Let's talk power grab.
The military council that took over interim, or seemingly interim, control of the Egyptian government upon the ouster of Hosni Mubarak has postponed the announcement of a winner in the presidential runoff, re-imposed marshal law, shut down the Parliament, took control over the writing of the constitution and gave the power traditionally assigned to the executive branch a trim and a shave, in effect reducing the president to a mere figure-head.
The influential Al-Ahram newspaper titled its lead story “The Most Perilous 48 Hours in Egypt’s History.” That may be a touch hyperbolic, but it’s not far off the mark, for this political crisis could morph into a turning point in modern Egyptian history, defining the country’s future trajectory. Will Egypt, in other words, continue to be a nation ruled by a military dictatorship, with a restive population and a stagnant political culture? If so, that would represent a betrayal of the egalitarian themes of the revolution and a retrenchment from the ethos of the Arab Spring.
A showdown was expected and a showdown it became. The Muslim Brotherhood, along with sundry liberals, reformers and progressives, gathered by the tens of thousands in Tahrir Square to protest the arbitrary decrees, while the generals, for their part, deployed tanks, troops and concertina wire around Cairo in their own show of force. It was a case of people power against military power.
There is another player in this high stakes poker game over the fate of the most populous and pivotal country in the Arab Middle East. And clearly that would be the United States, most of whose annual aid package of $1.3 billion to Egypt goes to the military, the very junta that is now crushing the revolution. So will the US, you ask, put its money where its mouth is and threaten to suspend that aid unless members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces see the light, go back to their barracks and let the democratic process move forward?
For Washington, it’s not as easy as all that. To start with, the $1.3 billion in question may be, on paper, given to Egypt, but it is in effect a subsidy to US arms manufacturers, since the money is rerouted back to companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics that are contracted to deliver F16 fighter jets, Abram tanks and other military hardware to Egypt. And that translates into American jobs that the Obama administration would be loath to jeopardize.
Then there is the issue of how this aid was approved in the wake of the Camp David accords brokered by President Jimmy Carter 30 years ago. It was, very simply, approved as a reward, or as a bribe, to Egypt for making peace with the Zionist state, and for scrupulously maintaining it to this day. Israel does not want see the Egyptian military cut down to size, and a civilian government in Cairo answerable to the people — to whom that treaty is far from popular anyhow — come to power.
And trust me on this one: What Israel wants from the White House and Congress, Israel gets.
All of which creates a disconnect for US foreign policy in that part of the world. For here, on the one hand, Washington is on record as championing democracy in Egypt — indeed, championing it wherever movements triggered by the Arab Spring have taken place — and, on the other, obstructing its emergence there by continuing to turn a blind eye to the excesses of the military council. A kind of disconnect wrapped in a paradox, wouldn’t you say?
To be sure, Egyptians en masse do not appear to have much trust in the Obama administration, nor do they appear to have any illusions that it will come to their aid. According to a recent Pew poll, 76 percent of Egyptians do not want to see the incumbent president re-elected, a far cry from the thunderous applause he received from them when he arrived in Egypt in 2009 to address Egyptians, and through them the entire Muslim world, at Cairo University.
In the wake of the wishy-washy response from Washington to the power grab taken by the military junta in recent days, it is now clear that President Obama has decided that he wants his administration to be associated with the counter-revolution, leaving by the wayside the idealistic principles he outlined in that famous speech about mutual interests and mutual respect. By, hey, the US is a big power, and to big powers political, economic and strategic interests come first, even at the cost of moral principles. So why blame the beast of prey for being a beast of prey?
Egypt itself is to blame. This is a country that has been ruled by the military for the last 60 years. Its political regression, social woes, and economic decline go back to 1952 when Gamal Abdul Nasser triggered his country’s descent after he abolished all political parties and banned free media, a major building block of a democratic, free, dynamic polity. The body of 20 generals who make up the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces today are simply following in his and his two successors’ footsteps.
You, like me, must feel sad, perhaps maudlin, recalling those books you read in your teens about Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s when its two major cities were the font of Arab culture. Alexandria was where any Arab with any serious claim to literacy, and where the Egyptian-born Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and the Indian born novelist Lawrence Durrell, lived, wrote and thrived. And Cairo was the city to which flocked sundry Arab intellectuals, activists, political refugees, theoreticians, ideologues and social critics, whose literary effusions enriched the entire world of Arabs.
Both cities today have lost their glamour and become transformed into crowded, impoverished, in places fetid, Third World metropolises where the inescapable monotony of eking out a living is people’s only lot in life. Damn these military rulers who have immobilized Egyptian society and today want to keep it subservient against the will of its own people.
This article is exclusive to Arab News
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