Sphinx

Blair disses Algerian democrats

2006-07-29T23:24:00.000+03:00

It should come as no surprise that I don't accept the global Islamist evil conspiracy theory which is all that Bush and Blair have left to persuade their ignorant constituents that power is in good hands. But viewers and listeners with the slightest memory of recent history should have wondered at Blair's 'lecture' in the White House about all the evil things those Islamists have done in the last few decades. Here it is in all its glory:

Before September the 11th this global movement with a global ideology was already in being. September the 11th was the culmination of what they wanted to do. But, actually -- and this is probably where the policymakers, such as myself, were truly in error -- is that even before September the 11th, this was happening in all sorts of different ways in different countries.

I mean, in Algeria, for example, tens and tens of thousands of people lost their lives. This movement has grown, it is there, it will latch on to any cause that it possibly can and give it a dimension of terrorism and hatred. You can see this. You can see it in Kashmir, for example. You can see it in Chechnya. You can see it in Palestine.

For the record, Algeria sank into civil war after the army cancelled elections which the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was about to win in a sweeping victory. You can argue about the long-term commitment of FIS to the democratic process, if you find that useful or interesting, but the lack of commitment of the military was transparent and instantly verifiable. And these are the guys lecturing us on the Middle East on the virtues of democracy!
As for the other cases of conflict -- Kashmir, Chechnya or Palestine, wouldn't it make more sense to take a stand in favour of justice than walk away on the grounds that a few extremists have taken advantage of the victims' plight and desperation? Blair is increasingly a despicable worm, a man of shallow intellect and perverted conscience.

Craven American Journalist

2005-11-08T23:29:00.000+03:00

The journalist called Matt who traveled to Latin America with President Bush last week set a new standard for blind obedience when Bush spoke to reporters on his plane. Here's the exchange:

One more. Yes, Matt.
Q Mr. President, you're likely to cross paths with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at this summit. How should Americans think about this President, who has said many hostile things about you and your administration?

Since when, for heaven's sake, did the press ask an imbecile president what the public should think?

Al Wasat Party Decision Postponed

2005-10-02T23:06:00.000+03:00

The Arabist Network rightly notes the significant postponement of a ruling in the case of Hizb al-Wasat, the 'Islamic heritage' party which could be a serious threat to the Mubaraks, if it ever wins recognition. Just as I predicted earlier in this blog (or perhaps in some private communication), al-Wasat won't be able to fight the parliamentary elections as a party, though individual members can stand. I haven't had a chance to discuss it with Wasat leader Aboul Ela Madi, but I understand from newspapers today that he intends to dispute the delay through the courts. There's something truly pathetic about a system which gives judges of dubious independence a strangehold over the rules of the political game, instead of allowing people to organise themselves and allowing the electorate a real choice. But as government officials in several Arab countries have told me over the years: "That would be anarchy. There have to be rules, rules, rules (preferable invented by us)."

Washington in Robot Mode

2005-10-02T22:33:00.000+03:00

After Karen Hughes (I missed the chance to make fun of her trip to Saudi Arabia, where she was surprised to find that women are human beings and can speak) and then Liz Cheney, there was Condoleezza Rice going through the motions at Princeton University of pretending to have a Middle East strategy and of really caring for the future of 300 million Arabs. I was amused at her homage to Anne-Marie Slaughter, one of the best think-tankers in the United States and a frequent and sound critic of Bush's surreal worldview. 'Constructive instability' reared its ugly head again and she made another attempt to sell the preposterous theory that the death of Arafat and the succession of Abu Mazen opens the door to peace. On Egypt:

For years, the topic of reform was not even a part of our dialogue with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But President Bush insisted on having these difficult discussions with our two oldest friends, in private and in public. Both countries are now taking steps to greater political openness. Saudi Arabia held imperfect municipal elections earlier this year because women did not vote. But they have promised that they will vote in the future. Egypt held flawed but landmark presidential election this summer in which there was, at least, vigorous debate of the options before Egyptians. And they will turn to parliamentary elections next year. Democracy, however, is more than a matter of holding elections. And we therefore expect both Egypt and Saudi Arabia to begin reforming the political institutions that are the key to lasting success for any democracy.

So no new thinking there. Oddly, she gave the wrong timing for the Egyptian parliamentary elections, which are in November and December. Someone should tell off her speechwriter for sloppy research.

Another gem from Karen Hughes on her appearance at a Saudi diwan:

I thought it was kind of an odd situation that the president of the journalists’ association was giving me his opinions on the situation. It was just sort of an odd one. It was sort of awkward, because at lunch, at our table, he was sort of "I want to make sure you know this, and you know this, and here’s what I think."

Oh my God, a journalist with opinions of his own and willing to share them! So unlike the ones we have in Washington, where they just write down my words and regurgitate them for public consumption. Who said Saudi Arabia was 'backward'?

Old Guard New Guard

2005-10-02T22:07:00.000+03:00

The annual conference of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party was such an inconsequential affair that hardly anyone even bothered to write about it. I see that the French news agency AFP had to fabricate a story for want of anything else to say. Young Gamal did not 'stamp his authority' on the party nor claim that his group had triunphed over the old guard. In fact, Gamal was no more prominent than at last year's meeting and, far from claiming victory, he specifically denied the existence of any old guard or new guard in the party. In an interview with Al Masry Al Youm last week, 'old guardist' Kamal el-Shazli certainly didn't sound defeated in the least and sensible commentators are saying that Shazli and party secretary-general Safwat el-Sharif are here to stay, at least for a while. From Gamal Mubarak's point of view, the presidential elections did not prove decisively that his 'modern' way of running a political party is more successful than that of the dinosaurs. On the contrary, it was the dinosaurs who brought out the vote and stuffed some ballot boxes, saving Daddy from a humiliating turnout which could have been as low as 10 percent (compared with the 23 percent which the election commission announced).

Meanwhile, the skulduggery against Ghad Party leader Ayman Nour reached new lows on Saturday when expelled party members held their separatist 'general assembly' to go through the motions of ousting Nour as leader. They brought in employees of a company owned by the Mustafa Moussa family, as well as women from a literacy eradication class, to pose as Ghad Party delegates and vote in favour of Moussa Mustafa Moussa as new party leader. They found it hard to find a venue, given the dubious legality of the proceedings, but state security eventually persuaded the syndicate of tatbiqiyin (a category of professionals unknown to the English language) to lend them their premises. State television covered the event and took at face value the absurb pretensions of the organisers, who must now rank among the lowest form of human life existing on the planet, along with police informers, grave robbers, backstreet abortionists and U.S. Republican politicians.

Nour produced at a press conference on Sunday one of the company employees who refused to take part in this charade and had the courage to go to the nearest police station and report that something fishy was happening. The guy, Mohamed el-Awadi, said he had never had anything to do with politics and didn't plan to do so in the future, after this surreal experience. I mean, how would you react if your boss put you in a minibus, took you to a conference centre and told you to pose as an official of a party you knew nothing about? No guesses for what happens to that police report!

Max Weber and the 'Evil Ideologists'

2005-09-27T22:25:00.000+03:00

Rereading Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism after a gap of many years reminded me of the misguided methodology of the 'Evil Ideologists' -- those who believe that the world's troubles have their roots in a 'jihadist' ideology which has suddenly and inexplicably descended on the Muslim world and infected the brains of thousands of young men, driving them to take up arms and bombs against 'Western civilisation'. Weber is rather more subtle, of course, and he qualifies his theory enough to protect himself from any charge of naivety. The thrust of his argument, in case you are not familiar with it or have forgotten it, is that the spirit of capitalism sprang from Protestant Asceticism, which combined the essential elements of frugality and sustained dedication to a 'calling' in the practical world, regardless of whether the combination led to great individual wealth. With time the religious element receded, leaving as its residue the Protestant work ethic, which holds that man's duty in this world to do a job well, invest and take advantage of economic opportunities that arise.

The link between Protestantism and acquisitive capitalism of the bourgeois kind which dominates the developed world is almost indisputable, but Weber fails to explain convincingly why Calvinism, or more generally Protestant Asceticism, became so widespread in the early modern period. He presents early capitalism as an accidental consequence of an ideology which started out as a means to secure eternal salvation, or at least which gave the adherent the illusion that he had a better than average chance of eternal salvation.

But in the real world, people have a vast range of ideologies to choose from, and their choice depends less on what is currently available in the marketplace of ideas than on what suits their economic, political and social interests at any given moment. The ideology of frugality and dedication to hard work has always been available, but few people adopted it before the 16th century and even then mainly in the most advanced economies of Europe -- England, Holland and parts of France. What we need to look at is the motives of the individuals who chose Calvinism over Lutheranism or Catholicism and try to establish what practical benefits it offered them in the real world, where most people live. Is it not more likely that, once economic and political circumstances made it possible for individuals without special privileges to accumulate capital through hard work, those individuals chose and adjusted a religious philosophy which justified their abandonment of traditional economic morality? I think so.

Similarly, versions of militant Islamism have always been available in the repertoir of variants of Islam (historically represented by the Khawarij, the Qarmatians and Ibn Taimiya, for example) but large numbers of Muslims were not inclined to adopt those ideologies until the circumstances of the real world made them attractive. The social, political and economic conditions came first and the popularity of the ideologies followed.

Intervention? What intervention?

2005-09-27T21:46:00.000+03:00

I apologise in advance for harping on U.S. Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes but her encounter with students at the American University in Cairo on Monday gave a revealing glimpse into the mindset of the people who are trying to run the world. They have the historical insight of newborn children and a level of cultural empathy unique to monoglots brought up in provincial America. Here's the exchange:

QUESTION: Why do the first world countries, or at least most of them, insist on interfering in the third world countries' affairs instead of just offering help and guidance?

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: Are you referring specifically to America?

QUESTION: Just developed countries in general. Many of them --

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: What type of interference are you talking about?

QUESTION: They interfere in most of the third world countries' affairs -- political, economic, not just helping them or offering help and guidance.

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: Well I think what you maybe referring to are the millennium development goals -- is that what you're referring to? -- where most of our countries feel like in order to help this development we need to make sure countries are taking steps that lead toward good governance, toward getting rid of corruption, toward--in other words -- we believe that it is important to reward and respect those countries that are doing the right things to help make lives better for their citizens, not countries that are siphoning off money to corruption or money to enrich leaders or money that is not actually getting to worthwhile projects that help the people.

Not exactly, Ms Hughes. I hesitate to speak for the anonymous Cairene student, but here's a short (not exhaustive) list of interventions you might start with:

Overthrowing Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953
Military intervention to support Lebanese President Camille Chamoun in 1958
Helping install the Baathists in Iraq in the 1960s
Military intervention in Lebanon in the 1980s, again on the side of a minority Christian government, in this case in support of Israeli interests
Supporting Egyptian Presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak from 1977 to the present, in return for protecting Israel's southern flank
Supplying valuable intelligence and other forms of military assistance to Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war
Invading Iraq in 2003, on false pretences and in violation of international law
Ensuring Israeli military superiority over all potential adversaries for the past 40 years, at a cost of several hundred billion dollars to American taxpayers
And that's just a cursory selection from the Middle East, leaving aside South East Asia, Latin America and Africa

And then you bring up the Millennium Challenge Accounts?

Too Hard on Juan Cole

2005-09-26T22:39:00.000+03:00

Issandr El Amrani is much too hard on Juan Cole's piece in Salon. Let me take up a couple of points:

On Saadeddin Ibrahim: Whatever the truth about the independence of the judges on the Court of Cassation, the government has a hundred ways of manipulating the legal system. They could easily keep the case out of the Court of Cassation, for example, if they felt that the judges there might not cooperate. I see no reason to doubt that Saadeddin was imprisoned mainly for suggesting that Mubarak was preparing a dynastic succession or that international intervention helped secure his eventual acquittal.

On the Ayman Nour case: The trial of Ayman Nour has resumed this week and we haven't seen any evidence that the charges against him are serious. In fact, all the evidence suggests this really is a trumped-up case driven solely by motives of political revenge and harassment. As Ayman Nour has repeatedly stated, the alleged crime would have been completely without motive. Nour could easily meet the requirement for endorsements when he set up Ghad and had no interest in forging extra endorsements beyond the legal limit. It is also most implausible that Nour, as a lawyer with an intimate knowledge of the obstructionist procedures of the Shoura Council Parties Committee, would have risked his party's status in the way alleged. The fact that one of the defendants has repudiated his confession must raise doubts about the soundness of the case. Who has more power to influence witnesses -- the security services or Ayman Nour? The government (or someone in the government) clearly has an interest in making life difficult for Nour, while Nour had no interest in forging signatures. Case closed.

On the boycott: Here I must agree with Issandr. Apathy far outweighed the call for a boycott.

On the middle class: Any attempt to analyse Egyptian politics in the 2000s in terms of class is bound to fail, because levels of political participation are so low. Issandr is right in saying that the urban middle class does not vote at all, so their party preferences must remain largely unknowable. But it is also true that al-Ghad draws its support from the middle classes in the private sector. The Wafd less so, because in some areas it also draws support from peasants loyal to traditional Wafdists. The vast majority of Egyptian voters are people susceptible to financial or professional inducements or pressures, such as public-sector workers who vote en masse, peasants mobilised by local political bosses or urban drifters who have nothing better to do on election day but vote (for a small fee or a free meal). Analysing their political choices is a waste of time.

The Truth about U.S. Intervention

2005-09-26T21:45:00.000+03:00

The closed lunchtime meeting today between Karen Hughes and a selection of Egyptian intellectuals (the U.S.Embassy is never very imaginative in its choice, by the way) turned out to be fairly inconsequential, according to the accounts I have heard from several of the participants (you didn't know I was so well connected, did you?). The participants, all for their own good reasons, could not agree whether they should be talking about Iraq and Palestine, or about the influence the United States has on domestic Egyptian politics.

If you're interested in improving Washington's image (but frankly why should the participants care to do that?), then Iraq and Palestine are the obvious places to start. But if you're interested in improving the lot of Egyptians, it might make more sense to harangue Hughes on the way the United States deals with the Egyptian government, or free trade, or how it disburses U.S. aid. Several of the participants set out to sell Hughes their pet projects, in some cases on the spurious grounds that these held the key to salvaging Bush's reputation in these parts.

Maybe I haven't spelled this out in sufficient detail before but my views on the matter are very simple: the less U.S. intervention in the region, the better for the Middle East as a whole. This requires restraint by the United States and I have no illusions that this is likely to happen until the United States ceases to be a superpower with major interests in the region. That might be sooner than we expect.

What would this new approach entail?
Firstly, it would redress the imbalance of power between Israelis and Palestinians, which U.S. diplomatic support and military cooperation have tilted so heavily in favour of Israel. This would accelerate the search for a compromise and open the door to a recourse to independent legal arbitration, which the United States has repeatedly prevented for the past 40 years or more.

Secondly, a reduction in U.S. purchases of Middle Eastern oil (yes, even buying oil is form of intervention) would redress the imbalance of power between the governments and citizens of Arab countries with large oil reserves. The governments would be more responsive to popular demand and civil society organisations independent of the governments would have more space in which to operate. That could pave the way for peaceful transfers of power. Talking about democracy is pointless when the United States (and Europe) by their actions entrench the existing elites in their positions of power.

Thirdly, withdraw U.S. forces from all Arab countries and abandon the practice of rewarding Arab governments for the military facilities they offer in secret -- the use of bases, overflight rights, passage through waterways such as the Suez Canal, rest and recreation facilities for U.S. military personnel, and so on. At the very least, all such arrangements should be published and open to public scrutiny.

Fourthly, stop using democracy demands, human rights and weapons proliferation as sticks with which to beat Middle East governments which do not cooperate with U.S. geostrategic objectives, while ignoring abuses by government which do cooperate (commonly known, quite rightly, as the double standard). At the very least, if you want to reward democratic governments and punish undemocratic ones, do so with an even hand. That means taking a tough line against Israel's nuclear weapons programme and Israel's race-based discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens. Hopefully, if and when the previous conditions have been fulfilled, this fourth step would be superfluous.

Fifthly, restrict U.S. aid to purely humanitarian projects, without using any political criteria.

That's a tall order, of course. But my point is this -- it's intervention in the Middle East that gives the United States a bad name. Intervention, except within the strictest humanitarian limits, always distorts the regional and domestic balances of power, alienating large numbers of people. You can organise as many student exchanges or new television stations as you like, but as long as you are intervening, you're asking for trouble. Amen.

Happy (Palestinian) Families

2005-09-26T21:17:00.000+03:00

For the last few days, I was tired of indignation. All it took was a visit by U.S. Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes to revive that sentiment within me. In Cairo on a mission to improve the image of the U.S. government, she showed that she still has no understanding of why Arabs and Palestinians can be so angry. Here she is trying to persuade the media that the Bush administration really has the best interests of the Palestinians at heart and empathises deeply with their aspirations:

Sometimes with policy decisions there are two sides to the coin, and you have one set of views in one place and a different set of views in another. Take, for example, the Palestinian issue. The goal of our United States policy in Palestine is that the Palestinian people might have the opportunity for a better life, that young people growing up in Palestine have an opportunity to be educated and to have a job. I remember meeting with someone who told me who told how many Palestinian young people, because they don't have an opportunity to have a job, don't feel that they can afford to be married and to have children, and have the experience of having children and families. And that's what we want for the Palestinian people. That is the goal of our policy. When you hear sometimes the discussion of our policy here in the Middle East, that's not the version that you hear. But that is the goal of our American policy.

How about this, Karen, if you're listening? Palestinians want back the land that was stolen from them in 1948, again in 1967 and every year since then, land stolen under the cover of racist laws, military decrees and arbitrary fiats, but still stolen. Land stolen to make space for immigrants from Russia, the United States and all over, land stolen by brute force without recourse to any legal system. Happy families are great but first let's come clean about the roots of this conflict. In fact, some Palestinians have shown they are willing to go without marriage and children for the sake of their community's rights. Until Karen Hughes and her likes come to terms with this reality, they are wasting their time. So cut the crap about helping Palestinians have children, and bring some justice to this conflict.

Khawaga Writes Hilarous Review of Adel Imam Film

2005-09-21T18:03:00.000+03:00

I hope the editors at the New York Times read this because they really should know what a nincompoop they have sent out to Cairo for the past few weeks. Michael Slackman's review of the Adel Imam film Al-Sifara fil-Imara (The Embassy's in the Building) is so completely misconceived that it's hard to know where to start. First of all, it's clear that Slackman didn't understand a word of the dialogue and whoever briefed him on the content seriously misled him (deliberately, perhaps?). Having taken hold of the wrong end of the stick, Slackman then proceeds to twist what fragments he has to match the preconceptions he started out with. Take this:

The director, Amro Arafa, uses comedy to try to get Egyptian audiences to consider a most serious point: that peace with Israel is in Egypt's own interest.

Now, Egyptians in general don't favour war with Israel, not by a long way, but that's mainly because they know they would lose and their parents have bitter memories of the hardships that war brings. But the film has nothing to do with war and peace; it's about normalisation of relations with Israel and the presence of an Israeli embassy, which is an entirely different matter. The consensus on that is entirely negative and the film accurately reflects, even endorses, that feeling.

When the state security agent says: "We have signed peace with this country.. This is our country's policy, and it is for our interest. Do you want to be against the country's interests?", Slackman clearly didn't catch that the director isn't endorsing this attitude. On the contrary he is portraying state security as complacent, as collaborators without principles.

"We do not have a problem with the Israelis or the Jews; we have a problem with the Israeli government," said Mr. Arafa, the film's director, repeating a semantic distinction that was once popular among Egyptians but was dropped altogether after the second intifada heated up in 2000.

That's just a semantic distinction! Well, I never. Making a distinction between Jews and the Israeli government is rather more than that -- it's the same as the distinction between racism and justice. So Slackman thinks that after the intifada the Egyptian people turned racist? I would like to see his evidence for that.

Now I don't know what Tarek el Shenawy said, because I wasn't present, but if he said that the protesters (in the film) neither called for the embassy to leave Cairo nor demanded the end of relations with Israel, then he was clearly watching a copy of the film different from the one I saw. I distinctly remember banners saying "No to Normalisation" or "Go home, ambasaador" and the like.

By the way, the film does make fun of some leftists, but in the final scene, the Adel Imam character, after years of indifference towards politics, realises the justice of the Palestinian cause and joins the leftists in the protest.

Then there's this:

Whether Mr. Imam can make people laugh is not in doubt. But on the question of whether his comedy can help promote a more moderate view toward relations with Israel, the jury is still out.

Who said anything about "a more moderate view towards relations with Israel"? Ah, now I understand, Slackman (great name) had a brief to test whether Egyptians are becoming more friendly towards Israel. From the point of view of New York Times readers, I guess, that's what Egyptians are for. All their other attitudes are irrelevant.

Fisk at his Best

2005-09-20T23:34:00.000+03:00

Hurray! Robert Fisk has rediscovered his voice. Not ranting, just speaking truth to power, as he was meant to do.

Standing Ovation for Nour

2005-09-20T22:34:00.000+03:00

Ayman Nour of the Ghad Party was on top form today at the party's general assembly at the Cairo International Conference Centre and he deserved the many standing ovations he received from the 900 or so party members who gathered at two days' notice from all over the country. The aim was to give him a vote of confidence after all the disinformation in the state media about rifts in the party. They gave it to him -- 831 v. 13 by secret ballot. Even after the expulsions and suspensions of the agents provocateurs who tried to oust him (about 20 people, I believe), that's a fairly hefty endorsement from the base. The Ghad has achieved something close to a miracle -- 540,000 votes in presidential elections after one year in existence.

Watching Nour today, I finally understood why he has gone so far. Egypt doesn't have many politicians of his calibre. He spoke for two and a half hours without notes and struck just the right tone -- the right mix of formality/informality, toughness/generosity, leadership/humility. He handled demands from the floor adroitly, listening carefully, answering sensibly and silencing people politely when they were wasting time. After a moment of silence for the people who died in the Beni Suef fire, someone started shouting "Down with Mubarak" -- Nour put an end to that. He even put to a show of hands the question of whether the leadership should be harsher or more merciful in its treatment of people who violate the principle of party solidarity (harsher won by a narrow margin).

