / iraq | link

Iraq investment law reconsidered

A quick update on Iraq’s new investment laws: the Governing Council has said that the new minister of finance’s comments last Sunday were “unnoficial” and that only the council’s president could officially announce policy.

A statement issued by the US-installed council distanced it from a key part of a sweeping economic package presented by interim Finance Minister Kamel al-Kilani at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Dubai on Sunday.

The text said only the council president could announce policy, “and the statements attributed to the finance minister about the law of investment cannot be considered official.”

It’s worth remembering that Kilani is a member of the Iraqi National Congress, and therefore an ally of Ahmad Chalabi, the current president of the congress. (By the way, wasn’t it awfully handy that Chalabi got the month-long rotating presidency just when the UN was going to hold its first general assembly since the way — enabling him to sit in as the official representative of Iraq? Just sayin’…)

12:25 | / iraq | link

For the record

Nothing very new here, but this interesting transcript of a press conference by Colin Powell and Egypt’s then foreign minister (and current head of the Arab League) Amr Moussa in February 2001 revealed quite a different stance towards Iraq’s WMDs. Colin sez:

We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions — the fact that the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

I can understand, after 9/11, the worry that Saddam might pass on WMDs to Osama — even if in practice it all seemed so extremely unlikely that the two would cooperate. But if Powell thought that there was no significant WMD program and that containment had worked (at the time the big issues were dealing with the humanitarian problems caused by the sanctions and illegal oil trade through new “smart sanctions”), why the war?

12:05 | / iraq | link

Pirates of the Red Sea

The movie industry is getting worried about online downloads:

Also, as early as next month the industry will begin promoting a “stealing is bad” message in schools, teaming up with Junior Achievement on an hourlong class for fifth through ninth graders on the history of copyright law and the evils of online file sharing. The effort includes games like Starving Artist, in which students pretend to be musicians whose work is downloaded free from the Internet, and a crossword puzzle called Surfing for Trouble.

Why are these corporations allowed to spread their advertising into schools? Are these students (or their schools) getting paid to listen to this? Shouldn’t they be studying maths or geography rather than learn how to become better consumers?

I’m not defending internet piracy, but I have to say there are good sides to it too. When Egypt’s censors banned Matrix Reloaded, for instance, within a day I had several friends who had acquired a pirated copy on the internet. Once they were done watching it, these ordinary middle class Egyptians couldn’t really see what the problem was. In countries were the flow of information is controlled, getting information of any kind is difficult. The internet is making controlling that information more and more difficult, which in my book is a good thing, even if you get downsides like piracy and child pornography along with it.

11:50 | / technology | link

That Iraq place again

I’m am back from the Western end of the Arab world to its supposed center. In the former, a courageous press (and a few imprisoned journalists) , a timid reform movement that just hopes to hang on against government pressure and those unhelpful Islamists. In the latter, continuing aimlessness under the yoke of a lingering mediocracy. In other words, boring stories about slow changes, small regressions, petty oppression, routinized corruption and technocratic malpractice. Only 100 million people are concerned, so let’s get back to that exciting eye-rack place further East.

Since Sunday, the big story is “the sale of Iraq” — the announcement of new rules that will allow unfettered foreign ownership of Iraq’s non-oil state companies. That means the ability for foreign companies to bid for up to 100% of all the state-owned companies that are going to be put on the privatization block, with the ability of repatriating 100% of the profit they make and both personal and corporate taxes fixed at 15%. Imports, for their part, will only face a tariff duty of 5%. I don’t think an economic set-up like this exists in any country in the world. It’s a neo-liberal economist’s wet dream — except that it’s bound to cause all kinds of problems, is not adapted to the needs of a ravaged country (or even its indiginous business class) and even theoretically, it’s absolutely useless in a world where no one operates this. Anyone remember last week’s Cancun WTO talks?

The Guardian says:

The last big socialist, centralised economy that opted for such sudden and drastic shock therapy was Russia in 1992. The result was economic devastation, rampant corruption and the rise of a powerful class of businessmen, the oligarchs

…

In adopting a neoliberal economic orthodoxy, the US falls into the trap of believing that the state has only to be removed from the sphere of the economy to see a vibrant free market appear. History suggests this process has to be managed by a stable, home-grown government.

I believe in the US we called this the New Deal, and I seem to remember that it got us out of a lot of trouble.

The LA Times gets some local reactions:

“It’s the wrong approach,” said Sam Kubba, who heads the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “It’s a recipe for disaster because it gives the impression that they’re trying to sell off all the Iraqi resources. They should go about it much more slowly. Start by getting a democracy in place first and letting the people elect a government.”

Juan Cole notes that it’s probably illegal under the Geneva Convention, which the US is bound to as an occupying power:

The US occupying forces blatantly contravened the Fourth Geneva Convention on Monday, announcing that they were opening the Iraqi economy to foreign investment and setting low trade tariffs. The economy has been plagued by massive unemployment (estimated by many observers at 60%) since the fall of the Baath regime, which had channeled oil money to employees through state industries and patronage. US civil administrator Paul Bremer, a fanatical devotee of the “Washington Consensus” on the absolute benefits of “free trade,” has managed to get the Interim Governing Council to sign off on a wideranging set of new economic regulations.

Iraq Democracy Watch has a series of posts and tons of links on this and related subjects. It’s probably the most comprehensive source if you bother to read them all and see what they add up to. All this reading made him make this interesting point:

Comparing the British and American papers’ coverage of the new economic liberalization laws in Iraq should be a lesson for anyone who thinks that the media is unbiased.� The Guardian, Independent, and even the conservative UK Telegraph all had headlines variously proclaiming, “Iraq for Sale.”�

The American headlines, in contrast, used phrasing like, “A Free Iraq Economy…” ( LA Times ), or “Economic Overhaul” (Washington Post ).

Also, do dig up his excellent overview of “America’s conflicting interests with Iraqi agriculture” from an older post, which points out that the man currently in charge of the US Department of Agriculture effort in Iraq, Dan Amstutz, is a former executive at one of the biggest agro-business companies in the world, Cargill:

Dan Amstutz had at one time worked for Cargill, a US agribusiness giant — the largest privately-owned corporation in the world and the third largest food processor on the globe, and also a company that controls a sizable portion of US grain exports, according to an article by Emad Mekay from Inter Press News Service and written for the Global Policy Forum.

In a press conference this year, Mr. Amstutz insisted that he no longer had any relationship with Cargill, but an article in The Holland Sentinel from June 22nd, 2003, as late as “ late-October 2000, Amstutz was named chairman of the board of directors of a new company established by ADM, Cargill, Cenex Harvest States, DuPont and Louis Dreyfuss.”

Mr. Amstutz isn’t just drawing the wrath of NGOs and international agriculture ministers. Jeffrey St. Claire, in his article, “The Rat in the Grain, Dan Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture,” reprinted in various news media, quotes George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition as saying,

Daniel Amstutz, an ex-Cargill executive, is there to push the agribusiness agenda, not a democratic agenda…He will excel in telling the world that his policy is good for farmers, consumers and the environment when just the opposite is true.

Says Mr. St. Claire,

The small farmers of the grain belt of the Midwest have a particular loathing for Amstutz. During his stint in the first Bush administration, Amstutz devised the notorious Freedom to Farm Bill, which eliminated tariffs and slashed federal farm price supports. As a result, thousands of American farmers lost their farms and monopolists like Cargill reaped the benefits.

Doesn’t sound good, does it? And why again did those Cancun talks fail?

The Arms and the Man — the definitive blog on “who’s making a killing on killing in Iraq” — notes that big capital is getting ready for all these juicy prospects, for instance by hosting $1500-a-head conferences on “Exploring Business Prospects in Iraq.” In the meantime, Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle himself goes on teevee and counters claims of war profiteering by one of those pesky human rights activists. She (Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange) says:

The resentment will only grow unless the U.S. turns this over to a legitimate authority, which is the United Nations, which will have a quick time line for Iraqi self rule and that the money that is pledged by the U.S. and the international community — and let’s remember the international community will not pledge money unless it is in the hands of the United Nations — and that money should go directly to Iraqis and not to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel that are profiteering from this war.

Perle replies:

What you just heard is a tirade against American companies in the left-wing tradition that she represents.

Those America-bashing left-wing liberals. Why do they hate us?

For a local perspective, if you read anything read this post on Baghdad Burning, which has a few concrete examples of why unfettered foreign investment is bad and how it can lead to serious economic and moral abuse. Here’s the first ‘graf, to set the tone:

For Sale: A fertile, wealthy country with a population of around 25 million… plus around 150,000 foreign troops, and a handful of puppets. Conditions of sale: should be either an American or British corporation (forget it if you’re French)… preferably affiliated with Halliburton. Please contact one of the members of the Governing Council in Baghdad, Iraq for more information.

Read it all.

11:43 | / iraq | link

Sat, 20 Sep 2003

The wrong Iraqi

David Phillips has a good overview in the NYT of how Ahmad Chalabi’s bad advice before the war was partly responsible for the mess after it. That bad advice was especially listened to the civilians in the Dept. of Defense, who also gave him funding for a militia and made him one of the three key members of the temporary Council, which he presides this month. Many Iraqis must be asking themselves what he’s doing there.

Why such devotion to a man whose prewar advice proved so misguided? For one thing, Mr. Chalabi has shown himself amenable to those in Washington who want to reshape the entire Middle East. They envision Iraq as a springboard for eliminating the Baath party in Syria, undermining the mullahs in Iran and enhancing American power across the region.

I wonder when the people that supported Chalabi are going to start to realize that before enacting their grand plans to transform the region, they’re going to have to deal with stabilizing Iraq and bringing legitimacy to its new government. It doesn’t seem to me that a new government where Chalabi plays an important role would be that legitimate, especially as he continues to base himself and his cronies in property that belongs to the Iraqi people, not some rag-tag militia.

15:38 | / iraq | link

A looming bread crisis?

The last time Egyptians took to the streets really en masse, it wasn’t because of US and Israeli policies or some other external political reason. It was because Sadat, in 1977, had raised the price of bread by cutting subsidies to bakeries. It’s this “Arab street” of the stomach that the regime fears much more than the inevitably limited political Arab street that we hear so much about in the West.

