The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (14 page)

Arab regimes always triangulate and spread their bets across the board; this is the only way to maintain power in a political system where survival, political and existential, is the objective. Democracies must fight their enemies in order to preserve the state, but Arab regimes are caught in a perpetual pincer movement, squeezed by foreign
enemies on one side and their much more dangerous and always present domestic challengers on the other. Since all of these enemies cannot be defeated militarily, the regimes sometimes fight and at other times use different methods, as we’ve seen, like manipulating the unlikeliest of bedfellows or sending potential rivals to fight in foreign lands. On September 11, the United States was one of those foreign lands, a dumping ground for jihadis.

What was extraordinary about the attacks on lower Manhattan and the Pentagon was not the carnage—certainly not compared with some of the most vicious intra-Arab campaigns over the last several decades—but that the Arabs had shifted the field of battle to the continental United States. Washington’s response was to try to fix a political system that it thought was broken, when in fact it was functioning just as it always had, for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

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ntil 9/11 it had been easy for Americans to forget that the first duty of the leaders of a liberal democracy is to protect its citizenry. If elected officials cannot ensure the security of their constituents, they will lose their jobs to others who are willing and able to defend the men and women who vote for their leaders. National security is built into the mechanism of liberal democracy. This is not the case with Arab regimes.

Over the last half century, Arab leaders have imprisoned, tortured, and murdered thousands of their own citizens, and waged foolish wars costing the lives of millions for the sake of a vain fantasy that, from Nasser to Saddam, and Arafat to Nasrallah, was always a variation on the same theme—the new Saladin would restore the dignity of the Arabs and redeem their humiliation. When the Bush White House made Middle East democracy promotion a keystone of its U.S. national security strategy, its goal was to bind the Arab masses together with their leaders in a democratic contract. The hope was that with a voice in their own governance, the Arabs would be able to make their leaders accountable to them. (Actually, the
hopes for accountability went beyond this: insofar as elected Arab officials would be responsible for the welfare and actions of their own citizens within their states’ borders and outside them, governments would also be made accountable to the international community. Arab regimes could no longer exculpate themselves by claiming they had nothing to do with the manufacture of terrorism and no way to stop it.)

Representative government, then, was coming to the Arabs, and the first direct multicandidate presidential elections in Egypt’s history were held almost four years to the day after the event that kick-started the Bush administration’s Arab democratization program, September 7, 2005.

“I wish we had elections every day,” said Raouf.

At 4:30 in the afternoon Cairo is usually choked with rush-hour traffic, but we were cruising easily through the city. Raouf figured that the government offices all emptied early when employees were bused en masse to various polling places throughout the city. As a reward for presumably performing their duty—that is, voting for their employer, Hosni Mubarak, to keep his job—they all got to go home early, so while the streets weren’t exactly empty, life in Cairo, a city of eighteen million that’s short on all sorts of space—personal, social, economic, and political—seemed manageable.

Still, it was not an easy day. Raouf’s wallet holding his voter ID card had been stolen a few weeks before, so we spent hours looking for where he was supposed to vote. At one polling place, one of the presidential candidates showed up to cast his ballot and couldn’t find his name on the register, as did many other Egyptians who had not registered in time to vote.

Whether or not Egyptians should vote at all has been a question for locals and foreigners alike going back to the British occupation of Egypt. In 1922, as Egyptian officials were petitioning for further independence from the crown, one Egyptian minister went against his colleagues and explained that a parliament would put the country
“into the hands of the dominant class who would manipulate elections and purchase votes—the whole system of administration by baksheesh would start afresh and the fellah would undoubtedly be oppressed.”
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The argument against popular political participation hasn’t changed much over the last century: the masses of Egyptians are so poorly educated—illiteracy is at least 40 percent—that they are easy marks for the ruling elite, whose corruption would further increase the gap between rich and poor.
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But even without the popular vote, the ruling classes had managed to keep the poor and illiterate in their place.

