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January 29, 2011
Mehdi Hasan in The truth about Egypt in the New Statesman says that the US and UK governments, aided and abetted by the US and UK media, might like us to believe that they are on the side of the protesters, fighting for their democratic rights and freedoms, and not on the side of the ageing, corrupt dictator, Hosni Mubarak, and his secret police trying to ride out the storm.
The reality, however, is that:
Mubarak is in power in Cairo with the west's blessing, approval, support, sponsorship, funding and arms. Democrat and Republican presidents, Labour and Conservative prime ministers, have all cosied up to Egypt's "secular" tyrant, a self-proclaimed but ineffective bulwark against "Islamic extremism", since he assumed the presidency in 1981.
What the West supports are the brutal dictators who are the main enemies of their people, now demonstrating against the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt.
Over decades the ‘Western’ powers not only propped up unaccountable, corrupt and despotic rulers but also allowed or prompted them to pursue policies which were highly unpopular with large domestic constituencies. While the US favours Egyptian political reform in theory, in practice it has propped up an authoritarian system for pragmatic reasons of national self-interest. It behaved in much the same way towards Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s, when Iraq was at war with Iran. A similar tacit bargain governs relations with Saudi Arabia. The US is part of the problem. The U.S. talk about human rights and international law does not apply to its closest allies--only to rogue states.
As Simon Tisdall points out in The Guardian:
In the final analysis, the US needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one. Whether the issue is Israel-Palestine, Hamas and Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, security for Gulf oil supplies, Sudan, or the spread of Islamist fundamentalist ideas, Washington wants Egypt, the Arab world's most populous and influential country, in its corner. That's the political and geostrategic bottom line. In this sense, Egypt's demonstrators are not just fighting the regime. They are fighting Washington, too.
Egypt, like Yemen, faces the pressures of huge numbers of young people without jobs, growing outrage over abusive security forces, corrupt leaders, repressive political systems. Suspicion of American intentions runs deep and Mubarak's empty promises of reform are quickly seen through. The citizens’ protests in Egypt appear to be driven by domestic demands--concern about citizens’ living conditions within the borders of the Egyptian nation-state.
Will the popular discontent being expressed in the streets be able to challenge the government's authority, undermine the cohesion and loyalty of the Egyptian security forces, and render Mubarak's continued rule untenable? Or will Mubarak survive a few more days, manage popular discontent by making partial concessions on the economic issues while arbitrarily dismissing the political issues of the post colonial state (more democracy and less corruption and repression), the protest movement will falter, and the Mubarak regime can go back to the old status quo of governing through coercion, not consent?
Or will the Obama administration play a key role in talking Mubarak down? Keeping the U.S. military aid flowing dominates Mubarak's foreign policy, defined first and foremost in the region by its cold peace with Israel. Will the US pull the plug on the $1.3 billion military aid that enables the armed forces rule Egypt? The army will have to decide whether it stands with Mubarak or the people.
Update
Soumaya Ghannoushi in Arab states: a quagmire of tyranny says that:
Much of the turmoil plaguing the region today is traceable to its diseased political order.....Events in Tunisia, Egypt and – to a lesser extent – Algeria are harbingers of a change long impeded and postponed. Were it not for the international will to maintain the worn out status quo, what happened in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s could have occurred in the Arab region too. Its decrepit autocrats were allowed to stagger on, shedding their old skins and riding on the wave of rampant economic liberalism, which benefited the narrow interests of ruling families and their associates alone, and thrust the rest into a bottomless pit of poverty and marginalisation.
She says that the trouble is that an entity that has made coercion its raison d'etre and violence its sole means of survival has left itself no option but to sink deeper in the quagmire of tyranny.
Despite Barack Obama’s call for greater personal liberties and restoration of internet access in Egypt, it is clear that Washington would just as soon Mubarak presided over a transition to his successor.
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"In the final analysis, the US needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one."
Simon Tisdall makes it an either/or statement. It does not have to be that way...
Had the US taken a more hands-off approach, the result could have been a friendly AND democratic government. Instead, by propping up an unpopular leader, they convince the oppressed citizens that the US is part of the problem. Some of these citizens will become more radical than others.
“Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable” ~John F Kennedy
Makes sense, dunnit?