It now seems that we may be heading for another bread crisis:

Newspapers have for days been reporting shortages of bread, which is subsidized by the state. Long lines of customers have formed outside bakeries.

The situation is expected to come to a head on Saturday when summer holidays end and hundreds of thousands of children return to the classroom.

Observers say the problem stems from a national flour shortage caused by a below average wheat harvest, technical problems at mills and higher international wheat prices.

Back in 1977, it wasn’t only bread prices that had upset Egyptians. Many were also upset with the effects of liberalization policies and the fact that Sadat had abandoned the Palestinians while negotiating peace with Israel — a treaty that most in Egypt did not support, something that is often forgotten by Westerners who just remember the “historic” handshake at the White House. At the time, many were a lot more ambivalent, or simply opposed, to what Sadat was doing (and many still are.)

It was the combination of angry political activists, protesting for against dealing with Israel or for more democracy, with a real mass anger because of falling living standards that made the 1977 riots what they were. But I’m reminded of an anecdote a friend has told me many times. During one of the protests, a democracy activist was out on the street shouting for democracy and the release of political prisoners. A poor old man standing next him turned to him and said: “Look, young man, don’t think that we’re here for your democracy. We just want to eat, and once we get decent prices for our bread, we’re going back home.”

Now, obviously I’m not saying that “the masses” in Egypt don’t want democracy — although I suspect they would like to know more concretely what the word “democracy” means, since after all they are currently governed by the National Democratic Party. Nor am I saying that revolution is about to happen in Egypt — I think the regime has learned its lesson from 1977 and would never allow the situation to degrade this far. But that it’s even getting this close is bad timing, and shows a worrying degree of carelessness.

My point is more that we’ve reached a point where both the apolitical “masses” (I hate that word) and militants may converge. Something similar also happened at another time in Egypt’s history — the Cairo fire and riots that preceded the 1952 Free Officers’ coup. At that time, various political movements instrumentalized and worsened what was originally a mostly non-violent protest.

For a good look at the current situation, you wouldn’t be able to do much better than Mona El-Ghobashy’s article on “Egypt’s summer of discontent.” Since I can’t find it on MERIP’s website, I’m going to post it in its entirety here. Read and savor.

Egypt’s Summer of Discontent

Mona El-Ghobashy

September 18, 2003

(Mona El-Ghobashy is writing a doctoral dissertation on Egyptian politics at Columbia University.)

As the long, hot Egyptian summer of 2003 wore on into autumn, gloom-and-doom scenarios filled opposition papers and daily conversations, warning of a terrible quiet before the storm. Elites and the masses are slowly being pushed together by palpable disaffection at rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, fueled by the government’s January devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and the stagnation in the nation’s political life, symbolized by raging speculation that Husni Mubarak is grooming his son Gamal to succeed him as president.

The decision to float the pound has dealt a further blow to Egyptians’ already meager purchasing power. Officials argued that the depreciation would boost the competitiveness of Egyptian exports, but because 72 percent of consumer goods, foodstuffs and industrial inputs are imported, citizens watched prices skyrocket for tea, cooking oil, sugar, transportation and utilities. Coming on top of a liquidity crisis and recession since 1999, double-digit unemployment and the loss of an estimated $1.2-2 billion worth of exports to Iraq under the UN Oil for Food program, the devaluation hit the vast majority of Egyptians hard, especially the fifth of the population living in poverty.

The regime is still stinging from massive anti-war sentiments unleashed during the US-led invasion of Iraq, which dovetailed with rising discontent at the government to produce the largest street protests since the January 1977 “bread riots,” complete with biting anti-Mubarak slogans, such as: “O Gamal, tell your father Egyptians hate him!” The war accelerated a significant trend among elites and masses alike to directly challenge Mubarak, such as a March statement signed by prominent intellectuals disagreeing with Mubarak’s view that Saddam Hussein alone was to blame for the impending invasion of Iraq. In July, prominent lawyer Essam al-Islamboli sued Mubarak in the administrative courts for failing to appoint a vice president. A ruling is set for November 11.

THE RISE AND RISE OF GAMAL MUBARAK

By far the hottest political issue over the summer was the increasingly public role of Gamal Mubarak, 39, who has taken a prominent position in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), and led what the semi-official press called “high-level delegations” to the United States in February and June 2003. With the gradual political promotion of Gamal since 2000 has come the advancement of a group of big businessmen who share a self-described “pragmatic” worldview that seeks to integrate Egypt into the global economy and to strengthen bilateral ties with the US.

In February 2000, Mubarak appointed Gamal to the General Secretariat of the NDP, laying to rest rumors that Gamal was to found a new party called Hizb al-Mustaqbal (Party of the Future), but fueling speculation on his political ambitions. Gamal Mubarak holds degrees from the American University in Cairo and is a former investment banker with the Bank of America in Cairo and London. In November 1998, while chairing a private equity fund, Medinvest Associates, he founded the Future Generation Foundation, an NGO which provides job training to young people. In September 2002, at the NDP’s eighth annual congress, an elaborate political pageant which inaugurated the party’s “New Thought,” Gamal was further promoted to head the newly created Policies Secretariat. The Policies Secretariat is a 123-member core group of relatively young economists, businessmen and academics close to Gamal, but also includes university presidents, heads of government think tanks and professors with no background in politics.

Party members say official NDP candidates’ resounding defeat in the 2000 parliamentary elections convinced its leadership of the need for a housecleaning. Since then, figures like Minister of Youth Alieddine Hilal have worked to reinvent the party of the government, instead casting the government as representatives of the party. Glossy literature distributed last September announced the NDP as “the party of positive centrism” and “the party of all Egyptians” in an effort to delink the NDP from the government. The role of the Policies Secretariat is to oversee the transformation of the NDP from a state patronage machine run by old-guard party bosses to a modern majority party managed by a clique of savvy technocrats.

On March 6, 2003, Gamal announced that his Secretariat was introducing a “package of reform bills” to Parliament. The three bills proposed dissolving the state security courts that had drawn international criticism after twice convicting Egyptian-American sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, abolishing hard labor as a criminal penalty and establishing a National Human Rights Council to defend Egypt’s human rights record abroad and “deepen the culture of human rights” in the country. The package was railroaded through Parliament in June. Majority NDP deputies heaped praise on the Policies Secretariat for leading Egypt into the twenty-first century with such progressive new legislation.

Critics in Parliament, the opposition parties and civil society dismissed the reforms and the Policies Secretariat as vehicles for the political rise of Gamal Mubarak, noting that his September promotion coincided with a high-profile “anti-corruption” campaign by the government which aimed to portray Gamal as a fresh-faced reformer. In the same month, the right-hand man to old-guard NDP powerhouse Youssef Wali was charged with accepting bribes to import carcinogenic French pesticides into Egypt. At the party congress, Wali was shoved out of his post as NDP secretary-general to make room for Information Minister Safwat al-Sherif, another Mubarak crony. The critics pointed out that the law abolishing state security courts, whose verdicts were subject to appeal, leaves intact emergency state security courts whose verdicts are subject only to presidential review. They added that the hard labor penalty has not been applied for 30 years. In August, the government referred five anti-war activists to an emergency state security court on charges of “reviving a communist organization,” and the latest roundup of Muslim Brothers on September 8 included ousted MP Gamal Heshmat.

During the summer months, Gamal’s public visibility continued unabated. His statements received front-page coverage in the semi-official press, and the evening news often showed him delivering slick PowerPoint presentations to enraptured audiences. The board meetings of his NGO were televised, he was once filmed sitting unobtrusively in a corner during a cabinet meeting, and during his father’s annual talk before university students, he was shown sitting between presidential foreign policy adviser Osama al-Baz and chief of staff Zakariyya Azmi. Gamal and members of his Policy Secretariat visited the US in February and June, meeting with Dick Cheney and others. In June, the delegation was to push for a bilateral free trade agreement, but Trade Representative Robert Zoellick poured cold water on the request, declaring that an agreement “isn’t going to be handed to them just because Egypt is a big and important country.” Observers theorized that the comment came in retaliation for Egypt pulling out of a US-sponsored lawsuit against the European Union for prohibiting the import of genetically modified foods.

Asked by interviewers whether he had his eyes on the presidency, Gamal has said, “There are rumors that I am being groomed for the post, but they are baseless and have nothing to do with reality. Scaling down my activities is not an option; I want to encourage the youth to be active and I will not alter the role I believe in.” He has also said, “I’m pretty much satisfied with what I’m doing now.” Much as many Egyptians may wish to believe him, Gamal’s unmistakable ascendancy has convinced them that a surreptitious process of inheritance of power (tawrith al-sulta) is underway and must be resisted.

SENSE OF OUTRAGE

Since September 2002, tawrith al-sulta has become a main motif in Egyptian political discourse. Anti-war demonstrations in March and April condemned the apparent father-son succession scenario, and a recent internal party document of the leftist Tagammu’ party attacks “hidden attempts to bequeath the regime to President Mubarak’s 39 year-old son, Gamal.” The most consistent and explicit anti-succession pulpit is the weekly Nasserist al-Arabi, which has morphed from a shrill, predictable and marginal broadsheet into a bold and entertaining political forum, earning positive mention in the influential annual review put out by the quasi-governmental Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. The NDP congress that midwifed Gamal’s rise breathed new life into al-Arabi, and under the editorship of Abdallah al-Sennawi and Abd al-Halim Qandil, the weekly newspaper has run a constant Gamal watch, skewering the president’s son in editorials and maintaining a sense of outrage over the prospect that Egypt could turn into another Syria.

Every Sunday, al-Arabi crosses the “red line” against direct criticism of the president. In May 2003, on Mubarak’s birthday, the newspaper’s main headline blared, “President Mubarak, on your birthday we ask you: are you democratic?” In June, the front page featured a now infamous photo of George W. Bush at the Sharm al-Sheikh summit driving a golf cart with Arab leaders in the passenger seats. The accompanying headline read, “Arab rulers in Bush’s cart.” On the fifty-first anniversary of the July 1952 coup, best-selling novelist Alaa’ al-Aswani wrote a page-long fictitious dialogue between Presidents Nasser and Mubarak in which the former comes back from the dead to advise Mubarak to reassure citizens once and for all that his son will not assume power, and to implement democracy as soon as possible. In September, Qandil began his column, “The desired change begins with President Mubarak himself, begins with the head…. These are constitutional basics.” The newspaper has run countless op-eds heavily criticizing the Mubaraks, and its gifted satirists Gamal Fahmi and Akram al-Kassas write laugh-out-loud funny appraisals of Egypt’s ruling class.

