My IPS piece on Egypt’s role, and related observations

My latest IPS analysis, ” Egypt’s Star Rising in Regional Politics”, is here.
The key judgment I made there was this one:

If, as all the polls indicate, U.S. ally Fatah was weakened politically by the Gaza war, by contrast Mubarak’s Egypt seems to have emerged from the war with its political position in the region stronger than before.

This was my considered judgment, reached in light of the discussions I held with a small but high-quality and politically broad sample of Egyptian analysts, and the general observations I made as I moved around the city. Including, in the latter category, the fact that the general level of security-forces presence in and around downtown Cairo seemed notably lower than it was when I was last in Cairo, in February 2007.
Those I talked with included Dr. Esam el-Erian, the spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood, a couple of retired high-level officials, Fahmy Howeidy (who’s a veteran, well-informed commentatorial icon of, broadly, the left Nasserists), etc etc. However, the judgment I reached about Egypt having emerged from the war “stronger than before” is not one I heard expressed in those terms by any of the people I talked to. It is my judgment, only; and one to which I gave much careful consideration before I reached it.
To me the clinching piece of evidence was that– for all the harsh criticisms that Hamas’s allies launched against the Mubarak regime during and even before the war– at the end of the day, when the Hamas leaders decided they wanted/needed a ceasefire, it was to Egypt that they turned. And now, as I noted in the IPS piece, Egypt has emerged as the crucial intermediary in the many complex negotiations being conducted in the post-war period: between Hamas and Israel over consolidating the ceasefire; between Hamas and Israel over the possible prisoner exchange; and between Hamas and Fateh over finding their own long over-due rapprochement.
One other key little piece of evidence that I didn’t have room to mention in the IPS piece was the series of large posters I saw plastered on the walls of a couple of the large military encampments that are strategically placed to buffer Cairo International Airport from any oppositional mobs that might gather in the extremely densely populated downtown: Some of them said, quite explicitly, in large white letters “Al-Misr Awalan”– “Egypt First.” This is a sentiment I have never seen so publicly flaunted in Egypt, a country that under Gamal Abdel-Nasser prided itself on being the beating heart of Arab nationalism, third-worldism, pan-African liberation, you name it…
That sentiment of “Egypt First” was certainly broadly promulgated by Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, in the late 1970s as he broke with the Arab consensus and launched his own very personal (and Egypt-first-ish) peace diplomacy with Israel. Then, it was used– though never, I think as explicitly and in-your-face-ishly as today– to shuck off all the criticism that Sadat engendered from the Palestinians and many or most other Arab parties. Later, Sadat– and even more so Mubarak, after he came to power following Sadat’s assassination in 1981– worked to rebuild the country’s ties with the other Arab nations. But now, an explicit version of Egypt-first-ism is back with a vengeance; and Hamas, like everyone else, seems to have little alternative but to carry on working with Egypt.
However, as it pursues its new calling of “regional fulcrum”, the Mubarak regime still faces numerous stiff challenges. One is that Mubarak and his advisers have evidently decided that, to have any chance of success (or perhaps, even just to survive) they need to carve out, and maintain in public, a position that is notably distinct from the one that was Washington’s orthodoxy– at least until last January 20th. Hence, for example, the statement that Egyptian FM Aboul-Gheit made about his hosts in the US State Department yesterday, that I quoted in the IPS piece:

“They understand very well the situation. They know they will have to exert pressure on all sides to achieve the objective of peace…They say that they understand the problem of settlement activities and it has to come to an end.”

