Center for a New American Security

One of the things that has come up in several conversations today has been the professionalism of the Egyptian military. It is worth noting, too, that even though the United States is getting a lot of blame from protesters on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria for our support for the Mubarak Regime through the years, the United States will likely be able to retain a great deal of influence in Egypt even in a post-Mubarak political landscape because of the way in which the U.S. military has kept up such close relations with its Egyptian counterparts. Egyptian officers have been coming to the United States for training for three decades now, so most high-ranking Egyptian officers have close friends in the U.S. military with whom they went to the War College or CGSC. (We Americans would also like to think we have played a role in the professionalization of the Egyptian officer corps, but that may be giving us too much credit.)

What a different situation we have in Pakistan, where an entire generation of the Pakistani officer corps was "lost" to the U.S. military because of the Pressler Ammendment and the way in which it halted cooperation and exchanges between our two militaries. In that way, one thing Egypt and Pakistan have in common is the way in which each, in different ways, highlight the very real benefits of mil-mil cooperation, officer exchanges, and security force assistance.

The continued willingness of pundits with no previous experience in or expertise on Egypt to opine about what is taking place there continues to impress. As CNN's Ben Wedeman tweeted from Cairo, "If I had a dollar for every silly statement made by instant-Egypt experts in newspapers, TV, I could retire tomorrow."

If, however, you are an intellectually curious American looking to make sense of either Egypt or currents in Political Islam, here are two great books to get you started. The first is Max Rodenbeck's Cairo: The City Victorious. Rodenbeck is the Economist's longtime Middle East correspondent and grew up in Egypt. His book on Cairo is really just lovely. The second -- an antidote to all the ill-informed ravings about Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood -- is Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939, probably the best single-volume introduction to the main currents of thought in the Arabic-speaking world since Napoleon routed the Mamluks at the Pyramids.  

Or you could just watch Glenn Beck explain all of this, as I did while stuck in the airport in Jacksonville, NC yesterday. Beck was, needless to say, akin to the love child of Leszek Kołakowski and William Montgomery Watt in explaining how political Islam and Marxism will combine to create a Muslim caliphate in Europe. (If, you know, that love child was high as a kite on PCP.) Having successfully scared his viewers s***less, he predictably broke for a commercial for one of those gold funds he endorses. Success!

Update: Yes! Thanks to the YouTube, you can now watch Glenn Beck's lecture yesterday. This is amazing. I watched this with 20 other people, and you could see the way in which we were collectively growing dumber as this went on.

I grew up in Egypt and Hosni Mubarak was my uncle. To be honest, I think he was an uncle, father or grandfather to the 66 percent of Egyptians who are under 30. In fact, even if you were older than him, you probably still saw Mubarak as a fatherly figure. I wasn't born in Egypt. I arrived as an 18-year old Arabic student and I left a jaded Middle East correspondent hitting 30. But it was difficult to avoid the effects of an extremely well-crafted state propaganda machine that relied as much on the threat of thinly veiled force as it did on subtle manipulation.

Uncle Mubarak ran a very tight ship. It wasn't that he was mean. It was more that he didn't want you to hurt yourself in your youthful exuberance. Just to make sure you knew that he cared, there were quite a few pictures of him looking like the kind yet tough teacher you wish you had in school. Mubsy, as we used to call him at work, didn't look like those other leaders who liked to see their photos all over the place. He didn't have Hafez al Asad's dead-eye menace or Vladamir Putin's unspoken snarl. No, Mubarak looked like he was there for you. The problem was that he was everywhere, he wasn't going anywhere and, in the end, it was clear he wasn't actually helping.

In the beginning, Mubarak was more than an uncle. In fact, he was more than a man. He was somewhere between the Queen and the Prophet Mohammad (imagine being British Muslim). Mubarak represented Egyptian pride. He was the former airforce hero. He was a steady hand and a cool eye. He was ibn el-balad (son of the soil). At the same time, he was blameless. If something was wrong, it couldn't be his fault. Even if he said he was ultimately responsible, you wanted to say; "No, no. How could it be you? But thank you for manning up to shoulder the burden. I would have expected nothing less." Mubarak was familiar like a family member, but, at the same time, so much better than we could ever hope to be.