Beyond political shock value, the pages of al-Arabi offer a coherent critique of Gamal Mubarak and Company’s “pragmatic” worldview that seeks to relieve the state of providing social services beyond subsidies of basic foodstuffs. On foreign policy, Gamal’s group favors a regionally isolationist stance that puts “Egypt first,” while downplaying Egypt’s Arab orientation and role in regional power dynamics. At home, the NDP policy mandarins favor what they call “development of political culture” rather than constitutional reform, free elections and the direct election of the president from among several candidates — all major demands of independents and the opposition.

TWO VISIONS

Ironically, the fact that Gamal is Husni Mubarak’s son may be a distraction. While he parrots his father’s stance on Egypt’s pro-US orientation and has no plans to liberalize the country’s political life, the younger Mubarak is emblematic of an influential new class that has mushroomed in the past 15 years. Its members have close economic ties to the US (many are the Egyptian agents of American companies) and merge business interests with political influence; many are MPs or protégés of politicians. They advocate free-market policies while retaining an elitist, cautious attitude when it comes to extending democracy to the masses. As Mubarak fan and Policies Secretariat member Hala Mostafa wrote, addressing herself to US policymakers pushing political reforms in the Arab world, “Certainly there is a danger latent in the excessive emphasis on democratic processes. Free elections, for example, could well bring victory to populist or totalitarian forces that would subvert the future of democracy in the region as soon as they came into power.”

Al-Arabi’s writers question the younger Mubarak’s claim to represent the aspirations of new generations and call for a serious rethinking of Egypt’s “strategic relationship” with the US, proposing a much more autonomous Egyptian foreign policy. They dispute that the free market is the solution to Egypt’s grave economic ills and blame neo-liberal economic policies for the shrinking of the middle class and the alarming increase of poverty. On domestic politics, they favor allowing the Islamists to establish legal political parties, and call for truly free elections where all compete on a level playing field. Instead of only airing the views of Nasserists and Arab nationalists, as it has done in the past, the newspaper includes the views of Islamists and independent voices brought together by shared alienation from the status quo. While occasional Nasser nostalgia still appears in al-Arabi’s pages, it is of a qualitatively different kind from the reflexive hero worship peddled by the newspaper not so long ago. Now, reflections on Nasser’s achievements are laden with bitter comparisons to a defeated present, when Egypt seems devoid of effectiveness on the international stage or dignity and justice at home.

THIRST FOR CHANGE

The scale of disaffection with the regime manifests itself in extra-parliamentary politics. On July 30, Egyptian journalists elected the first non-government chairman of their union in 22 years and a board dominated by independent journalists, sending a clear message that thrilled many and perturbed some: we’ve tried the government and look where it got us. Newly minted Chairman Galal Aref’s election-day motto was simply: “Change.” Turnout was 77 percent of 4,332 eligible voters, and 53.6 percent chose Aref in a heated battle whose outcome was genuinely uncertain. Egyptian professional syndicate elections have long been far more contested affairs than parliamentary or municipal elections, a trial run for what Egyptian democracy might look like if the state lifts its heavy hand. In light of Egypt’s sclerotic leadership in both government and opposition, the journalists’ choice was an obvious call for turnover in executive positions.

Contributing to Aref’s success was the government’s candidate, Salah Montasser, a lackluster septuagenarian scribbler for the semi-official al-Ahram with no record of activism in union politics. Montasser was the eleventh-hour choice when al-Ahram editor-in-chief Ibrahim Nafie, union chairman for eight years (1993-1997, 1999-2003), bowed out after first announcing he would run despite union bylaws prohibiting reelection after two consecutive two-year terms. Before the elections, a series of court rulings and counter-rulings invalidating and revalidating previous election results would have given Nafie an opportunity to run. But a day before a final court ruling on July 7 confirming previous election results, Nafie announced his withdrawal from the race, while keeping the door open to a candidacy in 2005.

Regime power brokers in the syndicate scrambled to find a replacement and came up with Montasser, who later said he was “sitting in the shade” when he was informed of his candidacy. He ran a pathetic campaign that angered many journalists, not least women, for his position that female journalists with small children should stay at home rather than go to work. Two days after his candidacy was announced, Montasser had an audience with Prime Minister Atef Ebeid after which he proudly proclaimed that Ebeid had generously granted journalists a 40 pound hike in their monthly paychecks. Many journalists were offended by this unsubtle attempt to buy their votes. But Montasser’s real Achilles’ heel was his position advocating normalization with Israel, having visited the country twice in the 1990s in violation of resolutions adopted by the union’s general assembly. Montasser protested, “I thought there was peace,” and affirmed that as chair he would prohibit any journalist from visiting Israel.

By contrast, Aref is a veteran union activist who almost defeated Nafie in 1993 and was instrumental in key battles between the union and the government, notably the struggle over a press law imposing hefty fines and a two-year prison sentence for slander. A journalist at the other leading state-owned publishing house al-Akhbar, Aref’s campaign platform centered on abolishing the law and regaining the syndicate’s independence after 22 years of government control and masked bribes to journalists in the form of perks such as reduced rates on cell phones and summer resorts. Though Aref beat Montasser by only 370 votes, he took the majority of votes of all the state-owned publishing houses and 29.6 percent of al-Ahram votes, a significant precedent given the pressure on journalists at the state-owned outfits to vote for the government’s man. Nine seats on the 12-seat board were captured by independent journalists, all of whom work in the state-owned press. The only journalist from an opposition newspaper to win a seat was al-Arabi’s Gamal Fahmi.

Four Islamists won seats on the board, notably Muhammad Abd al-Qaddous of al-Akhbar who garnered the highest number of votes of any candidate. Four Nasserist-leaning candidates also won, leading to triumphal columns in al-Arabi hailing a supposed Islamist-Nasserist alliance. Yet, on election day journalists did not appear to be voting for political trends so much as trusted individuals with track records of union service and credible promises of taking back the syndicate from government control. Veteran journalists also pointed out that many were simply casting a protest vote against the government. Pro-government writers, on the other hand, warned that unfettered democracy brings in “undemocratic forces,” as putatively liberal columnist Reda Helal at al-Ahram opined. He argued that the journalists had made a “suicidal” choice they would later regret. The majority, however, hailed election results as examples of real change in contrast to other developments on the political scene and in the economy.

FED UP

Six months after the depreciation of the pound, prices on basic foodstuffs have risen by 40 percent. By the government’s own count, 6.8 million government and public sector employees have lost half the value of their salaries, while more than half of household budgets go to cover the cost of food and drink. Pensioners learned that higher delivery fees would be taken out of their meager checks. Traditional garbage collectors saw their livelihoods being taken over by private European sanitation companies, while households were suddenly informed that sanitation fees would be calculated according to their electricity consumption. Citizens sued, but the court ruled in favor of the incomprehensible new system.

In his recent book “The Arabs Confront Aggression,” public intellectual and ex-judge Tariq al-Bishri theorized that Egypt was witnessing a yawning gap between government and people and a growing rapprochement between socio-political groups in the opposition and civil society. Recent events bear out his thesis. The Egyptian regime, its new policy elite and their American patrons appear ever more isolated from majority sentiments. Ambient anger at crushing economic conditions and the Egyptian government’s tepid stance on Iraq and Palestine unites disparate strata of society. A fin de siecle mood fills the air, with vast social inequalities bringing back memories of the days before the 1952 coup, as colloquial poet Ahmad Fouad Negm says.

Housewives, ex-judges, centrist columnists, garbage collectors, unemployed university graduates and civil servants with diverse grievances are ranged against an indifferent and incompetent government that seems to have dispensed with even the pretense of responding to public needs. Time will tell if the Egyptian state’s vaunted powers of cooptation are coming apart at the seams, or if 2003 is merely a turbulent transitional period where traditional alliances are being reshuffled and new social alignments formed.

00:42 | / egypt | link

Fri, 19 Sep 2003

Amr Khaled and religiosity in Egypt

In a post below, I mentioned Patrick Haenni’s new piece in Le Monde Diplomatique and my own interviews with him for an article on Sheikh Amr Khaled, the preacher of Cairo’s gilded youth. Here’s the link for my article, “A sheikh for modern living.”

18:19 | / egypt | link

The Iraq situation

“Well, I think we’re fucked.” TPM interviews veteran ambassador Joseph Wilson.

18:09 | / iraq | link

Bullet points

Thomas Friedman is hysterical. He’s now convinced the real enemy of the United States is France. And this is the most influential Op-Ed writer in America?

But just to show that one bad apple at the NYT does not make a rotten barrel, John Burns has this scathing attack on the way journalists behaved in Saddam’s Iraq. A must read.

Der Spiegel debunks the 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Patrick Haenni co-wrote this fascinating piece on Egypt’s air-conditioned Islam. After you read it, you may want to take a peak at a piece I did last year on Amr Khaled, the sheikh of Cairo’s gilded youth. It quotes Haenni a lot, and his research is cutting edge when it comes to religiosity in the Arab world.

Also, I’ve mentioned it below, but do read Arab Street Files.

01:00 | / potluck | link

Thu, 18 Sep 2003

The state and the blog

The Eclectic Chapbook writes:

Issandr El Amrani has a powerful entry posted this weekend that raises issues revolving around Mubarak’s seemingly endless incumbency. It’s hard for an outsider to determine how sensitive it might be for a writer who usually lives in Cairo to even raise this subject in public. Or… how dangerous.

It is, I believe, cogent to keep in mind that a pro-American Egyptian journalist named Reda Hilal just “disappeared.” [Last noted on this blog on Sept 11th.] One suspects that the Muslim Brotherhood may have kidnapped him to shut him up. That would be somewhat like the KKK kidnapping someone. One worries that Hilal may not have survived.

