Egypt

Saturday

James Forsyth

A region in flux

The kaleidoscope has been shaken in the Middle East and it is impossible to know where the pieces will settle. Watching the scenes, one’s inclination is to be hopeful. But as Jeffrey Goldberg notes the challenges facing any new Egyptian order are immense. One thing that is clear is that the autocrats of the Arab world are nervous. The Washington Post reports that the king of Bahrain is giving every family there $2,700 in an attempt to appease opinion before a planned day of protest on Monday. The Algerian government is offering to lift the state of emergency the country has been in for the past 19 years and the

Kate Chisholm

Expert witness

Recent events in Egypt have exposed not just the chasms in our understanding of what’s been going on in the countries of the Middle East, but also the effects of changes in how the BBC is spending the licence fee on reporting ‘fast-breaking’ stories. Recent events in Egypt have exposed not just the chasms in our understanding of what’s been going on in the countries of the Middle East, but also the effects of changes in how the BBC is spending the licence fee on reporting ‘fast-breaking’ stories. Instead of ‘stringers’ in the field, kept ticking over in foreign parts on a modest retaining fee to become deeply versed in

Philip Hensher

Why the heck not?

Philip Hensher recounts how a handful of British mercenaries in the 1960s, headed by the Buchanesque Jim Johnson (pictured above), trained a rag-tag force of Yemeni tribesmen to defeat the full might of the Egyptian army in a conflict that Nasser later referred to as ‘my Vietnam’ ‘Enormous fun and a tremendous adventure,’ one of the participants called it afterwards, voicing the sentiments of every British soldier running amok since the beginning of time. Probably there were soldiers under Boadicea who said exactly the same thing. This little known story from the very end of the imperial adventure is redolent of cheek, bravado and the undertaking of a challenge for

Friday

Alex Massie

Egypt: Now the Hard Work Begins

Well, well, well, how the worm turns. I refer the Honourable Gentleman to the post I wrote some hours ago. Again, it’s worth noting that this is just the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. The Pessimists may yet be proved right but this, at last, is a day for the Optimists. There’s no guarantee that Egypt can build the kind of future that will satisfy the economic and political aspirations of its people but nor is it inevitable that it will swap secular authoritarianism for religious authoritarianism. At the moment, and today at least, one of the losers from this process is Osama bin Laden.

David Blackburn

Mubarak stands down

Finally, Mubarak has gone. Time will tell what undid last night’s defiance, but the armed forces have taken provisional control of the country, along with the head of the Supreme Court and the speaker of the Parliament. Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s Vice President, has been frozen out for the moment. In this moment of the protests’ triumph, it’s worth recalling Daniel Korski’s point that: ‘It is not clear if Egypt’s protests can morph into a responsible movement for change.’  Both the security of the country and the region rest upon that question.            

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama to Mubarak: Your Time Is Up

The Americans have made their move and it’s not good news for Hosni Mubarak’s friends and defenders. This is the statement released by President Obama tonight: The Egyptian people have been told that there was a transition of authority, but it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful or sufficient. Too many Egyptians remain unconvinced that the government is serious about a genuine transition to democracy, and it is the responsibility of the government to speak clearly to the Egyptian people and the world. The Egyptian government must put forward a credible, concrete and unequivocal path toward genuine democracy, and they have not yet seized that opportunity.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Mubarak to Egypt: Drop Dead

Seventeen Days that Shook the World? Not so fast, my friend! Hosni Mubarak’s speech this evening was many things but it wasn’t much of a resignation statement. Mostly, it was a nationalist plea for Middle Egypt’s sympathy vote. Presenting himself as father of the nation – including his “children” gathered in Tahrir Square and in cities across the country – Mubarak’s pitch seemed more likely to appeal to that generation’s parents. How many Egyptian youths are really preoccupied with the moment the Egyptian flag was hoisted over the Sinai? How many, surveying their gloomy economic prospects and the lack of political opportunity, care about the past? Precious few. Nor, for