As a badly behaved 19-year old student, I and three friends decided to get our revenge on a tight-of-fist-yet-wide-of-girth landlord who had told us he was keeping our deposit while boasting of his generosity in the same breath. As we left his flat we deposited empty cans of tuna everywhere and opened the front door to the stray cats that inhabited the building. We spent three nights in a Cairo jail for our trouble but were released uncharged by a senior police officer who made sure we knew we were lucky to have been arrested in a country ruled by a man as benevolent as the great Hosni Mubarak. The officer was right in a way. Uncle Mubarak liked you if you were a wealthy foreigner with the right passport. I wouldn't have been so lucky if I had been one of the poor Egyptians beaten in front of me with rubber hoses. And, I definitely did not want to be the man in the next cell over whose blood I saw in thick pools on the concrete floor.

In reality, Mubarak didn't have it easy. He was the fourth leader of the Egypt's Free Officers' regime which came to power in a military coup against a constitutional monarchy in 1952. Egypt has a long history of being at the forefront of Middle East affairs and its people have a strong sense of pride. Political squabbling, corrupt politicians and disastrous war against the newly formed state of Israel motivated the middle class military professionals to remove their king, and British influence along with him. The coup's leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, made Egypt the focal point of Arab hopes and earned their eternal admiration. In reality, he achieved little. His successor, Anwar el-Sadat switched the regime from the pro-Soviet to the pro-Western camp during the cold war. Sadat realised post-independence Egypt's central problem; it's economic muscle didn't match its ambition.

To be the power it wanted to be, Egypt needed a stable political system based on rule by consensus. This would allow it to build a state machinery that would allow government to be effective and nimble enough to generate economic growth. With a strong body politic and economy, Egypt would have the independence and resources it needed to project its strength. Egypt's military leaders, however, didn't see it that way. Their phobia of political competition acquired by their experience of the constitutional monarchy they replaced prodded them to the conclusion that Egyptians were not ready for democracy. They were too "unruly" or "hot blooded" (often said with a hint of pride). Once the rulers had adopted a colonial view of their fellow countrymen, they replicated their mode of rule. Members of their own caste - other military men - were the only ones to be trusted with positions of power and authority.

The Free Officer regime was built on the tacit understanding that the officers would restore Egyptian pride. However, the problem with a rule-by-military-clique approach to government is that it does little for long-term development. Sadat's solution to this problem was to leverage Egypt's strategic value to the United States as a source of income.

Mubarak, when he took over after Sadat's assassination, decided to double down. He saw stability and security as paramount, with his continued rule as vital to both. But, he faced a conundrum. How could Nasser's Egypt be dependent for its survival on US aid and western tourist dollars? A more inventive leader might have found another way, but slow and steady bomber pilot Mubarak decided on bluff and relied on Egyptian pride to make it work. Under no circumstances, he seemed to have decided, would greater freedoms be risked.

The disaster for Egypt was that the relationship with the US and the collective voluntary hypnotism worked - for a while. Much needed reforms to the state were avoided through reliance on aid, grants, debt forgiveness (after the first US-Iraq war) and US inclination to look the other way. The civil service was not stream lined, nor were workers' pay increased. All the while, corruption stifled the growth of small business (the backbone of a successful economy, corroded the state's ability to educate its younger generation or even keep its citizen's safe when they used public transport

Mubarak stifled any dissent by blurring the line between loyalty to him and patriotism while creating a state that totally extricated any sense of civic participation or responsibility. There were no elected town councils, provincial assemblies or trade unions with any real power. The only public bodies there were became vehicles for patronage with shady businessmen or prominent families vying and bribing to be seen to have Mubarak's stamp of approval. All the while, politics was stage-managed and Mubarak was destined to win. The result was a Frankenstein country - a powerful and influential army and a massive internal security force. While opposition politicians had no experience or knowledge of what it would take to run the country, and the political culture didn't differentiate between party, state and country.

In my book The Long Struggle (shameless plug) I mention an episode when I met Egyptian journalist friends at the journalist union in Cairo. One was from the opposition Nasserite party but argued vehemently that Mubarak's party should be the only one allowed to exist (he just wanted it to change its policies a little). During one election, I remember an eccentric old man who ran the right-wing Umma (Nation) Party say at a press conference that he would take off his shoe and beat anyone who didn't vote for Mubarak.

It wasn't all based on subtle subterfuge. The regime also used coercion and force. The closest I came to being shot was not in Iraq, Gaza, the West Bank or Darfur. It was on the grounds of a leafy Cairo villa that served as the HQ of the liberal Wafd Party. The leader Nomaan Goma was popularly understood to be a government stooge who spent all his time subverting any party activity aimed against the regime. He sometimes appeared on television sitting meekly near the president at the odd public occasion. One Saturday, the party had decided to oust Gomaa but he was holed up in the HQ with hired thugs and refused to leave. The thugs were lent by the government. When party members started banging on the door, the thugs fired from the other side. A bullet whizzed past me at chest height.