Another argument against democracy was that the Egyptian masses would elect the Muslim Brotherhood. The unhappy retort is that the Islamists had already shaped the social and cultural agenda over the last two decades. While the state had beaten the Islamist movement militarily, the Mubarak government co-opted the language and symbolism of the Islamists to shore up its legitimacy. As a result, the public rhetoric of the regime differed little from that of its religious rivals, with the notable exception of the peace treaty with Israel, which the Islamists rejected out of hand.

Still, while these arguments didn’t hold up, there is a fundamental problem with holding free elections in Egypt, namely, that it isn’t clear that the masses care all that much about democracy. Indeed it isn’t obvious that Egyptians, who live in a country where much of the land is still farmed with ox plows, want anything to change at all. Nasser himself had confronted this problem when he tried to inspire the revolutionary aspirations of the countrymen on whose behalf, at least ostensibly, he had overthrown a king. After the Free Officers’ coup, Nasser was reportedly frustrated to find that the Egyptians “weren’t really motivated in any direction.”
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“I don’t know what the Egyptian popular will is,” said Raouf. “We should take a year to drive all around Egypt and find out what democracy means to Egyptians. Does it mean more food on their
plate? Then they would like it. Does it mean that their daughters all have to go to college, because then maybe many of them would not like it. A lot of people say they want the Muslim Brotherhood, but if they come to power and won’t let Egyptians listen to Umm Kulthum or let girls smoke
shisha
, I don’t think Egyptians will accept it. And if it just means they get to vote, I am not sure many people care that much.”

Raouf was happily surprised that so many of his friends did care, when he assumed most of them would stay home. All of them voted for the two runners-up, one of whom was the liberal candidate, Ayman Nour, jailed by the incumbent shortly after the elections. Despite irregularities at the polls—Raouf’s friend who was working at one of the many polling places we visited told us that party operatives were openly campaigning for Mubarak at the ballot boxes—and reports that the government “manipulated electoral laws, subverted judicial processes, beat up demonstrators, and blocked voters from the polls,” the vote was relatively fair, by Arab standards anyway.
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With 88.6 percent of seven million votes, about 22 percent of the thirty-two million registered voters, Mubarak’s victory was competitive compared with the nearly unanimous triumphs for the elected presidents of other Arab republics, like Syria and Saddam’s Iraq, who typically received 99 percent of the vote (as had Mubarak in the days before free elections). Mubarak’s 2005 success reflected, as Raouf had surmised, that the mass of ordinary Egyptians were perhaps not so interested in democracy—or that they fundamentally trusted Mubarak to keep Egypt safe and steering a more or less steady, albeit impoverished, ship of state.

Mubarak must have figured as much because the well-oiled media campaign he ran before the election wasn’t aimed at securing Egyptian votes. The man wearing an easy smile and pancake makeup in the slickly produced video ads was not an authoritarian regime chief, but a democratic leader in an open-necked collar who joshed easily with the press; this Mubarak was not a president for life surrounded
by corruption, but a man at ease with the Egyptian peasantry in all their folkloric splendor; he was not an Arab strongman whose decisions consisted of winks and nods, but a commander in chief sitting behind a desk, signing his name to official papers. This was an American-style media campaign for American consumption, because Washington was watching closely. And it seemed to work. The United States had pressed the Egyptian regime to open up the elections, and afterward the State Department called it a “beginning … that will enrich the Egyptian political dialogue for years to come.”
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Egypt was among the many Arab states where U.S. pressure for democratic reform appeared to be gathering some momentum.

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ypically, it is that group of hard-charging ideologues known as the neoconservatives, policy makers who were concentrated in the Bush White House’s National Security Council staff, the Pentagon, and Vice President Cheney’s office, who are credited as the intellectual architects of Arab democracy. However, the administration’s policy was anything but revolutionary: the quest for Arab democracy is a habit of the American mind, dating back to the earliest American travelers to the region, the nineteenth-century Christian missionaries. Once the proselytizers found there was little room in the Holy Land for the Protestant gospel, they started to preach America’s civic religion—universal equal rights, freedom, democracy. Our missionary calling in the Middle East underpins a long tradition of American policy making, from President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech promoting self-determination for all peoples, to President Eisenhower’s decision to stand against Washington’s “imperialist” allies France and Great Britain at Suez in 1956 and demand they withdraw from Egypt.