A master stroke came towards the end when he nominated two people to share the honorary title of 'party personality of the year'. The first was Ayman Barakat, his lawyer friend who has been detained in another fabricated case. The second was an unknown party regular by the name of Ahmed Abdel Waddoud Said. He turned out to be a cripple in a wheelchair who attends every party event he can. They carried his wheelchair up on the stage and placed him next to Nour, who introduced him. Said spoke too, with some difficulty because he has a slight speech impediment, and it was clear that this was a memorable occasion for him. Said repeatedly made a strange idiosyncratic victory gesture with his crippled right hand and grinned like a cat -- a performance symbolic of triumph over adversity. But not a trace of tokenism or maudlinness. Nour appeared to show genuine affection for Said and I saw why he has such a following in Bab el-Shaaria. Imagine Mubarak doing such a thing! Impossible. I saw tears in the eyes of many.

Juan Cole takes on Wall Street Journal

2005-09-19T23:23:00.000+03:00

Hearty congratulations to Juan Cole for his article in Salon, answering the very convenient Wall Street Journal fantasy of an Arab Spring. I've said much the same before, and made appropriate fun of Condoleezza's feeble attempt to keep the myth alive. But Juan says it very well, so cheers to him. I'm also glad to see that Hitchens spread Juan's fame by ignorantly attacking his academic credentials, which are impeccable.

Juan ends eloquently:

Egypt watchers may as well take a nap for a while, since Mubarak is unlikely to permit much change anytime soon, Bush or no Bush. A people who figured out how to get rid of Napoleon Bonaparte within a year is hardly flummoxed by a mere Texas poseur. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal will be so kind as to wake us up when spring comes.

But I hope he's wrong on that -- there's plenty of scope for excitement in the two or three years to come, especially if Mubarak tries to install Gamal halfway through his six-year term, as some expect. Then there's the small matter of the life expectancy of 77-year-old Egyptian men, even ones as well preserved and well tended as His Majesty.

Poachers and Gamekeepers

2005-09-19T22:40:00.000+03:00

The state media have been making cryptic references to a campaign against corruption, driven by no less than HM Hosni Mubarak. Ibrahim Nafie, the man who ran al-Ahram for 27 years and allegedly left his post with 3.5 billion pounds (close to $600 million) just a couple of months ago, is one of those under investigation. I'm not usually one for gossip but I did hear that Nafie left for Paris with many suitcases the day after his first interview with the public prosecutor. But the idea of a serious investigation into Nafie doesn't make much sense. The presidency must have known for years what was happening with al-Ahram's finances and, apart from getting a little old, Nafie does not appear to have committed any blunders.

But do I detect that some senior members of the ruling party are feeling uncomfortable? Investment Minister Mahmoud Mohieldin, who's rather a maverick, told an illustrative anecdote at a World Bank event on Sunday morning. He said that after he mentioned the campaign against corruption in public at last week's Euromoney conference (presumably to reassure foreign investors), he was approached by certain unnamed people who complained he had been talking about them in their absence!! Tell us more, Mahmoud. Anyway, businessmen Ibrahim Kamil, the very same who hinted at how Gamal Mubarak might become president and who was also at the World Bank event, tried to change the subject with a dismissive "The level of corruption in Egypt is the same as anywhere else in the world". Transparency International, which monitors corruption around the world, does not agree -- it ranks Egypt 77th, below Saudi Arabia and Mexico. Some Arab countries are substantially cleaner -- notably Oman and the United Arab Emirates, which rank a fairly respectable 29th equal, above Italy and Cyprus.

Payback Time for Nour

2005-09-19T21:39:00.000+03:00

It's been a tough week for Ayman Nour, the candidate who mounted the strongest campaign against Hosni Mubarak in the Egyptian presidential elections this month. Mubarak's National Democratic Party, sensing that the world has lost interest and has broadly accepted that Mubarak 'won', has reverted to its old practice of undermining troublesome opposition groups by trying to divide them against themselves. In other words, it's dirty tricks and payback time for Nour and his Ghad Party. I can't say exactly what methods of persuasion they use (blackmail, bribery and promises of favours come to mind) but they certainly seem to be working. The state media has gone along with the pretence, portraying the group of 'dissidents' inside Ghad as honourable men with genuine grievances rather than as the unscrupulous opportunists they appear to be.

First the public prosecutor floated a story that Ayman Nour was somehow implicated in the case of a businessman who paid another man to assume his identity and serve jail time in his place (would anyone really believe that such a thing is plausible?). The prosecutor said he would ask parliament to lift Nour's immunity to answer questions about the case. Then a group of party members, including deputy leader Moussa Mustafa Moussa, tried to prevent Nour from holding a General Assembly, which would undoubtedly endorse Nour as leader. In parallel, using powers of attorney they received at the time Nour founded the Ghad Party last year, they rustled up enough leading members to pass a resolution ousting Nour and the other party members who were most active in the election campaign. Not surprisingly, Moussa and his associates did almost nothing to help Nour in the campaign, which confirmed the party as the most serious liberal opposition force. Also in parallel, Nour and his group persuaded the party's council of wise men to expel the troublemakers from the party.

The validity of all these resolutions is in doubt and both sides in the dispute have submitted their decision to the Parties Committee of the Shoura Council, the upper house of parliament. The committee, which regulates political parties, is chaired by Safwat el-Sharif, the secretary-general of the National Democratic Party and a past master in the art of inciting opposition politicians against each other when any one of them causes trouble for the regime. In some past cases, Safwat has engineered internal disputes in such a way that the party has been paralysed for years.

Nour has called a General Assembly for tomorrow, Tuesday, and it should be interesting to see whether he manages to beat off this entirely transparent attempt to wreck his party. Nour's supporters say they believe the motive for this assault on Ghad is Nour's refusal to recognise the results of the elections and congratulate Mubarak on his victory.

On top of all this, Nour goes back on trial next Sunday on the forgery charges for which he was detained in January. No reasonable person believes the charges have any basis in fact, because the alleged crime had no possible motive.

The obvious conclusion from these machinations is that either the elections did not weaken that wing of the ruling party which believes in dirty tricks or that the split in the ruling party was a charade to give the world the impression that there were limits on the freedom of action of those who posed as reformers. Watch this space for future developments.

King Abdullah and the Ulema

2005-09-17T20:59:00.000+03:00

King Abdullah of Jordan is a big disappointment, so shallow and eager to please the people who keep him in palaces and expensive German automobiles. His speech to the United Nations World Summit plumbed new depths for shallowness and sycophancy. My rule is be very suspicious of people who pose as cultural liberals and then claim to know the truth about something as vast as Islam -- whether they are George Bush, Tony Blair, Tony Blankley or King Abdullah. Here's what the diminutive dauphin said:

Our country, our region, and the world, are all affected by the prospects for peace. One critical step is to ensure zero tolerance towards those who promote extremism. Jordan has worked with the international Muslim community to oppose extremist interpretations of Islam. Jordan wants true, moderate, traditional Islam to replace fundamentalist, radical and militant Islam, everywhere in the world, for every single Muslim.

In November of 2004 we issued the Amman Message, which sought to clarify the true nature of Islam – what it is, and what it is not. Then, last July, over 180 scholars met in Amman. They represented 45 countries, and were supported by fatwas from 17 of the world's greatest Islamic scholars. Together, they achieved, for the first time in history, a unanimous consensus on a number of critical issues.

First, the declaration recognized the legitimacy and common principles of all eight of the traditional schools of Islamic religious law. Second, it defined the necessary qualifications and conditions for issuing fatwas. This exposes the illegitimacy of the extremist fatwas justifying terrorism, which contravene the traditional schools of Islamic religious law and are in clear violation of Islam's core principles. Third, the declaration condemned the practice known as “takfir” (calling others apostates) – a practice that is used by extremists to justify violence against those who do not agree with them.

The trouble with the King Abdullah school of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) is that it is so reactionary, so supportive of the status quo, but what can you expect from a monarch whose main claim to ascendancy is a spurious descent from the family of the prophet Mohammad? If Abdullah and his party had their way, we would have an Islamic thought police, banning fatwas by people who have not passed some official test. One of the virtues of Islamic religious culture is that the political authorities have rarely been able to impose any kind of orthodoxy. They have tried hard, especially in recent times (with the 'nationalisation' of al-Azhar, for example) but they have never fully succeeded. Interestingly, several of the opposition candidates in the Egyptian presidential elections proposed reintroducing the old system whereby senior ulema choose Sheikh al-Azhar by election, setting it free from the state. Advocates of this change are the true liberals, while King Abdullah's proposal works in the opposite direction. His ideas are a recipe for permanent stagnation in religious thinking and can only further discredit and compromise the religious authorities. Innovation requires risk -- the risk that some fatwas will not suit George Bush -- but in the end the battle will be fought in the marketplace of ideas, not through the imposition of controls. So just to show the little king what he's up against, I hereby issue a fatwa of my own: "Extremism in defence of the right to issue fatwas is no vice; moderation in pursuit of conformity is no virtue" - the Sahih of Abdel Bari Goldwater.

Saadeddin Mandela

2005-09-17T12:10:00.000+03:00

I found the Galloway-Hitchens transcript here in the end and read the whole thing. Turns out, of course, that when they sat down together they agreed on many points -- Saddam bad, Saudi rulers bad, Mubarak bad and so on. The points of disagreement: was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein worth all the death and destruction? is resistance to the Jaafari/Talabani government legitimate? Reasonable people could argue both sides of the argument.

But it was striking how Hitchens raises Egyptian sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim to the status of a liberation icon. Read this:

The moral leader of the Egyptian democracy movement, the man who has been begun to break open the argument in Egypt, and he's suffered a long period of imprisonment during this time and was written to by Nelson Mandela as Egypt's equivalent, has told me, and for quotation, that in his opinion, this new mood in the region would be unthinkable if it was not for the removal of the single worst tyrant who was present there. That's not nothing, in point of testimony, that's from deep within the bowels of the Egyptian prison system, the man who is the moral hero of the democracy movement. He says, and I agree with him, and he is echoed by Anwar Ibrahim as far away as Malaysia, who is the Malay equivalent, and by the leader of the Socialist Party of Lebanon, Mr. Jumblatt, have all stated publicly, uh, that this for them is the beginning of the end, the fall of the wall as they put it.

For the record, no Egyptians consider Saadeddin to be the moral leader of any democracy movement. Some consider him to be a brave academic, others as someone of dubious patriotism because of his dual nationality and close ties to Washington. Saadeddin did not suffer a long period of imprisonment by the standards of this part of the world (about one year compared to Mandela's 27 years), and I very much doubt he ever descended to the bowels of the Egyptian prison system, where very bad things can happen. If Saadeddin had stood in free and fair elections this month, he might have won one percent of the vote. Besides, Saadeddin's view that the removal of Saddam shook up the political status quo in the Arab world (that's hard to dispute) is not incompatible with the widespread view that the cost was too high and that Bush's intentions were tainted. Next time I see Saadeddin I will ask him exactly that -- was it worth it?
Remember, so far all this talk about democracy in the Arab world is just that -- talk. The elections in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Palestine and now Egypt did not lead to any transfer of power. What happened in Lebanon was a geostrategic shift from Syrian influence to American/French influence, accelerated by Syrian bungling and foreign intervention. The Lebanese people played a prominent part, but Lebanese politics is so mired in sectarianism that democracy means little in this context.

Hitchens-Galloway Debate

2005-09-16T23:54:00.000+03:00

Damn! Nowhere can I find a full transcript of the debate between George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens. How strange that these two white British men should be standing in for 'us' and 'them' in this conflict which, whether we like it or not, will decide the future of the world. I can't disguise my feelings -- I see Hitchens as just about as close to a traitor as I could ever consider anyone. But since I'm still a tolerant guy, I'd be happy to have a drink and an argument with him. Galloway, well, after his performance in the Senate -- speaking truth to power, and making such fools of power -- I'm willing to overlook his faults. If words are power (and they are), these two guys outrank George Bush and Osama bin Laden.

Being a man, I want to know who won. Judging by the buzz, Galloway had the edge, since everyone's quoting his lines:

"What Mr Hitchens has done is unique in natural history, the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly into a slug... I mention slug purposefully. The one thing a slug does leave behind it is a trail of slime."

"Hitchens, you're a court jester ...not at Camelot, like other ridiculous former liberals before you, but at the court of the Bourbon Bushes."

I know it's childish but I want to read the whole thing.

Sorry, No Good Headlines Today

2005-09-16T12:40:00.000+03:00

That Condoleezza Rice interview with the New York Post has stacks of other fascinating material about the Middle East, especially on the Arab Spring myth. An indication of how successful the Bush administration has been in lulling the U.S. media into euphoria about the way the Middle East is changing is this question from the editorial board, more royalist than Queen Condi:

But why don’t more Americans appreciate all the gains that we made in terms of the democracy movement? But are we too focused on violence and how do you overcome that? Is there more than the Administration was doing to overcome the focus on the negatives, the violence, the suicide bombings and focus more on the accomplishments that you can talk about?

With ignorant stooges like that on the editorial boards of mainstream newspapers, the Bush administration doesn't need to do much more spinning, does it? Rice's answer:

When we did have the drama of the Lebanese in the streets, Iraqis voting, Palestinians voting, people took note. That was that period of time, February-March, you might remember where everybody noticed what was happening and it was palpable around the world. It’s been supplanted – it’s almost as if its shelf life expired and now people are again focusing on the violence and the fact that it’s really hard. And the problem that we have is that when you’re in the middle of big historic transformations, they’re messy and they are violent and they are tough. And you don’t make progress everyday...
So how you communicate the extreme complexity of what is going on as this region is changing dramatically, I mean, it’s like a cauldron right now of change out there and it’s affecting every corner of it. But it’s not tidy and it’s not a story that you can write a good headline every day about what’s going on. And I think that’s essentially the problem we have.

But things are happening! Saudi Arabia has a new king! -- he's the same guy who's ruled the place for the last 10 years, but Condi thinks he will "make some changes". "Places like Jordan and Bahrain and Morocco are, you know, sprinting along" - not quite sure how but it sounds good.

Here's my advice -- hold some more elections! More and more elections! It doesn't matter if they're just the same old characters playing the same old games, with the same winners, but it looks so good! Go out and vote, Arabs!

At Least He Campaigned!!

2005-09-16T11:49:00.000+03:00

Condoleezza Rice looks at the bright side of the Egyptian presidential elections in this interview with the New York Post editorial board. She also stretches the truth a little to show how successful she has been in 'promoting democracy' in these parts. The positive aspects which she cites:

At least he (Mubarak) campaigned!
He went to two places in Egypt every day! (More like one place every two days, unless you count the presidential palace as a place to go. Anyway, a tribute to his mobility at the age of 77.)
He talked about how he’s going to overturn the emergency law! (And probably replace it with an equally draconian law)
Now consent matters in the Egyptian system! (What were all those referendums about - in 1981, 1987, 91993 and 1999?)
Unemployment was on the front pages! (What does she think al-Wafd and al-Ahrar have been publishing on their front pages for the last 15 years?)
People questioned all kinds of things about the presidency and about the succession! (What were the answers?)

The Egyptian state news agency MENA has its own spin on the interview:
"U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the presidential elections which took place in Egypt recently were the cleanest she has seen."
What Rice really said: "I will not tell you that these were the most perfect elections I’ve seen." But hell, what's a negative between friends!

Israeli Fears are News

2005-09-16T00:17:00.000+03:00

This story by CBS/AP should never have seen the light of day, at least not in this form. Let's make this clear -- people's alleged fears, unless substantiated by some shred of evidence, are not in themselves news. Besides, study it closely and find a single direct quote from an Israeli saying he is afraid (Regev's remarks don't meet that test). Oddly the only person saying he's afraid is Abu Mazen aide Rafiq Husseini, although another Palestinian official dismisses those 'fears' as baseless. Note the hyperbole generously sprinkled throughout the report -- "Israel is worried about mega-terror on its soil and the Palestinian Authority fears that it could be toppled and replaced with an Iranian-style regime", "Gaza is being flooded with weapons". To spice up this insubstantial report, Berger adds this:

Islamic militant groups, some claiming connections with al Qaeda, have been active in northern Egypt but there has been no indication they've infiltrated Gaza, which until this week has been tightly sealed.Its operatives are prime suspects in a triple bombing that killed at least 64 people in July at Egypt's popular Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik on the southern tip of the Sinai.

Now for the facts:

* Unknown groups claiming affiliation with al Qaeda have claimed to be operating in North Sinai but there's no evidence that these groups even exist, let alone have a presence in North Sinai

* The operatives of those groups, which may not even exist, are NOT prime suspects for the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings. All the available evidence points to an independent group of Sinai Bedouin, possibly with some Palestinian members.

The CBS/AP does however serve a purpose. It perpetuates the idea that Israelis live under constant threat from ruthless and wily 'terrorists' who will jump at any opportunity to attack and that the Egyptian and Palestinian authorities will do nothing to prevent them.

Arabs and Kurds Drift Apart

2005-09-15T22:33:00.000+03:00

The interview which Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari gave to the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram this week is a sad reflection of the abysmal state of relations between Sunni Arabs from countries like Egypt and the new Iraqi government. In many ways, the questions are more telling than the answers. Zebari is a Kurd, of course, so why should he feel any sympathy for the interviewer's horror at the idea of the new Iraq diluting Saddam Hussein's commitment to Arab unity, Arab 'solidarity', Arab nationalism and the Arab League? The sad truth is that too many Arabs (outside Iraq) don't recognise Kurdishness as an authentic identity. From lack of exposure to Kurds in education and the media, too many Arabs imagine them to be merely perverse Arabs, probably speaking an Arabic 'dialect' (a tell-tale word in itself) and insisting on their separateness only under American or Israeli influence.I hear the same attitude when Sudanese northerners and southerners argue. It's as if the northern Arabs were saying: "Maybe you're not Arabs like us, but surely you WANT to be Arabs?" It's more naivety than racism, because the Arabs want to assimilate them, not exclude them, but are puzzled by the reluctance. The occasion for the discussion in the interview is the decision by those drafting the Iraqi constitution to omit any reference to Iraq as an Arab nation, substituting a reference to Iraq as a founder member of the Arab League, a historic fact which the Kurds do not attempt to deny. Here are some condensed extracts for those of you who don't read Arabic:

QUESTION: Mr Minister, how did this new and strange concept come about when the Arab constitutions all say the 21 states (in the Arab League) are Arab countries, when Iraq comes out with a new concept that it is a founding member of the Arab League, instead of the concept of Arab identity?
ZEBARI: Every country has its own circumstances and composition... In Iraq there are non-Arab citizens who number millions. The Kurds for example are eight million and more... Why should we join the Arab nation and abandon our Kurdish nation of 20 million and more? The Turkoman too say: 'We are an extension of the Turkish nation.'
QUESTION: As an Arab citizen, my fears for Iraq and the neighbouring countries and the region is that the citizens of other countries will demand the same and we'll be surprised to find a Kurdish state, and a Shi'ite state and a Turkoman state?
ZEBARI: We assert the national unity of Iraq. The Kurds are Iraqi citizens. Previously, before the fall of Saddam, they had an independent status and they have conceded their rights and agreed to live in one state. What happens in other countries is their responsibility...
QUESTION: Mr Minister, quite frankly, do the Iraqi people want the Arabs or do they have a feeling of, I won't say hatred, but of distance and alienation, do they feel they can dispense with the Arabs, after the neglect that has taken place...
ZEBARI: Unfortunately, this is a feeling that some people have because of the alienation. The neglect (of Arabs for Iraqis) has created an Iraqi reaction and we are working to prevent this leading to a rift between the Arabs and Iraq.
QUESTION: Mr Minister, why do some people yearn for the days of Saddam Hussein?
ZEBARI: In Saddam Hussein's time there was security through the security services but there wasn't social peace. Now the picture is reversed. We have peace with our neighbours and with the world but security is threatened by Saddamist and Baathist groups which do not aim to take part in power but to destroy the current government. In the face of that we are waging a political struggle and it will last for a time.
QUESTION: Mr Minister, on what basis did the saying arise that the Sunni minority ruled for the past years over the Shi'ite and Kurdish majority? Do you have accurate statistics in Iraq for the size of each sect and ethnic group?
ZEBARI: We don't have any statistics...

Zoellick cites Malaya

2005-09-15T22:02:00.000+03:00

After all the discussion about the 'lessons' of the Malayan Emergency, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Zoellick brought it up en passant in an interview with Al Arabia. This is what he said:

So if you look at the history of insurgencies, for example, the one that took place in Malaya, it took many years to deal with because you can have a relatively small number of people that are still committed to violence and suicide in this case, that can disrupt a society. So I think the benchmarks are whether Iraqis are able to seize control of their own future, do so in a way that builds support among the public and eventually turns back those that are committed to violence, as opposed to solving problems through democratic debate... It's much harder to do if your neighbors are the vehicles for sending people across the borders that are committed to suicide bombs.

What he's trying to say, I think, is that the Iraqi government really can defeat the insurgency if given enough time. But he doesn't sound very convinced, or convincing. The point about the success of the British (not so much the Malayan government) against the ethnic Chinese insurgents in Malaya was that the insurgents DID NOT have significant support through neighbouring countries and certainly didn't use suicide bombs regularly. Zoellick also doesn't mention the British/Malay strategy of removing hundreds of people from their villages and isolating them from the insurgents. My conclusion is that Zoellick is just showing off his profound knowledge of 20th-century insurgencies, without having a point to make. For an American, merely saying 'Malaya' rather than 'Malaysia' shows that he's done his homework. President Bush thinks it's in southern Africa, next to Zimbia.

By the way, I wonder if Zoellick ever apologised for his outburst against those Cairo-based reporters in July. He said it was 'cynical' to doubt that the Egyptian authorities would make a decision about international monitoring of elections until the elections began. History proved him wrong. They decided about two hours after voting started, and set conditions that no one could meet before it ended.

'Terror' reinfects Bush brain

2005-09-15T10:15:00.000+03:00

Bush is back on the 'terror' path, judging by the frequency with which the word or its derivatives occurred in his UN speech on Wednesday. It's a record for recent times and is very high by any standards:

President Addresses United Nations Security Council, Sept 14 -- 15 terrors in 457 words: one for every 30 words uttered.

President Discusses Hurricane Katrina Relief, Sept 8 - 0 terrors in 1,109 words

Speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of V-J Day, August 31-- 15 terrors in 3,655 words: one for every 244 words uttered

Radio address, August 27 -- 10 terrors in 724 words: one for every 72 words uttered

Address to military families in Idaho, August 24 -- 45 terrors in 4,409 words: one for every 98 words uttered.

