Authors: Kim Ghattas
Earlier that day, protests had erupted across Egypt. A wave of small-scale demonstrations
against Mubarak’s stranglehold on power had taken place in 2004 and 2005 under the
slogan “Enough.” Mubarak had been president since 1981, reelected regularly with a
surreal 98 percent of the vote. He was grooming his son to take over. The “Enough”
movement petered out while another protest group started up: the April 6 movement
was launched on Facebook in 2008 and called for a national strike in support of textile
workers. Inspired by the nonviolent Otpor! group in Serbia, which helped bring down
Slobodan Miloševi
ć
, one of the movement’s members also attended a youth conference organized by the
State Department in December 2008. He told U.S. officials about a plan to replace
the Mubarak government with a parliamentary democracy by 2011. In a diplomatic cable,
revealed by WikiLeaks, U.S. officials said this was a highly unrealistic goal. The
April 6 movement did little between December 2008 and January 2011. But now the simmering
anger and frustration in a country of eighty million people had been inflamed by Bouazizi
next door, and the youth movement in Egypt seized its chance.
One of its members, a young, veiled activist named Asmaa Mahfouz, made a home video
exhorting her fellow citizens to take to the streets on January 25 if they really
cared about their country. She posted it on YouTube and the video went viral. Thousands
of Egyptians discovered they had a voice and took to the streets. In some of the largest
demonstrations Egypt had seen in decades, protestors outnumbered police for the first
time. But it would take all day for the world’s media to notice something was different
about these demonstrations. As the day ended in Cairo, in Washington a reporter sitting
in the front row of journalists at the morning press conference asked Clinton about
the violence in Egypt. Three people had been killed so far in clashes with the police
and forty-nine wounded.
“Is there concern in Washington about the stability of the Egyptian government, of
course, a very valuable ally of the United States?”
Hillary was being asked whether a steadfast ally of the United States for the last
thirty years, a country of eighty million people, with a powerful army that received
more than a billion dollars in American aid every year, was stable. She didn’t seem
to think twice.
“We support the fundamental right of expression and assembly for all people, and we
urge that all parties exercise restraint and refrain from violence. But 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.”
Since Egypt was a behemoth state with a massive army and police force with total control
over its territory, it would have been difficult to say that the Egyptian government
was
not
stable, because that wouldn’t have been entirely accurate either. There was unrest,
and the United States was certainly concerned, but Egypt was not Yemen. Mubarak’s
forces were in charge of every village on the Nile, every slum of sprawling Cairo.
Egypt had been stable, it had been a valuable ally, and, through its accord with Israel,
it had been (indeed, still was) the cornerstone of the region’s cold peace with the
Jewish state. Clinton had known Mubarak and his wife since her days at the White House
and described them as friends. But if there was often method to Clinton’s off-script
comments, there was nothing to be gained from using the word “stable.” It was superfluous
and damaging. A few days later, in a television interview, Vice President Joe Biden
said Mubarak was not a dictator and should not step down. Washington just couldn’t
fathom letting go of Mubarak instantly: the stirrings on the streets of Egypt did
not signal a sea change in the country just yet. Despite the corruption, human rights
abuses, and repression by a police state, Mubarak was not a ruthless dictator like
Saddam Hussein had been, for example; he was an eighty-two-year-old stubborn, greedy
pharaoh. But mostly, the United States was keen not to alienate Mubarak. He barely
listened to their calls for reform when the country
wasn’t
protesting; they couldn’t risk shutting down all lines of communications with him
now. But when Clinton next spoke in public, she said nothing about stability. She
urged the Egyptian government to implement real reforms and said that the United States
supported the democratic aspirations of all people.
Many Egyptian protestors had already drawn an instant conclusion—that America did
not support them. They had wanted the United States to ditch Mubarak and take sides
with the people unconditionally, immediately, to fulfill everything they believed
America stood for, to be on the right side of history, human rights, and freedom.
