Rainblog

In the movie “Three Kings”, Archie Gates (George Clooney) sums up the political situation in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War with the words:

Bush told the people to rise up against Saddam. They thought they’d have our support. They don’t. Now they’re getting slaughtered.

There’s room for debate over whether supporting the Iraqi uprisings would have been a good idea - it would probably have led to sectarian killings and ethnic cleansing on a huge scale, and might well have split the country three ways, so US reluctance to get involved is at least understandable. Still, the rebels did believe that they’d have foreign support, in part because that’s what the international community - particularly the US - let them believe. When they didn’t get it, they and their families died in vast numbers, and Saddam remained in power until the US finally mounted a hugely expensive war to get rid of him.

Fast forward just over twenty years and some more rebels have just learned that they don’t have our support. The international community, in its wisdom, has decided that any kind of decisive intervention in Libya is not warranted and has limited itself to the equivalent of sending a strongly-worded letter. The rebels, militarily weaker than Gaddafi’s oil-funded military, are being pushed back. If you need to be reminded what happens next, think back to 1991.

Gaddafi may look like a figure of fun, with his preposterous dress-up uniforms, his barkingly-insane speeches and grandiose public works projects, his put-away-wet physiognomy and his unwise personal grooming choices. He isn’t. He is a vicious thug. Frankly, I don’t care if he did or did not sign off on the Lockerbie bombing: what he has done to his own people is ample grounds for hanging him by his heels from his palace gate.

I’m not normally hawkish on foreign interventions. Unlike those who actually have the power to command them, I’d never try to pretend that they are easy or uncomplicated. But in the past few weeks, a window of opportunity in which we could have crossed off another villain briefly opened up. Thanks to the inability of the international community to display even the appearance of decisiveness, that window has probably closed. Gaddafi was weak; a show of real resolve could probably have toppled him. When that show never came, he fought back and now he’s getting stronger every day.

We know what comes next because we’ve seen how a dictator consolidates his rule after a rebellion. Tens of thousands will flee, creating a refugee problem that the international community, in its goodness, will also fail to solve. Of those who remain, many will be tortured or killed. If things really go south, a good friend of mine may be among them.

The miraculous thing in all this is that would-be rebels still believe that, when push comes to shove, the rich countries will come down on their side. Granted, it’s almost never happened before, certainly never in a timely fashion. But this time, they must say to themselves, it will be different. Our dictator has been a thorn in everyone’s side for years: surely, this time the rest of the world will act.

But once again, they are wrong. Once again, we will dither. And once again, they will die.

Hosni Mubarak’s speech on Tuesday was basically a fuck-you to the protesters. The clear message was “Fuck you all, I’ll resign when I feel like it”. Although it was flavored with self-pity (“after all I’ve done for you”), in essence it was a bravura piece of arrogance. He was at pains to make it clear that nothing the protesters could do could make him change his plans.

Now he’s gone a step further. The supposedly spontaneous ‘pro-Mubarak’ demonstrations (or, to put it another way, armed assaults on anti-Mubarak protesters) show signs of having been organized and paid for by the regime. If that’s the case, that’s not just the act of a spiteful tyrant lashing out at the people who dared to challenge him: it’s Mubarak sending another fuck-you, this time to the international community and in particular the United States. To allow Mubarak to save face, Obama kept his speech carefully non-committal, but his core message was unambiguous: change needs to start immediately. Sending in armed mobs to beat the protesters bloody, is equally unambiguous: you don’t tell me what to do either.

This may not have been a clever move. You don’t slap a US president in the face. Barrack Obama acts like a civilized man, but he is only the pinnacle of a vindictive system that has a history of avenging slights with near-medieval brutality. The US focus is likely to shift from providing a golden bridge that allows Mubarak to retreat with dignity to cutting the ground from under his feet at every opportunity. The king-maker in Egypt today is the army. US envoys are probably already speaking to key generals, reminding them who foots the bill for all that modern equipment they enjoy so much. Mubarak, on the other hand, has little left to offer them. That doesn’t bode well for his long-term survival.

But long-term survival may not be his plan. At 82, may feel he has nothing left to lose. Faced with the certainty of defeat, he may choose to lay waste to everything around him, to sow such divisions in Egypt as to render it ungovernable and leave a legacy of chaos for his successors. Alternatively, he may really believe - just as he really believes that Egyptians should be grateful to him - that he can still win this one.

Either way, the chances for a peaceful transition to a more democratic Egypt look much smaller today than they did a few days ago.

In Hillaire Belloc’s poem “Jim (who ran away from his Nurse and was eaten by a Lion)”, the father of the eponymous character advises small children to “always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse”.

Something like that attitude is implicit in Israel’s position on recent events in Egypt, as described in this article from Haaretz. According to the article:

Israel called on the United States and a number of European countries over the weekend to curb their criticism of President Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region.

This is essentially the same “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” reasoning that kept Mubarak in power for thirty years. As far as the Israelis (and the Americans) were concerned, if Mubarak could keep anti-Israeli elements in line and support American goals in the Middle East, he was welcome to run the country however he saw fit. To seal the bargain, Mubarak’s Egypt was the second-largest beneficiary of US foreign aid after Israel, getting an average of $2bn annually — most of which went to the military. 

Politics inevitably involves compromises, often ugly ones, but it’s a matter of some shame that the US is so often in the position of supporting tractable tyrants like Mubarak in the interests of an apparent stability. The real trouble is that it’s short-term thinking. In the long run, no dictatorship can last. When it crumbles, the people in the streets know who their friends were. If the army yields to Mubarak’s calls for them to turn their American weapons on the protesters, Egyptians are going to remember who armed the soldiers for a long, long time.