Now frankly, who knows if that was exactly what Hillary Clinton and the others who hosted Aboul-Gheit there had told him? But whether it was or not, for Aboul-Gheit to say that– and thereby publicly put the Obama administration somewhat on the spot on the settlements issue– showed a degree of Egyptian boldness in the public pursuit of the pan-Arab peace agenda that I haven’t seen for quite some time.
So if Egypt is to continue to be successful in playing an active, calming, and pro-peace diplomatic role in the region, it is going to require increasing amounts of solid, substantive US support for that role. Most importantly, in terms of some real US activism in “exerting pressure on all parties”, and not just on one party, and in taking substantive steps to end Israel’s continued pursuit of its settlement-construction project in the West Bank (and Golan.)
If such much-needed support for the pro-peace agenda is not forthcoming from Washington, or if– heaven forbid– the Obama people should just continue on diplomatic auto-pilot and not make “a clean break” with the divisive, exclusionary, and blatantly anti-Arab policies of President Bush, then Mubarak’s Egypt could yet, very easily, crash and burn in its new, notably out-front role in regional diplomacy.
Will the Obama administration be up to doing this? Let’s see.
A second challenge the Mubarak regime faces– which I also didn’t have time to delve into in the IPS piece– is the simple, one might even say “age-old”, problem of anno domini. Mubarak is now 80 (not 81 yet, as I’d written in the piece: that doesn’t happen till May.) His current six-year term as President runs through 2011. He has remained in power ever since, as Sadat’s existing vice-president, he easily and constitutionally stepped into Sadat’s shoes after Sadat was brutally assassinated by an Islamist extremist faction in October 1981.
Mubarak himself has never named a vice-president. Since 2000 there has been much speculation the President has been grooming his younger son, Gamal, now 44, to succeed him. In 2002, the Prez named Gamal the General Secretary of the Policy Committee in the ruling National Democratic Party. It’s a pretty safe bet that several figures in the country’s still very powerful and well-funded military– from which Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all emerged into politics– are fairly strongly opposed to any such “dyanstic” concept of political succession in a country that is, after all, supposed to be a republic. (Bush family dynasty in the US, anyone?)
We can note, though, that almost exactly the same dynamics were at work in republican Syria in 2000, when Hafez al-Asad died and his son Bashar was named his successor within hours of his death. In the Syrian case, many analysts at first saw Bashar as only a compromise or transitional figure, and speculated that behind the scenes the powerful generals would soon determine which among them would politely (or otherwise) elbow him aside. But that never happened. Instead, Bashar has not only survived as president for nearly nine years, but has also weathered numerous perilous political storms and built himself a significant nationwide political base… So who knows about Gamal Mubarak?
But anyway– as Fahmy Howeidi and others noted while I was in Cairo– the senescence/succession question is currently an inescapable fact of political life both in Egypt and in another key US ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi monarch, King Abdullah ibn Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, will be 85 this year. And though he seems to spend just about as much as Hosni Mubarak on hair-coloring products, no amount of boot-blacking on his follicles can hide the fact of his gathering senescence; and there, the succession issue is possibly even harder to predict, and therefore, a cause for even greater uncertainty. Saudi succession story in short: unlike Hosni Mubarak, Abdullah does have a designated successor, in his case Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz etc. But Sultan is only two years younger than the king; and once he goes it seems very likely there will be huge pressure from the next generation of Saudi princes– many of whom are in their 60s and 70s already– for the crown to pass to one of them. (That, though there would probably still be a few more sons of Abdul-Aziz to consider… remember that these Saudi princes, by taking massive numbers of wives in rapdi succession, have a reproductive life that can span 50 or 60 years.)
Of course, you could always say that it would be good thing if all or most of the literally thousands of people who now consider themselves to be “Saudi princes” got a proper job and started contributing productively to human betterment. Yes, you could say that. But for now it seems that most Saudi citizens have not (yet) rallied behind that point of view.
You could also perhaps predict that the advances made in high-end, and very well-funded geriatric care could keep both Abdullah and Sultan ticking over, in a condition that is semi-presentable in public, for another 15 or 20 years. Yes, their health-care system has indeed been very heavily invested in… mainly, one supposes, as a way to try to postpone as long as possible the tsunami of succession conflicts that is almost bound to arrive when these two doughty old survivors exit the scene.
But this does not, I submit, look anything like a stable system of governance in the modern world…
Bottom line, therefore, on the memo to Barack Obama and George Mitchell: Nail down the final portions of this Israeli-Arab peace business before these two weighty pro-US countries enter the shoals of real succession crises. That is, do it as fast as you can!