The system of government Mubarak inherited but then perpetuated contributed to his undoing. But the consequences of his method of rule and the acquiescence of his allies will be felt by Egyptians for some time to come. Mubarak often said he was working towards a gradual democratic transformation. But his actions did not bare out his words. Any credible secular party trying to establish itself was routinely denied permission. Parties that already existed were subverted from the inside. Secular political leaders like Ayman Nour were harassed and jailed on trumped up charges. Islamist politicians - even moderate centrists - were subjected to military courts and jailed by the thousands. Elections were regularly rigged quite blatantly, and often pretty badly (with journalists covering them often getting arrested). Secular middle class women who demonstrated in support of independent judges and secular democratic reform were sexually assaulted. All this generated little complaint from the United States.

Sometimes, the United States itself became an indirect target of the regime's spin. The fact that human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim had accepted foreign (including US) funds for his centre and had US citizenship was used to insinuate allegations of espionage. Every now and again, the security services would arrest gay men. The leaked details would suggest they were "imitating US lifestyles" and the state had acted to uphold Islamic values. I often heard Mubarak giving impromptu Arabic interviews to local journalists where he would allege that the Muslim Brotherhood was supported by the United States to destabilise the country.

Some of the US and UK coverage of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations happening now suggests that extremists are waiting to take over. Considering Mubarak's manipulation of feelings towards the United States and suppression of moderate Islamists and secularists, it's a surprise that the demonstrators are not all extremist Jihadis.

However, the legacy of Mubarak's rule means that there are few leaders with any of the contacts, stature and relationships that would allow government to function if Mubarak's regime was removed root and branch. Few people outside the ruling circle even have any idea of what the country's real financial situation is. Those who demand that the peace treaty with Israel be cancelled have no idea what part it plays in keeping their country solvent.

There is hope. The Egyptians who turned up to prevent the looting of the Cairo Museum, the popular committees, the Muslim-Christian cooperation show glimmers of hope that Egyptians - despite the best efforts of three decades of Mubarak - have retained the civic values that will be vital for their future.

Hey, I'm not trying to get all Edward Said on the readership here, but I do have one small request: can we all agree to stop using European historical analogies to describe what is taking place in Egypt? It's not Europe in 1848 or Eastern Europe in 1989 or France in 1789: it's Egypt in 2011.

What is taking place in Egypt today is the result of sui generis social, political, cultural and even geographic phenomena. When we use "western" frames of reference to make sense of what is taking place, by contrast, we a) sound really freaking narcissistic and b) fail to take those local phenomena seriously and thus miss a lot of what is going on.

Egypt has been doing this civilization thing, it occurs to me, for quite some time. Maybe even longer than Western Europe (by, oh, a few thousand years or so). So let's take Egypt and the Egyptians seriously -- on their own terms.

Dear Umm al-Dunya,

On behalf of the American people, I want to congratulate you all for thrilling the world these past few days with an inspired display of people power. We Americans ourselves once won our freedom from an evil dictatorship, only the people we fought had these British accents which made them seem far more evil than those clowns at the NDP.

Because our freedom-loving government has apparently been supporting the Sadat/Mubarak regime for the past 30+ years (honestly, who knew?), it is with great hesitation that I write to you on behalf of my countrymen with a little constructive criticism. But over the past few days, we Americans have been watching your street protests with much wonder and a little concern. It's not like we are the greatest baseball players on Earth -- no, that would be the Japanese -- but because of our national sport, we Americans all learn how to throw a baseball at an early age. Judging from your rock-throwing, we think you could get an extra 20-30 yards/meters on each throw if you stop throwing like a girl use some techniques we Americans have developed through the years. People of Egypt, allow me to introduce the crow hop:

We sincerely hope this comes in handy of the next few days. If any of this is confusing, call a man named Tom Emanski collect once they turn the phones back on. And in all seriousness, stay safe out there.

Yours,

Abu Muqawama

I was home in Tennessee for a brief 24 hours and woke up yesterday morning to MSNBC's "Morning Joe," which Mama Muqawama likes to watch before work. Nothing against the people on that particular show, because it's probably just representative of U.S. cable news in general*, but I was absolutely stunned by the willingness of the show's guests to opine about Egypt without having any actual experience in or expertise on Egypt or the broader Middle East. Is it really that tough to say, "Hey, that's a great question, Joe, but I am not really the best guy to give the viewers at home a good answer?"

Instead, guest after guest -- most of whom are specialists in or pundits on U.S. domestic politics -- made these broad, ridiculously sweeping statements about the meaning and direction of the protests.

