About the series: Adalah ("justice" in Arabic) is a diary series about the Middle East, with special (but not exclusive) emphasis on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The authors of this series believe in the right of self-determination for all the people of the Middle East and that a just resolution respecting the rights and dignity of both Palestinians and Israelis is the only viable option for peace. Our diaries will consist of news roundup and analysis. We invite you to discuss them in the comments or contribute with stories from the region which deserve attention. We ask only that you be respectful and that the number of meta comments be kept to a minimum.
The political revolution in Egypt, still very much a work-in-progress, was a remarkable achievement. The spectacle of an oppressed population constituting itself, to the surprise of most observers, as a political force to secure its own liberation deeply inspired observers not just in the Middle East but around the world.
Solidarity demonstrations were organised in Britain, the U.S., France and elsewhere by people who opposed their own governments’ complicity in the Mubarak regime and who identified with the Egyptian struggle, drawing parallels with their own. This, it seems to me, was a sound framework through which to approach events in Egypt. As British, French or American citizens the most concrete way for us to aid Egyptian protestors is to end our governments’ support for the institutions and forces stacked against them.
Moreover, the Egyptian uprising helped demystify the role of our own states, domestically and abroad. Egyptian (and Tunisian, and Yemeni, etc.) protestors shone a spotlight on the West’s deep complicity in tyranny and repression in the Arab world, an issue conventionally seen as too embarrassing to mention in polite company. Egyptian protestors demanded an end to Western support for their tormentors, and images repeatedly surfaced of weaponry “Made in U.S.A.” being deployed to crush the uprising. Media coverage was thereby forced to address the fact that Mubarak had long been a major Western ally and a key pillar underpinning U.S. hegemony in the Middle East.
The explanations offered for this policy were, however, often misleading, portraying U.S. support for authoritarianism in the Middle East as a pragmatic concession to the need for “stability” or as a reluctant security measure driven by fear of “Islamism”. Thus a New York Times article sought to explain the tendency for American governments to “embrace… dictators” in terms of a conflict between idealistic urges and pragmatic imperatives. “Every country”, readers were informed, “has both values and interests”, and “sometimes they conflict.” The term “stability”, a staple in official discourse, was frequently regurgitated uncritically, with obvious questions – what kind of ‘stability’, and for whom? – unasked. (Nicholas Kristof’s lament, in the New York Times, that “[f]or far too long, we’ve treated the Arab world as just an oil field” was a notable exception). In the Guardian Noam Chomsky offered a more plausible account, which pointed out that the West is happy to support “Islamists” when doing so is perceived to further the interests of powerful constituencies within Western societies. More to the point, U.S. subversion of democratic movements whose success is perceived by American planners to be inimical to their interests has been a consistent pattern since WWII, and not only in the Middle East. The common factor present in all these cases was not Islamism, nor Communism, but independent nationalism hostile to American foreign policy objectives. Narrow explanations for U.S. hostility to democracy in Egypt – that, for example, emphasise fear of an ascendant Muslim Brotherhood – are therefore partial, at best.
Evidence supporting the argument outlined above is not difficult to unearth. The author of the New York Times article cited above, for example, could have begun with a look through his own paper’s archives. But to examine it would require adopting a similar level of scepticism towards the proclaimed role of the American and British states as that shown towards the claims made by the Mubarak regime in Egypt. This brings us to the second educational service performed for us by the demonstrators in Egypt. Just as historians, journalists, and other commentators tend to be much clearer about the role of class and powerful interest groups in shaping state policy when discussing events that happened a long time ago, so they are often able to be more frank about the character of political systems in foreign states than they are when discussing our own.
This can manifest itself as an atypical boldness on the part of journalists in exposing deceit by powerful actors, as when CNN’s Anderson Cooper challenged the “lies” of the Mubarak regime (provoking a revealing reaction from some of his colleagues). More importantly, it can also produce unusually acute descriptions of how power operates in the real world. Thus an article in the New York Times described the “intersection of money, politics and power”; “[p]ublic resentment at the wealth acquired by the politically powerful”; a political system in which “wealth bought political power and political power bought great wealth”; the “rise of a moneyed class” through “self-dealing, crony capitalism and corruption”; politicians aligning themselves with “rich businessmen”; GDP growth accompanied by a rise in poverty; purportedly “free-market” policies disguising a reality of “crony capitalism”; “banks [acting]… as kingmakers”; etc. The Times was talking about Mubarak’s Egypt, of course, but the similarities with our own political system are difficult to miss.