Because of these contextual circumstances, one hesitates to draw too much attention to El Amrani , so as to avoid exposing him to similar risk by raising his public profile too much. I certainly wouldn’t want to be responsible for him coming to harm.

Thanks for the link and concern, but I feel I should clarify a few things. First, I have no idea how dangerous it is to maintain a weblog on links or posts critical of Mubarak. It is certainly less dangerous to me that it might be to an Egyptian. I’m Moroccan-American, and that little blue passport can offer a lot of protection. Of course, there is always a risk that I’ll be kicked out of the country, which I wouldn’t want to happen. I love Egypt and love my life there, which is why I like to write about the place and hope it progresses towards a more open sort of government. When I write editorials for the foreign (i.e. British or American) press, that is what I write. It has landed me in trouble once, but Egypt is not Syria or Iraq. Critical information on Egypt is aplenty in human rights organizations, starting with Egyptian ones. So I think I’ll be OK. It might not be the case with Egyptian bloggers, such as Arab Street Files, who prefers to remain anonymous. And in any case I’m not sure how sophisticated the powers that be are about blogging, or how much they care.

As for the Reda Hilal disappearance, no one knows what happened. The Muslim Brotherhood does not engage in kidnappings — it’s a moderate group and would be extremely unlikely to carry out anything like this. I mean, 16 of its members are MPs (as independents), so it has no interest in appearing extremist. And while it could be a more radical group, there is really no evidence of that whatsoever. It’s kinda like Saddam and 9/11: he might have been happy about it, but there’s no logical reason he would have participated. The whole affair remains a mystery.

Eclectic Chapbook also notes the following:

On another note related to this weblog, whenever I read this one, my fan goes on, and I get the impression that reading it strains my computer. I don’t know why this is happening, but it worries me. El Amrani seems to be on the Mac system, and I’m on the Windows system, but I thought that internet browsers would make any of these systems (including Unix) cross-accessible. Whatever the cause may be, I think it’s worth noting.

That was indeed worth noting. I do use a Mac, and do my testing for the site mostly on Safari, the Apple browser. As it’s a great standards-compliant browser, I have no problems. But I do notice that other browsers do not display things the same way, for instance IE for Mac does not show the red lines on the side. I’ve been meaning to redesign the site, and even did a draft version that uses entirely CSS (no tables) but many browsers are not yet standards compliant (which is an outrage). As for the problems with your computer, I think it’s problems with the Javascript in the Iraq Body Count and Cost of War gizmos in the sidebar. I’m removing them for now until I find a solution. But if you’re interested in seeing this site exactly as I intend it to look, use Safari. I only learned HMTL about four months ago, so it’s gonna take a while before I make the site fully cross-platform.

Finally, I’ll be making big design changes to the whole site and will be adding a section on current live bands in Cairo, a picture library, a book review/recommendation section and possibly more stuff. The blog will be just one part of a bigger thing. I’m also interested in creating an Agonist-style Middle East news-only blog that will be moderated by people who can claim some expertise on the topics. It will also have discussion forums, document collections, etc. I’ll be looking for editors/moderators, so if anyone has any suggestions or wants in, drop me a line.

20:23 | / about | link

The Saudi bomb

Saudi Arabia apparently wants to develop nukes, the Guardian reports. I can’t say I’m that surprised, especially considering their uncertain relationship with the US — particularly the neo-cons — and the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. Not to mention the fact that Israel has its own nukes, and that its nuclear policy is still pretty unclear.

But there is also another powerful rationale for building nuclear weapons: it protects you from regime change. Look at the Koreans, who do have them. Look at the Pakistanis, who were helping Bin Laden and the Taliban (and might still be doing so) right until 9/11. Look at Saddam, who was gotten rid off partly because there was a fear he would get them (This was the only remotely “legitimate” reason for the war as I have a hard time believing anyone in the Bush administration cared that much about the humanitarian disaster that was Iraq.) With a rising of chorus of voices in the US either calling for change in Saudi Arabia, some people in Riyadh must have realized that if they have a bomb, not only will there no be regime change but that they will be supported against internal dissent because the US and others won’t want to see the bomb fall into the wrong hands. Look at Pakistan, where the US supports a military dictator just as it claims to want to spread democracy in the Muslim world. Being a nuclear power means people are going to deal with you much more carefully.

Another aspect of the Guardian story is that they are considering buying their nukes rather than developing the technology themselves:

David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington thinktank, said he doubted whether the Saudis would try to build a nuclear bomb, preferring instead to try to buy a nuclear warhead. They would be the first of the world’s eight or nine nuclear powers to have bought rather than built the bomb.

It would certainly be in line with the past record of weapons purchases. But who might they buy it from? The North Koreans might be willing, but they are under heavy scrutiny. The Europeans are unlikely to be selling — even the French, who cooperated with Israel on its weapons program and built Saddam Hussein a nucler power station in the early 1980s, seem unlikely to do so. Pakistan is a maybe, but probably doesn’t have that many bombs itself. China has no clear incentive, not even money, that would make it sell its arsenal.

Who’s left? Russia, with whom the Saudis recently signed an oil agreement and have started talking to for the first time since Saudi Arabia was created. The Saudis have some pretty strong bargaining chips for the Russians. Aside from the oil — the Saudis are trying to get the Russians into OPEC, and still have the greatest impact on international oil prices, the only thing that has fueled the recovery of the Russian economy in the past few years — there are also geopolitical considerations:

This week’s state visit is not only about oil. Abdullah’s trip is repairing bilateral ties forged in 1926, when the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the Saudi Kingdom. But relations were severed ahead of the second World War, and remained frosty for decades after. Riyadh was angered by the Soviet presence in east Africa and the Afghan invasion, and kept ties on ice even in the final days of the Soviet collapse.

But when Moscow and Riyadh both showed their support for Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion in 1990, their formal hostilities “began to look absurdly anachronistic,” according to Igor Timofeev, a historian specializing in the Middle East.

Diplomatic relations were restored in 1992. But many observers agree that the true reunion came only a decade later, in the aftermath of 9-11 and the subsequent war on terror. Some say the U.S. offensive in Iraq may have Riyadh — which is suspected of harboring Islamic extremists — worrying about its own future. Timofeev says Abdullah’s visit may be a way of shoring up Moscow’s support: “There are already threats. You have the example of Iraq. We won’t analyze here how everything happened [in Iraq], but we know that it happened by [circumventing] the United Nations. And in order for something like that not to repeat itself and to avoid similar risks, Saudi Arabia needs support among well-respected countries like Russia, the [EU states], India, and China.”

With this in mind, the Saudi leader will attempt to reassure Putin that Saudi charities provide no support to Chechen rebels in their four-year war with Russia.

Riyadh is not the only possible benefactor. Closer ties with Saudi Arabia would also improve Russia’s standing in the Islamic world. Last month, Putin announced that Russia may seek to join the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), a body of 59 countries.

In a page-long press released published in today’s “Vremya Novostei” daily, Saudi Information Minister Fouad al-Farsi appeared to give his backing to Russia’s OIC bid. The press release said, in part, that Moscow’s membership would “stimulate Russia’s contacts with the Muslim world.”

As a major economic power and a founding OIC member, Saudi Arabia’s support may prove key for Russia.

Formally, Russia is not eligible for OIC membership because its 20 million Muslims account for less than 25 percent of its population. But Moscow may still find a persuasive argument for joining the OIC — which, according to Timofeev, would effectively cut Chechen separatism off at the knees.

“It is a well-known fact that territorial integrity is a condition [of membership in] the Organization for the Islamic Conference,” Timofeev said. “This means that if Russia joins this organization, 59 Muslim countries will be telling the Chechens, ‘Don’t think you’ll be seceding from Russia. That would be against our principles. Russia has Islamic status and you can only exist only as a part of [Russia].”

Russia’s OIC membership bid is expected to be discussed in October, during the next assembly of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Russia will be present as an observer.

A Saudi-Russia alliance would present many advantages to both parties. Together, the two countries would have unprecedented power over international oil prices, and by extension gas prices. Both Russia and Saudi Arabia are important providers of oil for Europe and Japan — much less for the US. The Russians would get backing over the Chechnyans (which must be a hard pill to swallow for all the powerful Saudi backers of the Islamist rebels there), and perhaps a more important role in Gulf politics if the US continues to have doubts about the Saudis. And the Saudis have already agreed to crack down on the charities that send money to Chechens. This is pure speculation, but I could imagine, a few years down the line, Saudis trying to acquire bombs from their new Russian allies. It’s a story to watch.

19:40 | / saudi arabia | link

Fight the future

Keeping up his great series of columns for the Beirut Daily, Kamel Labidi last week addressed the political hot potato of succession in Egypt in a piece called “Fighting a hereditary republic in Egypt.” With the congress of the ruling National Democratic Party coming in a few days — and probably offering Gamal Mubarak and his cronies yet another opportunity to grab power and everyone’s attention.

Regime figures in Egypt — and even a couple people who claim to be anti-regime democrats (you know who you are)— say that although Gamal and his father have said that he won’t be the next president, they don’t necessarily see what’s wrong with it in principle. After all, they argue, Gamal Mubarak is an Egyptian citizen and he has the right to run for president. One even told me that “it would be unfair to discriminate against Gamal Mubarak because of who is father is.” That would all be swell if elections in Egypt were run honestly, if state security forces didn’t prevent people from voting (I’ve seen it myself) or harass opposition candidates, if party politics allowed a serious opposition opposition — whether liberal, leftist, or Islamist — to flourish (something Kamel wrote about before), or if “anti-terrorist” emergency powers did not give so much power to the president in the first place. After all, the tendency towards hereditary political dynasties is a fact of political life everywhere. But under the current circumstances, this argument is so such a shame-faced lie that I wonder how anyone with any self-respect can utter it.

