Like everyone else of sense, I’m wary of people who are too certain about anything that might happen next in Egypt. That suspicion certainly extends to my own opinions. I’m not sure we even know what the known knowns are, far less anything else.
That said, I think one can reasonably suspect that the appointment of Omar Suleiman as Vice-President is neither a sign of Hosni Mubarak’s strength nor anything like enough to satisfy the protestors. The regime may yet survive but I wouldn’t rush to purchase Hosni Futures. Unlike David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, Barack Obama hasn’t talked about this year’s elections yet but one imagines, reading between the lines of his most recent statement, that will be his next move. Elsewhere, the relationship between the Pentagon and the Egyptian military becomes ever-more important. Here one assumes the Americans must be counselling caution. This would be good for the United States and, much more vitally, good for Egypt.
As Noah Millman writes in this excellent post, the army is the key. Not just in terms of Mubarak’s survival but, if he falls, in determining to some degree whether, among other options, Egypt emulates Pakistan or, just as troublingly, Algeria. Elsewhere, there are voices convinced that the present uprising is no kind of Arab 1989 but rather a 1917 (Russia) or 1979 (Iran). Needless to say, none of these four historical comparisons are especially optimistic. Hence the suspicion that Mubarak or something like him might be “better” than anything else that’s available. In the name of “stability” you see. That’s one view of western interests. But it’s not the only one.
We have reached the moment at which Realism is no longer sustainable. It has been made redundant by events. Realism is no longer realistic. In that sense, one neoconservative* insight will be proven correct: the clock will have run out on the status quo. I think that’s true even if Mubarak or some facsimile of his regime survives for a short while yet. A managed transition to a new set of arrangements – both political and economic – might, if only it could be guaranteed, be in most people’s best interests. But that requires greater modesty and wisdom than we’ve seen from the regime thus far.
Pessimists, of whom there is no shortage, tell us that the middle-class is neither ready nor strong enough to sustain anything that might even approach a western understanding of “democracy”. Perhaps they are right. But do the liberal, moderate, middle-classes need to be quite that strong? Or do they need to be just strong enough to prevent a slide towards total extremism and the spectre of an Algerian-style civil war?
At the moment the protests and the grievances do not seem to show any** support for turning Egypt into a religious state. Rather it’s a matter of economics and opportunity. Perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood are simply keeping a low profile, ready to seize the initiative if the regime falls and no other interest group emerges to be a rallying point and force for the stability of law and order. But I’m not sure we should read too much into the success of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated candidates in the 2005 elections. Those were conducted in circumstances very different to those we might tentatively think would apply in a post-Mubarak environment.
Brookings’ Bruce Riedel makes the case that there’s less reason to fear the Brotherhood than many think. Many will doubtless think him hopelessly naive. But supposing the Brotherhood does emerge as the dominant force in Egypt After Mubarak, these are still the fiirst steps, not the final destination. It is always easy and tempting to suppose that what has happened to this point or what is happening now will continue to happen. But neither history nor politics operate in such a linear fashion. The first season of a post-Mubarak Egypt may not look much like the second or third. Better-Worse-Better could be as feasible as Worse-Worse-Worse or, more optimistically, Better-Better-Better.
Like Reihan Salam, I want to read what Reuel Marc Gerecht (like Riedel ex-CIA but unlike him a genuine neoconservative) has to say about all this. His 2004 monograph The Islamic Paradox argues we should not be afraid of more-democratically-legitimate Arab regimes even if they prove less liberal and more nationalistic than western liberals might wish. Indeed he goes further: such regimes, even and perhaps especially if Islamic in nature, are a feature of progress not a bug impeding it. As he puts it, “Islamic fundamentalism must evolve to kill off bin Ladenism”. Furthermore:
Gerecht does not shy away from the ugly aspects of all this (particularly for Israel) but he may have a point (though you may also think him too optimistic, if cautiously optimistic for different reasons than most optimists). This is a long game. Perhaps a fundamentalist regime in Cairo would be able to use religion to paper over shortcomings elsewhere in its portfolio but unless it decides to cut Egypt off from the rest of the world, the economic and demographic fundamentals driving this uprising will force it to engage, substantively if not necessarily rhetorically, with problems of a magnitude greater than mere religion can solve. Otherwise it will fail as surely as Mubarak’s regime has failed.It is certainly possible that fundamentalists, if they gained power in Egypt, would try to end representative government. The democratic ethic, although much more common in Egypt than many Westerners believe, is not as well anchored as it is among the Shiites of Iran or in the fatwas of Grand Ayatollah Sistani. But the United States would still be better off with this alternative than with a secular dictatorship, like Mubarak’s, which oppresses and feeds fundamentalism. Without Mubarak or the general who is likely to succeed him, evolution starts. The Iranian model comes into play. Fundamentalists become fundamentalist critics. They become responsible for their own spiritual destiny, in addition to potholes, sewage pipes, imports, exports, and the nation’s credit rating. The State Department talks about encouraging “generational” change. But time moves quickly now. Given how rapidly bin Ladenism went from an idea to an operational reality, we are of course lucky this is so. In twenty years, the Iranian revolution collapsed and the clerical regime, not the United States, became the principal focus of the people’s anger. The same process is unavoidable in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world, if Islamic activists become dictators or elected representatives wielding real power.
All this may prove premature and much too optimistic too. A post-Mubarak Egypt will be an uncertain and difficult place. It will not be an American “client” and there’s every chance regardless of the warmth of its relationship with Washington it will, like Ankara, surely want to show it can act independently of its erstwhile-sponsor. Furthermore, nationalist pride makes it seem likely that Egypt will want to reclaim its faded position as the focal point of the Arab world. That increases the risk that, like Iran, its foreign policy will be less than helpful and used to provide cover for stalled reforms or broken promises on the home front. This carries obvious dangers about which it would be foolish to be too sanguine.
Nevertheless and one way or another the Nile is beginning to look like the Rubicon and we may soon need to learn the arabic for Alea iacta est while hoping that, this time, the Republic will be reformed and strengthened so it can survive without the need for any Egyptian Caesar. The form and shape of that Republic is a different matter, however…
*Brother Korski writes that after six “fallow” years this tumult shows that “the neoconservatives were right”. Well, sort of. Matters are complicated by the fact that many of those routinely labelled “neocons” were never any such thing (Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney come into this category) and by the fact neoconservatives were hardly the only people who believed – and believe – in reform in the Arab world. (The neocon foreign policy sensibility, remember, was a reaction against the “Realism” of both right and left.) Saying the neoconservatives were right both gives them too much credit and simplifies the nuances of, and divisions in, neoconservative thinking.
UPDATE**Andrew Stuttaford rightly cautions me against saying there isn’t “any support for turning Egypt into a religious state”. True. I should have written “any great”. And of course, this like so much else may change.
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