Observing that the New York Times would not dream of publishing “such a sweeping denunciation of the plutocratic corruption and merger of private wealth and political power” in the U.S., Glenn Greenwald argues that such articles manufacture the “appearance that such problems exist only Over There, but not here.” I agree that this can be the effect. But the existence of such analysis in an establishment venue can also be used to illuminate some of the principles that characterise our own political system if the parallels are elaborated, as Greenwald himself expertly does. To give one example, the ongoing attempts by the Egyptian regime to neutralise the protests by offering superficial concessions while keeping its substantive political and economic power intact mirrors quite closely the historical function of much democratic and progressive economic reform in Britain.
This brings me to the proximate cause of this article - a piece published earlier this week by Peter Beinart, which approaches the Egyptian uprising from a different angle than that advocated above. Beinart sees in Egypt not a prompt for critical self-reflection but an opportunity for self-congratulation:
“Ever since the financial crisis hit, Americans have been feeling bad about ourselves. Our infrastructure is moldering; we owe everyone money; barely anyone thinks we’re the future anymore. All that may be true. But now and then an episode comes along that reveals what an unusual, and impressive, great power the United States still is. That’s what the Egyptian revolution has done.”
Far from being inspired by Egyptian demonstrators to examine the American political system more critically and protest its injustices more assertively, Beinart uses the Egyptian revolution to actively apologise for it. It is doubtful whether the Egyptian workers striking against the neoliberal programme that the U.S. has aggressively pushed domestically and abroad would be enamoured with Beinart’s attempts to conscript their efforts to its defence.
Beinart acknowledges, in one dismissive sentence, the fact that the U.S. has “buttressed Mubarak’s tyranny for decades”. But “in the last three weeks”, he would have us believe, while the world’s attention was focused on the uprising in Egypt, a quiet revolution in Washington went unnoticed: “[f]orced to choose between national interests and national ideals, the Obama administration—after a little stammering—chose the latter”. Disproving both the “realist” doctrine that sees ideology as a cover for naked “national interest”, and the “Marxist” belief that the U.S. is generally “hostile to global democracy”, “America”, faced with a choice between supporting an allied dictator or the Egyptian population, cast “our” lot in with the latter.
Beinart’s analysis is consistent with that of the New York Times article cited above, in that both attempt to explain U.S. foreign policy in terms of a clash between ‘values’ and ‘interests’. This analytical framework is quite common. Thus, Nicholas Burns, professor of diplomacy and international relations at Harvard Kennedy School, pictures President Obama on a high wire juggling two “important” but “conflicting” objectives: its ambition to be “Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Empire of Liberty’” on the one hand and its “real world interests” on the other. Former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel Daniel Kurtzer similarly informs us that a “complex and confounding dilemma” lies at the heart of the “US-Egyptian relationship”. On the one hand the Egyptian regime co-operates with U.S. foreign policy objectives, but on the other hand, its mode of governance “is at odds with our ideals”.
For Beinart, the U.S. government resolved this deep “dilemma” in Egypt by ditching America’s “national interests” in favour of its “national ideals”. One searches his article in vain for any explanation for this overnight reversal of decades of consistent, bipartisan U.S. policy. We are invited simply to applaud at the sheer force of the Obama administration’s idealism.
But Beinart’s attempted critique of ‘realism’ in fact repeats its major error, positing an entity called “America” and ascribing to it “interests” and “ideals” that are then understood to shape “American” foreign policy. In reality U.S. foreign policy is determined by a complex array of constituencies and institutions, many of which contradict each other. Talk of “national interests” and “national values” elides these contradictions. It also obscures the fact that American policymakers tend to be particularly sensitive to the concerns of the wealthy and the powerful. None of this is particularly abstruse, incidentally; it was as obvious to Adam Smith as it is to demonstrators in Egypt today.