On Tahrir Square, Abdullah al-Murhoni, a middle-aged engineering professor, said he
had hoped that the United States, a country that always spoke about freedom and democracy,
would have supported the protestors rather than stood by the dictator oppressing them.
Past American administrations had happily and quickly voiced their support for popular
revolutions attempting to topple dictators that the United States disliked, like in
Ukraine, but these Egyptian waters were uncharted, and while Obama recognized that
the way the United States approached the Middle East was outdated, there was no instant
new script. At this early stage of the protests, Washington was also unsure how far
the Egyptian people themselves wanted to go. Did they want Mubarak out, or did they
just want radical reforms? Did they want him out now, or would they wait till the
next presidential election? Did the hundreds of thousands on the street represent
the millions of Egyptians? There was no way of telling, and Obama, who had so carefully
avoided the “freedom agenda” of the Bush administration, did not want to get out in
front of the Egyptian people. The protests continued to swell through the week as
officials in Washington watched closely, trying to take their cue from the streets
of Cairo.
In the West Wing, at the Pentagon, in Foggy Bottom, everywhere, there were human beings
without all the facts agonizing over difficult decisions. They were euphoric to discover
“people power” in the Arab world but torn about how to handle it. Excited and disbelieving
diplomats told me they couldn’t peel themselves away from their television screen
but that they were also at a loss about what to actually do. When crowds chanted “death
to America” around the world, as they had been doing for several decades, American
officials took it in their stride; they were used to such sentiment by now, a bizarrely
comforting background hum, maybe like the sound of shelling was to me when I was child,
scary but familiar. But there was no America in the slogans now; instead the streets
echoed with “The people want the fall of the regime.” “This is not about us,” American
officials kept telling me. “This is about what Egyptians want.” And yet everyone still
wanted to know what Washington had decided about Egypt’s future: Would America drop
Mubarak or prop him up? The reality wasn’t that simple.
There were endless interagency meetings as a debate erupted within the administration.
The debate wasn’t about whether Mubarak should stay or go but about how and how quickly;
it was a battle between the idealists and the pragmatists inside the administration.
Some officials were trying to avoid a protracted face-off between the people and their
rulers or the total collapse of institutions that would send Egypt into a black hole
if Mubarak departed too quickly. Mubarak had often warned that the alternative to
his rule was a takeover by Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood, once banned for its
espousal of violence, was still repressed by Mubarak and shunned by the United States,
even as a peaceful political party. In 2005, Condoleezza Rice had said that the United
States had not and would not engage the Islamist group. Egypt’s neighbor Israel was
also fretting about the prospect that Mubarak could be replaced by an Islamist government.
Their peace with Egypt was cold. Mubarak had only ever visited Israel once in thirty
years, but he kept the peace treaty alive. For decades, both the United States and
Israel seemed unable to understand that Arab dictators who wore ties or spoke English
and warned that the alternative to their rule was chaos were only feeding radicalism
with their repression. Israel was at peace with one man, Mubarak, not with eighty
million Egyptians. Mubarak himself fed anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment and
then used it to justify his control over the country.
Younger, more idealistic advisors around Obama, like Samantha Power, were more carried
away by the winds of history: we can’t stop it; we can’t look like we’re trying to
hold it back because it could backfire and destroy our credibility. Obama took something
from each school of thought. His administration would listen to the people and let
them set the tone while trying to coax Egypt’s leaders in the right direction. Clinton
and Gates represented the more traditional thinking inside the administration. They
were averse to uncertainty and cautioned against pushing Mubarak out too quickly.
America was constantly accused of abandoning its allies; this would be the ultimate
and terrible proof that America was a fickle friend. The Saudis were already furious
that Washington had refused to show unconditional support for Mubarak. King Abdullah
called the Egyptian leader to offer his backing. “Some infiltrators, in the name of
freedom of expression, have infiltrated into the brotherly people of Egypt, to destabilize
its security and stability,” the king said, according to the Saudi Press Agency.
