- (December 2005)
Is the USA trying to bring down Mubarak?
Mubarak may be paying a high price for having criticized the Bush administration
on just about everything. A strong ally of the USA since the days of Sadat,
Egypt has received and still receives more aid than any other country in the
world except for Israel. Egypt is obviously perceived by the USA as a key
player in the Arab world, a strategic asset. And this is probably a correct
assessment: Egypt has been traditionally one of the two cultural centers
of Islam, the other one being Iraq. But Mubarak may have underestimated his
personal importance in the overall scheme of things: Egypt is strategic for
the USA, but maybe Mubarak is not. Maybe Mubarak is a weak link precisely
because he is the head of one of the most strategic allies of the USA.
Mubarak, for example, does little to dispell popular lies about Jews and the
USA. Al Jazeera and the various national newspapers routinely spread all sorts
of crazy theories, from the fact that Jews are being all terrorist attacks in
the world to the fact that the USA caused the death of millions of Iraqis in
the 1990s. Mubarak has survived by allowing these lies to flourish in Egypt
and directing his people's anger towards Israel and the USA.
This old trick may have dried up his mentor's patience.
When Condy Rice was at a conference in Egypt, she explicitly announced the
end of USA tolerance for totalitarian regimes with a famous sentence:
"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability
at the expense of democracy in the Middle East, and we achieved
neither". Then the USA forced Mubarak to allowed the opposition to stand in
both presidential and parliamentary elections. Now it is demanding the
release of the leader of the opposition, Ayman Nour, whom Mubarak has just
sent to jail. The parliamentary elections turned out to be a triumph
for the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic movement that routinely sides with
Osama bin Laden on major issues. But the USA seemed quietly satisfied that
Mubarak's power was being eroded. Now it is basically calling for Mubarak
to do more of the same.
The USA does not seem to miss any opportunity to put pressure on Mubarak's
regime. All this pressure would eventually lead to the demise of Mubarak's
regime. This might be viewed by the street-marching anti-Americans of western
Europe as yet another reckless and irresponsible gesture by a dumb USA
administration, but it might instead be a calculated strategy to turn
both Iraq (with force) and Egypt (with political pressure) into two fledging
democracies, and thus upset the entire status of the Arab world.
WEstern Europeans are wimps who are afraid of the consequences of any change
within their old sphere of influence. The USA is a bold new power that is
not afraid to force change in the world. After all, the current set of
mad Arab dictators is a legacy of the old European order. The USA has made
the mistake of trying to coexist with this old European order.
Now it may have decided that it is time to install a new USA order, one based
on messy, unstable, unpredictable democracies instead of ordered, stable and
reliable tyrants. The reason is very simple: history has proven that,
in the long run, the reliable dictatorships are just the opposite, very
unreliable (see Saddam Hussein) while unreliable democracies are just the
opposite, very reliable (even the worst enemy of the USA within the
democratic world, France, is a better friend than the best friend of the uSA
within the totalitarian world, Saudi Arabia, that bred the
terrorists who attacked the USA).
While it is obvious that the USA is trying to bring down Assad in Syria,
it may be less obvious that the USA is also trying to bring down Mubarak
in Egypt. But this administration seems to be after the big fish, not
the small ones: Assad is now surrounded by USA allies (Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon,
Israel) and thus less and less relevant, whereas Mubarak sits at the helm of the
geographical center of the Arab world and controls a sizeable percentage
of the Arab population. If both Iraq and Egypt are turned into democracies,
this will be indeed a brave new Arab world.
It is indeed a gamble: Islamic parties could win in both countries and then
turn against the very country that made their victories possible.
But recent history has proven that something has been done quickly to
reunite the Arab world (still living in a medieval condition)
to the rest of this (rapidly modernizing) planet.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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