Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif said before the opening of the conference that reform in Egypt "will not happen in a month, or two months, or six ... It will take years. And we have the time. We are not in a hurry." He pointed to the successes that Islamists had in the Egyptian elections last winter, when they gained 70 seats -- they now have 87 -- in the 454-member Parliament. He rejected the formation within Parliament of a "secret party bloc," a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a proscribed party.
Nazif continued, "As soon as you begin the [reform] process, you find that things happen. You see, for instance, that Islamists have achieved gains in Parliament here, and in Palestine, and in Iraq. For that reason, we have begun reviewing our position on what is happening." He said that despite this reconsideration, he does not think there is any room to reverse course from reform.
The Mubarak government, a hybrid military-civilian regime that mainly champions the interests of the country's newly wealthy and its middle classes, has fought a long struggle against fundamentalists such as the Muslim Brotherhood as well as terrorist splinter groups such as the Islamic Jihad of Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Muslim Brotherhood is forbidden by law from running candidates in elections under its own banner, since recognized parties may not have a religious character. It therefore puts up candidates in other parties that are willing to run them.
Mubarak has clearly had it with the Bush administration's Middle East policies. He had warned Bush not to invade Iraq, predicting that such a move would create a thousand bin Ladens and throw the region into chaos. Bush refused to listen, and Mubarak can take little pleasure in having been right. Mubarak resisted Bush-style "democratization," which focused more on open elections than on the prerequisites of democracy. Bush's policies have allowed Shiite religious parties and now the Iraqi version of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood to dominate Iraq. Mubarak recently caused a stir when he alleged that Arab Shiites are more loyal to Iran than to their own countries.
And, the Bush approach to elections in the region is what allowed Hamas to come to power in the Palestinian Authority, a disastrous outcome, since neither the United States nor Israel will negotiate with what they consider a terrorist organization. This bizarre policy, of pushing for elections but then refusing to deal with the elected government, has doomed the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to gridlock and threatens to punish ordinary Palestinians with food and medicine shortages. Mubarak has spent his political life making sure that fundamentalist parties never come to power in Egypt.
Mubarak has been most hurt of all by the open attacks on him by Bush administration officials whenever he has engaged in his ordinary practices as a soft dictator, such as jailing his liberal challenger, Ayman Nour, on corruption charges. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice publicly chided him into allowing other politicians, including Nour, to run against him in the presidential elections last fall. Mubarak was humiliated by having to let Nour out of prison and countenance his going about the country campaigning against the president for life. Mubarak runs Egyptian elections the way Mayor Richard J. Daley used to run Chicago elections. So, of course, Mubarak won handily against Nour, and then promptly jailed his opponent again.
Then in the parliamentary elections of November and December 2005, Muslim Brotherhood candidates running under other party banners took an unprecedented 87 seats, despite police repression of their campaign rallies and extensive arrests of Brotherhood activists throughout 2005. Some in Egypt believe that so many were allowed to be seated because Mubarak wanted to send a message to Bush and Rice that if they persisted with their pressure for democratization, they would only achieve a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the biggest country in the Arab world.
Ever since it agreed to make peace with Israel in 1978, Egypt has received $1.8 billion a year in military and civilian aid from the United States. According to the Washington Post, Congress, having noted the jailing of Nour, is beginning to think about reducing that amount and insisting that Egypt give a better accounting of how it is spent. (As with most U.S. foreign aid, much of the money has to be spent on U.S. goods and so actually goes to U.S. corporations, though the Egyptian government receives the materiel bought with it.) The Bush administration may have begun backing off its earlier pressure on Mubarak. At a recent hearing Assistant Secretary of State David Welch testified that withholding any of the aid to Egypt "would be damaging to our national interests." Nevertheless, tens and perhaps hundreds of millions may be cut out of the aid package if critics such as David Obey, D-Wis., have their way.