But there is an even more pernicious argument defending a Gamal Mubarak presidency out there. It is the one that may just be uttered in Western capitals in 2005, when Hosni Mubarak comes up for re-election and may step down in favor of his son. (It should be noted for the record that both father and son have publicly denied this scenario, and that Mubarak has not said that he had any intention of stepping down in 2005. The last time he came up for re-election in 1998, there was a referendum campaign — not an election — for Egyptian to vote “yes” or “no” for Mubarak. He won over 99% of the votes.) This second argument is that Gamal Mubarak, in a strategic country like Egypt, represents the only alternative to chaos or the Islamists. This is the same kind of argument that kept Saddam in place after the Gulf War (and led to the failure of the Shia uprising) and also secured the reign of countless third world autocrats. There is an alternative, and it’s called the law. Egypt has a constitution which clearly guarantees a democratic electoral process. The problem is that it has never been applied in letter or spirit, which is why over the past twenty years Egypt’s Supreme Court has declared several parliaments illegal.

Handling the legal aspect of things is simple — judges can observe, as they did in the 2000 parliamentary election, or international institutions. As well as the electoral practice itself, other engrained habits like the exclusion of opposition voices from public media or the busing of public servants to polling stations to vote for the ruling party would need to be addressed. But there’s an even bigger problem that Kamel touches upon at the end of his article:

It seems unlikely that the Egyptian regime will soon allow intellectuals free and unfettered access to a society eager to hear new and independent voices. Intellectuals cannot play a healthy role under the 22-year-old emergency law and other laws curtailing basic rights. Much the same situation faces beleaguered opposition parties, which are struggling to lay the foundations for a national front to defend democracy.

Unless the marketplace of ideas, to borrow a term from pop academia, is liberalized enough so that different voices are heard than the state’s droning monologue, it won’t matter. In a democracy, citizens need to be educated about their choices and responsibility. Currently, the only voice they are likely to hear is either the state’s tired old song or the Islamists. And that’s not enough. What Western countries, with their recently discovered passion for spreading democracy in the Middle East, can do for the people of this region is not impose democracy from above in a crude way that will be easily manipulated by so-called patriots (remember, patriotism is the first refuge of the scoundrel), but by putting subtle pressure on governments when they repress an intellectual, human rights activist, or journalist. With a little help like that, those on the ground will be able to accomplish much more than they would otherwise. Sometimes it’s the little things that count the most.

18:21 | / egypt | link

Amazigh

For the first time in the history of modern Morocco, Berber children are being taught their own language in schools. I doubt there will be much about it in the international press in these days of occupation and failing peace processes, so here’s the BBC story (they seem to cover everything). I’m preparing my own pieces on it, but it will be in a few days.

Last night I met with Mounir Kejji, a Berber militant, who alleged that — according to a former minister — over 80% of Morocco’s population is Berber speaking. That’s a pretty staggering statistic, but there’s no way to really know because while there is a census, the figure is a state secret. Still, this is an important development because the more the multicultural aspects of Moroccan identity are emphasized, the more the monolithical vision of Islam favored by the Wahabbis and other fundamentalists seems ridiculous and unnatural. Morocco is an Arab country, but it also a Berber country and a Jewish country. And those identities and perfectly co-exist and cohabit without a problem.

“Amazigh,” by the way, is the way Berbers refer to themselves in their own language. It means “Free Men”.

18:17 | / morocco | link

Tue, 16 Sep 2003

I’m a profane pervert Arab blogger too!

Salam Pax has resurfaced after two weeks’ absence. Apparently he’s been busy plugging his new book and doing interviews and stuff like that. Good for him. Just don’t let it to your head.

As part of this media blitzkrieg, he wrote this piece for the Guardian, which has this nice little paragraph:

The first reckless thing I did was to put the blog address in a blog indexing site under Iraq. I did this after I spent a couple of days searching for Arabs blogging and finding mostly religious blogs. I thought the Arab world deserved a fair representation in the blogsphere, and decided that I would be the profane pervert Arab blogger just in case someone was looking.

You’re not alone anymore, Salam. I’m a profane perverted Arab blogger too. In large part thanks to you, because you made me realize that there was a definite need for that “fair representation” of the Arab world in the blogosphere. In many ways, you’re the pioneer. (I’m talking about the blogging, the perversion and profanity came beforehand.)

Speaking of profanity, a Google search for “Arab atheist” recently took me to The Raving Atheist, a blog dedicated to praising the Lord’s non-existence. There I found this interesting post quoting a Reuters story saying that Saudi Arabia’s chief executioner had clean conscience because he is an atheist. It’s so fantastic it is obviously not true. Here’s his quote:

RIYADH (Reuters) - The leading executioner in Saudi Arabia, which implements strict Islamic sharia law, has no compunction about beheading convicts because he is an atheist.

“I sleep very well,” Arab News daily quoted executioner Mohammed Saad al-Beshi as saying Thursday in a rare interview that offered an insight into a job that is much-criticized in the West and by human rights groups.

“It doesn’t matter to me: two, four, 10. Because there is no god, it doesn’t matter how many people I execute.”

Of course, this is horseradish. He’s no atheist at all. Here is the same paragraph in the original story:

RIYADH (Reuters) - The leading executioner in Saudi Arabia, which implements strict Islamic sharia law, has no compunction about beheading convicts because it is “God’s work”.

“I sleep very well,” Arab News daily quoted executioner Mohammed Saad al-Beshi as saying on Thursday in a rare interview that offered an insight into a job that is much-criticised in the West and by human rights groups.

”It doesn’t matter to me: two, four, 10. As long as I’m doing God’s work, it doesn’t matter how many people I execute.”

For a split-second he almost had me going. Very funny.

23:36 | / about | link

Johnny Cash, 1932-2003

I can’t claim to know much about country music, and for a long time I didn’t think that any of it was worth listening to. But was of the first artists I started listening to after being introduced to the genre by an Egyptian-American born in Louisiana and raised in Texas was Johnny Cash, and I haven’t looked back since. As I type this I’m listening to Live at Folsom Prison, a chilling album considering how grim some of the songs are, and even more so if you’re in prison. Take for instance “25 minutes to go,” a song that counts down as a man is about to hanged. Here are the end lyrics:

I can see the buzzards
I can her the crows
One more minute to go
And now I’m swinging and here I go…

Or the beginning of “Send me a picture of mother:”

After seven years behind these bars together
I’ll miss you more than a brother
When you go
When you go
I only I had not tried to escape
They’d pardon me with you
I know
Yes, I know
Won’t you tell the folks back home I’ll soon be coming soon
And don’t let them ever know
I’ll never be free
Be free

He could be funny too, as when he sang “I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart.”

One thing that I liked about Cash is that he sang about the poor, the downtrodden, the misfits and all the people who didn’t fit in, the damned of the earth. We could use that kind of reality check now.

02:10 | / potluck | link

Mon, 15 Sep 2003

“It’s plus ça change all over again”

A great Maureen Dowd column:

But he’s like a kid singing with fingers in his ears, avoiding mentioning Saddam or bin Laden, or pressing the Pakistanis who must be protecting Osama up in no man’s land and letting the Taliban reconstitute (even though we bribed Pakistan with a billion in aid). He doesn’t dwell on nailing Saddam either.

Guess who’s she talking about?

02:21 | / politics | link

Fri, 12 Sep 2003

Qandil on Mubarak

I don’t normally trust MEMRI, the soi-disant Middle East press watchdog that drags up the most extremist writing in the Arab press and brands it as typical and representative. But this astounding translation of an article in the Nasserist weekly Al Arabi has to be seen:

The Longest Incumbency in Egypt’s Modern History

“Perhaps it is incorrect to demand of President Mubarak that he make changes [in the government], as the story is not the failure of [Egyptian Prime Minister] ‘Atef ‘Ubeid’s government, of the government that preceded it, or of the one that will follow it. The necessary change begins with President Mubarak himself. The necessary change begins at the top.

“I’m not talking out of personal caprices for which I alone will bear the responsibility. I am not seeking a great battle beyond what I can withstand. We are talking, in my opinion, about constitutional axioms. …[T]he constitution gives the president quasi-divine powers; he is the president of everything in Egypt. He is responsible for the minister and for the guard. He is the one who is responsible, first and foremost, and solely, for the decisions made in political, economic, and cultural areas. The ministers and the prime minister are a group of clerks in the president’s office. [The president] is responsible for success, if there is success, and responsible for failure.

“The main flaw does not lie in the kleptocratic government; it is the bitter fruit of the choices of a regime that has grown old on its seats, the bitter fruit of the lengthy stagnation that has taken over Egyptian life.

“In the meantime, President Mubarak has had the longest incumbency in Egypt’s modern history, except for Muhammad ‘Ali. President Mubarak began his era with beautiful words on morality and ‘shrouds that do not have pockets’; but the story ended with the theft of the shrouds themselves, and there is no criminal investigation examining who took [what] and who gave [them] the keys. This is not our job. The bottom line, unfortunately, looks shocking.”

…

“We need to remember only one example. In the early 1990s, the [various] Mubarak governments estimated the worth of the public sector designated for sale [i.e. privatization] at 500 billion Egyptian pounds in the early 1990s. Afterwards, the value of what was sold and what was not sold dropped to a mere 28 billion. The time difference: 10 years. The price difference: 472 billion Egyptian pounds.

“Don’t ask where this huge sum went. It’s a long, complex, and complicated story that can be justly called ‘The Labyrinth of a Country,’ and in it, kleptomania can certainly be attributed to people and elements, as well as – and this is the most important – [an] actual kleptomaniac policy. Here I stop, and refrain from stating clearer words.

“These days in Egypt, the sun does not rise in the morning without the state being plundered as it has never been plundered in its history. The public robbery is only one aspect of the picture. The general oppression is far too clear, and obviates any need to point it out. The constitution has taken a long vacation, and it is emergency law that is actually [in force]…

“The [international] role played by Egypt has shrunk to the point of disappearance… and Egypt is compared to Burkina Faso, not South Korea, which we were ahead of in the 1960s. This is a picture that is undisguised, un-retouched, and un-faked. This is a picture with no optical illusions. This is the catastrophic disaster that aroused the rage of great Egypt and turned it into a small farm, an estate that looks tempting to bequeath, an open buffet for thieves…”

…

“I assume that the president is dissatisfied with the condition to which Egypt has fallen. He realizes that the solution does not lie in replacing the prime minister or disbanding the People’s Council. The only solution is transferring the rule, in its entirety, to the hands of the public. If the president did this, it would be the greatest of his achievements.”