Egyptian jailers?

2005-09-13T21:09:00.000+03:00

The future of the border between Gaza and Egypt is something to watch in the coming days and months. We've already seen some fairly dramatic events there, at least for the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in Gaza. It's easy to forget that many of these people, especially the younger ones and those the Israelis don't like, have never in their lives left the strip, which measures about 140 square miles (about twice the size of the District of Columbia). If the Egyptian border opens, it will be like flinging open the door of a large jail. Many thousands of Palestinians left into Egyptian Sinai on Monday, many of them just for the adventure of it -- the sheer exhilaration of GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE and SEEING SOMETHING NEW. I wish I had been there. The Egyptians, to their credit, turned a blind eye, maybe out of sympathy, maybe because they didn't relish the idea of holding them in by force. "We do not intend to be alternative oppressors," a senior Egyptian official said. Many of them just went shopping or visited friends and relatives. Some of them haven't seen each other for many years. It's hard to imagine the trials and tribulations Palestinians have faced going back and forth across this border for the simplest things -- going to university, visiting sick relatives or whatever. If they were lucky enough to get a pass from the Israelis, they risked long delays on each crossing. Sometimes hundreds of Palestinians spent days, even weeks, at the border for reasons entirely beyond their control, usually at great financial expense.

How is that going to change, if at all? The Egyptian government has promised to prevent arms smuggling from Egypt to Gaza and has started to deploy 750 border guards along the eight-mile stretch to perform this function, essentially protecting Israelis from possible attack by Palestinian groups. That's a big responsibility and could be a source of serious conflict. What happens if Israel says the Egyptians have been negligent and it intends to redeploy along the border, reimposing the prison conditions of recent years? Egypt and Israel have an agreement covering such points but inevitably they are not publishing the details, which could be highly embarrassing to the Egyptians. But what about the movement of people? Egypt, a poor densely populated country with high unemployment, is not about to give Gazans unrestricted access to Egypt, because too many would choose to stay. Life in Cairo is a good deal more attractive than life in Gaza. For many months, until they see how the system is working, Israel plans to maintain control on their movement anyway, by insisting on an Israeli presence at the only approved crossing-point.

The tragedy is that the promise of easy access to the outside world will probably turn out to be a false one for many Gazans. Until they have a country they can call their own, open to the world as a whole, this window into Egypt is likely to be very narrow.

Linguistic Interlude

2005-09-13T20:14:00.000+03:00

My fledgling linguist of a son sends out an appeal to any passing linguists who may be able to throw light on the nature and articulation of the emphatic voiceless lateral fricative which existed in proto-Semitic. I've tried to help. I've even given my best demonstrating the voiceless lateral fricative with occurs in modern Welsh (as in 'Llandudno'). I'm quite versatile but the emphatic version is outside my phonetic repertoir. I understand 'emphatic' in this context to mean what most Arabists called 'velarised' -- that is articulated with the tongue spread laterally and raised at the back. But this one is beyond me. Help.

'Burn Mosques to Survive' Says Tony Blankley

2005-09-12T23:46:00.000+03:00

Some American rightists are saying some truly alarming things these days. If I was George Bush or Dick Cheney, I might speculate that they are in their last throes or that they're hitting out in desperation in the knowledge that their cause is lost. I'm not so optimistic and I sometimes fear for our communal future. Some of the racist commentary thrown up in the wake of Katrina has been really ugly, as though the hurricane gave thousands of closet bigots an opportunity to vent their rage. But Tony Blankley of the Washington Times (again, alas) takes the biscuit for this piece of vile incitement against European Muslims, which might have been written about Jews by one of Hitler's propagandists in the 1920s. Remember, this is not some marginal rag but a newspaper read over breakfast by many Republican leaders. Take this, for example:

The public anger (at the murder of Theo van Gogh), which included the burning of mosques in traditionally tolerant Holland, is evidence that the European instinct for survival has not been fully extinguished.

Western civilisation in danger!! Fifth column penetrates Europe!! Multiculturalism, political correctness endanger civilisation!! Many ('ordinary') Muslims share 'religious convictions' of jihadists!! Streets will run with blood!!

It gets worse and worse. Listen to this:

The radical Islamists are able to rationalize concessions to modernity with ancient-sounding mumbo jumbo while still sounding like authentic fundamentalists, the only true voice of Islam. The Nazis overwhelmed German society with these methods 70 years ago. There is building evidence that the radical Islamists are moving ever more successfully down the same path...

How to respond, other than to suggest Blankley keep his morbid and paranoid fantasies to himself? Since when was fundamentalism 'the only true voice of Islam'? Who is Blankley anyway to say what is the true voice of Islam? It's the old 'true Scotsman' argument with a vengeance. A. 'Sheikh al-Azhar doesn't believe in jihad by European Muslims against their Christian compatriots.' Tony Blankley: 'He's not a true Muslim then!'

Blankley's doomsday comparison with the rise of Nazism does contain one especially glaring flaw, deliberately overlooked to save his argument falling flat on its face -- the fact that the non-Muslim people of Europe are not fertile ground for jihadist recruitment. The Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, but if the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture, they won't find many Germans signing up.

He suggests that European governments "lead the struggle for European cultural survival" but does not say what exactly they should preserve. Christianity? - few Europeans are committed Christians anyway. Aryan supremacy? - doesn't sound like something worth preserving. Democracy? - fine, but the proportion of European Muslims opposed to democracy is even smaller than the proportion of Americans opposed to racial equality, evidently much smaller. Thank you, Tony, but Europe doesn't need your help.

Down with Flag Fetishism

2005-09-12T20:59:00.000+03:00

If Egyptian television plays again that slick videoclip of Egyptians of various ages, classes and genders proudly displaying the national flag -- on balconies, desks, bicycle handlebars and in every other conceivable location, I think I will puke. The central scenario -- each scene in the drama interspersed with other kitschy flag 'moments' -- is a group of youngsters carrying a vast rolled-up flag, maybe 15 metres wide and many times longer, to one end of the October 6 bridge (I think) in central Cairo and then rolling it out across the bridge. I assume this is computer-generated, unless they closed the bridge one day for several hours and no one told me, which seems unlikely (word travels fast in Cairo). It would also be a huge waste of fabric (maybe they later had it sewn into thousands of galabias). I've asked around and Egyptians just don't care for their flag. It means nothing, full stop. Just a piece of coloured cloth that flies over public buildings. There's probably a law against flying it from your balcony but only a lunatic would think of doing that anyway. I share their indifference. Flag fetishism of the American variety (or Danish variety, I might add) is a sad ailment and I resent any attempt to spread this perversion to a part of the world so far immune to it.

Who's behind it and why? It's clearly linked to last week's presidential elections but I'm baffled to see the connection. Egyptian television, taking its cue from CNN and other U.S. stations, ran a fluttering Egyptian flag in the bottom left corner of the screen for weeks before the elections, with the legend 'Presidential Elections' attached. If the idea was to persuade people to vote out of patriotism, then it seems unlikely it would succeed. If the flag doesn't evoke any emotions, why would it persuade anyone to do anything? Most people refused to vote because they don't have any confidence that their vote will be counted, or else they didn't like any of the limited selection of candidates on offer. The idea that it's a patriotic duty to waste a few hours taking part in an exercise to give Mubarak a spurious legitimacy is a disgrace to patriotism, a sentiment which may occasionally have some positive aspects. Less than one in 10 Egyptians voted anyway, but we can't easily judge whether it would have been even less without the flag gambit. At the results announcement news conference, there were dozens of these flags behind the speaker, who made such pompous opening remarks that the company I was among laughed at him. Even Ayman Nour had a flag behind him in his post-election news conference.

The U.S. occupation authorities have been trying to impose flag fetishism on Iraq but they got a rude awakening (remember?) when the Iraqis rejected the hideous new design they proposed, preferring the old one amended by Saddam (adding the words 'Allahu Akbar' between the stars). But the Iraqi flag campaign continues.

Just what is the idea? I suppose in Iraq the aim would be to reinforce a sense of national unity (hard when the Kurds already use their own flag), but in Egypt??? Egypt is not about to fall apart, as far as I know.

The only explanation I can come up is that one of the ruling party campaign managers, having studied political sciences in the United States, decided that Egypt too needed a dose of good ol' American-style flag fetishism. If anyone can throw any light on this, drop me a comment. Or if any Egyptians want to rebuke me for my iconoclasm and pledge allegiance to their rag, also let me know.

Gamal Mubarak for President

2005-09-12T14:57:00.000+03:00

If anyone ever had any doubts that one of underlying aims of the constitutional amendment this year was to enable young Gamal Mubarak to succeed his father through elections, Al Masry Al Youm's interview with businessman Ibrahim Kamil should put them to rest. Kamil is a businessman and member of the ruling party's policies secretariat, which is chaired by Gamal. Here are the relevant sections:

Question: Has the inheritance question gone away completely or is it still there to some extent?
Kamil: What do you mean, inheritance? Do we have a system called inheritance? If I want to put my son in my place, I wouldn't be able to do that. But if my son works in political activity and is able to stand in presidential elections in the light of the new amendments and the constitutional amendments which will take place in the future, that would not be inheritance.
Question: But would he come when his father is still president or after he leaves power and then it's his right to stand, as in Syria?
Kamil: It's wrong to compare the presidential elections which took place (in Egypt) with what happened in Syria. We, under the present system, if President Mubarak decided not to stand in the current elections and I came, as a member of the general secretariat (of the ruling National Democratic Party), and nominated Gamal Mubarak for the presidency, would that mean I am nominating him because he is the son of the president? That would be wrong, because it would be because he's a young man in his early 40s who has obtained a superior political training which 20 million other young men in Egypt have not obtained. He's well-educated and very well brought up, but the difference is that he's the son of the president.
Question: But he obtained that education and political training because he is the son of the president?
Kamil: Yes, that's true, so we say that the recent period during which the son of the president embarked on party work inside the National Party gave him a background inside the party and in the framework of the policies committee and through the supreme policies council. Let the dialogue remain open inside the National Party and let the young members of the party learn from it.
Question: Do you expect Gamal Mubarak to rise higher in the coming period to become secretary-general of the National Party?
Kamil: I hope that Gamal Mubarak is promoted within the party.
Question: You hope or you expect?
Kamil: I hope because it's not my decision. President Mubarak said that the question of inheritance is not for discussion now.

It's not much of a surprise, but it's certainly bold of Kamil to air such ideas so soon after the elections. By the way, remember that if Mubarak died or retired any time in the next two months, the ruling party would choose ALL the candidates in the presidential elections to replace him. That's because no opposition candidate would qualify unless at least 65 members of parliament endorsed him, and the opposition in parliament, even if united around one candidate, could not muster 65 members. Unless one of the opposition parties wins at least 23 seats in parliament in November, plus other seats in other subsequent elections later, this extraordinary state of affairs could continue until the next parliamentary elections in 2010.

Kamil just about sums up the self-perpetuating nature of government in Egypt for the past 50 years:

Question: What is the legitimacy of the current system based on?
Kamil: It's based on the existing constitution, and on the basis that the current system, whether we disagree or agree, supports the current government.

Of course, he makes light of electoral abuses, saying they are of the kind that happen in every country in the world. No interest in investigating specific violations or holding anyone to account, God forbid!

Condoleezza on Egyptian elections

2005-09-12T10:34:00.000+03:00

Condoleezza Rice's statement on Egyptian presidential elections is interestingly lukewarm. It doesn't explicitly recognise Mubarak as the winner, for a start, nor does it recommend any changes in the constitutional arrangements behind the elections. It's easy to say that the campaigning brought "freer debate, increased transparency, and improved access to the media" when there have never been any previous presidential elections with which to compare. The statement tries to fit the elections into the "Arab spring" mould which Washington likes to propagate ("one step in the march towards the full democracy..."), overlooking the possibility that these elections were an ad hoc adjustment to unusual circumstances early this year. It portrays "universal suffrage" as a novelty, when in fact women have been voting in Egypt since the early 20th century and minorities have never been excluded from politics. It doesn't reprimand the government to failing to allow international monitors but says they would be a good idea in the parliamentary elections in November. The statement expresses solidarity with "Egypt" -- an entirely meaningless sentiment when the country is divided over what should happen next.

All in all, the United States is interested in Egyptian democracy mainly as a prop to sustain the ideological framework it has constructed around its Middle East policy (the "freedom on the march" theme), not as an end in itself, certainly not as a way to obtain an Egyptian government more representative of public opinion.

Keeping the Iran Option Alive

2005-09-11T20:18:00.000+03:00

You would think that New Jersey Republican Jim Saxton, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Threats (what a title) has enough on his plate dealing with the disastrous occupation of Iraq and the consequent strain on the resources of the U.S. military. But that doesn't stop him from exploiting the anniversary of September 11 to take an ill-informed and gratuitous swipe at the Iranian government, whose influence in Mesopotamia has grown considerably thanks to the Bush administration's adventurism.

Writing in the the Washington Times, the favourite newspaper of Washington Republicans, Saxton argues in favour of an alliance with 'nontraditional partners' inside Iran, apparently to overthrow the government and remove the alleged threat to the United States from Iranian weapons of mass destruction. This is what he says:

Iranian influence is felt deeply throughout the Middle East and, to some extent, around the world. It is evident the ayatollahs have used surrogates to create regional destruction and mayhem. Terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad are actively and fully supported by Iran, often through Syria in an attempt to avoid fingerprints. For this reason, I believe the U.S. needs a renewed Iranian policy with both traditional and nontraditional partners, inside as well as outside Iran. We must be innovative in our response. This need not include a military component but must take to heart the severity of the Iranian threat.

What is alarming about his drivel is not that the Bush administration is likely to launch a military campaign in Iran, but rather that such influential people can write such idiocies without fear of ridicule. It's absurd to suggest that Iran has deep influence throughout the Middle East. In fact its influence is confined to Iraq (especially through the government backed by the United States) and in Lebanon (where Hizbollah restricts its military activities to a small area of Israeli-occupied Syrian territory). Iran has hardly any influence anywhere from Egypt to Mauritania, precious little in the Gulf either.

Saxton deliberately tries to implicate Iran in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq when even he must surely know that the active insurgency is almost entirely Sunni-based and hostile towards any Iranian influence in Iraq. It's equally ridiculous to imagine that Iran's nuclear programme, assuming the aim is nuclear weapons, is directed at the United States or that Iran would ever risk leaking weapons of mass destruction to any small group. Saxton knows this, so what's his game?

Saxton of course is a great enthusiast for Israel's Likud Party and has sometimes given Likud preference even over his own party and the White House. He once sponsored a congressional resolution saying: 'United States foreign policy with respect to the Middle East peace process should not include an attempt to require Israel to make concessions which Israel does not believe to be in its self-interest, including concessions which would jeopardize the security of Israel'. In 2003, he received an award from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, one of the groups which sold the invasion of Iraq to the clueless Bushies. Surprise, surprise, at the same ceremony JINSA gave an award to Major George Thiebes of U.S. Special Operations Command for is role in securing the "surrender" of the Mujahideen El Khalq in northeastern Iraq after the U.S. invasion (amusingly, JINSA calls them Muhajadeen -- I guess the word 'mujahideen' is just too much for their delicate stomachs). Of course the Mujahideen didn't really surrender at all. They just lay low for a while and some people, including Scott Ritter, believe the United States has reactivated them to carry out sabotage missions inside Iran. So that's what Saxton is talking about. Makes sense to me.

Pathways to Liberty

2005-09-11T17:06:00.000+03:00

The Nation has an interesting article on the way American history textbooks for schoolchildren are treating the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. In my experience, American textbooks are much more balanced than one might imagine on Middle Eastern matters, given the low standard of public discourse and of media coverage of the area. One of the textbooks, The American Promise, by James Roark et al., contains this:

"High levels of poverty ignored by undemocratic and corrupt governments provided bin Laden a pool of disaffected young Muslims who saw the United States as the evil source of their misery and the supporter of Israel's oppression of Palestinian Muslims."

You could easily quibble about the validity of the 'poverty' factor (hijackers were not especially poor, and so on), but it's not a bad effort for a school textbook, especially as it comes close to presenting 'Israel's oppression' as an established fact. Why 'Palestinian Muslims', I wonder? I'm not sure many Arabs distinguish Palestinian Muslims from Christians when they talk about the conflict -- just as the Israelis are equal-opportunity oppressors. The trouble is that Americans receive only a tiny fraction of their information on the Middle East from school books -- television is a much bigger influence, accounting at a guess for more than 90 percent of the input.

But American textbook authors should watch the titles they attach to their works. "The American Promise" and "Give Me Liberty" are too Hegelian, teleological for my taste. You don't have to write American history as though 'promise' and 'liberty' are central themes, even if you write it from a leftist point of view, in other words documenting the struggles of minorities and the poor. If you're intellectually honest, you shouldn't write it as though it's moving in any particular direction, towards any particular goal.

Bush terrorometer - update

2005-09-11T12:20:00.000+03:00

We've been keeping track every now and then of how frequently President Bush uses the word 'terror' or its derivatives. There was a dramatic slump after Hurricane Katrina caught him napping, but the anniversary of September 11 is bringing it back up again: Here's an update:

Radio address, Sept 10 -- 3 terrors in 783 words: one for every 261 words uttered

President remembers 9/11 Heroes, Sept 9 - 5 terrors in 1,315 words: one terror for every 263 words uttered

President Discusses Hurrican Katrina Relief, Sept 8 - 0 terrors in 1,109 words

Speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of V-J Day, August 31-- 15 terrors in 3,655 words: one for every 244 words uttered

Radio address, August 27 -- 10 terrors in 724 words: one for every 72 words uttered

Address to military families in Idaho, August 24 -- 45 terrors in 4,409 words: one for every 98 words uttered.

Back to the Eurocentrism debate

2005-09-11T11:37:00.000+03:00

After a surfeit of Egyptian election blogging, which was really very dull, it was a relief to come across this anti-Eurocentric article in the Boston Globe. It makes several points I was not aware off, for example, that Pedro Pizarro recognised the 'contribution' that disease made to the defeat of the Incas, that the Incas operated large offshore vessels in the Pacific (300 miles from home port), that the native Americans of the northeast coast also took to coastal shipping, after acquiring European vessels, as well as many other details. He makes the point well that early European handguns were not much of an improvement on the older technologies. The author, Charles Mann, has written a book on the subject -- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, -- and that looks very promising. Perhaps it should be read in conjunction with Francis Jennings's The Invasion of America, which was remarkable for treating the indigenous peoples as participants in a political struggle, not as passive victims of a game played over their heads.

Not Ukraine

2005-09-11T01:41:00.000+03:00

Big demonstration in central Cairo this evening, with Ghad Party, Kefaya, Popular Movement for Change, Labour Party (Islamists) and a few others. They had a little success in drawing people from the pavements to join, but this was not Kiev. The Egyptian people are not about to rise in protest. I noticed some of the protesters trying to persuade others to join but the group of bystanders I overheard did not seem to know about allegations of electoral abuses and they certainly did not care enough to take a stand. It brought some of the main shopping streets to a standstill for half an hour at a time, but the police were very restrained. Perhaps they assume that the protests will die out now that Hosny is safely installed for another six years. The police even held back a group of zealous ruling party thugs who were raring for a confrontation. Ayman Nour was there some of the time, but I did not see him. So was his wife Gameela Ismail, plus Saadeddin Ibrahim for a while. Kamal Khalil was grinning away and leading the chants -- he's irrepressible. The best parts were when they moved down narrow streets and the chants echoed off the walls, and when they passed a poster of Mubarak and shouted "There's the thief, there's the thief." Maximum turnout 2,000, I would say -- not enough to start a revolution.

Shock Election Result

2005-09-10T10:30:00.000+03:00

The results of the presidential elections really are quite a shocker. The shock isn't in the percentages for the various candidates but in the turnout figure -- 23 percent. That means that Mubarak was elected by less than nine percent of the Egyptian population as a whole. It looks like this time they counted the votes. If we assume that three million of the votes for Mubarak were the result of ballot stuffing or double voting and other fraudulent practices by members of the ruling party, we end up with these results:

Turnout 13.5 percent
Hosni Mubarak 77 percent
Ayman Nour 13 percent
Noman Gomaa 5 percent

That strikes me as a plausible result and the distortions came before the counting process began. This represents a significant change in the way the authorities run elections and the implications are enormous. It means that next time Egyptians will be more inclined to vote, in the belief that their votes will matter.

Another indication of relatively honest counting is Ayman Nour's victory over Noman Gomaa, which was not the result the government wanted. The ruling party and the Wafd are saying Nour won because he was the 'protest vote' candidate and many members of the Muslim Brotherhood voted for him. The Wafd is also saying that many Copts voted for him. Well good for him. If he can attract the Muslim Brotherhood, the Copts and the disenchanted, then he has a promising political future!

My initial predictions were not far off (Mubarak 82 percent, Gomaa 9 percent, Nour 7 percent) but I was working on the assumption that they would make the results up without bothering to count them.

The other significant change in these elections was the level of independent monitoring. That will continue and as the monitors become more effective, it will become harder and harder for the ruling party to cheat.

The most disppointing aspect is the abysmal performance of the Presidential Election Commission. Al Masry Al Youm has a lovely story about the large relaxed lunch they had on election day. That sums it up: Out for lunch.

Maalesh

2005-09-09T17:06:00.000+03:00

Monitoring groups and even some of the opposition parties (in other words, the Wafd) are taking a very relaxed maalesh attitude towards all the fraud and other violations that took place in the presidential elections on Wednesday. After fighting so hard for the last months, they suddenly seem to have given up. It's not enough to say that the abuses could not change the result, because this election was more about the process than the result anyway. They should keep fighting, even if the Presidential Election Commission ignores them, as it will. They should fight in the ordinary courts and with international public opinion.

The attention does appear to be having an effect. The voting figures published in the government newspaper al-Ahram today suggest that the count (if there was a count) was more realistic than in most previous elections. Based on the results they publish, the turnout in 15 provinces was about 30 percent. Safwat el-Sherif also quoted the 30 percent figure. If you include all the ballot stuffing that took place (and we have no idea how widespread that was) that's almost plausible. But it does put the authorities in a difficult position. How can they explain the figures from the last four referendums which gave Mubarak the presidency? Here they are:

1999 - Mubarak won 93.8 percent on 79.3 pct turnout
1993 - Mubarak won 96.3 percent on 84.2 pct turnout
1987 - Mubarak won 97.1 percent on 88.5 pct turnout
1981 - Mubarak won 98.5 percent on 81.1 pct turnout

So when Information Minister Anas el-Feki said on Wednesday that the turnout was unprecedented, did he mean that the referendum results were invented? I think someone should ask him.