Eisenhower later called his intervention at Suez the worst mistake he ever made,
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and with two notable exceptions (Beirut in 1982 and Kuwait in 1991) subsequent administrations tended to play a less
activist role in the region, entrusting U.S. interests to regional allies inclined to repress their own people, a tendency the Americans noted with displeasure but did not correct. September 11 returned the White House to the missionary roots of U.S. Middle East policy, but were it not for the confluence of other unforeseen events, and unsuspected allies, it is unlikely that Arab democracy would have become the cornerstone of U.S. national security strategy.

The kernels of regional transformation were strewn before the invasion of Iraq, and its unwitting Johnny Appleseed was a career military man from the “realist” school of U.S. foreign policy. Secretary of State Colin Powell was opposed to using American might for the sorts of ideological and idealistic ends associated with the neo-conservatives, but when he warned President Bush of the consequences of military action in Iraq, he set the table for the new policy. “You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,” Secretary Powell told the president. “You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You’ll own it all.” This principle is derived from American retailing; Thomas Friedman called it the “Pottery Barn rule”: “You break it, you own it.”
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It is not an idea that is readily traceable to the realist school of American policy making, which cares little for the hopes, aspirations, and problems of foreign nationals.

The fact is that the divisions in the administration weren’t as clear as Washington insiders have made them out to be. Realists like Powell weren’t as realist as they and their cheerleaders in the press let on, and for the neoconservatives Arab democracy came a distant second to American interests. The mantra often associated with the neoconservatives was “regime change,” which did not necessarily mean that representative government would replace bad actors like Saddam Hussein, but only that the leaders of regimes across the region were put on notice that their days might be numbered.

As the Bush White House sought to prevent further attacks on the United States, the invasion of Afghanistan was little more than a policing action to round up those responsible for the attacks—the
Arabs led by bin Laden, who had in effect rented space from the Taliban to use as a base of operations. But a national security strategy is not the same thing as a criminal prosecution. The goal cannot be simply to apprehend wrongdoers after the fact, but to protect Americans against external threats, which means taking the initiative and going to the heart of the problem. And in this case, that was not Al Qaeda, and not Islam (as the White House tried clumsily to explain so as not to alienate the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims). The heart of the problem lay in the Arab world. Nineteen Arabs had struck the United States on behalf of Arab causes—Palestine, U.S. sanctions on Iraq, U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and so forth—supported by Arab rulers and the Arab masses alike, which is why on 9/11 Arabs across the region, from the Palestinian territories to the Persian Gulf, passed out baklava in celebration. The Iraq adventure was a punitive war against the Arabs, or more specifically against those who fund, arm, and embody the causes for which Arabs are willing to kill Americans: Arab regimes.

While much of the public debate in the United States was focused on the grievances that motivated networks of rogue operators to murder Americans, even before the invasion of Iraq the leaders of Arab states had reason to fear they would come in the crosshairs of an angry White House, since they knew better than anyone that stateless terrorism is a fiction designed to conceal their hands-on relationship to violence beyond their borders. Libya and Sudan were quick to let the White House know that they had nothing to do with 9/11 and were out of the terror industry. A diplomatic cable from the U.S. embassy in Libya dated a week and a half after 9/11 says that Khaddafi was “hysterical in his telephone call to [Jordan’s] King Abdullah as if only his personal intervention would prevent U.S. action.”
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Even Cairo, which interceded on behalf of Khaddafi and Sudanese president Omar Bashir, was scared of reprisals. In the fall of 2002, a state-owned Egyptian newsweekly carried an interview with imprisoned Islamist militants from al-Gama’a
al-Islamiyya,
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who explained that since they had repented of their violence and were no longer terrorizing ordinary Egyptians or foreign tourists, or taking orders from Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, neither they nor Egypt should pay the price for 9/11.