There is a grain of truth in Beinart’s argument that:
“when nations rise up nonviolently against their pro-American tyrants, Americans across the political spectrum grow ashamed, and that shame can be the difference between a peaceful revolution and Tiananmen Square.”
This isn’t always the case – witness, for example, the overt opposition to democracy in Palestine. Nonetheless, decades of popular struggle have forced American officials to pay at least rhetorical tribute to ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’, and so on, and have succeeded in imposing some measure of constraint on the policies the state is able to pursue. But the influence of public opinion on foreign policy is often marginal and the historical record – I’ve given one recent example above – suggests the U.S. government still retains the capacity to intervene to undermine democracy abroad.
Another problem with Beinart’s account is that it doesn’t fit the reality of U.S. intervention in Egypt. When protests first erupted the Obama administration stood staunchly behind its ally, with American officials rejecting accusations that Mubarak was a “dictator”, calling for his “continued leadership” and dismissing the possibility that the Tunisian uprising could be repeated in Egypt. When it became clear that Mubarak’s continued rule was untenable, having alienated both the population and an important sector of the military elite beyond repair, the U.S. and the Egyptian regime shifted to Plan B: “to ride out the uprising with their basic authoritarian prerogatives intact”.
Already by February 1 it was clear that behind the scenes Mubarak was no longer in control and that a military coup by newly-appointed vice president Omar Suleiman, defence minister Tantawi, and their supporters in the military establishment and abroad, was in motion. By February 5 U.S. officials were informing their counterparts in Europe that Suleiman was in control and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was openly calling for a “transition” process led by Suleiman and the military. Suleiman, a long-time US/Israeli ally, was the Mubarak regime’s torturer-in-chief, and is nearly as unpopular with the Egyptian population as the President himself. In backing him to oversee the “transition” the U.S. and British governments were directly opposing the demands of the protestors in Tahrir Square.
Throughout, the U.S. has refused to cut military aid to the regime, surely a truer reflection of its priorities than Obama’s flowery rhetoric. Clinton and Obama are now busy apologising for the Egyptian military in the international media, despite the fact that according Amnesty International Egyptian soldiers have been torturing arrested protestors.
Increasingly blunt American calls for Mubarak’s exit, as well as the Egyptian military’s decision to refrain from firing on the protestors, can thus be explained as an attempt to secure the legitimacy of the regime to “ensure that a post-Mubarak Egypt doesn’t alter its behavior”. Academic Robert Springborg explained:
“The military will engineer a succession. The west – the US and EU – are ... working closely with the military … to ensure a continuation of a dominant role of the military in the society, the polity and the economy.”
As Ross Douthat summarised, praising the administration’s approach, it is clear that
“the administration’s real goal has been to dispense with Mubarak while keeping the dictator’s military subordinates very much in charge. If the Obama White House has its way, any opening to democracy will be carefully stage-managed by an insider like Omar Suleiman.”
This promotion of the Egyptian military was intended “to ensure that Mubarak’s fall does not” fundamentally alter “the existing order”. Mubarak would leave and the political process would be modified in some respects, but there would be a substantial “continuity of policy” and true “regime change would not take place”, since any new elite would remain “dependent upon the military, internal security forces, intelligence service, bureaucracy and business community to govern the country”. Again, instructive parallels with our own political system suggest themselves.
Whether the U.S.’s strategy will be successful remains to be seen. After taking power the Egyptian military began to re-assert its control, dispersing the protestors in Tahrir Square and banning labour organising. However, strikes across the country are ongoing and demonstrators continue to call for full civilian rule. Moreover the regime has now formally committed itself to holding elections. The battle is far from over.
However it develops, it is difficult to square the U.S.’s role as described above with Beinart’s account. To the extent that “America” has been guided by its “ideals”, as Beinart suggests, we ought to call not for victory parade but for a psychiatrist.
The courageous popular struggle in Egypt offers us an excellent opportunity to understand more clearly some of the injustices present in our own political systems. No less importantly, it should inspire us to take action against them.
Originally published at New Left Project