Mubarak appears to be resisting Bush's push for democratization most of all because he is grooming his son, Gamal Mubarak, as his successor. Gamal created a furor at the Davos Conference by showing up with his stunning young dyed-blond Egyptian fiancée, a recent graduate of the American University in Cairo, on his arm. This attempt to project an image of glamour and of having settled down domestically may telegraph a push by Gamal, 42, to assume the mantle of heir apparent. Mubarak once imprisoned sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim for having complained about the system of "repubarchy," or republican monarchy, in the Arab world, whereby presidents for life are often succeeded by their sons.
Gamal Mubarak was sent on a secret mission to Washington on May 12, where he met with national security advisor Stephen Hadley, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and Rice. President Bush briefly greeted him. The press speculated that Gamal was pleading with Washington to cease its pressure on the regime, which faces the prospect of civil unrest -- in part because of the expectations raised by Rice's rhetoric on democratization.
Certainly there is no evidence that Mubarak is liberalizing. When Judge Ahmad Bastawisi criticized electoral irregularities, he was reprimanded by the courts, a clear signal that the regime would not countenance genuine judicial independence. Other dissident judges have protested being reined in, and have joined forces with popular protesters upset about the government crackdown on liberal opponents. On May 18, police brutally put down a rally in Cairo by the Kefaya (Enough!) Party, and certainly are prepared to deal with Thursday's planned protests in the same way.
Mubarak has survived longer than most rulers in the bad neighborhood of the Middle East. His predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was cut down after only 11 years in 1981 by the bullets of a member of al-Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad. At home, Mubarak has succeeded by a combination of ruthlessness with enemies and cultivation of the army and the new Egyptian wealthy classes. Abroad, he has survived through cooperativeness with Washington. The Bush administration has upended that formula, by making it more problematic for Mubarak to be completely ruthless at home -- with the result that the Muslim Brotherhood for the first time forms a powerful bloc in the Egyptian Parliament. Elsewhere in the region, Bush has pursued revolutionary policies that Egypt cannot support, such as invading and attempting to reshape Iraq, or allowing Hamas to come to power in the Palestinian Authority and then cutting it off completely.
Egypt's political future is unclear. The country has been remarkably politically stable despite an authoritarian government, a high population growth rate, and lack of measurable economic progress. The reasons for this relative political stability are difficult to trace. The regime is careful to please the rural middle classes. Some pressure is taken off the regime by the high number of Egyptian guest workers abroad, especially in the oil states, and the remittances they send home and businesses they later found. Egypt's tourism industry is huge, worth billions every year, and so many people benefit from it that few have an interest in disrupting society in such a way as to scare the tourists off. (Thus, the bazaar merchants in Iran in the late 1970s funded Khomeini, but Egypt's shopkeepers seem to like the status quo, and if they want change, want it to be gradual and orderly.) The government has several sources of substantial "rent" that prop it up -- U.S. aid, tolls on the Suez Canal, Sinai petroleum, and cotton sales. The question is whether this apparent stability is artificial and whether the transition from Mubarak to whatever succeeds him will suddenly roil society.
Mubarak is deeply dismayed at what he considers the mess Washington has made in his neighborhood, and at the way Rice has more or less incited his own people against him.
Since Bush's grand projects in the region have crashed and burned, Mubarak has been emboldened to push back against pressures to open up. Washington's overweening ambition may actually have set back reform. If Iraq is what "democratization" looks like, few in the region would want to buy into it. When push comes to shove, Mubarak will choose the old tried-and-true methods at home over closeness with Washington, especially if that is what it takes to ensure that Gamal succeeds him and that the Brotherhood remains on the sidelines. That is probably the message that Gamal really brought to Washington earlier this month -- and that Washington, for all its lip service to democracy, probably signed off on.
If Washington is returning to realism, after its flights of Wilsonian fancy, it will have made things much worse, raising popular expectations and then once again dashing them. In the end, the United States prefers sclerotic regimes that don't threaten U.S. interests to democracies that do. The people of the Middle East know this, and it is a main source of their anger at us.
About the writer
Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002).
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