Keep watching the Nour/Gomaa contest for second place. The figures in al-Ahram clearly show Nour getting twice as many votes as Gomaa (six versus three percent). I can't tell how accurate those figures are, but will they survive the last-minute 'adjustments' that the election commission will inevitably make?

I still have grave doubts, along with millions of others, about the good intentions of the alleged 'reform' group in the NDP. If they are really interested in transparency, why have they allowed the creation of an election commission which is impervious to complaints? The commission is wholly Panglossian -- all's for the best in the best of all possible worlds. No abuses, no violations, nothing. Besides, no one seems to have witnessed this alleged count. Be on your guard. Ritzy Mabrouk is doing a grand job.

Egypt's Ruling Party Screws Up

2005-09-08T23:11:00.000+03:00

Many thoughts and observations about the Egyptian presidential elections on Wednesday. I hardly know where to begin so this is at random:

The turnout figure they announce is the one to watch because it will indicate how serious they are about counting the votes and recording the result, in other words to what extent they fabricated the result. Any turnout figure over 20 percent is dubious and the higher it is the more dubious it becomes. Sitting in Cairo, as I have been for the last two days, it's hard to judge what's happened in the countryside but in Cairo less than five percent of people voted. It's also clear that after all the bribery and intimidation by the ruling party, President Mubarak did win most of the votes cast -- maybe as many as 80 percent. Ayman Nour of the Ghad Party was second and Noman Gomaa of the Wafd was third. Do not be surprised if they give Gomaa more votes than Nour, whom the ruling party hates and fears -- that's another test for rigging.

Because the fraud and other abuses were so rampant, they will have to reduce the Mubarak vote and the turnout figure to make the results look credible. Ironically, if they had held entirely fair elections, they could have obtained a result which would have satisfied most Egyptians, plus the United States and the rest of the world. If they had said, for example, that 15 percent of people voted and 80 percent voted for Mubarak, everyone would have said: "Amazing, things have changed, they are starting to tell the truth." They will probably blow that chance.

The government and ruling party shot themselves in the foot big time with their inane refusal to allow monitors until the last moment (about 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning). Monitors were already dispersed across the country and faced very few restrictions on access (because of chaos and a few independent-minded judges). So the attempt to exclude them achieved nothing other than to tarnish the government's reputation for many months and make Egyptian diplomats look foolish. The Presidential Election Commission, which has turned out to be a replica of the worst examples of totalitarian obstructionism, did the government an even bigger disservice by appearing to set impossible conditions for monitors (they had to obtain a permit in Cairo, even if they were working hundreds of miles away). Another irony is that the Egyptian observers did a far better job than any outside group could have done -- they understood the language and the lie of the land.

The old guard of the ruling NP and the 'reformers' around presidential son Gamal will argue over which of them won the victory. The 'reformers' will say Mubarak would have won without the mass mobilisation and strong-arm tactics which the old guard employed to bring out voters in the afternoon and evening, after it became clear that hardly anyone was voting. The old guard will dispute that. The party needs the old guard anyway, for the parliamentary elections in November.

Many Egyptian liberal groups have a high tolerance for electoral abuses and are willing to turn a blind eye to violations which would be shocking elsewhere. Many of them said they were pleasantly surprised that the security forces played little part in the election process. But on the contrary, the police should have been active in controlling the excesses of the ruling party. The main opposition parties - Ghad and the Wafd -- had everything to gain from abiding by the law, so they did not pose a challenge to security. That's very different from parliamentary elections, in which the supporters of rival candidates need law and order to hold them in check

The Bush administration has largely lost interest in political change in countries like Egypt in the Middle East. It's arguable that Washington never wanted a serious challenge to Mubarak in the first place. On the defensive in Iraq and New Orleans, Bush does not have the political capital to pursue his 'democracy' campaign.

The New York Times and the Washington Post covered election day very poorly. They relied almost entirely on their own observations and gave little weight to the very credible reports from NGOs. But it's impossible for a handful of people working alone to assess what's happening in a country of 72 million. The Los Angeles Times and the British press were much better.

Eve of Elections

2005-09-06T22:33:00.000+03:00

I'm too busy right now to write much about the presidential elections tomorrow but the latest judicial developments do not augur well. Extensive fraud is probable tomorrow and many wrangles over who can go into polling stations and who can witness exactly what. Not necessarily because Mubarak or his campaign team have ordered a rigging operation but because the tradition of producing a result favourable to the leader is so deeply entrenched in the system and Mubarak does not have the will or even perhaps the inclination to stamp that out. Be wary of some reports from reporters who have flown in for the event. The Independent has a wild headline -- "Opposition to Mubarak may force poll into second round" -- supposedly based on internet polls. I'll eat my galabia if Mubarak doesn't get at least 75 percent, by hook or by crook.

Ritzy Mabrouk

2005-09-06T00:13:00.000+03:00

I'm adding a link to the wonderfully named Ritzy Mabrouk. At first I thought she was a socialite favourable to the ruling National Democratic Party, but it turns out she has a mind of her own. She hit the right note with her mockery of the U.S. Congressional delegation that visited today. She's also very diligent about gathering news about Egypt from a variety of sources. But I still disagree with her on Gamal Mubarak's (alleged) good looks and on the (alleged) genius of Prime Minister Nazif. Do we know each other, I wonder?

CNN on Egyptian Elections

2005-09-05T23:54:00.000+03:00

CNN started coverage of the Egyptian presidential elections today but the result was very inadequate. It said Mubarak would win because people trust him to protect the country (true to some extent) and because his rivals have little experience (true). But there are some important factors they overlook:

* The Muslim Brotherhood cannot take part because the rules are fixed to exclude them. The Brotherhood, with its long history of social work and reputation for clean and competent management, would make him sweat.

* Fifty years of government by the heirs of the 1952 military coup have destroyed the political class. Emergency law and state control of the main media have kept opposition parties on the sidelines. For most people, other than members of the ruling party, politics has been so dangerous that only the very brave and the very foolish take part. It could take some years for strong politicians to emerge.

* Few people will vote because, after so many rigged elections in the past, they have no confidence in the system. Apart from making empty promises, Mubarak and his entourage have done nothing to reassure them that their votes will count.

* If the vote goes badly for Mubarak on Wednesday, they will make up the result they want and ride out any protests.

Egyptian Election Procedures

2005-09-05T23:04:00.000+03:00

When you're an anonymous blogger, you can correct yourself without embarrassment. What I wrote yesterday about the procedures for declaring the vote count at the local level was only partially correct. Law 173 on the Practice of Political Rights specifically excludes presidential elections from its sphere of influence.

Article 36 of that law reads as follows:

"The chairman of the general committee (i.e. polling station) announces the result of the election or the referendum and the number of votes each candidate has obtained in his constituency. He and the secretary of the general committee sign during the session three copies of its report, one to be sent with all the ballot or referendum papers to the Minister of the Interior, the second directly to the Supreme Election Commission, and the third to be kept at the headquarters of the security directorate."

Well and good, but that doesn't apply to presidential elections, for which there is a separate law (Law 174 of 2005). The parallel articles of this law read:

"Article 38: The chairman of the general committee gathers the votes of voters in all polling stations (in that area) and writes down what each candidate has obtained in each polling station in a report with three copies signed by the chairman and sent to the Presidential Election Commission (in Cairo), and the committee will decide the rules for preserving these copies and the ballot papers.
Article 39: The Presidential Election Commission announces the result of the election within the three days following the arrival of the reports from the general committees to the committee, and the result is published in the official gazette."

Readers in established democracies might wonder why there are such different procedures for presidential and parliamentary elections. The answer is that these laws were drafted by the ruling party in such a way that it keeps its options open for future fraud in the presidentials, which are much more important to the people at the top. Also note the sloppy drafting -- an indication of the haste with which these laws were put together in the summer.

The scope for abuses here is enormous. Firstly, there's no requirement to inform the representatives of the candidates of the vote count at the local level, so there is no way the candidates can know whether the vote count at the national level is a fair reflection of the local counts. Secondly, there is no requirement to preserve either the reports from the polling stations or the ballot papers. The Presidential Election Commission could unilaterally decide to burn them all the day after the elections.

After speaking to some opposition politicians today, I'm not sure they are aware of the dangers. They could be in a rude shock later this week.

An interesting development, however, is that the Presidential Election Commission appears to have acknowledged the jurisdiction of the administrative court which ruled on Saturday that civil society groups should be able to monitor the voting inside polling stations. No explanation. Some speculate that the chairman, Mamdouh Marei, received a message from on high advising him not to look so obstructive. The court will make some rulings on Tuesday, the day before voting.

A U.S. congressional delegation led by Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, bought the official line lock, stock and barrel. Davis came out of a meeting with Mubarak saying the Egyptian president had no objection to election monitors but "his hands are tied" by the Election Commission, which sets the rules. What an idiot! Where does he think he is -- Switzerland? One phone call to Marei and everything would change. If that's the background advice Davis and his delegation have received from the State Department and the U.S. Embassy, then the Bush administration has all but abandoned any effort to promote political change in Egypt.

Egyptian Legal Conundrum

2005-09-05T00:34:00.000+03:00

How's this for a legal conundrum? Article 36 of Egypt's Election Law (law 173 of 2005) requires three copies of the vote count at each main polling station, one of which will go to the central electoral commission in Cairo. The presiding judge should keep one and third should be deposited at the local security directorate. It doesn't specify that the vote count should be announced locally but it implies that the information should be retained for the record. The Presidential Election Commission says the presiding judges in each main polling station should not divulge the count to the local representatives of the candidates but should send it under seal to Cairo. The commission is immune from judicial review and has already decided to ignore rulings by the Council of State. We will be hearing more about this loophole for abuse in the days to come, especially on Wednesday night, after the voting in presidential elections. The commission's immunity, though written into the constitution in the amendment passed in May, is itself a violation of the constitution, which denies immunity to any non-judicial body, at least in the view of the best lawyers. What to do with a constitution which contains internal contradictions? How about throwing it away and starting again?

Shayfeen.com has a fairly good account of the discrepancy, in Arabic.

Sphinx as Terrorist Sympathiser

2005-09-04T23:59:00.000+03:00

Mohammad Sidique Khan, the London bomber, spoke a grain of truth in his videotape aired on Al Jazeera last week: "Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world and your support of them makes you directly responsible..."

The Hague Convention of 1907 on the Laws and Customs of War is out of date and needs to be rewritten. It was drafted by European governments which saw troops as sacrificial victims engaged in proxy ritualised combat on their behalf -- cannon fodder in other words. But it leads to contradictions incompatible with the average person's sense of natural justice. A conscript in the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein, sitting quietly in a trench on the Kuwaiti border because desertion is punishable by death, is not a legitimate target on an equal footing with a volunteer soldier in an army of occupation, even less so a civilian 'contractor' of the kind the Pentagon has deployed in certain functions in Iraq. Neither is a civilian who voted for a belligerent government a non-combatant in the same sense as someone who actively opposed that government's wars of aggression. The convention was an improvement on unlimited war but, short of making war impossible, humanity can do better. The threat of prosecution for war crimes should be an effective deterrent to political leaders. But their civilian supporters really do share some of their guilt, in an attenuated form, while uniformed conscripts coerced to fight by non-democratic governments may require more effective protection. I would like to see some alternative drafts, or, even better, more effective sanctions against any recourse to violence by one state against another.

Nour with Stalinist Backdrop

2005-09-04T00:22:00.000+03:00

The best thing about Saturday evening's election rally by Ghad Party candidate Ayman Nour was the choice of location. He placed his podium right in front of the Mugamma, the vast Stalinist building which symbolises Egyptian bureaucracy and the heavy hand of the state. From where I was standing, Nour towered above me, with his head silhouetted against the 10th floor of the building, which overlooks Tahrir Square in the very center of Cairo. In former times anyone who carried out any kind of opposition activity on this site soon found himself in the back of a police truck with some serious bruises. But times have changed.

I was inclined to vote for Nour for a while but I now have doubts. It's not that I don't like him personally -- in fact I find him very agreeable. But I'm not convinced he has a sufficient grasp of public policy, especially when it comes to economics. Mubarak is no economist either, of course, but he has managed to assemble a relatively competent group of people to run the economy for him. Nour made too many promises, too many wild allegations and failed to explain adequately how he would raise the money to finance his programs. He accused Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali of making many millions from a land deal in Ghardaqa (Hurghada) and displayed a photograph of some young kids whom he said had sold their kidneys for 250 pounds (about $45) each. If that's true, I think he should give us much more detail. He also accused the government of selling natural gas to Israel at half-price, but again I'd like to see the evidence.

Nour's strength is his attack on the government's record on human rights and political freedoms and his proposal to serve for a transitional two-year period of intense constitutional and political reform. He should have stuck to that message, instead of straying into obscure technical disputes over the real rate of inflation and the government's employment record. Everyone complains about unemployment but the rate hasn't changed much in 30 years. If anything it has declined, to about 10 percent today. Against that background, Mubarak's promise of 4.5 million new jobs over the next six years is realistic, but it is not ambitious enough. Instead of saying Mubarak had created only 100,000 jobs in 24 years, which is an absurb underestimate (in that case unemployment would now stand at about 60 percent, given the increase in population), Nour should have concentrated on ways to clean up government, enforce the laws and make the country more attractive to investment. He tried but the message was diluted by too much populism.

Let's Make Fun of Lewis

2005-09-03T00:22:00.000+03:00

That David Cameron speech I wrote about a few days ago contained a classic sentence about the man most of us around these parts love to despise -- Bernard Lewis:

As the great Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis has pointed out, there are some in the Islamic - and especially Arab -- world who are looking for a simple explanation for the decline in their region's power and prestige.

The irony, in case it eludes you, is that the claim is not particularly controversial, so why did Cameron undermine it by attributing it to a man as controversial as Lewis, much of whose work for the past 15 years fails to meet the smell test.

It's fun to make up similarly banal pronouncements and attribute them to similarly controversial characters. How about these?

As the great German war leader Adolf Hitler noted, the Soviet Union was a grave threat to Western Europe.

As the great Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko wrote, most plants need water, light and good soil for successful growth.

As the great Iraqi Baathist ideologue Tariq Aziz once remarked, the invasion of Iraq was motivated by oil and Israel.

As the great French thinker the Marquis de Sade noted in the 18th century, sex can be fun.

Make up your own and post them.

CNN Faults Foreigners on Katrina

2005-09-02T23:45:00.000+03:00

I couldn't believe my ears watching CNN about 1030 GMT today when the anchorwoman told UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland that Americans were angry with 'the international community' (that is, rich European countries) for failing to respond quickly to the disaster in New Orleans and the Gulf coast. I haven't detected any such anger in anything I've seen or read and I suspect that the anchorman just thought such a provocative question would liven up the interview. But it did set me thinking about the Third World aspects of the United States, of which there are many. In this context, the most striking aspect is the way in which the citizens, bombarded with relentless propaganda for the last few years, have allowed the Bush administration and the supine legislature to make a massive misallocation of resources, neglecting those duties of government which citizens should expect in an advanced democracy. Paul Krugman put it very well today:

Our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

The response of the federal government has been akin to that of an Idi Amin or a Mobutu. It's obvious that only public outrage shamed them into action.

To an outsider, two other features of the Katrina debate seemed quintessentially American -- the Governor of Louisiana taking a tough line in defence of private property (against looting shops, for example) at a time when people are hungry and thirsty. Come on, it's not as if the owners of those shops will ever be able to sell that stuff, if and when they regain access to their flooded premises. She sounded so, well, mean. It was also surprising how quickly law and order broke down. Even in the depths of the Lebanese civil war, when the police were long gone, shells were falling on the city and guns were readily available, it was always possible to walk the streets at night without fear of being mugged or raped. Somehow the Lebanese combatants drew a clear distinction between waging war and maintaining civilised life. But civilisation, like freedom, is a tender plant and requires constant vigilance.

Egyptian Judges Drop Boycott Threat

2005-09-02T23:12:00.000+03:00

Egyptian Judges, meeting at their club on Friday, dropped their threat to refrain from supervising next Wednesday's presidential elections, bowing to the reality that the government can find enough judicial personnel, if necessary Ministry of Justice civil servants, to maintain the semblance of judicial supervision, which the constitution requires. The government has clearly leant on many of them to weaken their resolve, breaking the solidarity of the judges as a whole. But the judges did not keel over, not at all. The turnout at the meeting was much lower than at their last meeting in May, perhaps as few as 600, but there is a large hard core of Egyptian judges who are in this fight for the long term. They made demands on the government, including access to polling stations for civil society groups and that the representatives of candidates receive copies of the voting figures at every station. Both of those measures would be crucial to preventing massive fraud. The Presidential Election Committee, which has shown itself to be a tool of the authorities and the ruling party, has so far rejected both those demands and I doubt it will change its position at this stage. The committee says that once the voting is complete in each polling station the secret figures will be put in a sealed envelope and sent to the commission's headquarters. This is a loophole as big as an elephant and gives the commission carte blanche to make up the figures it wants, on the instructions of whoever gives the commission its orders.

But the judges did not have many options. If they had called for a boycott, the response would have been partial at best and many of the judges who did take part would have been entirely in the pocket of the government. The judges are hoping that by running their own parallel monitoring system and publicising their own observations of the voting, they can expose any serious abuses. They can, as they did with the May referendum, but their very damning report on the referendum has not undermined the legal validity of the result or provoked much public outrage.

The meeting was excellent, however, a good example of open and healthy debate. It was impossible not to admire the courage and wisdom of some of those who spoke, often at risk to their own privileges and promotion prospects. It is heartening to see that Egypt has so many public servants dedicated to justice and the common good. But too many stayed away -- one wondered where they stand.

Gunpowder Book Blows Hole in USS Eurocentrism

2005-09-01T23:31:00.000+03:00

If you can afford it or have access to a good library, and care about the distortion of history for ideological purposes, you should read Hungarian historian Gábor Ágoston's new book Guns for the Sultan, a sober and academic survey of the arms industry of the Ottoman Empire. That's rather obscure, I hear you cry, why should I be interested in that? Because the Ottoman military, and the nature of the Ottoman state itself, are prominent themes in the debate over the rivalry between Christendom and the Muslim world in the early modern period. A common argument is that the Ottomans were so conservative, so resistant to innovation, so technically challenged and so circumscribed by religious taboos that they were bound to lose out to their daring, creative and adventurous European rivals. In the realm of firearms, three specific conceptions have gained ground in the European literature, copied from text to text until they have acquired the status of conventional wisdom. Like Dawkinsian memes or computer virus, they have permeated popular works on the subject, including newspaper editorials.

The Ottomans, the argument goes, specialised in giant guns which were immobile and impractical, depended on foreign (that is, European) technicians to produce them and were unable to create the industrial infrastructure to sustain their own armaments industry. For the sake of example rather than completeness, two works come to mind. Carlo Cipolla, in Guns, Sails and Empires, writes: “In their (the Ottomans’) primitive fury they mostly strove for huge guns that hurled enormous stone balls… In their obsession, they never admitted the shortcomings of huge cannon, nor did they realize that it was becoming obsolete. (My italics)”

David Landes takes up the theme in his widely read 1998 work The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, a triumphalist celebration of European ingenuity which was popular during the time of the dot.com boom. Landes writes:

The Ottomans tried to keep up, but they were imitators rather than inventors. The understood the value of cannon and especially of siege artillery, but they depended on Christian technicians to do the founding…The Ottomans tried to keep up (with Europe) by importing large quantities of war materiel: muskets, gunpowder, saltpetre, iron, blades.

A researcher with the time and the will might profitably explore the origins of these conceptions, which seems to be based mainly on a small selection of anecdotal evidence from European travellers. Ágoston, on the other hand, has ransacked the Ottoman archives, digging up production data for the empire’s many armament factories.His book blows a large hole in the hull of the USS Eurocentrism and his conclusions are very different:

"Data presented in this chapter and the Appendix demonstrate that the Ottomans used all sorts of guns from the largest şaykas and balyemezes to the smallest şahi, saçma, prangı, eynek, misket and şakaloz guns, often firing projectiles of merely a few grams. Eyewitness accounts show that the Ottomans deployed hundreds of smaller guns during their campaigns. Similarly, even during sieges the majority of their ordnance consisted of smaller pieces, and large siege artillery, though considerable in number by contemporary standards, comprised no more than 10 percent of the Ottoman siege train."

In the European and Mediterranean theatre as a whole, technology transfer was rapid and experts often migrated in search of lucrative employment. "The contribution of European technicians to the Ottoman arms industry and weapons technology should not be exaggerated… Even in the Empire’s European fortresses, where the Ottomans ‘inherited’ dozens of Christian arquebusiers and gunners, there were several Muslim tüfenkçis and topçus, working together with their Christian colleagues, as early as the middle of the fifteenth century. Their numbers rapidly increased and the proportion of Christian to Muslim artillerymen had changed in favour of the latter by the sixteenth century."

"It is obvious from the data … that the Ottomans were self-sufficient in the production of gunpowder well into the eighteenth century." The empire’s gunpowder production was up to 1,000 tonnes a year at the end of the sixteenth century, compared to 276 tonnes at the most in Castile, the heart of the Spanish empire.

I expect Ágoston’s work will dominate the field for many years to come.

