Obama and the Egyptian struggle for democracy

The democracy protests that swept Tunisian President Zine el Abedine Ben Ali from power are going viral, but sadly President Obama and other Western leaders seem immune.

Indeed, it is quite likely that the president and his colleagues in Europe are as frightened of the potential explosion of people power across the Middle East and North Africa as are the sclerotic autocratic leaders of the region against whom the protests are being directed.

The question is, why?

Why would Obama, who worked so hard to reach out to the Muslim world with his famous 2009 speech in Cairo, be standing back quietly while young people across the region finally take their fate into their own hands and push for real democracy?

Shouldn't the president of the United States be out in front, supporting non-violent democratic change across the world's most volatile region?

The answer, as is increasingly the case, comes from the ever-growing cache of leaked documents from WikiLeaks and other sources that are providing inside evidence of America's true interests and intentions in the Middle East.

Specifically, as The Palestine Papers revealed by al Jazeera demonstrate (and which I will analyse in more detail in my next column), the US under Obama-as much if not more so than under his predecessor-demands that leaders remain in place who will do its bidding even if it means subverting the will of the citizens of a country and maintaining a system that manifestly harms their interests.

Thus the administration at least twice threatened to cut funding to the Palestinian Authority if elections were called and anyone other than Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad remained in power.

And it actively works with Israeli and Palestinian security services to deny the democratic will of Palestinians.

What is clear, then, is that Obama not only prefers the status quo, but the United States will actively subvert democracy in order to ensure that governments that will follow its policies remain in power.

If the administration has taken such an anti-democratic line with Palestinians, imagine how it must feel about the protests that have just exploded in Egypt, where substantive democratic change and a truly representative government would no doubt be far less amenable to US policies and strategic objectives regarding Israel and the war on terror than is Mubarak's.

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Tonight in his State of the Union address the world will learn whether President Obama has any of his once celebrated vision, courage and audacity left in him, or if he's been so thoroughly beaten down by the forces that actually run Washington that he can barely muster support for the young people around the Arab world who are increasingly saying "Kefaya", Enough!, to their governments, and the larger global system that has kept them in power for so long.

It's probably too much to ask the President to say "Kefaya" to the forces that have so circumscribed his once progressive vision.

But it would be nice if he could at least offer a few words of support to the people of Tunisia, and now Egypt and other countries across the region, who are actually following the example of the United States and fighting for their freedom.

Update: In his State of the Union speech, the President did not mention Egypt at all. He did mention Tunisia, declaring "we saw the desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.

"That is a nice sentiment, but it's both a "day late," since the revolution has already succeeded, and glaring in its omission of Egypt, whose capitol was burning as he made the speech. Indeed, earlier in the day Secretary of State Clinton declared, "Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people." If this is Obama's official policy, then the intifada in Egypt risks becoming  a revolution against the US as much as against Mubarak, with far reaching consequences across the Muslim world.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden.

the sclerotic autocratic leaders of the region

Aljazeera has now gone to extensive coverage of Egypt after slowly and inadequately covering it in the first few days. It was giving full and unending coverage to Palestine Papers (which are important for sure), but was slow to deal with Egypt. Now, it has changed. It went wall-to-wall. I still believe that Mubarak's visit to Qatar was intended to reduce and affect Aljazeera's coverage of Egypt. I do believe that some agreement was reached. I say that because when I asked Emir of Qatar last July about the state of his relations with Husni Mubarak, he told me that Mubarak has refused all efforts at reconciliation with Qatar. I then hear that Mubarak suddenly shows up in Qatar. And the coverage of Aljazeera of the Egyptian sham elections was low key.

Comment: xxxxxxxxxxxx [an April 6 activist] offered no roadmap of concrete steps toward April 6's highly unrealistic goal of replacing the current regime with a parliamentary democracy prior to the 2011 presidential elections. Most opposition parties and independent NGOs work toward achieving tangible, incremental reform within the current political context, even if they may be pessimistic about their chances of success. xxxxxxxxxxxx wholesale rejection of such an approach places him outside this mainstream of opposition politicians and activists.

Two complexes afflict western, especially American and French, policy in the Middle East and the Muslim countries generally: 1) the Tehran ’79 Syndrome; and 2) the Algiers ’92 Syndrome. In both cases Islamist factions effectively co-opted popular unrest in the first case turning a generalized revolt against a particular pro-western dictator into an “Islamic Revolution” that torpedoed a presidential re-election campaign and tanked a major American ally and in the second a predominantly Muslim polity held free elections in which an Islamist party won the overwhelming majority of votes and then devolved into a decade long Civil War. In the first case, the lesson was to stand by allies in times of crisis for strategic as well as domestic political reasons. No American president, especially no Democratic president, wants to end a first term like Jimmy Carter did. In the second, the lesson as that democratic processes in Muslim polities, especially in Arab ones, lead to Islamist victories which drastically increases the risk factor associated with political reform or popular protest. The emergency laws so popular in many Arab states (and which usually ban demonstrations or significantly the activities of political parties) therefore seem easily justifiable from the standpoint of western interests. In both cases, the country put at risk was a major oil or gas producer. Both countries were strategically positioned in terms of either Eurasian or European geopolitics, though one less than the other (Iran in relation to the Persian Gulf and the Soviet Union; Algeria in terms of southern Europe, particularly in terms of immigration and Mediterranean shipping and energy). The Iranian problem cast its shadow over the Algerian one; and the Algerian experience has loomed over other Arab-Muslim experiments with democracy in America, Europe and the Arab countries. Iran looms more heavily in the American psyche — with the hostage crisis the Iranian revolution was an enormous humiliation and geopolitical shake up. The Algerian crisis was more serious in the French mind, but has been prominent in American analysis and thinking about Islamists and elections.

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France’s response to the Tunisian uprising (and indeed the whole dialect in which Chirac and Sarkozy discussed their support for Ben Ali: the talk about how France “doesn’t want a Taliban regime” in Tunisia for example; an allusion to Algeria, not Afghanistan), for example, reflects this most clearly. The dominant official American attitude toward democratic reform in Egypt is concerned with the possibility that the Muslim Brothers might sweep the polls and cut off the treaty with Israel and debase the American relationship with what is considered a pivotal ally. Reams and reams of paper have been used debating, discussing, contemplating, marinating on the character and ambitious and fanaticism and enlightenment of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its allies. Democracy is tolerable so long as there is no Islamist problem...