An Israeli official quoted in the Haaretz article says:

“The Americans and the Europeans … aren’t considering their genuine interests … Even if they are critical of Mubarak they have to make their friends feel that they’re not alone. Jordan and Saudi Arabia see the reactions in the West, how everyone is abandoning Mubarak, and this will have very serious implications.”

By ‘genuine interests’, he apparently means the considerations of realpolitik, not moral obligations or democratic principles. Still, he’s not wrong on one level. The Saudis and the Jordanians are definitely watching developments in North Africa, and they’ve noticed the sea change in the international attitude. If the US finally lets Mubarak twist in the wind, they will take note and draw the appropriate conclusions.

Or will they? There are at least two possible conclusions to be drawn here. One, which the unnamed Israeli has in mind, is that the US is not to be trusted and that it will abandon its allies when the chips are down. The other is that it’s time to start making such much-needed reforms at home or one day the ruling families of the Arab world will also be looking out of the palace windows at an angry mob and wondering where it all went wrong. This may actually be a ‘teachable moment’, when Barrack Obama can - and should - try to convince some of our ‘friends’ of the truth of Kennedy’s dictum that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” 

But amid all the exhilaration of watching ordinary people actually stand up and kick their dictators to the kerb, we shouldn’t forget that what comes next isn’t guaranteed to be all sugar plums and rainbows. The problems facing the people of Egypt and Tunisia aren’t going to disappear overnight simply because the local dictator finally left for the airport. Widespread poverty, endemic corruption and massive unemployment are all things that will survive the fall of the regime.

There’s also the question of the power vacuum. Something has to take the place of the ousted strongman. It would be nice to think that a vibrant, pluralistic democracy could spring up overnight, and that a suitable man of the hour, someone sober and statesmanlike, might step forward to take the helm. Maybe there’s a whole queue of North African Mandelas, all ready to heal the wounds and steer the country into a new era of peace and prosperity. That may be over-optimistic, however.

The US and the Israelis would probably like to see someone like Mohammed El-Baradei in charge (I confess, I’ve always had a certain respect for him, and never more so than when he refused to be bullied by George Bush). Someone who can work with the West but isn’t tainted with tyranny would be just ideal from their point of view. Their fear is that the moderates may not have the necessary support and that it could be the religious movements that end up taking power.

That may be less bad than it sounds. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is religious, but it’s hardly the kind of fiery bomb-throwing organization that Americans imagine when they hear the name. Even the Tunisian Islamists have pledged to work to establish a democratic system. It may be that - as usual - the people of the Arab world have better sense than the West is prepared to give them credit for. The future rulers of Egypt and Tunisia may not be as well-disposed to the West as Hosni Mubarak, but they might serve their own people better.

The Israelis are afraid that whatever comes after Mubarak and Ben Ali will be ‘something worse’ from their point of view. They may well be right. If the place left by the current crop of despots does end up being filled by religious extremists or military strongmen, then the change may also be for the worse for the people of North Africa. At the moment, however, I’m cautiously optimistic that it may not come to that.

Sooner or later, you have to let go of Nurse. If you’re lucky, you may find that it’s not all lions out there.

The must-see item on the Internet today has been Al-Jazeera’s live coverage of events in Egypt. It’s too early to call it for certain, but if someone were to ask me what regime change looked like, I’d probably point to the footage from Egypt and say “something like that”. If I were Hosni Mubarak, I’d be calling my travel agent about now.

Al-Jazeera’s coverage is good: juxtaposing the tranquil images broadcast by Egyptian state TV with their own footage of blazing police trucks was a nice touch. I have quite a lot of respect for “the Arab CNN”. As the scrappy new kid on the block, they’re not afraid to ask the tough questions that the more compliant and complacent American media won’t touch. Earlier today, one of their reporters was hounding a spokesman from the State Department mercilessly, belaboring him with “have you stopped beating your wife?” questions about the US relationship with the Mubarak government. You wouldn’t see that on CNN.

More interesting than that was their overall attitude. From where I was sitting, their coverage didn’t look neutral. It looked strongly sympathetic to the demonstrators, with their correspondents breathlessly enumerating each new development that suggested that the regime was in retreat and that the army was about to throw in with the protesters. For my money, based on what I saw, Al-Jazeera’s sympathies definitely lie with the Arab street.

Al-Jazeera is headquartered in Doha, Qatar. In common with a number of other states in the Middle East and North Africa, Qatar suffers from what Julian Assange might refer to as a “democracy deficit disorder”. To put it politely, Qatar and its neighbors are not exactly shining beacons of liberty and freedom of expression. In fact, on the Economist’s Democracy Index, Qatar sits at #137 - just one place above Egypt. Yemen and Jordan, which have protests of their own, are at #146 and #117 respectively; the UAE is at #148 while Saudi Arabia is down at #160.

Right now, the rulers of many of these states are probably looking over their shoulders and wondering if they’re next. If Egypt goes the same way as Tunisia, the odds that others will follow are going to increase enormously.

And Al-Jazeera is cheering for the Egyptian protesters. The US may be waiting to see how the chips fall before saying anything - remember, not only do they have to avoid alienating Mubarrak if he somehow survives, but everything the administration says will be carefully scrutinized by the Saudis and all our other autocratic friends as well - but Al-Jazeera isn’t quite so reticent. It looks to me as if the Arab world’s leading news network has already made up its mind that the future lies not with the autocrats but with the discontented masses.

Interesting, no?