I traveled to Egypt twice in 2005 and lived there between January and August of 2006 while studying Arabic after having completed my master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. I am by no means an expert on Egypt. But I like to think I know the people who are, so as a service to the readers, I am providing you all a list of no-%$#@ experts on Egypt. This list is, happily, by no means exhaustive: unlike the lack of informed commentary on Afghanistan, the United States has thousands of people who have lived and studied in Egypt as civilian researchers and students and can thus provide some reasonably informed commentary on events there. The following list is filled with some people whose opinions matter and whose analysis might actually be informed by study and experience. This list is in no particular order except for the first two people on the list, who are both good friends as well as two of the world's best experts on Egyptian politics.

Issandr el-Amrani, Arabist.net, @arabist

Elijah Zarwan, Crisis Group

Michael Wahid Hanna, The Century Foundation, @mwhanna1

Marc Lynch, GWU/CNAS/FP.com, @abuaardvark

Steven Cook, CFR, @stevenacook

Samir Shehata, Georgetown University

Josh Stacher, Kent State University, @jstacher

Amil Khan, Abu Muqawama, @Londonstani

Max Rodenbeck, The Economist

If you can, follow the live feed on al-Jazeera Arabic, which has made for the most exciting television I have watched since the Red Sox came back from three games down in the 2004 ALCS. (These events are arguably more geostrategically significant.) If you can't follow that feed, try al-Jazeera English or follow the updates on Robert Mackey's most excellent New York Times blog The Lede.

*An exception to the rule: Ben Wedeman at CNN.

Update: Someone in the comments suggested Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid), and I second that. Again, my list was happily not exhaustive. There are a lot of very smart analysts out there who can thoughtfully opine on Egypt -- in large part thanks to the legions of Arabic-language students who pass through Cairo at some point in their training.

Perhaps unsurprising for someone who grew up working in a newspaper, I spend a lot of time analyzing journalism and often criticize journalists. So I need to highlight when journalism is frankly awesome. Do yourself a favor and listen to this amazing audio recording of the Guardian's Jack Shenker reporting from inside an Egyptian paddywagon after being beaten by plain-clothed state security thugs and imprisoned. Pretty freaking great.

On a related note, where the hell was al-Jazeera yesterday?

[Blog fun fact: Londonstani and I first met when we were both living and working in Cairo. He was a journalist for Reuters at the time, and though I have not spoken to him, I would bet he is wishing he was back there now given the events of the past 48 hours!]

If two Arab countries can produce this much anger towards each other..

"Riot police in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, quelled a violent demonstration near the Algerian embassy in the early hours of Friday. Egyptian protesters reportedly hurled firebombs at police protecting the embassy and overturned a police van. Egypt's Interior Ministry said 35 people were injured"

..over a game of football

"The clashes stem from Egypt's defeat by Algeria in a World Cup qualifying match on Wednesday, securing Algeria the last African place for next year's finals."

..What would happen if Israel was playing?

OK, ok, so Londonstani knows there's bad blood between Egypt and Algeria... but hey, they've never fought a war - let alone three.

"The statement by Egypt's Football Federation added: "Egyptian fans, officials and players put their lives at risk before and after the game, under threat from weapons, knives, swords and flares".

"We should treat Algeria like any country that has declared war on us," university student Amr Higazi told Agence France Presse."

I mean seriously, this sounds like its turning to a mid sized diplomatic incident between Algeria, Egypt and then Sudan, when all they did was host!?

Oh no, the pride of Mahrouna, Haifa Wehbe, has gotten in trouble for calling those from Upper Egypt "monkeys". Tsk, tsk. I don't think singing this in Aswan is going to make up for the hurt, either.

Hookers 5-0 Egypt:

JOHANNESBURG — In news that, if true, will bring relief to World Cup organizers and embarrassment to the Egyptian soccer team, three South African newspapers reported Sunday that Egypt’s players apparently did not lose their money to robbers but to prostitutes after an historic 1-0 victory over Italy at the Confederations Cup. The accusations were quickly denied by the head of the Egyptian soccer federation. “I think that they said that to divert attention from the main issue, which is security, by creating a scandal for the Egyptian team,” Samir Zahir, the chairman of the Egyptian federation, told The Sunday Independent newspaper. Security has been the hot-button top in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. The South African police said Friday that Egypt had reported that five team members had their wallets lifted. The amount reportedly was $2,400. The burglary was said to have been discovered after the Egyptian players returned to their hotel rooms following Thursday’s victory over Italy.