Being Hosni Mubarak
Bret Stephens , The Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2011
Imagine yourself as Hosni Mubarak, master of Egypt for nearly 30 years. You’re old, unwell, detested and addicted to power. You could have orchestrated a graceful exit by promising to preside over free and fair presidential elections later this year—elections in which the Mubarak name would not be on the ballot. Instead, you gambled that you could ride out the protests and hold on.
It’s a pretty good gamble.
Like everyone else, you’ve been “listening” to Egyptians marching through the streets and telling you it’s time to go. That’s an opinion they’ll likely revise after a few more neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria are ransacked, looted and torched by gangs of hooligans.
But you haven’t just been listening to the demonstrators. You’ve also been watching them—the way they dress, the way they shave. On Sunday, in Tahrir Square, you could tell right away that most were from the Muslim Brotherhood, though they were taking care not to chant the usual Islamic slogans. And Western liberals want you to relinquish power to them?
Then there are the usual “democracy activists,” minuscule in number, better known to Western journalists than to average Egyptians, most of them subsisting on some kind of grant from a Western NGO. They think they’re lucky to have Mohamed ElBaradei as their champion, with his Nobel Peace Prize and his lifetime in New York, Vienna—everywhere, that is, except Egypt itself. They think he gives them respectability. They’re wrong.
Finally, there are the middle-class demonstrators, the secular professionals and minor businessmen. In theory they’re your biggest threat. In practice they’re your ace in the hole.
What unites the protesters is anger. But anger is an emotion, not a strategy, much less a political agenda. What, really, does “Down With Mubarak” offer the average Egyptian?
If the Brotherhood has its way, Egypt will become a Sunni theocracy modeled on Iran. If the democracy activists have theirs, it’ll be a weak parliamentary system, incapable of exercising authority over the army and a cat’s paw for a Brotherhood that knows its revolutionary history well enough to remember the name of Alexander Kerensky.
Luckily for you, this analysis is becoming plainer by the day to many Egyptians, especially since Mr. ElBaradei, imagining he has the upper hand, stumbled into a political alliance with the Brotherhood. Also increasingly plain is that it’s in your hands to blur the “fine line between freedom and chaos,” as you aptly put it last week, and to give Egyptians a long, hard look at the latter. No, it wasn’t by your cunning design that thousands of violent prisoners made a jailbreak last week. And the decision to take police off the streets was done in the interests of avoiding bloody scenes with protesters.
Not quite everyone.
They will make their move in their own time. I have little doubt that they’ve been quietly hard at work behind the scenes all these many weeks.
Mubarak has kept the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, down till now — but they are the oldest existing and best organized body in Egypt, apart from the army itself. They may be “crazies,” but they are FAR from being dummies.
They’ve acquired a good measure of political savvy during all their time under wraps; they’ve had to, in order to survive in an autocratic secular state. They project an image these days of [the Egyptian equivalent of] “just folks.”
They will ride the back of this tiger to power, with Baradei, I suspect, fronting for them. This will keep the army on their side, and in all probability, American money continuing into the Egyptian spigot. When it suits their purposes to declare themselves for who and what they are, they will.
When they have a firm grip on the govt, they will remilitarize the Sinai (if that hasn’t already happened before they emerge), and they won’t leave without the encouragement that only superior firepower — directed at them — can provide.
The big question mark for me is what they’ll do with the CANAL — because that bears directly on more than just Israel.
Still, as I say, they’ve gotten to be pretty good at poker….
RS you are a typical clueless liberal. Any regime which replaces mubarak will not respect human rights but will implement sharia law. We should not be rejoicing in this unless you favor sharia law. What world are you living in?
I am not sure if the US government allows citizens access to Al Jazeera – if anyone has a problem I believe they Twitter and Facebook. All people who support human rights should rejoice in these events in the ME.
Bland, take a break, you have diarrhea of the brain.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Give us a break.
Nobody predicted the exact circumstances of what seems to be taking place on the ground today but: I have predicted a radical change in Egyptian leadership for years going back to 1979 so my timing is slightly off.