Arab rulers often blamed outsiders—more specifically, the West—for anything that went
wrong in their countries. The Egyptian foreign minister Aboul Gheit was convinced
that because one member of the April 6 movement had attended a conference in the United
States, the whole revolution had been plotted by Washington. On Tahrir Square, some
protestors were also wary of too much public support by America, worried that it would
only feed the government’s attempts to dismiss them as agents of the West.
The leaders still believed in this lie of foreign interference, which was their own
falsehood, but the people had woken up to the truth. Now, someone had to wake Mubarak
up. Clinton suggested sending someone to Egypt to explain to him, privately, that
he must start heading toward the exit before the situation got out of hand. Presidential
elections were due to take place later that year, and the message from Washington
was that they had to be real—not fixed: neither he nor his sons should stand, and
there had to be open competition. There was enough time to prepare for a proper exercise
in democracy.
Clinton chose Frank Wisner, a former ambassador to Egypt, to deliver the message,
and he prepared to fly out to Cairo on a secret mission. Meanwhile, Mubarak sacked
his cabinet on Friday evening, January 28. He also appointed his intelligence chief
Omar Suleiman as vice president, but these were futile gestures. Mubarak was still
the boss. At the end of that day in Washington, President Obama made a speech.
“When President Mubarak addressed the Egyptian people tonight, he pledged a better
democracy and greater economic opportunity. I just spoke to him after his speech and
I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete
steps and actions that deliver on that promise.”
On Sunday, Clinton sat through interviews with all five of the Sunday shows on American
network television and delivered the next installment of Washington’s policy. On air,
she made clear that Mubarak had to listen to his people, that there had to be a national
dialogue, and she called for an “orderly transition to democracy.” It was a new term
in the diplomatic panoply, though what it meant exactly was open to interpretation,
to be defined by the Egyptians themselves. On Monday, the thirty-first, during the
briefing, a journalist asked P. J. whether the United States would prefer that President
Mubarak not seek reelection. “These are decisions to be made inside Egypt.” In public,
the administration was exceedingly careful not to sound like it was driving the process
or imposing its will—this was not about what the United States wanted.
Behind the scenes, gentle advice to the Egyptian leader continued. Wisner landed in
Cairo and met with Mubarak, delivering his instructions from Washington: the president
had to make way, for the good of the country. But the crusty old man had no ears for
that. He had no new tricks in his bag. He was ancient and knew how to do things only
one way.
At the White House and the State Department, officials worried about the fixation
on the streets of Cairo with specific individuals: Mubarak in, Mubarak out, Suleiman
in, Suleiman out; the protestors didn’t seem to take into account that there was a
massive institution and apparatus that stood behind Mubarak and could remain fundamentally
intact and manage the process even without him. On the Sunday shows, Clinton had warned
that there was no point removing Mubarak just to have him replaced by a military dictatorship.
The United States knew how powerful the military was: just as in Pakistan, the army
was a corporation with entrenched interests, underwritten by American money to the
tune of more than $1 billion a year—in many ways, a good investment since the army
was promising today not to shoot at the people. But who knew what they would do tomorrow?
There were limits to how much influence the United States had over a sovereign army.
Democratic and Republican senators were starting to call on Mubarak to step down,
pressing the administration to publicly call for his resignation. Some of my American
friends were furious it was taking Obama so long to say Mubarak had to step down.
If I were still living in Lebanon, I may have thought the same, infuriated by America’s
typical reluctance, its pursuit of narrow interests. But after several years with
a front-row seat in Washington, I was starting to understand the complex decision-making
process and I could see how the United States tried to weigh its actions. I found
myself debating with a friend the deliberate approach taken by the administration.
Was it the responsible choice? Empower the people but make sure it’s not an American-driven
process; don’t say things you can’t deliver on; don’t push people out front only to
leave them hanging because you can’t protect them when the police arrest them or beat
them to death (or both). In 1991, after the Gulf War, the United States had encouraged
Shiites in Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein. But Washington was unable or unwilling
to provide cover or help to the rebellion. Tens of thousands of people died as Saddam
crushed the uprising.