Al Arabi has been pushing and pushing close to the edge for over a year now, particularly on the touchy subject of whether Mubarak intends to put his son Gamal in his place. But by all standards, this should take it over the edge. It’s either a sign the Al Arabi editors have thrown all caution to the wind, or that they think Mubarak is in no position to retaliate, that he’ll actually let it slide. If it’s the latter, than he is in trouble. Several reputable Egypt-watchers (who are Egyptian themselves) have voiced the opinion that it will be over for Mubarak within a couple of years (most say by 2005, when he comes up for re-election), but I’ve never quite believe them. But lately, with the increasing frenzy around the Gamal Mubarak crowd and strident criticism by the Egyptian left, it is starting to seem possible. I’d like to check that Al Arabi article, which I’m unable to do now not being in Cairo, but if it’s true this is quite a coup.

22:06 | / egypt | link

Redemption?

Forgive me government for I have sinned: the strange story of Gamma Islamiya’s rethink gets stranger. The group that waged a civil war in Egypt’s south during the 1980s and 1990s, killed Sadat and was behind the 1997 Luxor massacre now condemns Al Qaeda and describes Sadat as a martyr. Are they for real? Hossam El-Hamalawy, rising expert on all things Islamist, thinks that there’s a split that may lead to a resurgence of a younger Gamaa.

The old leadership and its loyal middle ranks, have been exhausted by years of incarcerations, and could clearly see that violence was not leading anywhere. On the contrary, the young cadres, more zealots by age, didn�t come in close contact with the middle (let alone old) generation. They did not go through the prison experience, as they were likely detained for short periods but released for their then organizational unimportance.

A split led by radical disillusioned youth, if it happens, will be the first major incident in the Gamaa�s history, but can be very similar to other groups� experiences.

�Such [splinter] movements are usually motivated by youth, inside or outside prison,� explained Zayat. �They seek an elder figure inside prison, who would share their views. They�ll take him as a figurehead to gain legitimacy or guidance, and would cluster their group around him. This is just what happened in the case of Sayyed Qutb. It�s possible it may occur again.�

One to watch. (We definitely have to get that book done, Hossam…)

21:44 | / egypt | link

OK, some comment

I was too struck by the Haaretz story below to write anything about it — it all seems so obvious anyway — but I was glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks so. Juan Cole has a post about it that’s appropriately scathing towards Lieberman, as does Abu Aardvark.

It just seems unbelievable to me that Dean would actually get heat for suggesting that the US should be more even-handed in Israel/Palestine. It just shows how the political consensus on this issue has gotten hijacked by extremists who will do anything to paint those who disagree with them as radicals.

20:18 | / politics | link

No comment

Democrat’s remarks on Israel may lead Jews to cut funds

By Nathan Guttman

Haaretz 12 September 2003

WASHINGTON - The recent statements about Israel by leading Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean were the last thing the Democratic Party needed. The Israel issue sparked off a public confrontation among the candidates, with Democratic congressmen joining the fray.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are thrilled by the crack in their rival party’s united front regarding Israel. They are also heartened by the surveys indicating the growing tendency of American Jews to vote for the Republican Party.

How did the Israel issue rise to the fore of the Democratic primaries debate? It all began with a statement by front-runner Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor, at an election event at Santa Fe last week. He said “it is not our place to take sides” in the Middle East conflict. A few days later he told the Washington Post “the United States needs an evenhanded approach to the conflict.”

Senator Joseph Lieberman, also a Democratic candidate, responded sharply: “If this is a well-thought-out position, it’s a mistake and a major break from a half a century of American foreign policy.” Lieberman said Dean either understands nothing about foreign policy, or wants to damage the special relations between the U.S. and Israel since the state’s establishment.

John Kerry, once the Democratic front-runner and today second after Dean in the polls, said “it is wrong that Governor Dean has proposed a radical shift in the U.S. policy toward the Middle East.”

The argument climaxed at a debate among the nine Democratic candidates in Baltimore on Wednesday. In contrast to the previous restrained, polite discourse, the Israeli issue became the main sparring arena between Lieberman and Dean.

“All of us here … have quite correctly criticized George W. Bush for not standing by our values in our foreign policy and for breaking our most critical alliances. That, with all respect, is exactly what Howard Dean’s comments over the last week about the Middle East have done,” attacked Lieberman.

“I am disappointed in Joe. My position on Israel is exactly the same as Bill Clinton’s,” retorted Dean.

“Not right,” interrupted Lieberman.

“Excuse me, Joe,” said Dean. “I didn’t interrupt you and I’d appreciate it…”

“Not right,” Lieberman interjected, turning Israel into the hottest subject in the Democratic camp.

Jewish organizations protested Dean’s comments, which indicate he wants to change the American pro-Israeli policy to reflect a balanced approach to both sides. A letter is being circulated in Dean’s party denouncing his statements and position, and even Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi and her deputy Steny Hoyer have criticized his position.

Dean is trying to mend the impression, maintaining his positions are the same as Clinton’s. This week he wrote to President Bush, calling on him to ask Clinton to embark on an urgent mediation mission to the Middle East.

In an interview to CNN on Wednesday, Dean refused to withdraw his statement but admitted “I have learned that `evenhanded’ is a very sensitive term and I could have used a different one.”

Sources in the Jewish community say that Dean has wrecked his chances of getting significant contributions from Jews. However, some say this is less significant to Dean, whose campaign is based on contributions from citizens via the Internet. Many believe Dean’s statement will drive more Jews toward Lieberman and Kerry, enabling Kerry to take the lead again.

Republicans hastened to denounce Dean, hoping angry Jews would cross over to the Republican side. The Republican camp is now celebrating last November’s interim election results that were published this week. The exit polls were conducted by Voter News Service, whose systems crashed on election day. The data indicates that 35 percent of Jews voted for Republican candidates, compared to an average of 25 percent in previous congressional elections.

Howard Dean visited Israel last year and left the impression that he is sympathetic to Israel’s cause. He also appointed Steve Grossman, formerly one of the heads of the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington, to a senior post in his campaign.

However, Jewish sources believe his utterances reflect his true positions, which are left of the Democratic Party consensus.

Dean is now maintaining a consistently moderate pro-Israeli line. He says the settlements are an issue of negotiation between the sides. As for the assassinations, he says he opposes violence but the Hamas men are soldiers, not civilians. He is against deporting Arafat, and believes Israel can build the separation fence, but not set a border which deviates from the Green Line.

17:41 | / politics | link

Thu, 11 Sep 2003

Bullet points

A friend just pointed out an interesting website, Mafhoum.com, which I’ve added the the news links list on the left. It has an interesting, and eclectic, collection of articles from and on the Arab world in its press review section, which is updated weekly.

I should have done this at least a week ago, but here is an article I wrote on Egypt’s strange return to protectionism in one all-important sector of its economy: belly dancing. There’s also a version that appeared in The Times, but it was shorter and anyway you;d have to pay to see it. And if you want to see more on the same topic, read the feature over at the Cairo Times or this article at the Daily Star. Just remember mine came first…

Here’s another article I wrote a couple of weeks ago and should have posted, on the fascinating topic (no really) of the US-Egypt free trade agreement. Or to be more precise, on the lack thereof. The most incredible thing to me seems to be that there seems to be something fishy going on that no one wants to talk about. The bit about Mubarak starting a government-wide initiative to improve relations with the US is particularly curious when all sides keep on talking about how close they are.

If you read French and love Tintin (being partly Belgian, it’s a national duty for me), you have to see this great spoof — Tintin en Irak. I’ve only read a few pages so far, but it’s very well made. They’ve taken images from the real Tintin books and pasted them together after changing the text. Painstaking work it must have been, but it’s paid off. (Update: They’ve started to translate it in English.)

Because of the holidays, it’s been quiet over the past couple of months for me in terms of writing — just some basic news stories out — but I should be working on more interesting stuff in the coming weeks, based on my trip to Morocco. Things are really interesting down here. In some ways, it’s a great test case of the need to balance security and democracy (and the false dichotomy between them) as well as the difficulty that illiberal regimes (and Hassan II’s Morocco was certainly one) to change. More on this later.

16:26 | / potluck | link

Mon, 08 Sep 2003

At the center, and elsewhere too

Juan Cole has published a post looking at Bush’s speech on Iraq. He makes many good points, but this one stuck in my mind:

“In Iraq, we are helping the long-suffering people of that country to build a decent and democratic society at the centre of the Middle East.”

But Iraq isn’t at the center of the Middle East. Egypt is. Egypt’s ruling National Party is drafting a new election law. All the US would have to do is lean on them a bit, and Egypt could suddenly be much closer to being a democracy. But the US coddles Mubarak’s soft police state because it is a US ally. Apparently you have to virtually declare war on the US to have any hope that the Americans will turn your country into a democracy. Otherwise you are stuck with pro-US dictatorships. As for a decent and democratic society, what the Iraqis have so far is a peremptory American administration of the country, a huge crime wave, lack of electricity and potable water, and an unemployment rate hovering around 60%, not to mention deep insecurity from huge bombs going off.

Got that right. There may several parties in Egypt, and they all get to run in the elections, but that does not a democracy make. Not when there is no rotation of power possible and the most important opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, is not allowed to run. I dislike and disagree with the Brothers, but they’ve said they’ll abide by the rules of parliamentary democracy and I think they should be given the chance.

And it’s not only Egypt that had the problem of being a paper democracy. In another staunch US ally where I am at the moment, Morocco, the 16 May bombings in Casablanca have put an end to an already faltering democratic experiment. There is multiparty election politicking going in Morocco, and at least there the moderate Islamists are allowed to run, but the game is rigged. There are local elections taking place next Friday, and it’s common knowledge that the Parti de la Justice et du Developpement, the moderate Islamist party, is limiting the numbers of candidates it is fielding at the request of the interior ministry. A lot of the middle class here supports containing the Islamists to avoid a repeat of the bombing that took 19 lives in Casablanca. It was very sad to hear an old family friend saying this morning, “The King wanted democracy so much… he really did. But what can he do? With these Islamists, it’s simply not possible.”