Fact the Army will in the end decide who and what form of government will emerge in the short run, but they cannot defeat the MB, as long as 80% of Egyptians live as in most third world countries by any standard real hopeless poverty.
Fact in Egypt the top military are part of their elitist societal structure and are paid well and enjoy many perks. They will support anyone even their own who will guarantee continuance of their status quo positions.
Egypt has a ruling wealth class who control 95% of all the physical wealth in Egypt. They have the most influence and power and are the enemies of the Islamists and communists.
Egypt’s population demographics make their economic problems insolvable. They cannot provide enough jobs some 2000000 per year to an exploding population where some 40% or more are illiterate. Egypt subsidizes all basic foodstuffs and with an exploding population it costs them each year more and more eating the gains made by any increase in national income. If you increase productivity in Egypt it would deprive others of lowest paying jobs, for them better to have ten people doing the work of one productive worker.
In the past every revolution in the Arab world was food deprivation driven. Hungry people are the only real threat to these regimes who need extreme repression to insure their own viability and stability.
Mubarak was due by all accounts to end his tenure in any event in Sept. 2011. Even with or without his son taking over. He has cancer and could succumb at anytime. So for him at 82 his days as president of Egypt were numbered with or without the push being played out today, so there should be no big shocks or surprises to anyone who follows events here. So it comes down to who and what replaces him. That should have been the major focus and interest by all concerned long before the demonstrations we have seen for the past week. That nobody here in Israel or in the West seems to have been preparing for a worst case probability.’
The MB will eventually gain power in Egypt because of the dire economic conditions in Egypt and all non energy driven Arab state economies.
The internet and cellphones, Al-Jezira will be the great unifier and enabler of the Youth of these countries and there is no way any state can prevent them. Repression will only acerbate their motivation to rebel and revolt.
Note: Egypt is the largest importer of wheat in the world mostly from the USA. If the price of wheat rises as all commodities are today Egypt must subsidize the difference to keep prices to their masses down. They are broke and can’t continue, so prices will rise, inflation will rise, the poor will starve and civil unrest will continue regardless of who runs Egypt in the future. This is fodder for Islamists and if Egypt is nominally Islamist today they will become more and more radicalized the worse off economically they become.
Gradually Israel will find itself vis a vis Egypt where we were before our Peace agreement with Egypt. The big difference will be an Egypt with the largest and most modern military in the ME American supplied and American trained. Nobody will force Egypt to maintain the agreements, the Suez Canal too important to them and if it screws Israel who cares? Egypt will re-militarize the Sinai! Israel will need to increase our defense expenditures by a factor of half. Jordan will follow Egypt’s lead and we will be were we were before the 73 war but facing a much stronger Egypt and even increased Isolation in the region and the world. War is then an inevitability, and a war unlike any fought till now. Don’t want to seem too apocalyptic but?
Africa, Middle-East in turmoil: why it’s happening
Gerald Celente: Internet nuke bomb waiting to go off
RS,
Those praying Jews have the right idea. Only Hashem knows what’s really going on. Here’s an example of everyone else’s cluelessness:
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/2011218490882163.html
Ted,
You shouldn’t talk that way: I begged you and all Israpundit for days, to take notice of what was going on in the Arab streets; but neither you nor any of the “experts” here had anything to offer on the matter: not any commentary, not even any news. You did not see this coming, nor did Yamit, nor did Caroline Glick. DEBKA came out early with the news, but didn’t know at the time what to make of it all. Even today, days after the outbreak in Tunisia, all we’re getting for commentary here and elsewhere, is yesterday’s hash. Everyone thought the Islamic crazies would rise up; but they were taken by surprize. The plot is Karl Marx, with a high-tech twist; and you know how welcome Marxists are here, especially educated Marxists with an interest in the plight of the Arab masses. Spengler’s article is the only one I’ve seen here so far, that even touches on this matter; and he did not understand the matter enough to offer a solution. To say you understand something, but have no solution, is a lie: If you truly understand the problem, you understand the solution. That said, even Spengler’s comments haven’t appeared here until many many days after the events broke out.