The Intellectual Poverty of the 'Evil Ideologists'

2005-08-31T21:01:00.000+03:00

One of the most depressing aspects of the conflict which has intensified between parts of Christendom and parts of the world of Islam over the past four years is the light it has cast on the intellectual poverty of many mainstream politicians in Europe and the United States, and the shallowness of their erstwhile commitment to multiculturalism. It's easy to be magnanimous when everything's going well. The test comes when it's inconvenient to stand up for what you believe in. Daniel Pipes records with glee how some European politicians have decided, as he puts it, to "stand up for historic customs" -- a rather unfortunate term which could include old practices such as burning heretics at the stake, treating women as chattels and eliminating the indigenous peoples of attractive countries. He cites the banning of burqas in Italy, requiring a German school boy to attend co-ed swimming classes and making male applicants for Irish citizenship renounce polygamy (the latter presumably already covered by allegiance to Irish law). The German example is particularly odd, since I doubt co-ed swimming classes are a historic custom in Germany and compulsory sports practice for young Germans has disturbing connotations in many circles. But he also notes with approval a speech by British shadow education secretary David Cameron, which exemplifies well the superficiality of this new school, which I hereby dub the 'Evil Ideologists'. Before we start dissecting his argument, let's go back a few decades and understand why there are large numbers of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims in Britain in the first place. Most of them migrated, with the encouragement of British governments, to fill jobs which the existing inhabitants of Britain were no longer willing to perform at a price which British businesses or the British government were willing to pay. The immigration officers did not set conditions such as adopting particular styles of dress, marrying only people who speak English or abandoning curries in favour of pork chops. For many reasons, including the location of jobs and informal housing discrimination, many of them ended up living in the same areas, where they formed their own communities, generally coexisting peacefully with their fellow Britons. But suddenly, after at the most several dozen out of a million of them have taken part in acts of political violence, the politicians who once boasted of Britain's successful multiculturalism have imposed new demands and cast doubt on their legitimacy as British citizens. Let's have a look at some of the ideas Cameron espouses:

I don't think we need engage in some protracted exercise to define our shared values. We can do it in a single phrase. Freedom under the rule of law. This simple, yet profound expression explains almost everything you need to know about our country, our institutions, our history, our culture -- even our economy. It is why British citizens are free men and women, able to do what they like unless it harms others or is explicitly forbidden.

Wow, do people sit and listen to such ideas and nod sagely or applaud? Does Cameron, who is shadow education secretary for God's sake, know nothing of the long struggle of the British working classes, and the peasantry before them, for basic rights such as the right of association and the right to strike? Has he never heard of the Peterloo massacre or the Tolpuddle Martyrs? Aren't those events, and the two sides in those conflicts, part of English history and culture? Has he never read E.P.Tompson for example? The English-speaking peoples, as Churchill so horribly called them, did not go to the ends of the earth with freedom on their lips. Freedom had nothing to do with the the slave trade, the plantation system, the subjugation of India or the invasion of Egypt. Besides, placing freedom at the core of Britishness hardly fits in with Daniel Pipes' defence of historic customs. It's hard to see how wearing a burqa or refraining from co-ed swimming, if that's what you're into, harms others or should be forbidden. That sounds to me like enforced assimilation, not freedom under the law. The mind truly boggles, but let me proceed:

But I don't want to engage today in some generalised debate about multiculturalism, what it means, and what we should do with it.

Decoded in the context of the whole speech, this means: "I'm no longer interested in thinking hard about the problems of integrating people from different cultures into British society, about the compromises English people might have to make to accommodate them, or about the ways in which the English might benefit from diversity." This corroborates that interpretation:

I've argued that government's number one priority in education should be to enforce greater academic rigour throughout the system. This applies with equal force to the values that are taught in school. We need to be more rigorous in ensuring that all children are taught to be proud of Britain, our history and our values.

But what are these values, other than freedom under the law, a value which presumably 99 percent of British Muslims would readily subscribe to? And why should the children of a Bangladeshi textile worker in Yorkshire feel proud of British history? What are you going to do about it if they just don't share that pride? Expel them? How are you going to convince them that it's something they should be proud of, when it's such a mixed bag of villains and heros, vice and virtue, like any other history? Enlightened history teachers don't tell their charges to be proud of the past. They help them to understand it and instill in them a desire to explore it. Pride in history was for the imperial age, the demise of which we welcomed and the return of which we dread.

Cameron also has strong views on the need to privilege the English language and, like Tony Blair, he has an uncanny ability to read the minds of young Muslims:

(September 11 hijacker Mohamed) Atta romanticised the simplicity and purity of Islamic life, which, he believed, was mortally threatened by Westernisation. It wasn't just the presence of American troops on Muslim soil which offended, but the influence of Western ideas, capitalism, female emancipation, democracy and the mixing of culture.

How does Cameron know this? Has he discovered the secret unpublished diaries of Mohamed Atta? Has he interviewed at length Atta's friends and acquaintances? Not at all. He's just playing the favourite new game of the 'Evil Ideologists' -- invent your foes to suit your fancies.

Bush Terrorometer - update

2005-08-31T14:32:00.000+03:00

We're keeping track every now and then of how frequently President Bush uses the word 'terror' or its derivatives. Here's an update:

Speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of V-J Day, August 31-- 15 terrors in 3,655 words: one for every 244 words uttered

Radio address, August 27 -- 10 terrors in 724 words: one for every 72 words uttered

Address to military families in Idaho, August 24 -- 45 terrors in 4,409 words: one for every 98 words uttered.

The Iraq Quagmire

2005-08-31T08:26:00.000+03:00

Phyllis Bennis, one of the few internationalists left in Washington, coauthors a report on Iraq for the Institute for Policy Studies, giving details of the costs of 'staying the course'. It's quite a lengthy indictment sheet and I hope it receives the attention it deserves.

Beer in the Snooker Hall

2005-08-30T23:53:00.000+03:00

The trouble with being a literary critic, which I am not, must be that you have to review the latest works, while thousands of books from the past 2,500 years of literature lie neglected. They too need a little boost every now and then. So without embarrassment I make a plug for Waguih Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Hall, which people have told me for years I must read but which I just finished the other night. It's been hard to find as it was first published in 1964 and the edition I have was published in 1987. The blurb is totally misleading, giving the impression that the hero Ram is just some dissolute aristocrat hanging out in post-Faroukian Cairo. But it does have an endorsement from Gabriel Josipovici, who was brought up in Egypt and wrote Moo Pak, one of literature's most brilliant monologues of frustrated authorship. Ram is an engaging character, the kind of young man you would like to have for dinner, or sleep with. I had feared it might be a piece of ancien regime nostalgia, but no, far from it, this is more a novel of love, leftist politics and alienation. Ram doesn't fit in anywhere, certainly not in 1950s London, where he shares a roof for a year with a loud-mouthed but big-hearted Irishman, nor in the salons of bourgeois Cairo, with its cosmopolitan mix of Jewess heiresses and Coptic feudalists. Ram's women, Edna Salva and Didi Nackla, are of the kind every man dreams of -- elegant, refined, sensual, wealthy and strong-willed. When Ram visits Didi in her suite of the family mansion, where she binds books in leather, I was truly envious. I felt that Egypt hadn't changed that much -- such people still exists. It's strange how the country both attracts and generates such compelling people. Read it if you can find it.
But the reality of Waguih Ghali was a little more sombre. He moved into the London flat of publisher Diana Athill and killed himself there in 1969.

Whither the Arab Street

2005-08-29T23:26:00.000+03:00

Gordon Robison of the Middle East Media Project at the University of Southern California's Center for Public Diplomacy just doesn't ask the right people the right questions, so he ends up with a mishmash of contradictory ideas (thanks to Abu Aardvark for pointing me to this paper). Quite a few of them come from Kuwait, for example, which is the country least representative of the Arab consensus, the most sceptical of the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

There is no longer an Arab street in the Nasserite sense. That form of mass mobilisation became extinct decades ago. If Arab street means anything today, it must mean Arab public opinion where it differs from the policies of the national government. In that sense it's very much alive, and growing in strength, even if it is not often manifest in mass participation in street protests.

Most of these commentators mistakenly adopt an exclusive approach to the choices that Arab individuals make when they decide how to express themselves. They presuppose a dichotomy between concentrating on local issues such as political freedoms at home and wider pan-Arab issues such as solidarity with Palestinians, and likewise a dichotomy between vicarious politics through television chat and traditional political activity in the community.

I don't see those as choices. On the contrary, I see Arab satellite television stimulating debate and publicising dissident political activities simultaneously on local issues and on pan-Arab grievances. It was noticeable this year that without satellite television most Egyptians would never have heard of the Kefaya Movement. It was also evident that most members of Kefaya, especially the leftists and Islamists, felt just as strongly about Iraq and Palestine as in the old days. If they shouted more about domestic freedoms, it was because politics is the art of the possible and they saw a chink in the government's armour. But many of them made it very clear that an important objection to Hosni Mubarak was that he has made too many compromises to Israel and the United States.

Similarly, the very people who came out on the streets in Egypt and who are now taking part in dozens of civil society activities are the very same people who follow Arab satellite televisions and are guests on its programmes.

So when Daoud Kuttab says: "You have today a hundred Arab satellite stations, all rebroadcasting old Egyptian and old American movies. So what? ...Where is the content? We have to start working on content", then, I'm sorry, I don't know what he's talking about. It's hard to think of a single important subject that has not been debated in the finest detail on these channels, with every point of view at the table.

As for Hroub's rehashing of the "Arab conspiracy theory" trope, I'm amazed that he thinks that television has promoted that trend. On the contrary, it has reduced it. That's not to say that Arabs don't believe that political leaders in the United States, Britain and Israel have ulterior motives which they don't show in public. They do believe so, and they would be naive not to do so.

State Department Tries to Save Face

2005-08-29T22:49:00.000+03:00

It hasn't come up on the U.S. State Department website yet but I hear that spokesman Sean McCormack made a belated appeal to the Egyptian authorities today to let observers monitor next week's presidential elections. It's already too late to bring in international observers and the Presidential Election Commission has shown no interest in allowing formal monitoring of any kind whatsoever. Only a political decision at the highest level (President Mubarak) can make it possible at this stage. My assessment is that it isn't going to happen. The executive will say it's up the commission and the commission will say it can't change the rules, which make no provision for monitors. Deadlock. The request for monitors was the one specific proposal made by the Bush administration during the months of wrangling over the election procedures, so it is a serious snub. But Mubarak and the ruling party have calculated that the United States will get over it. They're probably right.

An update -- the text is now available. McCormack is right on (limited) access to the state media. The bigger problem has been the quality of the coverage, which has avoided debate and controversy. The pitch for monitors doesn't strike me as very forceful:

QUESTION: Egypt. There's going to be a presidential election in nine days. We're in full campaign. I was wondering if you could give us the United States' impression of whether or not this is unfolding as a free and fair election, and specifically on two points: one is that the critics are saying that the President is monopolizing the media, getting all the media coverage, and there's none available to his opponents. And second, that there's considerable concern over the fact there will not be independent monitors at the polls.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right. Well, I'm going to defer on any sort of final assessment of the, not only election day but the run-up to the election -- run-up to election day. As you've heard -- as you rightly mention -- one of our -- one of the issues that we raise in Egypt as well as other countries around the world is the fact that it's not just election day that matters, it's the run-up to the election and then, post election day, the counting of ballots and the announcement of electoral results.

I think you have seen other presidential candidates with access to the media. We have -- we encourage the Egyptian Government to make available or to ensure that candidates do have equitable access to media so that they can talk to the Egyptian people about their vision for Egypt's future.

So again, any sort of final assessment or sort of midterm assessments, I'm not going to do any sort of midterm assessments or play-by-plays on this. What we'll do is we'll take a look at the entire -- we'll take a look at the entire run-up to the election, the election day and the post-election period and we'll have some comment at that point.

QUESTION: You're not going to say anything about abuses that occur in the run-up to the election?

MR. MCCORMACK: Again, we will try to comment on specific matters for you. But as a matter of doing an assessment of where we stand now, we've said that we encourage the Egyptian Government to make available to -- or ensure, equitable access to media and that the run-up to the election period is one in which other presidential candidates can speak directly to the Egyptian people, whether that's through the media or in person.

As for the issue of election monitors, we urge the Egyptian Government to allow in election monitors, election observers. This is something we ourselves have done in our last presidential election. Other countries around the world have had election observers, election monitors. This is, you know, not a comment on any particular government or the state of their democracy. It is something that is commonly done. It certainly allows the world to get an independent picture of the electoral process and any issues that might arise during the electoral process. This is something that we encourage around the world and we urge the Egyptian Government to agree to let in election observers.

QUESTION: Sean, a follow-up. You've made your position clear and they said, "no." Do you have a reaction to that?

MR. MCCORMACK: We continue to urge the Egyptian Government to do so.

QUESTION: Just for the record, you have routinely in past elections in other countries offered, as you call them, "mid-term assessments," with value judgments about what is going on. And I take it, you're not prepared to do that in the Egyptian case?

MR. MCCORMACK: If we have a particular point that we like to make, as we go through the run-up to the election, we'll be happy to share that with you.

QUESTION: Sean, one more on this. Are you looking at these elections as being in any way democratic?

MR. MCCORMACK: Again, let's take a look at the entire electoral process before we have -- you know, make any final pronouncements on the run-up to the process as well as the elections themselves. I would note that this is a step in the right direction, in terms of opening up the Egyptian political system in which you have multiple candidates from different parties participating in this election. So we will take a look at the entire process once it's over with. But the fact that you do have a multi-candidate election is a step in the right direction. It's a positive development.

QUESTION: Can I just ask just -- one of your first answers you did say that some of the opposition candidates were getting access to the media? Is that what you said? Is that your --

MR. MCCORMACK: That's my understanding.

Michael Oren's Other Life

2005-08-29T00:22:00.000+03:00

Now I know why I couldn't read beyond page 60 of Michael Oren's Six Days of War, which I started on the assumption that it was the work of a serious historian. It wasn't that I doubted his facts; it was just that the work was embued with a certain offensive attitude towards the non-Jewish participants. Oren turns out to be a reserve officer in the Israel Offense Forces and took part in the operation to evict Jewish settlers from Gaza. This is his account. Among the many sentences I found a little partisan for a historian:

-- For the first time in history -- ancient or modern -- that state (Israel) would send its army not to protect Jews from foreign attack, but to evict them from what many regarded as their God-given land, in Gaza.

-- I wanted to end Israel's occupation of Gaza's 1.4 million Palestinians and preserve Israel's Jewish majority, but feared abetting the terrorists' claim that Israel had fled under fire.

-- I wanted the state to have borders that all Israelis could defend, but balked at returning to the indefensible pre-1967 borders.

-- Nothing in my 25-year army experience had prepared me for the horror of Jews fighting Jews. (Note: Much worse than people fighting people)

-- Could the army, which through successive wars strove to "protect the lives, limbs and property" of enemy noncombatants, now forcibly evict a civilian Jewish population?

-- The battalion commander ... reiterated the need to show sensitivity to the settlers' pain. (I'm sure they do that too before they demolish Palestinian houses).

-- Eventually, though, each of the families was led onto the evacuation bus, leaving the soldiers emotionally drained but also resolved to proceed to the next household, the next excruciating tragedy.

-- I am not ashamed but deeply proud of the IDF, its strength as well as its humanity.

By the end of his account, I was in tears.

Another Bright Idea -- the Malayan Example

2005-08-28T23:47:00.000+03:00

It's the season for more bright ideas about Iraq, rather belatedly. David Brooks in the New York Times invokes the example of the Malayan Emergency, repeatedly cited as the only successful counter-insurgency operation of the 20th century. Strategists have tried to pin down the factors which enabled the Malayan government and its British allies to win. But surely the Malayan insurgency is the exception that proves the rule -- it's very difficult for a foreign imperialist army to defeat a guerrilla force which is highly motived and embedded in the community. The same British Empire or its successors failed in one way or another in Aden, Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, the Suez Canal Zone, the United States in the 18th century and ultimately in Kenya. The list of failures by other European powers is very long. Here's the Wikipedia account of the factors which distinguished it from Vietnam:

Although the conflicts in Malaya and Vietnam differed on many points in so far as the details of their wars, it has been asked time and again by historians as to how a British force of 35,000 succeeded where over a half million soldiers of the U.S. and others failed. One of the main points that differentiated the two was that the MLRA never had a dependable ally close at hand like the Viet Cong did with the North Vietnamese Army.

The MLRA (the Malayan insurgent movement) was also, as mentioned above, a political movement almost entirely limited to ethnic Chinese; support among Muslim Malayans and smaller tribes was scattered if existent at all. The British war effort never suffered from anything approaching the criticism that hammered the U.S. in Vietnam, and the USSR and China were too involved in Korea to give serious aid to the MLRA. Also, many Malayans had fought side by side with the British against tbe Japanese occupation in World War II, including Chin Peng. This is in contrast to Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) where French colonial officials often operated as proxies and collaborators to the Japanese. This factor of trust between the locals and the colonials was what gave the British an advantage on the French and later, the Americans in Vietnam, Commonwealth troops saw ordinary civilians as allies, not enemies.

As with so many complex historic events, it's not always possible to identify the decisive factors. Maybe the British just struck lucky.

Bush Terrorometer

2005-08-27T22:43:00.000+03:00

Everyone knows that one of President Bush's favourite words is terror and its derivatives, but just how frequently does he spout them? We're going to keep track at regular intervals.

Radio address, August 27 -- 10 terrors in 724 words: 1.38 percent of words uttered

Address to military families in Idaho, August 24 -- 45 terrors in 4,409 words: 1.02 percent of words uttered.

Wesley Clark Clutches at Straws

2005-08-27T22:04:00.000+03:00

When I read Wesley Clark in the Washington Post, I realised why I could never be an American. This political culture is just too lenient, too obsessed with consensus, too eager to give President Bush good advice, instead of giving him the boot. Perhaps it's because some of these people giving advice are complicit in the crime that was the invasion of Iraq, so they have their own reputations to protect. But it goes further than that. Many of them really believe that they can help Bush salvage something for the sake of U.S. interests, when to the most ignorant outsider it's obvious that the only way to undo the damage is to hold Bush and his administration accountable for all the lies and misjudgments they are responsible for. If that means impeachment, civil disobedience, mutiny in the armed forces, whatever, then so be it. Clark's 'remedies' are just so too little too late. Establishment figures like Clark just tinker around the edges, instead of going for the jugular. It was obvious to anyone who knows the Middle East that the U.S. invasion was doomed within weeks, probably from the start. My argument at the time was that the rewards of power in Iraq are so great that at any given time some group would be willing to fight U.S. forces for that prize as long as the U.S. military is present. That hasn't changed and it will not change. Iraq is not a normal country. In most countries, governing is a major headache, what with different interest groups lobbying for favours and limited resources with which to placate them. In Iraq, once a ruler obtains exclusive access to the oil revenues, which someone inevitably will do, he can pay most people off and have enough money spare to buy a ruthless security apparatus to oppress the others. That kind of privilege is worth fighting for. The most likely outcome is that the political force which emerges from the chaos will be the one that can claim credit for having done most to drive the United States out. Some victory.

Intellectuals for Cynicism

2005-08-27T20:51:00.000+03:00

Al Masry Al Yom, my favourite newspaper, interviewed nine writers and intellectuals about the presidential elections on September 7. The verdict is overwhelmingly cynical, fairly representative in my judgment of the attitude of the vast majority of Egyptians -- "but ne're so well expressed". The irony is that remarks like those of these Egyptians would not have seen the light of day last year, so something has changed. That raises the question of whether the Mubarak government can survive for another six, even 12 years, ignoring all the while the slings and arrows of powerless dissidents. I suspect it can. Here are some samples of what they said:

Dr Abdel Azim Anis on President Mubarak's campaign promises: "When he says he will fight unemployment and give jobs to three quarters of a million people, I ask: 'Why didn't he do that long ago? What was he waiting for? Why did unemployment increase while he was in office to this frightening extent? Who ripped up land reform from the laws passed under (Gamal) Abdel Nasser and returned the land to the feudalists? Who privatised the factories and put them in the hands of foreigners? I cannot believe what he promises because we've had enough of talk remote from reality."

Dr Radwa Ashour (who refuses to vote): "The amendment to Article 76 (of the constitution, introducing multicandidate elections), as far as I'm concerned, was a farce and restricted any serious attempt to present rivals offering an alternative. So I feel that the faces who have come forward are just the decor in a play which is being put on for us."

Dr Mohamed Abdel Mutallib: "We have one candidate running against nine others who have joined the experiment to help the regime beautify its image... As long as President Mubarak is in power, he will win because all the executive bodies will work to ensire he wins without instructions from him. Why? Because the members of his retinue are more jealous of their own authority than of the president's power. So I see this battle as a kind of play for Egypt to present a democratic face to the world outside. I was coming from Mansoura (in the Nile Delta) today and I saw the candidates' banners hanging in the street. Ninety-nine percent were for the NDP candidate (Mubarak) and the other one percent, maybe less, for the others. Honestly I spoke to many of my relatives in Mansoura and found that their views are close to my own. They said it's like theatre. I won't go to vote and I haven't done that since the days of Abdel Nasser (died 1970)."

Novelist Mohamed el-Wardani: "They say we suffer from poverty and unemployment but how can that be when the editor in chief of a state newspaper just retired with 3.5 billion pounds ($600 million)? The president's aim is that every citizen should get 3.5 billion pounds, as well as a Rolls Royce and a Jaguar, and the president can fulfil his promises. In the past, whenever he promised anything, he did it. They say we live with corruption but corruption is a global phenomenon like torture, unemployment, poverty, ignorance, carcinogenic foodstuffs, polluted water, suppressing demonstrators and molesting women protesters. These phenomena continue within natural and acceptable levels. Are half the referendums and elections rigged just because it says so in a report from the Judges Club?"

Much more in this vein, with few holds barred.

Some poll 'data'

2005-08-26T23:28:00.000+03:00

The Arabist Network has assembled some Egyptian poll data, all hopelessly unscientific but it's all we have. It is indeed interesting that Ayman Nour is so far ahead of Noman Gomaa of the Wafd. There could be a grain of truth in that aspect of it, even if Ghad supporters are considerably more likely to respond to an Internet poll than Wafdists. That explains why the state newspaper al-Ahram is so keen to play down the Nour 'challenge' (challenge is rather too grand a word in this context!). In the meantime I've revised my estimates of the results the authorities will announce. They can't assign more than 10 percent to either Nour or Gomaa, for psychological reasons, and they have to give Gomaa more than Nour, so how about this: Gomaa 9 percent, Nour 7 percent, seven unknowns 2 percent between them, leaving Mubarak with the residue -- 82 percent.

For those who don't read Arabic, the poll on Manal and Alaa's site asks voters "In your opinion, what are the priorities for reform? 1. changing the type of jacket 2. changing the type of necktie 3. changing the type of boxers". I can't find the results but apparently boxers are winning. But the range of choices is decidedly sexist and some commentators suggest including some female garments.

Beer, Bibles and Condoms

2005-08-26T22:37:00.000+03:00

It's not quite sex, drugs and rock and roll, but it's moving in that direction. If you can take a country's social temperature by the billboards along its major highway, then Egypt seems to be changing. Driving to Alexandria and back today, I noticed three new sets of massive advertisements that might not have been so prominent a while back.

