Yesterday evening I put up a short post here about the fears swirling around the Middle East about the possible physical weakening of Egypt’s 81-year-old President Hosni Mubarak, an authoritarian ruler who is a key US ally in the region.
Now, more than 18 hours later, the vast (and vastly expensive) newsgathering operation of the NYT has finally caught up with the story.
Their Cairo-based correspondent Mona el-Naggar provides a few more details than I did.
She reports that “many local commentators” said that Mubarak, “looked weak and in poor health standing next to a youthful President Obama in their recent meeting here.” (Duh!)
Then she adds:
- This latest round [of concern about his health] … has its roots in a personal shock. Not long before Mr. Obama’s visit, one of Mr. Mubarak’s two grandchildren, a 12-year-old boy, died unexpectedly. By all accounts, Mr. Mubarak doted on the boy and was devastated by his death, canceling a planned visit to Washington — his first in five years — and disappearing from public view for about 10 days.
He resurfaced to receive Mr. Obama but did not go to the airport to greet him.
I note, however, that back when he cancelled his Washington trip, there was some serious questioning as to whether the death of the grandson, however, sad, was actually a sufficient explanation for the ageing leader’s occlusion at the time. So Naggar’s “by all acounts” is not, strictly speaking, true.
She is quite right to note that he has never appointed a vice-president. And of course this means that any news of him failing some physically is necessarily going to spark a sharp succession struggle within the country’s closed and long military-dominated political elite. She notes, as I did yesterday, that two main contenders identified in Cairo’s ever-humming political salons are First Son Gamal Mubarak and military intel chief Omar Suleiman.
Naggar adds:
- If [Mubarak] dies in office, then the speaker of the Parliament, a veteran leader [of the ruling ‘National Democratic Party’, NDP], Fathi Sorour, would serve as an interim president until an election could be called. With no real political parties here, an election would effectively be a formality to install the candidate selected by Mr. Mubarak’s party. Gamal Mubarak is a high-ranking official in the party, but there remains no guarantee that the old-timers in the system or the military would go along with his ascension, political commentators said.
Mubarak has been president continuously since Anwar as-Sadat was assassinated in 1981. He had been his vice-president; both men, like Gamal Abdel-Nasser who preceded Sadat, came from the military and relied strongly on the military to buttress their rule.
In the heady days of G. W. Bush’s push for “democratization throughout the whole of the Middle East”, Mubarak agreed to allow opposition parties to run against him when he ran for his current six-year term in office, back in September 2005. But he very cleverly use government resources and media to outfox them, winning a handy victory.
Two months later, elections were held for the 444 elected seats in the lower house of the country’s parliament. This time, though the regime deployed many brutally repressive tactics against its opponents, Muslim Brotherhood (MB) candidates running as independents were able to win 88 seats.
The MB is by far the country’s biggest and best organized grassroots movement. It has been committed to the use of only nonviolent methods since the early 1980s, but this has not prevented the regime from using considerable violence and numerous quite unwarranted arrest campaigns, etc., against it.
The MB’s victory in the three-round elections of November-December 2005 provided something of a preview of what happened in the Palestinian legislative elections held in January 2006. In the Palestinian elections, Hamas, which had started out life in the 1970s and 1980s as, essentially, an offshoot of the MB movements in both Egypt and Jordan, won an upset victory over the US-backed Fateh movement.
That surprise outcome ended the Bush folks’ enthusiasm for Middle East “democratization” once and for all. Not only did the US back Israel’s brutal siege campaign against the elected Palestinian leadership, it also planned for a Contras-style coup against it, though that coup was only successful in the West Bank, and not in Gaza.
In Egypt, the Bushites’ sharp shift away from being concerned about democracy meant that when elections were held for the “Shura Council” upper house in 2007, the Mubarak regime made no attempt whatsoever to pretend to run them democratically… and the US’s very generous allocations of aid to the regime continued uninterrupted.
First implying that Obama heeds her calls and now that the NYT follows her lead, I must borrow Shirin’s observation from the adjacent thread:
It’s called grandiosity, Lars, one of the primary characteristics of the disorder known as narcissism
Actually it is me who made the earliest and best calls on the Iranian revolt dying down in two weeks. Today there were hundreds of demonstrators, please, the crowds were larger and had more cojones last week in Pamplona running away from the bulls.