You were all just as clueless as me — except for Rongrand, of course, who has been convinced all along that the problem lies in what I had for breakfast.
This morning an Egyptian guy told me that it’s only half a million people wanting the overthrow of Mubarak, the other 85 million Egyptians do not want to see him go.
Half a million looks a lot on T.V. But what percentage is that? One wonders how accurately a “democratic” election would reflect the wishes of the majority of Egyptians. This, after all, is Africa, where election rigging is commonplace and hardly even reported by sufficiently intimidated news reporters and newspaper editors.
I believe Pres Obama is irresponsible in calling on the Egyptian government to do anything except do their best to keep bloodshed down to a minimum.
BlandOatmeal:
“The Egyptians and other Arabs need to be changed from within. This can only come from their hearing, believing and acting upon the Word of God — as individuals, one at a time. With the “Twitter Revolution”, we have seen this sort of thing in motion: Millions of leaderless people have heard, believed, and acted upon SOMETHING, and caught the leaders of the world flatfooted. The only thing that remains to be done, it seems to me, is to make sure that SOMETHING is the Word of God. This is already happening, and will soon bear fruit.”
Very true. Very true indeed.
You are wrong. As Spengler points out it was as predictable as it was unavoidable and unsolvable.
Hi, Ted.
I see that the pundits, including the Isra-pundits, are starting to come out of the woodwork and expound as “experts”. The fact of the matter, is that everyone from Barack Obama to Caroline Glick has been caught flat-footed by this revolution.
Bret Stephens has had several days to digest what’s going on, but I think he’s still missing an important point, perhaps the central point of this whole phenomenon: The fact that something entirely unpredictable has happened: that a leaderless mass of educated, Internet-savvy Arabs would start toppling one Moslem regime after another while the Islamic extremists had to await their moment on the sidelines as spoilers. Do you wan’t to know my comments on this phenomenon? Here they are:
(1) I have no comment, and
(2) I haven’t seen anyone else put one forth.
The comments I HAVE seen, including fragments of my own rather shocked remarks, have just been a re-hashing of history: references to Iran in 1979, to Jimmy Carter, to Alexander Kerensky… I’m frankly not interested in these rehashes, nor in people saying “I told you so” when actually they were all rather clueless. That’s all just so much hot air which is not being channeled into heating houses. I am looking for people identifying real problems and offering genuine, workable solutions.
The closest I have found to this is HERE
The author notes that democracy will only exacerbate the problem in the Middle East, because the problem is Islam itself and the culture of treachery and incivility that comes directly out of its doctrine. We’ve all heard this over and over, of course. The author then goes on to propose solutions — namely, how to rid a culture of the curse of Islam. He first says that the only method that has “worked” in rolling back Islam, was the reforms of Kemal Attaturk:
He then confesses that even this hasn’t really worked:
The author failed to bring up something which I fugured out after just a little pondering: The only way Islam actually WAS successfully rolled back, was by military force, accompanied by forced conversions and expulsions. Of course, these things are “no-no”s to the Western mind, accustomed to rules of engagement crafted in the days when wars were primarily leadership contests between uncles and cousins in European royal houses.
That said, I don’t advocate Crusader and Reconquista methods for winning the hearts of the Moslem masses. That’s because Crusaders and Conquistadors do not, in the long run, produce results that are all that tantalizing: At best, they lead to Christian monarchies, then parliamentary democracies and freedom, then the unthinking hedonistic nihilism that surrounds us today, followed by brutal, primeval dictatorships.
The Egyptians and other Arabs need to be changed from within. This can only come from their hearing, believing and acting upon the Word of God — as individuals, one at a time. With the “Twitter Revolution”, we have seen this sort of thing in motion: Millions of leaderless people have heard, believed, and acted upon SOMETHING, and caught the leaders of the world flatfooted. The only thing that remains to be done, it seems to me, is to make sure that SOMETHING is the Word of God. This is already happening, and will soon bear fruit.
Most people here don’t believe me. For them, this is the time and place for yet more re-hashed discussions about Khomeini, Kerensky, Munich, Antisemitism and Netanyahu. I leave you and the readers to them.