Al Ahram Beverages has launched a campaign to sell Stella beer, its basic brand, using rustic types instead of the jetsetters you might expect in a country where alcohol advertisers have usually targeted the upper middle class. Heineken, which al Ahram brews locally under licence, has had large advertisements for a while but the imagery is very discrete (the word Heineken is in tiny print, for example) and the text is all in English, so the devout Muslim who happens to be passing would hardly notice them. Now we have Amm Abdu the Upper Egyptian peasant, in white galabia and turban, brazenly swigging it straight from the bottle. Another ad in the series has a group of his friends, perhaps at the circumcision party for the village chief's baby son, having the time of their lives. I say circumcision party because some years back, stranded in the Upper Egyptian town of Baliana (near the Abydos temple) for the night, I ended up at just such a party. The Stella flowed, a thick cloud of hashish billowed out of the tent and the village chief was just about able to stand to do his stick dance with the bellydancer, well past her prime, that they managed to rustle up. A good time was had by all.

Durex, the British condom maker, also has advertisements, not so surprising perhaps since few Muslims have ever been puritanical about sex for pleasure and family planning is government policy. The slogan, if I recall correctly, was "Pleasure We Wish", in English, and the image included the faces of a man and a woman, smiling at each other.

The third advertisement, in Arabic, struck me as truly novel -- promoting the reading of the Bible (al-ingil). The exact wording escapes me but it played on the rhyme between ingil and gil ('generation'). Something along the lines of "The Book for Every Generation". The advertisers are an institution called Dar al-Kitab al-Muqaddas (the Holy Book Establishment), which I then noticed runs a book stall selling bibles and other Christian literature at the highway resthouse half way between Cairo and Alexandria. I understand that the stall has been there a while but the adverts are new.

Talking of beer, I noticed the number of Egyptians drinking the stuff openly on the beach this year. Some of the bins contained many empty cans. In the United States, you'd be hard pressed to find any public beach where you could drink a beer without some officious busybody telling you there's a law against it. In the United States, there's a law against everything. In Egypt, the police assume there's a law against anything but can usually be persuaded otherwise.

Presidential Props

2005-08-26T12:09:00.000+03:00

Al Masry Al Yom, still streets ahead of the rest of the Egyptian press, has a lovely story about the farmer and his wife who served tea to President Mubarak when he did his pitch to farmers out in Nubaria earlier this week. Nubaria is reclaimed land on the western edge of the Nile Delta -- a symbol of Mubarak's efforts to expand agriculture beyond the traditional confines of the Nile Valley. The farmer in question was Kamal el-Maraghi and his wife was Sana Ahmed Mohamed. Mubarak turned up at their hut in the fields 'unexpectedly' as part of his election campaign and had a relaxed chat with them. But Al Masry Al Yom writes: "When we asked about the hut in which he (Maraghi) drank tea with the president, the surprise was that it was removed after the president's visit after it had played its role in showing citizens the simplicity of the ruling party candidate (Mubarak)." Inverted Potemkinism.

Rather like Laura Bush's visit to an Alexandria school earlier this year. The Egyptian authorities told the usual schoolchildren not to come that day and brought in a more presentable group from another school. Traditional Potemkinism.

Jazeera Poll

2005-08-25T20:35:00.000+03:00

Out of 32,163 respondents to an Internet poll by Al Jazeera, held over three days, 93.1 percent said they did not think there were equal opportunities for the candidates in the Egyptian presidential elections. The remaining 6.9 percent said they did. It's a badly phrased question, anyway, because it could also equal chances of winning.

Is al-Ahram Listening?

2005-08-25T20:03:00.000+03:00

Has the Egyptian state newspaper al-Ahram been listening to criticisms of its election coverage, which has mainly been hopelessly biased in favour of President Hosni Mubarak? Has it taken action to improve its image? That's the obvious conclusion from today's coverage, which has the headline: "Civil Society Organisations Insist on Their Role in Observing Presidential Elections". Not only that, but apart from the photograph of Mubarak meeting Abu Mazen (Mubarak as head of state rather than presidential candidate), the only other front-page photograph is of Noman Gomaa of the Wafd Party. There's a story behind that -- al-Ahram has been promoting Gomaa as Mubarak's main rival, deliberately to belittle Ayman Nour of the Ghad Party, who has more 'name recognition' than Gomaa and poses more of a long-term threat to the Mubaraks and the ruling National Democratic Party. Nour's party has more seats in parliament but the al-Ahram editors argue that the Wafd has the weight of history and Ghad is merely an insignificant offshoot. The historic argument is compelling -- the Wafd dates back to 1919, while Nour received permission to set up his party only in late 2004 -- but so what? At a wild guess, I would say 30 percent of Egyptians know the name Ayman Nour, against maybe 5 percent for Noman Gomaa. My bet is that the results will be carefully 'arranged' to make sure Gomaa comes out ahead of Nour, to put him back in his place.

As for the civil society story, it doesn't say much and explains even less. It merely reports that human rights groups are in touch with the Presidential Election Commission and the ministries of justice and the interior to explain their desire to observe the elections with official approval. But it adds: "Counsellor Osama Atawia, the secretary general of the Presidential Election Commission, said the commission has not received any letters from governmental or non-governmental agencies which include the carrying out of any coordination work on the election process." It's strange how that commission never seems to receive anything sent to it.

Where 'El Negro' was (Recently) a Sign of Affection

2005-08-25T17:02:00.000+03:00

Venezuela's a long way from the Middle East and I have never been there. But we shouldn't let distance and some cultural differences stand between us and solidarity with supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, most of whom are poor and black. Johann Hari, writing in The Independent, gives a good overview of the class and race aspects of the polarisation of Venezuelan society -- another version of the political distortions that oil revenues bring. Note this:

How much of the division in Venezuela is based on race? Although there are exceptions, the wealthy elite tends to be white, and the skin tone gets darker the farther you go into the barrios. In the newspapers - which are all anti-Chavez - the depictions of the President in cartoons look like Ku Klux Klan propaganda, wildly exaggerating the thick curliness of his hair and the indigenous slant to his features. "Oh, there was no problem with racism before Chavez," Ellie tells me. "You know, it used to be a sign of affection to call somebody el negro. If you had a slow member of your family, that's what you would say. But now, since Chavez, people have begun to think it is racist!"

How quaint! Chavez may occasionally say some foolish things and propose some foolish policies but he always struck me as the authentic voice of Venezuela's poor. The editorial writers at the Washington Post, predictably enough, seem to be blissfully ignorant of the state of affairs:

Mr. Chavez, who, like Mr. Robertson, is infatuated with the absurd, fancies that the United States is out to kill him. It so happens that Mr. Chavez, when not meddling in the affairs of his neighbors and spawning anti-democratic movements, seems to enjoy portraying himself as a target of U.S. assassins -- a charge that he makes without evidence and that has been strongly denied by the Bush administration.

Strongly denied by the Bush administration! Gosh, then it can't possibly be true, can it? That's funny, I remember former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich positively glowing with delight when he thought the coup against Chavez had succeeded.

If it comes to taking sides, I know which side I am on.

2005-08-25T16:16:00.000+03:00

No Representation without Taxation

Philip Bobbitt, writing in The Guardian, argues that the Iraqis writing the constitution missed an opportunity to immunise themselves (to some extent) against future tyranny. They could and should have distributed oil revenues among citizens directly, and then taxed the citizens in the normal manner, instead of giving the government the power to distribute them as it sees fit. Quite right. But the drafters have little incentive to do that. Many of them hope and expect to get their fingers in the oil pie to pay for their favourite projects and pad their bank accounts. As far as I know Alaska is the only polity in the world to distribute the proceeds from oil directly to its citizens, through the Alaska Permanent Fund. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi proposed a similar arrangement for his country a couple of years ago but it has not come into effect.

2005-08-25T10:25:00.000+03:00

Rentier States Again

John Gray, in his review in the New Year Review of Books of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (by all accounts, his silliest yet), challenges Friedman's argument in favour of energy independence for the United States. This is what Friedman says:

If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia on the path of reform—which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil—strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming.

Gray retorts:

While greater energy independence may be an American national interest the notion that it would force recalcitrant countries onto a path of neoliberal reform is wishful thinking. A large drop in the oil price would surely destabilize the rentier economies of the Gulf and Central Asia, from Saudi Arabia to Turkmenistan, and in some countries could lead to the establishment of democratic rule. However, in a number of cases the chief beneficiary would likely be fundamentalism. Does Friedman really believe that democracy in Saudi Arabia would produce a liberal, pro-Western regime? In this and other countries, American energy independence could well further the advance of radical Islam.

It's an important question and it's hard to answer decisively. But a large drop in the oil price would weaken the Saudi government, make it more responsive to the demands of Saudi citizens (even their Islamist citizens), and drive more young Saudis into the private sector, where they would need real skills and would have to compete with their peers. The government might have to raise taxes and would have to explain to people how it planned to use the money. Saudis would try to hold their rulers much more accountable for government revenue than they have in the past.

Are those not outcomes that are good in themselves, regardless of whether they serve American interests? What Saudi Arabia needs to become is a normal society with real politics. It's the government's monopoly of oil revenues that prevents that happening. Whether Islamists take power or not is irrelevant. Anyway, aren't the Islamists already in power in Saudi Arabia? What more could they impose in the way of a conservative social agenda?

Saudi Arabia is a special case because of its enormous reserves and large investment in production capacity. Even if oil ceases to go up in smoke as fuel, it will still find a ready market as feedstock in the petrochemical industry. In fact, that's what oil should be used for. Burning oil is like burning mahogany trees instead of turning them into fine furniture.

2005-08-24T22:37:00.000+03:00

Middle East Democracy

Anyone interested in the great debate on democracy in the Middle East and U.S. policy has to read these two articles:

Gregory Gause, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues persuasively that promoting democracy in the Middle East may not help reduce "terrorism" arising in the region. He goes on to saying that Islamists hostile to the United States would be the most likely beneficiaries of elections in many Arab countries, so Washington should concentrate instead of promoting secular liberals. This is the crucial section:

The United States must focus on pushing Arab governments to make political space for liberal, secular, leftist, nationalist, and other non-Islamist parties to set down roots and mobilize voters. Washington should support those groups that are more likely to accept U.S. foreign policy and emulate U.S. political values. The most effective way to demonstrate that support is to openly pressure Arab regimes when they obstruct the political activity of more liberal groups -- as the administration did with Egypt after the jailing of the liberal reformers Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Ayman Nour, and as it should do with Saudi Arabia regarding the May sentencing of peaceful political activists to long prison terms. But Washington will also need to drop its focus on prompt elections in Arab countries where no strong, organized alternative to Islamist parties exists -- even at the risk of disappointing Arab liberals by being more cautious about their electoral prospects than they are.

That's what the Bush administration has already done in practice, particularly in the case of Egypt. They just haven't yet found a way to explain this approach in public in terms that don't appear entirely opportunistic and unprincipled.

Of course, such a policy doesn't appeal much to me, because what's good for the United States is not necessarily in my interests. I'm not alone either -- there are some 300 million Arabs who don't share U.S. interests, so as a practical policy this is going to be a hard sell. It opens the floodgates to more accusations -- entirely justified -- of a double standard. The United States would promote elections in countries where their favourites are likely to win, but bide their time in other countries until the secular liberals are strong enough to compete. Isn't that just a more sophisticated version of the old policy of the past 50 years, adjusted to account for the fact that elections have become more competitive in the Arab world?

The second article, by Steve Cook of the Council of Foreign Relations, published in Slate, starts off by accepting the Arab Spring myth and then, to some extent, debunking it. So in the end it's not really clear where Cook stands. When I read this: "Even the most cynical observers of the region have a sense that the status quo is crumbling", my immediate thought was: "Am I really even more cynical than the most cynical observers?" How cynical can I be? But then Cook reassured me: "What is happening in Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan is illustrative of the state of affairs throughout the Middle East. Not a pretty picture of democracy on the march, but rather of the all-too-familiar image of regimes using their considerable power to manage, deflect, co-opt, and repress opposition under the guise of reform." That's more like it. At least in Egypt, there's nothing to suggest that the status quo is crumbling. Hosni Mubarak will win another six years in office and his son Gamal has a good chance of succeeding him in 2011. The status quo has had to adapt, allow Egyptians a little more leeway, but the levers of power remain firmly where they were.

Interestingly, neither of the articles mentions the contribution the United States could make to Arab democracy by some hard work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Take an example that arose today. Israeli officials said a new agreement with Egypt on the Gaza-Egypt border includes a provision that Egypt will not allow arms deliveries to the Palestinian Authority without Israeli approval. What democratic government in the Arab world could accept such a provision and defend it in open debate against a credible opposition? Of course, the government would be pilloried, and rightly so. Even if the opposition had no intention of supplying the Palestinian Authority with weapons which might provoke a conflict with Israel, the democratically elected government of a proud nation could not permit such third-party intervention in a sovereign decision. Of course, what will happen is that the provision will remain secret, the Egyptian government will never acknowledge that it exists and even the opposition press will not dare to publicise it. That's what tame Arab governments are for.

2005-08-24T00:41:00.000+03:00

Fareed Zakaria talks about Rentier States

With a few quibbles here and there, I'm delighted to see Fareed Zakaria air the rentier state phenomenon in The Washington Post. But it's not true that "Tehran has launched a breathtakingly ambitious foreign policy". It's merely protecting its own interests in what the neoconservatives themselves like to call a dangerous neighbourhood. Iranian foreign policy has been remarkably defensive for many years, at least compared with U.S. policy. In Iraq, it's mainly filling the vacuum created by the United States. Also, I don't believe militant Islamists need Saudi or Iranian money, even if they have sometimes taken it.

2005-08-24T00:29:00.000+03:00

Secret Visit to Mrs Rumsfeld

This raised a titter. You can always trust The Onion. How's this for an immortal line: "Despite the hurried nature of the visit, I am proud to report that my wife met and exceeded the operational standards set by the U.S. military for readiness in a two-front war."

2005-08-23T23:35:00.000+03:00

Dem Muslim Bruthas

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (their website seems to be blocked, at least in Egypt) has taken an evasive position on the country's presidential elections on September 7 -- take part but don't vote for a tyrant. After Brotherhood leader Mohamed Mahdi Akef said repeatedly early this year that the Mubarak regime was finished and its cosmetic reforms were meaningless, no one is any doubt about who he means by the tyrant, but why is the Brotherhood so reluctant to name him, or indeed to endorse an opposition candidate who promises to let the Brotherhood into the political system and release Brotherhood detainees?

My interpretation is this:

Firstly, the Brotherhood sees no purpose in antagonising Mubarak and his retinue when it knows that Mubarak is going to win the elections. After his victory, Mubarak could turn around and crack down again, adding to the number of Brothers in detention. Detainees are a major grievance among the Brotherhood, because so many of them are in jail, including some very senior figures. The families and colleagues of the detainees constantly press Akef to secure their release. Their freedom was one of the demands the Brotherhood reportedly put to the government in secret negotiations on whether the movement might possibly support Mubarak. Those negotiations clearly came to nothing.

Secondly, the Muslim Brotherhood has waited more than 75 years to reach power and believes that another six years (the length of Mubarak's next term, if he survives) won't make much difference. In the meantime, it has two parliamentary elections to fight and it wants to make sure that the rules for those elections are as favourable as possible to its own members. In other words, it wants minimal restrictions on independent candidates. A confrontation at this stage, which the Brotherhood would surely lose, could complicate that endeavour.

Thirdly, the only alternative candidate the Brotherhood could plausibly support in the presidential elections is Ayman Nour of the liberal Ghad Party, who openly favours recognition of the Brotherhood as a political movement with its own party, if that's what it decides it wants. But its members don't like Nour's other policies and the Brotherhood hates to play second fiddle to a fledgling political party which is a fraction of the size of the Brotherhood. The Ghad Party, for example, favours a single Egyptian 'civil status' law covering marriage, divorce and inheritance. Because of the Coptic factor, such a law would inevitably be a compromise between traditional Islamic law and positive secular law. That's hard for many of the Brothers to accept. Whenever the subject of Ayman Nour and the Ghad Party comes up, Brotherhood leaders are dismissive of their credentials. They see them as parvenus, possibly as opportunists, against the background of their own long struggle and their service to the community over many decades.

By the way, Charles Levinson has a good overview of the elections in the Christian Science Monitor, but I detect a tendency to exaggerate the level of public interest in the campaigning. Turnout at rallies has not been heavy and none of the candidates have done or said anything controversial. Indeed, bizarrely for a presidential campaign, they have hardly mentioned each other at all. Mubarak's speeches have entirely ignored the existence of rivals. The opposition candidates have been soft on Mubarak, speaking vaguely about change and reform. And Mubarak, one week into the campaign, has still NOT ANSWERED A SINGLE QUESTION IN PUBLIC. Shame on him.

2005-08-22T23:09:00.000+03:00

Mamnou9 al-Duxoul

The chairman of the Presidential Election Commission, against which there is no appeal, said on Egyptian television that no one other than members of the judiciary and the representatives of candidates (and voters, of course) will be able to enter polling stations on presidential election day, September 7. Nor will the commission have any dealings with NGOs which want to monitor voting. That pretty well drives the last nail in to the coffin of any attempt to organise systematic teams of local or international observers. The arrangements are neatly structured to ensure that the authorities can make up any result they want, with plausible deniability intact. If anyone asks the government to let in observers, they will answer that it's all in the hands of the judiciary. If anyone ask the commission, it will answer that it has no mandate to change the arrangements. The chairman, Mamdouh Marei, also says he only needs 650 to 700 judges, posted at the main polling stations. That will leave more than 20,000 small polling stations in the hands of junior clerks, suspectible to official threats and/or inducements which some judges might have the integrity to resist. This was the outcome I expected. Without monitoring, external monitoring or comprehensive judicial supervision, the result will be entirely meaningless, because no one need believe it and anyone can dispute it. The trick for the authorities is to dream up some result which looks roughly plausible, not such a big majority for Hosni Mubarak that people will joke about it, yet not so small that people will think the opposition parties are making serious inroads. My guess -- 78 percent. Let history judge.

2005-08-22T08:20:00.000+03:00

Recantation

It looks like I was a little hasty in judging Barenboim on the basis of the Independent report. As Nur al-Cubicle points out, Barenboim's position is much more committed to a political solution than the Independent suggested. This story throws more light on it.

2005-08-21T23:06:00.000+03:00

Daniel Barenboim and Flying Kites for Peace

I was really reluctant to find fault with Daniel Barenboim and his success in bringing Israeli and Palestinian musicians together for a concert in Ramallah. But in the end, it has to go into the same category as such activities as flying kites for peace and the silly Seeds of Peace programme run by Aaron Miller after the State Department ran out of pointless tasks for him to perform. I know Barenboim has his heart in the right place, and he was a friend of Edward Said's, but this argument just is not convincing:

"This is not a project for peace," says Barenboim, "it is a fight against ignorance. Music is not only a way to forget the world, sitting down with a double whisky and listening. It is about integration. Every musician who plays two notes, who includes dynamics, tone and pitch, is engaged in an act of integration."

In this way, Barenboim sees the Divan as having a practical purpose. "We cannot talk about ideology first," he says, "because what is required is not a political solution but a change in the mode of thinking. So don't ask which comes first, the chicken or the egg. We must make the plate warm enough so we can have both the chicken and the egg."

There's no harm in Israeli and Palestinians playing music together, far from it, but it call it "an act of integration" which will change modes of thinking and keep the plate warm for a political solution is pure fantasy. As the Angry Arab noted, Palestinians don't want a chance to play music with Israelis. They want their land back. If Barenboim means that Israelis who play music with Palestinians will suddenly understand that basic and just demand, then I'll recant. But I don't hear him saying that.

2005-08-21T22:36:00.000+03:00

Stamping out Disinformation

I was amused to read of the Bush administration's latest plan to improve its image in the Arab and Muslim worlds. In essence, it's more of the same failed attempts of the past. But this time, they pretty much give up before they've even started:

Mr. Djerejian said that in talking with Ms. Hughes and Ms. Rice, it was clear that they understood that roughly 80 percent of the explanation for the poor American image stemmed from American policies, but that much could be done to improve the communication of those policies to affect the other 20 percent.

They don't intend to revise any policies, however, presumably because that would be 'giving in to terrorists'. The funny thing about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is that 90 percent of Americans would want it changed, if they knew what it is and what effects it has for Americans as a whole. More of that another time.

A central feature of the 'new' approach is the creation of rapid response teams to counter disinformation in the Arab media. In fact, the U.S. State Department launched such a programme months ago. Here's the latest version of it. But it doesn't appear to have been updated since May. Even when it was updated, it picked on reports that were so peripheral and obscure that 20 percent is a gross exaggeration. More like a fraction of one percent. But as Hisham Milhem, I believe, once said, every time Bush opens his mouth at an event covered by Al Jazeera or Al Arabia, he undoes the work of 1,000 diplomats. With competition like that, it's a Sisyphean task.

2005-08-21T21:10:00.000+03:00

Relentless hagiographers

Osama Soraya and Mohamed Ali Ibrahim, the new editors in chief at state newspapers al-Ahram and al-Gomhuria, couldn't keep their election resolutions of impartiality for long. I imagine them torn between uncertainty about the future, which might have inspired them to tone down the sycophantic tone of their predecessors, and anxiety to prove their worth as cheerleaders for the man who appointed them and who could throw them out any time over the next six years, President Hosni Mubarak. Osama Soraya, whose first few weeks in office have confirmed expectations that he can lick ass with the best of them, even had the cheek to tell British ambassador Sir Derek Plumbly that al-Ahram would cover the presidential election campaign with complete neutrality -- and then have a story to that effect planted in his own newspaper. But come last Friday, he was back at work, playing piper to the man who calls the tune, and in what execrable style! Here's a sample:

In his speech on Wednesday, President Mubarak launched the hopes of the millions of Egyptians for a new stage in Egyptian politics and elaborated the meaning of real change, setting out a comprehensive plan for national action over the next six years. He tackled our problems with daring and offered creative solutions in a framework based on commitment to implementation. He revealed to us, in facts and figures, and in depth enhanced by simplicity, what Egypt has been able to achieve, and explained to us how we were and how we have become. He went beyond the traditional language of election candidates, which resorts to propaganda and slogans which do not have content capable of lasting in the minds of the people...

Columns and columns of this complete drivel for Egyptians to read over breakfast on their day off, in a newspaper supposedly owned by the state and/or the people.