Alex Massie Alex Massie

17 Days That Shook the World

The extraordinary scenes in Cairo today should not blind us to the fact that Hosni Mubarak’s apparent departure is not the beginning of the end but merely the end of the beginning. The army may have assured the protestors – whose gallantry, courage and peaceful presence on the streets of Egypt’s cities has been as startling as it has been wondrous – that their demands will be met but those demands cannot be satisfied just by Hosni Mubarak’s departure. It’s not just personal, you might say, it’s business too. And that business is real and verifiable reform. Like Brother Korski I remain optimistic that momentum now lies with the reform

David Blackburn

A military coup in Egypt?

Reports from Tahrir Square are very confused. There is a firm body of opinion who doubt the ‘tough cookie’ Mubarak would have stood aside. Many suspect that today’s announcements are a ruse designed to strengthen his position. As Richard Ottaway put it, ‘Ill believe it when I see it.’ Meanwhile, others report the Mubarak has been pushed or ‘been resigned’. The Foreign Office is understood to be preparing a contingency plan for what is being described as “a soft military coup”. For the first time ever, the senior council of the military is meeting in open session without the President or his representatives: a very provocative or very risky move

Daniel Korski

Egypt becomes freer

The world does really end with a whimper, not a bang, as T.S. Eliot said. After 31 years in power, seventeen days of protests, more than 300 dead and a shouting match between the US administration and its one-time Egyptian ally, it looks as if Hosni Mubarak will be leaving office tonight. Twitter is atwitter with news that the Egyptian strongman will soon make a TV appearance during which he is expected to hand power to newly-anointed Vice-President Omar Suleiman. Expect Tahrir Square to erupt in a festival of freedom, as the heroic, web-enabled protesters savour their unlikely but amazing victory. But while Egypt’s revolution has been more successful than

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Hague joins Middle East protests…well, as good as

Foreign Secretary William Hague has arrived in Tunisia in order to support to the pro-democracy movement. Unlike his previous visit to Syria, which I think was poorly timed, this one is perfectly-timed. It could even end up looking like George Bush Snr’s visit to Poland in July 1989 when the US president publicly backed the revolutions sweeping across the European continent at the time and gave succour to the pro-democracy movements. Visits like this are so important to help the direction of travel. What people forget now is that in the Eastern Europe of 1989, the history of democracy was as limited as it is today in the Middle East.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hope on the Nile: Islam Does Not Have All the Answers

Not to grant him guru status or anything but I’m glad that Reuel Marc Gerecht has at last weighed-in on the Egypt Question. I’ve mentioned his writing before and think him one of the most interesting, and in some ways provocative, middle-east analysts. Even if you disagree with him, his ideas are worth serious consideration. His view that President Obama could usefully say “We are not scared of muslims voting” seems persuasive to me. So too his conclusion that it is time to “put an end to the West’s deleterious habit of treating the Middle East’s potentates respectfully and the Muslim citizenry like children.” He writes: Mr. Bush’s distastefulness helped

Monday

Daniel Korski

Democracy is now Halal

The popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have exposed as nonsense the notion, held in many quarters, that Middle Easterners – be they Arabs, Persians, Muslims and Christians – are uncommonly uninterested in democracy. But as former CIA agent and Middle East expert Reuel Marc Gerecht writes in the New York Times: ‘A revulsion against the Iraq war and a distaste for President Bush helped to blind people to the spread of democratic sentiments in the region. It blinded them to the fact that among Middle Easterners, democracy, not dictatorship, was now seen as a better vehicle for economic growth and social justice. Most important, Mr. Bush’s distastefulness helped to

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: The emperor of Egypt

Romans would have regarded Hosni Mubarak as effectively the emperor of Egypt. But they would not have thought he had played a very intelligent hand. The Roman emperor held supreme authority. As head of state (princeps), he ruled the Treasury, controlled all the top political appointments, passed all laws, was final arbiter in all legal cases and selected provincial governors. As pontifex maximus, he led all the major state rituals in honour of the gods. As commander-in-chief (imperator), he ruled over the armed forces, chose all generals and determined military policy, often leading the army himself. To help him he had a circle of hand-picked, trusted advisers and a remarkably