People here value their security more than their freedom in many cases, especially if they are well off. The poor — i.e. the vast majority of the population — has nothing to lose, and offers its votes (its only assets) to those who really seem different from the establishment, i.e. the Islamists. But until Islamists actually have enough responsibility in government to govern, make mistakes, and have people be disappointed in them (and get rid of them in the next elections) things will not change. The Islamists, their ideas untested, will remain heroes to many people. For more security, people should look for more democracy, not less.

22:22 | / islam | link

Fri, 05 Sep 2003

Unblogged

There won’t be any posts for a while. I’m traveling around Morocco, working a few stories, covering local elections, and seeing my “old country” for the first time in years. More when I get back.

19:08 | / potluck | link

Wed, 03 Sep 2003

Chalabi’s turn

At the beginning of this month, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, the main exiled Iraqi group allied with the neo-cons in Washington, assumed the presidency of Iraq’s Governing Council. He’ll only be there for a month, but I’m sure he’ll be trying to lay the groundwork for a more permanent position. After all, his allies in Washington are.

Take for instance a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by Bernard Lewis, famed orientalist historian, on the need to “put Iraqis in charge” to solve the growing Iraq crisis, which I saw pointed out by top Chalabi-watcher Josh Marshall:

Fortunately, the nucleus of such a government is already available, in the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi. In the northern free zone during the ’90s they played a constructive role, and might at that time even have achieved the liberation of Iraq had we not failed at crucial moments to support them. Despite a continuing lack of support amounting at times to sabotage, they continue to acquit themselves well in Iraq, and there can be no reasonable doubt that of all the possible Iraqi candidates they are the best in terms alike of experience, reliability, and good will. It took years, not months, to create democracies in the former Axis countries, and this was achieved in the final analysis not by Americans but by people in those countries, with American encouragement, help and support. Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress deserve no less.

Marshall of TPM however omits the preceding paragraph, which is more telling of the plans for Iraq that the neo-cons (ideological allies of Lewis even if he may be too old-fashioned to be a neo-con himself) have:

What then should we do in Iraq? Clearly the imperial role is impossible, blocked equally by moral and psychological constraints, and by international and more especially domestic political calculations. An inept, indecisive imperialism is the worst of all options, with the possible exception of subjecting Iraq to the tangled but ferocious politics of the U.N. The best course surely is the one that is working in Afghanistan—to hand over, as soon as possible, to a genuine Iraqi government. In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a period of discreet support would be necessary, but the task would probably be easier in Iraq. Here again care must be taken. Premature democratization—holding elections and transferring power, in a country which has had no experience of such things for decades, can only lead to disaster, as in Algeria. Democracy is the best and therefore the most difficult of all forms of government. The Iraqis certainly have the capacity to develop democratic institutions, but they must do so in their own way, at their own pace. This can only be done by an Iraqi government.

So basically what he’s saying is, put Chalabi in charge but don’t push him to be democratic. Hmmm sounds familiar… oh yes, that’s right, that’s the US policy for every other country in the region. “Discreet support” of dictators with the justification that if democracy is going to develop, these people must to do it “at their own pace.” Nevermind that many Iraqis don’t seem to care much for Chalabi, who let’s remember is still wanted for a large-scale bank fraud in Jordan. But in any case, for Lewis the Arab world is probably — for essentialist “cultural” reasons — probably incapable of democracy in any case. For an in-depth critique of Lewis, take a look at this new article on MERIP by Adam Sabra.

TPM has more on Chalabi, including speculation that he may have been responsible for the failure of a CIA coup attempt in 1996. His thinking is that Chalabi wanted the coup to fail because the CIA was carrying it out with exiled Baathist generals, and not his group. Chalabi, along with his best buddy Richard Perle, may have played the CIA into taking a more hardline stance against Iraq after the failed coup, which Chalabi may have warned Saddam about.

In another post, TPM notes a Washington Post article that refers to an interview with Perle in the conservative French daily Le Figaro. He only quotes a part of the interview that was translated by the post, so I dug up the original Le Figaro interview (now in its paid archives) and translated part of it. It picks up on the new neo-con theme of putting Iraqis in charge as soon as possible (and you know who he means) and has Perle making a ludicrous comparison between the occupation of Iraq and the liberation of France in 1944:

How can you pretend that the situation in Iraq under American control is going well?

The situation in Iraq is in any case much better than under Saddam Hussein, although I will not say that it is easy to change a country that was submitted for thirty years to a dictatorship like Saddam’s.

Do you think that anarchy is preferable to dictatorship?

I don’t think you can speak of anarchy. Yes, there is a lot of violence. But wasn’t there anarchy in France after its liberation in 1944?

Not a single American soldier was then killed, behind the front lines, in liberated French territory. Same thing in Germany, even though it was an enemy country.

But 10,000 French collaborators where killed by other Frenchmen! You cannot, from one day to the next, succeed in transforming a country that has gone through a history like Iraq’s recent history. There are Iraqis who worked for Saddam, belonged to his torture apparatus, his secret police. There are thousands of them and they have nowhere to go. What we are seeing now is a desperate attempt to show that the American administration of Iraq is not working.

Don’t the current problems come rather from militant Islamists who were not there under Saddam and who have succeeded in infiltrating the country in the midst of the anarchy? Don’t you think that the attacks against your soldiers and against the UN come from these Islamists rather than Arab nationalists from the former Baath party?

Evidently, we have problems with both groups. Three groups of people are responsible for the current violence and sabotage in Iraq: the Baathists who have nowhere to go, the Muslim extremists for whom the attacks are part of a global strategy, and, finally, common criminals, many of whom were freed from prison by Saddam. But the vast majority of Iraqis do not support any of these three groups.

Isn’t there a shocking contrast between the quality of military preparation, the rapidity of the invasion, and America’ total lack of preparedness in terms of civilian administration [of Iraq]? All the looting, the vandalized ministries, the burnt archives… Yet, you knew that the world would be judging you foremost on your civilian [as opposed to military] efforts. Isn’t there a historic American failure here?

Of course we didn’t do everything well. Mistakes were made and there will be others. Invading a country in order to run it is not part of American culture. We do not have colonial experience from which we could have pulled a doctrine. Our approach was necessarily empirical. Our main mistake, in my opinion, was to have failed to work in depth with the Iraqis before the war, so that an Iraqi opposition would have been able to immediately take charge of things. Today, the solution is to hand over power to the Iraqis as soon as possible.

Perle is right when he says that “Invading a country in order to run it is not part of American culture.” But setting up puppet regimes and not caring about whether they are democratic is. I wonder what tension is now developing between the hawks that truly believe they can install a form of democracy in Iraq and those that just wanted Saddam out and a tame regime — of any kind — in.

17:49 | / iraq | link

Herbert / blogs / Heseltine / Hi / design

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I like Bob Herbert. Now if only they could get rid of Friedman and Safire…

Baghdad Burning, the latest Iraqi blog, is giving Where is Raed? a run for his money.

If you want more proof that the world is upside down, read this scathing attack on Blair by Michael Heseltine, the former Tory deputy prime minister. It’s political dynamite. Heseltine is one of the few Tories for whom I have respect for as a statesman, along with Kenneth Clarke and, grudgingly, Michael Portillo (in other words, those Tories currently on the fringe of the party.) I see his words are as flamboyant as his hair.

Christopher Ross, a former US ambassador to Syria who briefly headed an anti-terrorism task force at the State Department in the late 1990s before being conspicuously given the boot (rumor has it he committed the cardinal sin of being an Arabist — he even spoke Arabic fluently, a no-no at the higher echelons of Foggy Bottom), is now in charge of Hi, the latest risible excuse for sound public diplomacy towards the Arab world. I briefly knew Ross in Syria and heard a lot of positive things about him, most notably that he could charm his tough Syrian interlocutors with his mastery of Arabic (which I remember as nearly accent-less.) It’s sad to see him marginalized like this when someone of his skills could be put to much better use these days. Read all about Hi at MERIP.

Readers may have noticed small changes in the look of the site, as well a temporary lack of style formatting yesterday. I’m experimenting with a radical design overhaul, but I’m still fixing bugs. I’ve created a table-free, entirely CSS-based version with a much nicer design, but of course the usual troublesome browsers (i.e. IE) can’t read it. In the meantime, I’m adding a few links, a “raw data” section on the sidebar, and making block quotes a different font to make them easier to differentiate, and, hopefully, to read. I’d appreciate any feedback…

02:17 | / potluck | link

Homage to Hossam

Hossam Bahgat, a good friend and former colleague at the Cairo Times, has been awarded a “Young Human Rights Hero” award by Amnesty International Netherlands for his work as program director at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). Hossam is not only a remarkably intelligent person, but also an incredibly precocious man who must be one of the youngest human rights activists in the world. Over the past two years he has shown great courage in taking up causes that many Egyptian human rights organizations simply won’t touch, such as Egypt’s ongoing crackdown against gays. Because of his work, his name has been dragged through the mud in some of the Egyptian press, which typically dubs him “the defender of perverts.”

You can read a recent Op-Ed piece of his on human rights and business in Al Hayat (in Arabic) here.

Mabrouk ya Hossam… and keep up the good work.

01:12 | / egypt | link

Against “Israeli escapism”

Avraham Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset and centrist candidate for leadership of the Labor party, has written an eloquent plea for a saner Israel that originally appeared in Hebrew in Yediot Aharonot and in English in the American Jewish magazine Forward. Considering that Burg was running as the more “moderate” candidate against Amram Mitzna, who lost the last general elections to Sharon, this piece comes as quite a shock.

It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents’ shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.

…

Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.

I had mentioned below in the post about neo-conservatism, the neo-cons seem be defending a certain idea of Israel — one that is maximalist and seeks to create a regional order based on Israel’s current overwhelming military superiority over its neighbors. The Israel of Benyamin Netanyahu — possibly even more than Ariel Sharon, who seems like a relic of another era compared his younger, and more ruthless rival. It would be nice to think that the alternative Israel to this is something like Burg’s or Mitzna’s. It would be nice to think that people like them could win elections.