Mohamed Ali Ibrahim, formerly editor of the English-language Egyptian Gazette, the shame of Egypt for the opportunities it has missed to serve credibly the country's substantial community of non-Arabic speakers, attempts to answer the question "What's new in Mubarak's election promises, and since he's been around so long (24 years), why hasn't he done all this before?" But he obviously feels more comfortable in simple hagiographic mode:

When he made his speech launching his election campaign for a new term, Hosni Mubarak was not speaking as a president of the republic who enjoys the powers of that position and is surrounded by the awe and majesty of the office and by his status as an Arab and regional leader attested by his foes as much as by his friends. He was speaking as a simple Egyptian citizen who shares with the people their daily troubles and understands the extent of the worries that they carry on their shoulders. Through his clear programme, he gave people hope that the years of tightening their belts and of suffering from the hardship of life will soon end. Egyptians felt that the candidate of the National (Democratic) Party was not speaking to them as president, but as the head of a family like them, concerned with everything that concerns them when they sit together in private, in cafes or when they meet their children and their wives at the end of a hard day's work, around a modest table, sharing simple food and dreaming of things they believe are impossible...

Somebody somewhere should tell these people two simple words -- kefaya ba'a.

2005-08-21T15:32:00.000+03:00

Kenneth Pomeranz cited in The Guardian

Dr Richard Drayton of Cambridge University has an excellent piece in the Grauniad on the contribution Africa unwittingly made to the economic development of western Europe -- a subject close to my heart and mind. For the first time I came across a reference in the Mainstream Media to Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence, a real eye-opener for those of us brought up on a diet of Eurocentrism in forms of varying virulence. When I see the name of J.M. Blaut on the op-ed page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, then I will know that the world is changing -- in the right direction.

2005-08-21T00:41:00.000+03:00

Trillion Dollar Mind Games

This article by Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Commerce, should make people stop and think. I remember calculating even before the invasion of Iraq that the likely cost of the conflict (about $200 billion was the rough estimate at the time) would be enough to convert a quarter of U.S. electricity generation to wind power. Just think what you could do with $1.3 trillion (that's $1,300 billion, in case you're confused). You could probably make serious inroads into the U.S. dependency on imported fuels by installing renewable energy installations (solar, wind, tide etc) and still have plenty of spare cash for throwing at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of course, money isn't the only solution but it sure helps. Even those ideologically driven settlers on the West Bank have their price and it might be worth paying it if it led to a viable Palestinian state in all the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. There would even be money to compensate Palestinian refugees for the loss of their property in 1948. Reducing demand for oil (and hence the price of oil) is the single most important step the world could make towards political reform in the Arab world. Mainstream pundits (Tom Friedman, occasionally, to his credit) hint at this from time to time but they don't have the courage to take up this cause and run with it. I'll explain why in greater detail some other time, but in the meantime consult other sources on the rentier state phenomenon -- the bane of the Middle East for the past 40 years.

2005-08-19T22:22:00.000+03:00

The Islamic Reformation Will Not be Televised

Salman Rushdie delighted his audience with his appeal in the Washington Post for an Islamic Reformation. As the Angry Arab recently wrote, there's a massive appetite "for those Muslims who are willing to blame Islam and all Muslims (and even Falafil) for the violent deeds of individual Muslims", though Rushdie may not really count as a Muslim (that's for him to decide). I was away at the beach at the time so I'm coming to this rather late, after much ink has already flowed. Besides, it's a big subject that requires much thought. But an idea does occur to me that I certainly haven't come across anywhere else, so I will share it with you.

Perhaps the Islamic Reformation started centuries ago but the world either did not notice or did not like what it saw, so it gave the movement a different name. "Reformation" sounds like it must be good, but that's mainly because it was the start of a process which led, after many twists and turns, to the Enlightenment, secularism, modernity, freedom of thought and all those wonderful things we cherish. But that's not how it started. The European Reformation began as a reactionary movement, claiming to restore the purity of early Christianity and purge the accretions and corruptions of subsequent centuries, especially the folklore elements which had crept into the beliefs of simple Christians, deprived of sound instruction. It was iconoclastic, intolerant and literalist. A central feature of early Protestant teaching was the emphasis it placed on the text of the Bible, which the reformers said should be as widely available as possible. Calvin and his colleagues did not espouse some relativist or post-modernist approach to biblical interpretation, seeing the text in the context of 1st century Palestine and the conflict between Roman imperialism, Jewish particularism and Greek cultural hegemony. They did not want to bring Christianity into some modern age. Anyone who wants to understand the true nature of the European Reformation must read R.H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, first published in 1926 but still as brilliant as ever.

Now, I don't have much faith in cross-cultural historical parallels, especially ones that assume that the world of Islam will obediently track Christendom, with a time-lag of 500 years or so. But it was Rushdie who used the term 'an Islamic Reformation', so I suspect that a model of that kind was at the back of his mind.

In that case, the very Wahhabis and their ideological heirs and companions, including the Muslim Brotherhood and countless other splinter groups of Islamists, are or were the counterparts of the Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabapists, Levellers and others who took part in the European Reformation. In other words, the Islamic Reformation started in the late 18th century and has accelerated with mass education, urbanisation and easy means of proselytisation. One of the characteristics of Islamism has been its rejection of folk Islam -- the Islam of illiterate peasants in isolated communities -- in favour of a more homogenised text-based Islam supposedly closer to the original.

So what happens next? I hesitate to predict but already we see signs of a counter-Islamism within Islam, not a return to folk Islam based on superstition, but a transition to exactly the kind of Islam that Rushdie appears to advocate. In fact, that kind of Islam is probably the majority version already, although many practioners are lying low because of the widespread feeling that the Muslim community as a whole is under threat. Solidarity matters. It's a fantasy for Rushdie to suppose that "governments and community leaders inside the Muslim world" are going to take sides in that battle of ideas. Just as in Europe, it will be a few brave men and women who lead the way. The great Voltaire, remember, perhaps the paragon of Enlightenment thinking, was born in 1694, more than 200 years after Martin Luther. Until the 18th century, deism, let alone atheism, were dangerous doctrines. Bishop Ussher, who calculated from biblical genealogies that the world was created in 4004 BC, published his masterpiece in 1650. At the time, most Englishmen believed it.

2005-08-18T23:14:00.000+03:00

Itxana'na

The opposition Wafd Party's presidential election campaign ads, with the prominent slogan Itxana'na ('We're fed up' or more literally 'We've been strangled') raised some eyebrows at Egyptian state television -- for decades a bastion of ruling party godfather Safwat el-Sherif, now the speaker of the upper house of parliament. Not since Egyptian television began broadcasting, during the days of late President Gamal Abdel Nasser, has such direct criticism of the establishment appeared on the airwaves. But the slogan did slip through, after much resistance, and it also appeared in major state newspapers, along with portraits of a representative sample of exasperated Egyptian men (silly of the Wafdists not to include some women). Here it is on the Wafd Party website. I love those puffed cheeks. So far, the state media have behaved much better than most of us expected in their coverage of the election campaign which began on Wednesday. My guess is that everyone is on their best behaviour while the ruling party assesses the lie of the land. The real test will come on polling day, September 7, and Mubarak's National Democratic Party has a wide range of options for ensuring a comfortable if not overwhelming victory.

The slogan is pleasingly colloquial -- another sign of the opposition trying to reach out to the largely illiterate masses. Along with Kefaya and Shayfeencom, there's definitely a trend away from the formal language of the past. In contrast, the ruling party's slogan -- Leadership and Passage to the Future -- is hopelessly sterile.

Incidentally, the blueness which surrounded Mubarak's previous speech (see my earlier blog) has died a death and the National Democratic Party has reverted to the safety of green -- Islam's favourite colour.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch visited but, at least in public, did not push the demand for international moniting of the presidential elections. His remarks confirm that as long as Mubarak's people don't do anything outrageous before Sept. 8, he's home and dry for another six years, with Washington's blessing. Here are the relevant extracts from his remarks to Nile TV after he meet Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif:

A/S Welch: We want to have a positive agenda to move things forward in the coming months. There are elections here in Egypt. We also discussed that. I wanted to get his views on how he sees that process unfolding. I expressed the views of the United States that we'd like to see this be as open, as transparent, as orderly as the people of Egypt expect. This is a good strong country. The citizens want to play a part in political life and we want to see more of that.

Q: Ambassador Welch, how do you support the presidential elections that will be occurring in Egypt next month? And how do you support this process?

A/S Welch: Well, we support the decision of the Egyptian people. I think it's very important that they have a voice. It's not for us to decide. You know, it's part of life everywhere these days that elections attract a lot of attention. The Egyptian election is attracting a lot of attention. I'm confident it can be handled in a very good manner and show a positive example throughout the region. As you know, this country has a very big impact on this neighborhood, and I think people respect the decisions that have been made for change here in Egypt, and are looking also to see them implemented in a fair and responsible way.

Very bland, no feathers ruffled.

2005-08-18T18:26:00.000+03:00

Hysteria from Florida

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republic congresswoman from Florida, epitomises for me the blind obedience and hysterical partisanship of so many U.S. politicians on any matter related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the day after a Jewish settler massacred three Palestinians, apparently out of anger at the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and in the middle of a process which could enable more than a million Palestinians to breathe more freely in Gaza, what is it that worries the witless Cubana? The possibility that United Nations Development Programme money may have been spent on posters or stickers reading: "Today Gaza, Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem". You might imagine that her objection is merely to the use of U.N. money for what might plausibly be construed as support for a political aspiration. But no, it goes way beyond that. This is what she says:

Ros-Lehtinen Condemns the United Nations Development Program Support of Anti-Israel Messages and Palestinian Incitement

“I am dismayed over the UN’s support of distribution of marketing materials with the slogan "Today Gaza and Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem," to Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza strip during the Israeli evacuation of Jewish Settlers in this region.

It is outrageous that instead of alleviating poverty as its mission intends, the United Nations Development Program has reportedly assisted Hamas to spread its messages of incitement in the heat and emotion of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza settlements.

As this latest example shows, Israel continues to be subject to debilitating forms of discrimination at the UN while, by contrast, there are several UN groups devoted to “Palestinian Rights,” and which are used as instruments of anti-Semitism and incitement against Israel.”

Correct me if I'm missing something, but her implication seems to be that campaigning for Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders is tantamount to anti-Semitism and incitement to violence. As the UNDP bravely retorted, the message is in fact "consistent with the relevant UN resolutions in the Security Council decisions about the status of Palestine" (source: Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations). It's also consistent with natural justice, common sense and the policies of the most majority of governments in the world.

While I'm on the subject, I was a little surprised (but then I haven't been a victim of U.S. media coverage of the Israeli withdrawal) to read the liberal Pissed_Off_Patricia at BlondeSense lament the plight of Jewish settlers being dragged out of their homes in Gaza. She writes:

Imagine the state adjacent to yours declares that you must leave your home or you will be forcefully taken away. I find it nightmare material to imagine such a thing.

I'm not sure she really understands the situation. This is not the state "adjacent to yours" -- this is your own state deciding that it's just too expensive and too much trouble to protect you indefinitely against the anger of the people whose land was stolen to make way for your subsidised and comfortable lifestyle. What she should be imagining is the relief of the neighbourhood when the police finally turn up to evict a group of pampered, unfriendly and heavily-armed squatters who arrived under the cover of a foreign occupation. I find it really hard to summon up any sympathy at all, especially since each of those evictees, who knew they were breaking international law when they arrived, will receive as much compensation in one lump sum as many of their Palestinian 'neighbours' will see pass through their hands in a lifetime.

Helena Cobban caught the Associated Press falling into a similar trap with a story in which sobbing Jewish settlers trump the three dead Palestinians for newsworthiness. This kind of racism really is pervasive.

2005-08-17T22:14:00.000+03:00

Divine Retribution and other Mirages

Harold Meyerson, writing in the American Prospect, says the pundits who helped the Bush administration sell its invasion of Iraq to the American public must take their share of the blame for the debacle. If only. Will anyone ever take any responsibility for all the mistakes, misjudgments and misconceptions? It's human nature to believe in divine retribution -- that somehow, in the long run, when all the accounts are settled, maybe on some Day of Judgment, the good guys will be vindicated and the bad guys will go around with their tails between their legs, eating humble pie. In practice, I no longer believe that happens, ever. The capacity of human brings to delude themselves and find new justifications for their past errors is simply inexhaustible. We have already seen the way that Bush and Rumsfeld can always dream up new corners they need to turn, new lights at the end of new tunnels, brows of new hills they need to climb before everything turns out hunkydory. I remember reading in one of those serious Washington think-tank quarterlies, maybe five years ago, an article on how the United States Won the War in Vietnam -- something along the lines of Vietnam turning to capitalist solutions after the failure of communism. If you wait long enough, you can always claim victory. As Zhou Enlai famously said in 1972, it's still too early to judge the French revolution. So don't hold your breath for Kristol, Krauthammer, Jamie Rubin, Kenneth Pollack, Tom Friedman and the rest of the gang to hand in their resignations and seek more suitable employment. No way. They will put a brave face on any discomfort they might feel and live to punditise another day. Depressing but true.

2005-08-17T12:44:00.000+03:00

Washington Institute on Egyptian Elections

The Washington Institute, an organisation whose analyses I usually disregard as hopelessly slanted, has a good background paper on Egypt's presidential elections. I couldn't find any errors in it.

2005-08-16T23:26:00.000+03:00

We Can See You

The founders of Shayfeencom, an Egyptian 'National Civil Monitoring Movement', held their formal launch on Tuesday evening at the premises of the Socialist Studies Centre near Giza Square in Cairo. It's a simple enough idea -- Egyptians who witness official abuses of any kind, initially in the September presidential elections but ultimately in any branch of government activity, can file a report to the movement, either by telephone (+20-12-487-6613) or through its website. The movement will collate them, pass them on the Egyptian media, compile occasional reports when it detects a critical mass of similar complaints and train volunteers to investigate. The driving forces are a group of middle-class women whose aim is to persuade Egyptians that they no longer need remain silent. I will be watching to see how their work develops. Two things struck me strongly about their doctrine and practice. Firstly, they reject any funding from abroad -- a direct rebuff to the United States, which has promised to pump millions of dollars into Egyptian civil society groups. And these are exactly the kind of people the U.S. Embassy might like to finance. They are not even particularly interested in 'servicing' the foreign media, preferring to concentrate on persuading the Egyptian press to publicise their findings. Secondly, they write much of their material in colloquial Egyptian Arabic (see the page www.shayfeen.com/meen.aspx, for example). That's fairly unusual in the context of Egyptian politics. The objective is clearly to appeal to Egyptians intimidated by the formal language of political discourse. That gave rise to an interesting interlude at their news conference, when some journalists questioned the linguistic 'correctness' of the slogans in their backdrop. One of the objections was that they write 'Shayfinkum' ('We can see you') without the letter ya between the fa and nun. It may not be the conventional way to spell such words (in cartoons, for example) but the movement has a good case. The ya indicates that the 'i' vowel is long -- but when you add the ending 'kum' (you) the vowel is shortened, without most Egyptians even noticing the change. Clever how the address of their website exploits the coincidental similarity between 'kum' and '.com'.

2005-08-16T22:45:00.000+03:00

Social Change in the Dir Valley

Thanks to the wise and gentle Helena Cobban, who repeats in full James Rupert's article in Newsday on Islams and Democracy. I probably would not have come across it without her. Rupert writes about a woman social worker promoting health, education and a political role for women in the Dir valley of Pakistan, near the Afghan border. It's a breath of fresh air to read something which, how shall I put it, recognises the limits of what it is possible to achieve quickly, even when people of goodwill set their minds to it.

For those of us who are Western outsiders amid this battle of Islams, I think it's very hard to understand how deeply any contribution we might want to make has been tainted by the baggage of still-not-so-long-ago Western colonization, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc. In Dir, the most dangerous thing our friend Shad does is to quietly take grants from Western relief and development agencies... But Western people and polities that shudder at the phrase "Islamic government" must learn to lose that reflex. Most of us in the West surely wish to help Muslim liberals and democrats, whether Iran's celebrated Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi, or the unknown Shad Begum of Dir. But we must understand that Islamic forms of democracy are the only kind these liberals can build. If we can't swallow that, the best thing we can do for Ebadi or Shad is to shut up and go home.

The best way they can help is this:
* by ceasing to brag endlessly about how their society and way of life are so much better. If they are better (and they may well be), then they must prove it in their own actions. They should set an example, without great show. Their actions will speak for themselves.
* by refraining from taking sides in theological debates they know little about. Even to someone like me, the sight of Bush and Blair pontificating on the true nature of Islam is thoroughly nauseating and entirely counterproductive. Imagine the impact Muammar Gaddafi, an opponent of the death penalty, would have in the Bible Belt if he started preaching that capital punishment was a betrayal of Christian values.
* by patience. It just is not possible to change the minds of millions of people in a matter of years, maybe even a generation. The idea that the overthrow of the Taliban would be a magic wand to liberate Afghan women was a dangerous folly. In the end only brave Afghan women, perhaps with a little outside inspiration to show them what is possible, can liberate Afghan women. Outside intervention mainly complicates their task.
* by listening rather than preaching. People trust listeners more than they trust preachers. Maybe the listeners would even learn in the process. They might learn, for example, that their own societies have serious flaws too -- flaws they had not even noticed. Nobody's perfect.

2005-08-16T22:24:00.000+03:00

Cheers for Cindy

I was a little too harsh on Cindy Sheehan yesterday so let me elaborate. Maybe this is the beginning of a political awakening for her, as suggested by the remarks she is reported to have made about Israel and Palestine, and we should both welcome and encourage that. The impression President Bush made on her when they met also appears to have been decisive, and rightly so, as there is nothing to suggest that Bush considers his soldiers to be other than expendable pawns in the service of his and his retinue's vested interests. Not that I envy him the horrible task of comforting the bereaved, because I could not perform that office well either, but I never aspired to be president of a bellicose nation, let alone order troops into battle. But the thrust of my reservations stand. Her letter to Bush, dated November 2004, makes it clear that the Iraqi victims are an afterthought:

By the way, George, how many more innocent Iraqis are your policies going to kill before you convince them that you are better than Saddam? How many more of their cities are you going to level before you consider that they are liberated?

The lesson Americans should draw from the Iraqi debacle is not some version of the Powell doctrine -- clear aims and overwhelming force -- but rather that the rest of the world should not be a playground for military adventures, at least not without serious consequences for the warmongers.

2005-08-15T14:44:00.000+03:00

American Narcissism and Cindy Sheehan

In my absence, and in such a short time, a decisive change seems to have taken place in the way Americans see the occupation of Iraq. That's all for the good, if only because it will probably accelerate the departure of U.S. troops, leaving Iraqis to decide their own fate, as best they can after the tribulations of the past 25 years. Some of the credit must go to Cindy Sheehan, who succeeded where so many before had failed and won a hearing in the Mainstream Media. But am I alone in seeing this as a very flawed success for the political forces which opposed the invasion of Iraq and would like the United States to adopt more pacific policies in the world at large? Let me explain why:

-- The thrust of Cindy Sheehan's campaign, as I understand it, is her demand that President Bush explain why her son Casey died in Iraq. In other words, her appeal is to those Americans who have concluded (and how could they not so conclude?) that the invasion and occupation of Iraq were not worth the sacrifice of 1,800 American lives and the injuries sustained by maybe tens of thousands of others. The corollary of that argument is that it might have been worth some sacrifice if the United States had fought a campaign which minimised American casualties. But that was not the reason I opposed the invasion. My argument at the time, and the argument of countless others, was based on bigger principles and wider considerations -- that it violated the fragile system of international law, for all its faults the best we have for the moment, that an invasion could not bring about peace and democracy in Iraq but would rather provoke a chain of conflicts and untold bloodshed, mainly among Iraqis, and that it would not make the world safer but would rather exacerbate the existing tensions between the Christian and Muslim worlds.

-- The concentration on American casualties, personified in Casey, perpetuates the belief, obviously widespread if unspoken in the United States (and Israel), that one American (or Israeli) life is worth a multitude of the lives of unnamed, unknown, unpersonified Iraqis (or Palestinians). U.S. public opinion has not even started to acknowledge or address this pernicious racism, which was always implicit in the 'flypaper' theory that it is better for thousands (of Iraqis) to die in Iraq than for a single American to die at home. Maybe I misjudge her but I am not aware that Cindy has yet done much to bring this racism to public consciousness.

-- Cindy Sheehan is not known to have opposed the invasion from the outset. In fact I recall that she was quite sanguine about the prospect of her son going off to Iraq as a loyal footsoldier of the American empire. That does not suggest a high degree of political awareness. It also leaves the impression, amply corroborated by other evidence, that the driving force behind her campaign is personal loss, not the wellbeing of the world as a whole. I've always been deeply suspicious of people who adopt causes based on private tragedy, like the mothers who campaign against drunken driving after they lose their children, or Christopher Reeve and his promotion of stem cell research, which might have prolonged his own life. American society does not seem to have any problem with that -- it's just another manifestation of American narcissism.

2005-08-14T19:14:00.000+03:00

Hagiography Corner

I'm back from the Mediterranean, where I did not watch television or read a single internet page for a whole 10 days. Instead I sat by the pool, played with a cat/kitten nuclear family (I'll resist the temptation to catblog), went to the beach in midweek when the crowds were thin, but mostly indulged in an old-fashioned passtime known as reading books -- five and a half books to be precise. One indulgence I failed to renounce, however, and that was reading newspapers, and such a treat that was, what with the state (government) newspapers making the most of the period leading up to the formal start of the presidential election campaign on August 17 to squeeze in as much hagiographic Mubarak material as possible. In theory, when the campaign opens, the state-owned newspapers are supposed to be neutral. We will have to wait to see what happens in practice. For the benefit of those who do not read Arabic or do not have access to al-Ahram, here are some gems I ran across and saved for your edification:

-- The Nile Delta province of Damietta declared that it had completely wiped out illiteracy among all inhabitants aged between 15 and 45. First lady Suzanne Mubarak had the honour of making this announcement, though the article does not overtly state that her benevolent intervention contributed in any way to this extraordinary achievement, in a country where about 40 percent of adults remain illiterate. The al-Ahram journalist does not appear to have tested this claim empirically (say, by asking a random selection of Damiettans in this age group about their reading skills). It's much easier just to regurgitate the press release from the governor's office. Nor do we learn much about the methods the local authorities adopted to bring about this sudden passion for literacy, except that teachers and students received incentives "most notably priority in obtaining government jobs". I suspect it might be just a slip of the pen, but the article does ominously refer at one point to "the task of eliminating illiterates". I don't think they went that far.