Quentin Letts

Talk like an Egyptian | 5 February 2011

As Fraser promised, here is Quentin Letts’ article from the latest Spectator, for CoffeeHousers’ delectation: Few of us understand what is going on at the dusty end of the Med. There may be a few chinstrokers who cup, in their wizened palms, a concise comprehension of the Cairo crisis — see pages 14 to 18 — but the rest of us struggle for something to say. Vivid reporting has been sparse. The Today programme produced an English-speaking dentist in Cairo but he let the side down by saying, before Thought for the Day, how ‘pissed off’ the protesters were. Use some of your mouthwash, mister! The Times resorted to a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

An orderly transition in Egypt requires Mubarak’s departure

It appears almost certain that the protests in Egypt are not going to stop until Mubarak leaves office. For that reason, Mubarak’s departure seems a necessary step to an orderly transition. The New York Times ‘ latest report reveals that the Egyptian military and US officials are discussing how Mubarak could visibly leave while remaining as the titular president: “The country’s newly named vice president, Omar Suleiman, and other top military leaders were discussing steps to limit Mr. Mubarak’s decision-making authority and possibly remove him from the presidential palace in Cairo — though not to strip him of his presidency immediately, Egyptian and American officials said. A transitional government headed

The Spectator

The world after Mubarak

Experts debate what happens next in Egypt and the countries around it In his retirement, Dwight Eisenhower admitted that the biggest foreign policy mistake of his presidency had been not supporting Anthony Eden over the Suez crisis. How right he was. If Arab nationalism had been strangled in its cradle in 1956 by the vigorous action that Eden, and also initially Hugh Gaitskell, prescribed, then the oil-price hikes of the early 1970s and all the economic woes that flowed from them would never have happened. I doubt there would have been a 9/11, either. Today, instead, we face a situation whereby, since half of Israel’s natural gas consumption comes from

Friday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: the fall of President Sadat

With protesters in Egypt trying to force President Mubarak to resign, here is the piece that Roger Cooper wrote for The Spectator on the event that propelled him to power: the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981: The legacy of Sadat, Roger Cooper, The Spectator, 10 Oct 1981   Rarely has a political assassination set off such divergent reactions as that of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on Tuesday.  President Reagan called it ‘outrageous and tragic’, the Pope praised him for ‘his noble vision of reconciliation’, and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, expressed deep regret at the death of ‘a great leader’.  But there was jubilation in Syria, Libya and

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

In this week’s Spectator | 4 February 2011

What to think about Egypt? Pick up most newspapers and you see a flood of words, but a trickle of information. Not so with this week’s Spectator, which has everything you need to know – and nothing more. Here are some pieces that I thought may interest CoffeeHousers. 1.  What you need to know. Our lead feature is an interview with a dozen people who know their onions. Anne Applebaum on whether it can be compared to Poland, Charles Glass on fifty years of Egyptian dictators, Douglas Murray on neo-conservatism and Islamism, Professor Stephen Walt on the geopolitical fallout and Andrew Roberts on the alarming power of the Cairo mob.

Daniel Korski

Labour’s gravest military blunder

Labour is often seen as having presided over the erosion of the British military, squandering money on Cold War equipment and sending under-equipped soldiers to far-away battlefields. But away from the public’s scrutiny an even greater lapse occurred – the nation’s cyberdefences were left undermanned while the threat grew daily. As William Hague will tell the Munich Security Conference: “Along with its numerous benefits, cyberspace has created new means of repression, enabling undemocratic governments to violate the human rights of their citizens. It has opened up new channels for hostile governments to probe our defences and attempt to steal our confidential information or intellectual property. It has promoted fears of