The right-wing drift of Israeli politics — the crisis in both the traditional Zionism of the Labor party as well as the slow death of the “peace camp” and the growing irrelevance of the once potent far left — is something I’ve been reading about over the past few days at The Head Heeb, a very well-written and well-read blogger that was kind enough to add this site to his links. (I am returning the favor.) In an interesting post dating from last January, just before the general elections took place in Israel, he makes a tentative comparison between the Likud and the Wafd, Egypt’s sadly moribund liberal party, based on a Cairo Times story published when I still was editor there. The comparison may not really hold (we agree on this point) but there is some food for thought: the Likud, like the Wafd, like today’s Republican party, is not what is used to be.

For at least a partial answer to what has happened, I would suggest to start with Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s The Global Political Economy of Israel, a startling book that offers a new way of looking not only at recent Israeli political history, but a new way of looking at politics and economics period. Nitzan and Bichler may really be on to something big — I can also recommend reading their theories regarding the real reasons behind the war on Iraq on their website. It’s pretty mind-blowing stuff. I haven’t finished reading the book yet, but I’ll be sure to post more — perhaps a review — when I have.

00:57 | / israel | link

Mon, 01 Sep 2003

Neo-conservatism defined

Irving Kristol, considered by many as the godfather of neo-conservatism, has provided a long sought-after definition in the Weekly Standard, the neo-con magazine run by his son and owned by Rupert Murdoch.

The definition he gives is a surprisingly social-democratic one — albeit with a few caveats — confirming the generally accepted notion that neocons are by and large former liberals that became disillusioned by the perceived “moral decadence” of the 1970s. They’ve read Trotsky and company, but are reinterpreting it in a radical-conservative way much like the neo-realist school of international relations theory took old ideas about power and realpolitik and added a fiercely anti-communist, normative streak to them.

But aside from a distinct ideological history, neo-conservatism as defined here really seems quite eclectic, and in certain respects rather shallow. Take their fiscal attitude:

One of these policies, most visible and controversial, is cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth. This policy was not invented by neocons, and it was not the particularities of tax cuts that interested them, but rather the steady focus on economic growth. Neocons are familiar with intellectual history and aware that it is only in the last two centuries that democracy has become a respectable option among political thinkers. In earlier times, democracy meant an inherently turbulent political regime, with the “have-nots” and the “haves” engaged in a perpetual and utterly destructive class struggle. It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously, that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.

The cost of this emphasis on economic growth has been an attitude toward public finance that is far less risk averse than is the case among more traditional conservatives. Neocons would prefer not to have large budget deficits, but it is in the nature of democracy—because it seems to be in the nature of human nature—that political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness, so that one sometimes must shoulder budgetary deficits as the cost (temporary, one hopes) of pursuing economic growth. It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning.

Doesn’t the casual hope that tax cuts will lead in more prosperity for everyone seem rather weak, especially considering that the recent tax cuts passed by the Republican-dominated Congress and the White House mostly benefit the richest taxpayers? And there is a certain degree of recklessness with the idea the deficits will be “temporary, one hopes.” As for the idea that “political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness,” well, that kinda seems ironic, doesn’t it. Finally, the last sentence about “egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals” vs. “economic reckoning” is incredibly dismissive of the fundamental idea behind what constitutes a just society as not being simply a question of how to create the most economically efficient society. This kind of reductionism (also found in free-trade fanatics, for whom the idea of a perfectly free economic system is the most desirable without regards to human consequences) makes you wonder whatever happened to ideas of justice inherent to the American system — it’s “pursuit of happiness,” remember, not “pursuit of maximum profits no matter what.”

Since Kristol’s article came out, there’s been a few critiques and reviews of it — two interesting ones I’ve come across are at The Agonist and Strike The Root. Both are well worth reading, and pore through Kristol’s every statement, which I’m not really interested in doing.

All this talk of neo-conservatism made me want to look into more expanded histories of the neo-conservative movement, and focus on one particular aspect that few like to focus on: their unconditional support of Israel, or to be more precise, a certain kind of Israel.

One great, if simple, resource on neo-conservatism is the Christian Science Monitor’s Empire Builders special, which looks at the neo-cons from different angles. It’s well worth reading the compiled articles and interviews there, and there’s a great quiz you can take too to find out if you are a neo-con too. (I scored liberal on it, but I think I’m more somewhere between liberal and realist…)

Much more exhaustive, and for my needs much more interesting, is this long, two-part article by Jihad Al Khazen that originally appeared al Al Hayat in June and has been reproduced and translated on Philosophy Notes (part one, part two.) Jihad Al Khazen is a senior editor at Al Hayat and one of the newspaper’s top editorialists. That does not make him popular in some circles — see what Michael Levitt, a “senior fellow in terrorism studies” at the pro-Israel, neo-con leaning Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has to say about him in an article subtitled “Arab journalists and intellectuals are apologists for terror” and published by the arch-conservative National Review:

The prime example of this state of denial and intellectual atrophy is Jihad al-Khazen, an outspoken apologist for Middle Eastern terrorist groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah � and one of the region’s most prominent editorialists. In fact, al-Khazen is not only considered the region’s Tom Friedman, he is a senior editor for al-Hayat, the paper widely regarded as the New York Times of the Arab world. His prominence has gained him considerable prestige, including membership on the board of advisers to Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. With people like this feeding the Mideastern denial frenzy, it’s no wonder the Arab street has responded with such hostility to Western efforts to expose international terrorist activities, even after September 11.

It’s incredible the lengths some of Israel’s American supporters go to discredit anyone who disagrees with them or poses a threat — Levitt even goes to the extent for asking that Al Khazen be barred from entering the United States. For his part, Al Khazen had this to say on suicide bombing in a recent column:

I reject suicide operations on principle. I also reject the last one, whatever the reason or pretext. I do not defend the planner and the executor. But I also condemn the policy of the Israeli government, which operates, with premeditation, to destroy the peace process and dispose of the Roadmap.

…

For over a year, I have been trying to convince Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop suicide operations. I worked on this, first with Mohamad Dahlan and Mohamad Rashid, and later with Mahmoud Abbas himself (prior to the cabinet formation), and I still am. I registered from those efforts and contacts what I could in this column. And I noticed, as did Abbas and the others, that every time we come close to an agreement, Israel does something to take us back to the starting point.

Judge for yourselves, take a look at Al Khazen’s article — it contains nothing that cannot be verified from many other sources. Or take a look at his excellent column in today’s Al Hayat where he draws parallels between the situation in Iraq and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Doesn’t sound like a fanatic, does it?

Anyway, the article looks specifically at the Israel connection among the neo-cons. Although the use of terms such as “Israel’s gang in the current administration” may cause some eyebrows to raise, the general tone is not conspiratorial and certainly not anti-Semitic. Instead, it’s a persuasive and exhaustive list of all the different institutions that make up or play host to the neo-conservative movement, with an eye for their positions towards Israel. Much of this information is already well-known (indeed a lot is culled from articles in the US press, such as Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker), but seeing it here collected makes a powerful impact.

The section on A Clean Break, the policy recommendations put together by neo-con luminaries headed by Richard Perle is particularly enlightening:

The 1996 paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm is a chilling and prophetic statement of neo-conservative thinking on Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Middle East which prefigures events in the seven years following its preparation. It was written for the incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The report was prepared within the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies by the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.

…
The report is adamantly against the Oslo peace process and the moves towards a “New Middle East” and criticizes Israeli for “agreeing to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and responding with resignation to a spate of terror.”

The report says that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of ideas. “While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform.”

In order to secure its streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel should break from the slogan “comprehensive peace” to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power. It should work closely with Turkey and Jordan “to contain, destabilize and roll back some of its most dangerous threats.”

Israel should change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, “including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafat’s exclusive grip on Palestinian society.”

The report calls for Israel to “forge a new basis for relations with the United States-stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West. This can only be done if Israel takes serious steps to terminate aid, which prevents economic reform.”

The report says the new prime minister must adopt a bold new perspective on peace and security. Rather than “land for peace” there should be “peace for peace”, “peace through strength” and self-reliance: i.e. the balance of power. “Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, ‘peace for peace’, is a solid basis for the future.”

A Clean Break is anti-Syrian to the extreme, and constantly suggests ways in which Israel can undermine the Syrian regime. “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” Since Iraq’s future “could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq…”

Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan “comprehensive peace” and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program, and rejecting “land for peace” deals on the Golan Heights.

The report states that Damascus “fears that the ‘natural axis’ with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be a prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.” A Clean Break calls for a new U.S.-Israeli relationship based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality. Prime Minister Netanyahu should highlight his desire to work more closely with the U.S. on anti-missile Defense “in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to their state. Not only would such cooperation on missile Defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel’s survival, but it would broaden Israel’s support among many in Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile Defense. Such broad support could be helpful in the effort to move the U.S. embassy in Israeli to Jerusalem.”

A Clean Break advises the Israelis on the language to be used in addressing the Americans, in order to manage and constrain U.S. reactions. “Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favours in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.

The paper says that Israel’s new strategic agenda can shape the regional environment in ways that grant Israel the room to focus its energies back to where they are most needed: to rejuvenate its national idea, which can only come through replacing Israel’s socialist foundation with a more sound footing; and to overcome its “exhaustion” which threatens the survival of the nation.

Spooky, isn’t it? I think that one of the questions that the rise of the neo-conservatives in American politics bring up is not just where to place them on the political spectrum. It’s also — particularly since they have no clear constituency in America like traditional conservatives or liberals but make alliances with certain established movements like fundamentalist Christians — what is their agenda? Who are they defending? Whose interests do they want to further? After all, all of the other movements are trying to push for somebody’s interests, whether it’s the labor unions, big business, anti-abortionists or whoever else.

I don’t think that the whole of the answer is that the neo-cons are acting on behalf of Israel. They do have other causes, as explained in the Kristol article. But Israel certainly seems to be unusually close to their heart. My guess is that they are defending a certain idea of Israel, and a certain group within Israel whose rise can be placed either in the 1970s with the emergence of Likud or in the 1990s with the Likud taking a more “pro-business” approach under the likes of Benyamin Netanyahu. These ideas are not just anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian or maximalist a la Eretz Israel. They are also anti-Labor. Just go read the document. It may not be politically correct to be thinking about these things these days, but it makes one wonder.

23:59 | / politics | link