I am also right on the money with my prediction that Iraq is starting to unravel at the tune of 50 blown up each day. The dirty little secret of the quiet in Iraq with such poetic names as “awakening councils” is that we bribed them. No poetry, no ideology or religion, we just outbid the money that was coming from Saudi sources to blow up coalition forces.
Two for two ain’t bad, maybe Helena will ask me to be an official contributor like Scott and Dominic.
About Iran, what’s truly stunning and which you decidedly did not predict was the enormity of the splits opening up within the clerical ranks.
That of course didn’t stop WINEP yesterday from issuing a bizarre report claiming the clerics are backing Khamenei. totally at odds with the facts.
Of course, the new neocon line is to get back to portraying Iran as the “mullah regime” — and all the regnant, ez agitprop that follows therefrom.
Mubarak agreed to allow opposition parties to run against him when he ran for his current six-year term in office,
Helena, It’s very disappointing that you never mentioned “Mubarak regime” the world longest ever regime living within 25-Year-Old Emergency Law
Egyptian Parliament, dominated mostly by Mubarak’s regime National Democratic Party, voted to Extending State of Emergency until 2010. The government argued this extension was necessary under the pretext of combating terrorism. Although Mubarak’s promise that it would be cancelled and replaced with specific anti-terrorism measures. The State of Emergency has been in place since President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, and essentially a justification to arrest at will and violate the rights of the opposition. The emergency law is a tool in the hands of the executive power to storm many basic rights and freedom guaranteed by the Egyptian Constitution.
The state of emergency is by definition put in place when the country is going through a period of danger such as a war or a natural disaster, which is not the case in Egypt.
The question is why the state of emergency extends although it has for decades been one of the main causes of human rights violations in the country?
So Helena, The Egyptian regime is in “a state of war” against its own people so it will be able to commit more human rights violations without being punished. The majority of the people in Egypt are poor and have no concern for things like elected representative governments or anything to do with democracy. The fact is that many people in Egypt do not in realize that they are under a state of emergency. They think the current situation is the norm. When you have small middle class who wants democracy, while the wealthy want to keep the statues quo (privileges) and the poor (majority) who are too busy surviving to care nothing is going to change. Even if someone assassinates Mubarak and his son Gamel another president (dictator) would take his place.
is that we bribed them.
Did you asked yourself from where the bribe money come from?
The Killers/ criminals/ thieves gives bribes what a noble statements?
Salah, the money for bribing the Iraqi awakening councils comes from my taxes. I would get out of that Iraq sink hole and stop paying money and lives. Let the followers of the Prophet slug it out with the follower of the nephew of the Prophet until there is standing on each side asking themselves what are the fighting over.
My money is about to be used for the most stupid and self destructive project the mind of Obama could conceive, bringing in a few thousand Palestinian refugees from Iraq to be resettled in the US. These are 1948 refugees that sides with Saddam and now are paying the price from the long Arab memory and the myth of Arab hospitality, they have been kicked out and are camping out somewhere in Iraq. Arab countries keep them refugees, and we stupid Americans with a monster deficit and 10% unemployment are going to bring a fifth column home. Are we stupid or what.
Where is UNWRA when the evictor is another Arab populace?
Yap, your money used for the most stupid and destructive project.
Where is UNWRA ?
A life in ruins
Where is UNWRA when the evictor is Arab neighbours to be claimed very civil who care about humans life, peace loving people and the Only Democracy in ME?
John Perkins, The first of a three part speech given to the Veterans For Peace National Convention, Seattle, WA in August 2006. Author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, in this part John discusses, from a hit mans perspective, the reasons and background to why we are at war in the Middle East.«
How Titus Tax money and the money of Arabs citizens in ME used by these ruling by these “Let the followers of the their Prophet (US) slug it out who are corrupted ugly kings and sheiks lairs who do whatever to keep themselves in power..
So you know now where OUR money goes and where YOUR TAX money goes isn’t Titus?