-- Presidential adviser Osama el-Baz, who has loyally served the last three Egyptian presidents and whom sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim mockingly described in Al Masry Al Yom as a modern equivalent of the high priests who upheld the doctrine of the divinity of the pharaohs, filled a whole page of al-Ahram with tales illustrating Mubarak's prodigious virtues. The one I liked best was this:

A young man still in education in a rural area went one day to the telegraph office in the nearby town and drafted a telegram to send to the president including in it offensive phrases, phrases not suitable at all. That was because a law passed around that time meant that his father could no longer cultivate about three acres of land, for the owner of this land was exercising his right to regain possession... Since the telegram drafted by the young man, out of sympathy for the plight of his father, was full of inappropriate insults, the officials in the telegraph office referred the matter to their superiors to ask how to deal with the matter. The surprise was that when the incident came to the notice of the president (Mubarak), the president refused to have the young man punished for his irresponsible haste in drafting the telegram, but said: "It looks like he did this to express sympathy for his father, a man of limited means." The president gave instructions to deal with the incident thus: firstly, not to have the young man prosecuted for criminal conduct, which means that the president renounced his right to confront him; secondly, to look for a suitable piece of vacant land in a reclamation area and give the young man's father a chance to cultivate five feddans there so that he and his family would have a livelihood.

-- A subsequent full-page piece in the same series entitled Testimonials from Up Close, this time by veteran state journalist Anis Mansour, includes this enchanting vignette from early in Mubarak's reign:

When I conducted my first interview with President Hosni Mubarak for October magazine, I asked him to write a brief message for me to publish on the cover. President Mubarak wrote a message of greetings to the magazine and the staff on the occasion of its sixth anniversary. This was the first time people had seen the new president's handwriting, style and signature. I submitted this message to the graphologist Dr Farid Hassanein after hiding the signature. Hassanein wrote: "The person who wrote this is a man who is self-confident, strong and candid." I asked him: "How so?" and he replied: "The vertical and horizontal strokes are serious, straightforward and clear. Then he has put the dots on every consonant. Then the equal distances between the words show that he is a disciplined, fair and extremely organised man."

2005-08-04T10:06:00.000+03:00

Those Dominant Palestinians

Los Angeles people reading Henry Chu in their local newspaper won't learn much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Assuming their historical knowledge is fairly superficial, as it probably is in most cases, they won't even find out that the Zionist project required any ethnic cleansing or forcible expropriation of land. All that happened is that Israel was created "on the land of the ancient Hebrew patriarchs ... (as) defined by the Bible". When Israeli governments on both the left and right backed Jews settling the West Bank and Gaza, the aim was "to expand Israel's foothold and security in the Middle East", not to steal land and water from the existing inhabitants. In this bizarre world that Chu creates, the Palestinians are not an oppressed and colonised indigenous people, but just happen to live in an area he calls "the Palestinian-dominated West Bank and Gaza". Dominated! If that's domination, how come it's the Israelis who seem to be taking all the decisions as they go through the turmoil of their existential angst about the true meaning of Zionism? And if the Israeli governments does go ahead with a withdrawal from Gaza, this would be a sacrifice for the sake of a "pragmatic state with both a Jewish and democratic identity". God forbid that anyone in Israel should think that controlling the lives of more a million Gazans against their will was unjust in itself. Naturally enough, neither Chu nor the people to whom he talks consider whether a Jewish and democratic state was ever possible, given that even at the time of partition, the Jews were a minority in the land assigned to them by international law. Shoddy work, Henry.

2005-08-03T21:05:00.000+03:00

Mauritania - An Important Test Case

Mauritania may be a far away place about which few people knew very much (it's the only Arab country I have never visited) but interest will greatly increase after the coup by army officers today. If my memory serves me right, this is the first successful military coup in any Arab country since Omar Hassan al-Bashir took power in Sudan in 1989, 16 years ago. That's fairly amazing in itself, given the frequency with which power changed hands by violence in Arab countries such as Iraq, Syria and Yemen in the 1960s. The big questions of course are who are the leaders and what policies will they follow. If they are Islamists, as they might be, that's a serious setback to the United States, because people will interpret the coup as a reaction to Ould Taya's close cooperation with Washington and his exploitation of the "Global War on Terrorism" to strengthen his position at home. If they are just another group of officers with specific personal grievances against the ousted president, then it won't make a great deal of difference, but the officers will have some explaining to do and Washington will pretend to keep its distance for a respectable 'period of mourning' for constitutional rule. They could even be Baathists, who have been influential in Mauritania in the past. That would be an ironic outcome. If they turn out to be genuine democrats who really do plan to hand over power to an elected civilian after two years, which seems by far the least likely option, then I suppose we should all be grateful. That would also be a bizarre outcome -- democrats overthrow a military ruler, backed by the United States because of his anti-Islamist activities, even as the United States advocates more democracy as an antidote to Islamism. Go figure.

2005-08-03T20:24:00.000+03:00

Salva Kiir's Eyes

Salva Kiir Mayardit, the newly installed chairman of the Sudan People's Liberation Army who is expected to be selected as vice president of Sudan, is a fierce fighter with traditional Dinka tribal scarring on his forehead and eyes that betray little, writes Marc Lacey in the New York Times. That's rather an odd thing to write and one wonders why the editors let that eye reference through. I doubt the New York Times would make a reference like that in a story about, say, a new leader of the British Conservative Party. It could mean that he looks cold, or shifty, or robotic, or disciplined, or just about anything. How much information do eyes really convey anyway, especially at a first meeting, as this encounter appears to have been? Just about the most they can do is change the direction of gaze, at variable speed and with varying degrees of attention to or avoidance of the interlocutor. You couldn't write, for example: "His eyes betrayed that deep in his heart he envied John Garang his international fame", at least not in a reputable newspaper. There's nothing like looking deep into the eyes of a loved one, but mostly what you find there is unfathomable mystery.

2005-08-03T14:41:00.000+03:00

Ibn Khaldoun and Berber Grammar

Here's a hard question. In Patrick O'Brian's The Hundred Days a Sephardi Jew by the name of Dr Jacob describes to Captain Jack Aubrey how he comes to speak both Berber and the archaic Hebrew of the Beni Mzab of Algeria (as a child, he was injured while on a jewel-trading mission with his family and had to stay among them for a while).

"It was there that I learnt the double guttural of the Beni Mzab Hebrew and that I became thoroughly at home with the triliteral roots of the Berber." He gave a great many examples of the Hebrew in question and of Berber grammar, illustrating them with quotations from Ibn Khaldoun.

I would like to know what Ibn Khaldoun had to say about Berber grammar, if anything, or indeed about the Hebrew of the Beni Mzab. It would be unusual for a premodern observer from the dominant culture, even one as astute as Ibn Khaldoun, to comment on the languages of peripheral ethnic groups. If only the Greeks and the Romans had more to say about the languages of the people with whom they came into contact. "Double guttural", by the way, is an archaic term for the Arabic consonant ain, a voiced pharyngeal fricative. There's nothing double about it. If anyone knows how it came to be called that, let me know. Bonus question: How does the triliteral root system work in Berber? Is it as central as it is in Arabic or has it been eroded in the millennia since the Afro-Asiatic group of families divided?

2005-08-02T23:54:00.000+03:00

The Embassy's in the Building

Adel Imam's new comic film, The Embassy's in the Building (Al-Sifara fil-Imara), faithfully reflects the distaste of most Egyptians for the presence of an Israeli embassy in their midst, especially under terms which make it impossible for Egypt to expel the ambassador without provoking an international crisis by appearing to violate a peace treaty which has lasted 26 years. Their shock and dismay is evident, and plausible, whenever protagonist Sherif Kheiry, a deracinated petroleum engineer returning from more than 20 years in Dubai, reveals to them his misfortune in having the Israeli embassy entrenched in the apartment next to his own. For obvious reasons, Israeli diplomats have rarely been welcome in Cairo and, as is the case now with their U.S. and British colleagues, the security measures needed to keep them alive are an irritant and inconvenience for hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary people. (How long will it be before the U.S. and British embassies do the decent thing and move to the desert where they can be pariahs in peace?) But the film errs towards anachronism when it suggests that Cairenes would take to the streets now in opposition merely to normalisation of relations with Israel, rather than in protest at some specific Israeli atrocity. Imam also evokes a distinctly nostalgic atmosphere when he shows old communists sitting under portraits of Karl Marx, or middle-aged and middle-class men gathering on a houseboat in Embaba getting stoned out of their minds with hagar after hagar of hashish. Perhaps that does still happen but it certainly isn't as prevalent as it used to be.

Imam's portrayal of the state security intelligence services is deliciously realistic. When the supreme interests of the state dictate it, they can arrange just about anything -- instant delivery of food from the take-away shop down the road, a reunion between a father and his children, now in the custody of an estranged wife, a flawless and complimentary repair job when a rocket aimed at the Israeli embassy does serious damage to Imam's apartment. But when you cross them, they can be devious and ruthless. The hapless Kheiry, a classic ingenu thrust into a drama beyond his control, sums up his dilemma neatly. "I've nothing against the supreme interests of the state," he says. "But we shouldn't overlook the lowest interests (al-masalih as-sufla) either."

In the end, Kheiry commits himself to the anti-Israeli cause, after he sees on television the funeral of a teen-aged Palestinian friend from Dubai, shot down by Israeli forces. He joins a protest, wholeheartedly this time rather than in pursuit of a pretty woman, and together they chant: "Down with the enemies of peace, down with the killers of children."

So is this a daring anti-government film by an actor who early in his career appeared to be serving state interests with films mocking the mindset of the militant Islamist? Is Imam trying to ingratiate himself with the public by giving voice to widespread disapproval of contacts with Israel? And what does the Israeli embassy really think of the film? I heard gossip that the Israeli ambassador thought that Imam does at least humanise the fictional ambassador, mitigating what must otherwise be a blow to Israel's hopes of 'popular' normalisation. Whatever the government thinks, it's clear that any attempt to obstruct the film would have backfired and that any embarrassment the film might cause is easily manageable.

2005-08-02T10:49:00.000+03:00

Another Slap on the Wrist

The United States has no idea how to stop the Egyptian government from using brute force to suppress demonstrations, even if President Bush himself said the practice was unacceptable. Here's what the U.S. State Department's Tom Casey had to say about the attacks on demonstrators on Saturday:

QUESTION: There was a protest and the police were pretty rough against the protestors. It looked reminiscent of what happened during a protest in May when the President actually was quite outspoken, criticizing it. What's the reaction this time from the United States?

MR. CASEY: Yeah. Well, I'm glad you asked. We are seriously concerned by reports of mistreatment and detention of opposition members in Cairo during a protest on Saturday. And as you know, we strongly advocate the guarantees of civil and political rights for everyone, regardless of the country or their political beliefs. The Egyptian people are going to go to the polls this fall and certainly any kind of intimidation or harassment of opposition groups would be incompatible with genuinely free and fair elections, you know. And it's obviously something we are raising with the Egyptian Government, too.

QUESTION: Does it not show how little Egypt is actually listening to the United States, that the President could use the prestige of his post to speak out about this type of action and then only a few months later, that we see a repeat performance?

MR. CASEY: Again, Saul, I think as you correctly point out, we have spoken out on this issue. The Secretary made, I think, a very important speech in Cairo during her last trip talking about the need for continued progress on democratic reforms in the region. And we're certainly not going to be shy about continuing to speak out there. I think we have been pleased to see that there's been some movement forward on some of these issues in Egypt. But obviously, this incident is again a serious one and it's one we have concerns about and one that we will speak out on both from here and in our private discussions with the Egyptians.

QUESTION: Will they listen? Will they do anything about it? I mean, have they done so far?

MR. CASEY: I think, Saul, that you'd have to go talk to the Egyptians about how they receive that message and what their reaction to it is.

QUESTION: Well, sir, I'm trying to judge how effective your diplomacy is, the President's spoken out, you cite how the Secretary was out there. And the impression is that they nod and don't do anything about it. Are you thinking of any other tactics to improve your diplomacy?

MR. CASEY: Saul, I'm going to talk about what we're doing today and what we have been doing, but I don't have any new policies to preview for you.

2005-08-02T00:30:00.000+03:00

Ups and Downs of Protest

The Arabic press hasn't featured enough on these pages, hardly at all in fact. That is going to change, inshallah. Today I bring to the attention of the rest of the world today's article in Al Masry Al Yom, the best of Egypt's independent newspapers, on the linkage between police brutality and the ebb and flow of Washington's attitude towards the government of Hosni Mubarak. The background to this is that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick visited last month, making minimal demands on political reform, then at least 64 people were killed on July 23 by bombs in the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, and finally on Saturday police thugs beat up peaceful protesters in central Cairo. Here are some quotes from the article, translated (but not necessarily endorsed) by me:

* Amr el-Shobki, an analyst at the Ahram Centre for Strategic and Politicial Studies: "It seems that international satisfaction with Egypt and the events in Sharm el-Sheikh contributed to the return of the big stick in dealing with peaceful demonstrations demanding reform and change... When there is a rapprochement between the regime and the United States, the regime bares its fangs towards the peaceful opposition and vice versa. When Washington finds measures taken by the regime to be unacceptable, you find the regime showing a certain flexibility towards these demonstrations."

* Diaa Rashwan, an expert at the same centre: "Repression is natural behaviour on the part of the regime. The small margin of tolerance allowed recently was the exception... The moderated tone of the U.S. criticism of the regime, especially after the visits of Robert Zoellick and (Condoleezza) Rice, gave the regime an opportunity to return to its former practices. It's a disturbing sign because it came a day after the start of the nomination of presidential candidates. It's tantamount to an early warning aimed at those who want to lead the election campaign in a direction that does not please the regime. The insistence on arresting Kefaya leaders was a clear message to all not to cross the line in criticising the regime. I tend to believe that repression will be the approach in dealing with future demonstrations. The regime will try to nip them in the bud but if any opposition group succeeds in organising a demonstration, definitely they will be beaten."

* Alaa el-Aswan, novelist and member of the Kefaya protest movement: "The regime has always taken foreign pressure into account so I link the rise and fall in repressive treatment to the foreign pressures. When the regime found that it had grown hard to win America's goodwill, it turned to Israel to buy its approval, because it well knows how the U.S. administration, which is under the control of the neoconservatives, is linked to the Israelis. The Israeli press reflects that when one of the newspapers reported that some Israeli leaders, led by Sharon, had intervened to reduce the pressure on Egypt. In the same context comes the promise (by Mubarak) to visit Israel and also the Egyptian role in Gaza."

*Nabil Abdel Fattah, also of the Ahram Center: "The major failure of the security sevices in Sharm el-Sheikh made them want to achieve a big success to remove the effects of the failure, by pleasing the regime by torturing, beating and jailing peaceful Egyptians calling for political and economic reform. Foreign pressures have become an inseparable part of political life in every country in the world... What has happened since the beginning of the year so far is that the regime has bought a new term in office in exchange for giving up beating people and counterfeiting the will of the nation, according to the judges' report (on the May referendum."

* Abdel Moneim Said, the director of the Ahram centre: "It's purely a matter of security. The decision on how to deal with demonstrations is not political. To hold the United States or other circumstances reponsible is going too far."

The Ahram Centre is attached to and financed by the state newspaper al-Ahram. The academics who work there are worried about the centre's future after so many of their colleagues have criticised government policy.

2005-07-31T09:09:00.000+03:00

Skulduggery in Cairo

Secretly, and guiltily, I was pleased at how badly the Egyptian presidential election has started. When you've been saying for months that the people around Mubarak have no long-term vision of reform and are merely making ad hoc cosmetic adjustments to make sure they stay in power, then you acquire a stake in that analysis -- your judgment and credibility, no less. Anyway, it wasn't much of a gamble. These people are fairly predictable. People made fun of opposition party leader Ayman Nour for sending his team to the offices of the Electoral Commission in the early hours of Friday to make sure he was the first to register as a candidate (he can be a little boyish in his enthusiasm) but it was a legitimate ploy and it could have made a small difference in a real election (one where they count the votes). It could have affected the placement of the names on the ballot paper -- no small matter when so many people are illiterate -- and the assignment of election symbols, worth a couple of percentage points if you get a good one. So it was entirely churlish of the National Democratic Party and the Electoral Commission to deny him his little victory and say that Mubarak's man arrived first (it's hard to prove that he was late but the evidence points strongly in that direction). It's also a bad omen for the impartiality of the commission.

Then there was the beating and arrest of demonstrators in Tahrir Square late on Saturday afternoon. I'm glad that was well caught on camera and was widely broadcast. I also hoped that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick saw it and winced, after the rosy view he painted last month of the government's sincerity. The government has given repeated assurances that it will respect the right of assembly. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif has also several times proposed assigning a 'safe haven' where demonstrators can say their word without harassment. Nothing happened on that proposal.

The front page of the main state newspaper al-Ahram ignored on Sunday Ayman Nour's call for a presidential debate with Mubarak. Even its inside story on his news conference, though surprisingly long, did not mention it either. The newspaper led on preparations for the Arab summit in Sharm el-Sheikh on Wednesday, an event guaranteed to keep Mubarak in the limelight.

2005-07-30T12:17:00.000+03:00

The Textual Analysis of Terrorism

Oliver McTernan, writing in The Guardian today, argues that the main root of violent extremism by Muslims is "the misinterpretation of their sacred texts by homegrown extremists." McTernan is director of Forward Thinking, an organisation founded "to help promote durable peace agreements by engaging in dialogue extremists currently considered to be beyond diplomacy". I think that such a dialogue is an excellent idea but I seriously doubt that much would come of sitting down with the likes of Mohamed Atta, even Osama bin Laden, and debating the merits of various interpretations of the Quran and hadith. For a start, the people who plan and carry out acts of violence under various Islamist guises are very rarely versed in the sacred literature, even if they have attended mosques where clerics preach the virtue of jihad. My imperfect understanding of human psychology suggests they went to those mosques in the first place because they wanted to hear men of religion reinforce their own justifications for what we used to call revolutionary violence. Besides, when he says "misinterpretation", McTernan presupposes that a correct interpretation exists. All that is required, he implies, is that other men of religion show these ideological deviants the light of true religion. Then they will repent of their ways and abandon jihad. This was part of the approach adopted by the Egyptian government in its handling of the uprising in the 1990s by al-Gama'a al-Islamiya. But the Egyptian government succeeded mainly because Gama'a leaders came to the conclusion that their guerrilla campaign had reached a dead end. Tens of thousands of members were in jail, public opinion had turned against them after the Luxor massacre of 1997 and the state was not on the verge of collapse. The Gama'a had failed to mobilise large numbers of recruits outside Middle Egypt, where the conflict had taken on the characteristics of a vendetta between the Islamists and the police.

McTernan and other advocates of what we might call the "re-education" solution to militant Islamism overlook the way in which ideologues can plausibly derive, and have derived, such a diversity of doctrines from exactly the same corpus of religious texts. Islam, like any other religion with such a vast geographic and chronological sweep, can be all things to all people -- a matrix into which intellectuals and activists can readily insert their priorities and favoured projects. Advocates of socialism, free markets, democracy, maybe even Baathist-style fascism, can all find "sufficient selective taxts" in the Islamic corpus to justify their positions. I sometimes wonder whether non-Muslims are aware of the richness and variety of the material available. Enter a bookshop in an Arab city and wonder at the sheer physical mass of those tomes -- sets of a dozen or more thick volumes, painstakingly compiled in manuscript by some pious scholar hundreds of years ago and treasured by generation after generation. So McTernan is right: "Today's extremists can find sufficient selective texts which, if interpreted in a literalist way, can be used to justify the atrocities they commit." But that avoids the question -- why do they choose those texts rather than any others, specifically the quietist ones? And why don't fringe groups of Southern Baptists, for all their fundamentalist tendencies, feel the urge to go smite the Amalekites or their modern equivalent (perhaps some of them already do, but I will leave that aside). My answer to that question is simple -- it's the politics, stupid.

By all means engage in dialogue with extremists so far impervious to diplomacy. But don't waste your time talking about theology. Ask them about their vision of a better world for all of us, and work on real grievances for which there might be real solutions. You might be pleasantly surprised.

2005-07-29T14:35:00.000+03:00

Breaking a Tom Friedman Resolution

When I started these notes earlier this month, I made a resolution at the back of my mind not to comment too often on anything written by Tom Friedman. He receives far more attention than he deserves anyway, so why should I contribute to promoting him as a commentator worthy reading, I reasoned. Today I had to break that resolution, so amazed I was at his latest addition to the revisionist version of recent Palestinian history:

the Palestinian intifada ... was as much a revolt by Palestinian youth against Fatah's corrupt old guard as against Israel

How's that for a bold gambit? Now, I'm not one to deny that many young Palestinians have no great love for Fatah's corrupt old guard, but to reduce the intifada that broke out in 2000 to this internal conflict is a distortion which cries out for a challenge. The intifada, as is amply documented, began as a largely spontaneous reaction to Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount and subsequent massacres by Israeli forces. Arafat and his colleagues ("Fatah's corrupt old guard") were onlookers rather than participants, unable to control events. They later decided to turn a blind eye to militant activities and they probably gave some substantial but plausibly deniable material support as well. That doesn't make it a revolt against Arafat, not by any stretch of the imagination of any impartial observer.

All this matters because of the relentless attempt by Bush and Sharon to spin the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a Palestinian-Palestinian conflict to which Israel is not a party. The corollary is that Israel need not do anything until the Palestinians sort out their internal differences. Hence the emphasis on Palestinian democracy as the starting point for any comprehensive peace agreement. We can see the same dynamic at work in the conflict with al Qaeda -- "It's up to moderate Muslims to win this battle. There's nothing we can do to help them." In the old days, this was known as irresponsibility, or worse.

It's not really Friedman's fault, I suppose, as merely the bearer of the message, but dear Marwan Muasher, the well spoken deputy prime minister of Jordan, also seems to be losing touch with reality. Perhaps he's been hanging around in the corridors of power for too long (at least 15 years, since I first met him). He says:

"For decades, people in the region were only interested in political parties that offered national liberation... But now all the existential threats to the different states are gone. Now the focus has shifted from national liberation to personal liberation."

Tell that to a Palestinian, or an Iraqi.