My Salon piece on the geopolitical ripples from Cairo

… is here.
I only really got to the start of where I wanted to go with the piece, by the time I got to the last paragraph there.
I have another non-blog piece about to come out, too: On the Muslim Brotherhood, at Middle East Channel.
Both these pieces are spinoffs, really, from what I blogged here last Thursday about the upcoming end of the US-Israeli imperium in the Middle East.
I feel pretty good, actually, about having “called” the significance of the events of the past three weeks fairly successfully. Including in this blog post, on the morning of Jan.14, when I wrote that the broad incidence of fraternization between protesters and soldiers in Tunis seemed to signal the imminent end of the Ben Ali regime– he flew out of the country that evening– and then in that post of last Thursday when I said the MB’s decision to participate in the protests scheduled for Friday signaled the imminent end of not just the Mubarak regime but also, over time, of the whole US-Israeli imperium over the M.E. of which Egypt has been, since 1974, such a crucial linchpin.
True, Mubarak did not fly out Cairo that same evening– heck, the old guy is still hanging on! But what is happening in Egypt is HUGE.
I also think it is just amazing that we can now start to think of Israel returning to its proper proportion, as just “that small country of some seven million souls that perches just above Egypt’s northeast tip.”
Israel has succeeded, for so long, in subverting both the rights of its neighbors, the Palestinians, and the whole concept of international law! For many years now, as I wrote in the salon piece, Egypt’s government has been both its shield and its spear in protecting that state of affairs, and those policies. If a stable order is to re-emerge in Egypt after the events of the past week, the country’s government will not be playing that role any more…

9 thoughts on “My Salon piece on the geopolitical ripples from Cairo”

  1. Next time a zionist tells you israel is the only democracy in the middle east and is surrounded by a sea of ara dictaorships, remind them how israel has souight to support and uphold the dictatorship of Mubarak!
    Israel likes and needs dictatorships, just as the US does

  2. We, your readers, were calling, too. That is precisely why we were here with you. In any case, it matters less how we called the last move, and more how we call the next one. Vijay Prashad talking to Pothik Ghosh given on Counterpunch today gives a pretty good outline of the next call that has to be made. For example:
    “Spontaneity is fine, but if power is not seized effectively, counter-revolution will rise forth effectively and securely.”

  3. There are no comparisons to the present revolution. I see the flow of information and inter-connection of all the world as observers and participants, fueled by a desire for freedom from oppression, bringing a better life for all.
    Dean Little

  4. Prashad is quite kind towards El Baradei who he says occupies “…a point of great privilege,” for example.
    Now it’s my turn to go back to 1917. Lenin had a “point of great privilege” at the Finland Station. That was in April, and Lenin had the support of a well-tempered Party. It still took until October to settle the matter.
    What did El Baradei do with his Finland Station moment, yesterday evening? He announced that it would all be over one way or another in a few days. El Baradei is not Lenin, and he has no party. He does not have the intentionality of a Lenin. The best we could get from El Baradei’s agency, as Prashad also says, is a kind of halfway house, “a hora”. The worst would the worst of all: fascism.

  5. The supreme misjudgement of the United States government, and its Israeli counterpart, in failing to recognize the dangers of supporting Egypt’s police state but instead continuing to give Hosni Mubarak $1.5 billion each year to do with whatever he liked, is a sad commentary on their joint foreign policy agenda.
    For the past decade, the US has colluded with Mubarak and Israel to run the Middle East as their private fiefdom with scant regard for the welfare of the millions of citizens within the states concerned.
    The US, under a weak president, has continued the failed policy of George W Bush in supplying both Egypt and Israel with billions of dollars worth of arms and military equipment with which to control their neighbours to the satisfaction of America’s oil interests. And that includes controlling 1.6 million Palestinians within Gaza by illegally restricting essential food and humanitarian supplies.
    Furthermore, over the past twelve months, Egypt has allowed Israel to send their German-manufactured, nuclear-armed submarines through the Suez Canal, thereby endangering the entire Middle East and in clear contravention of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty of which the US is a signatory. That action together with America’s collusion in making Israel the largest, secret nuclear-weapons state in the world, is a frightening portent as to the extent of their global agenda.
    The Middle East needs a radical, political cleanout as a matter of urgency. The arms race instigated by America must cease. The entire region including Israel and Iran must be declared a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone: all such weapons must be banned and any existing put under the immediate control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
    US backed Israeli hegemony in the Middle East is an obstacle to world peace and a specific danger to the security of the region, as the secret movement of nuclear weapons through the Mubarak-controlled, Suez Canal, proves.

  6. Lenin’s “April Theses”, first given verbally at the Finland Station, Petrograd, on 3 April 2011, are short. Here are some highlights:
    Thesis 2 says “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution — which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie — …
    “This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.”
    Thesis 4 says “As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.”
    This led to the slogan “All Power to the Soviets”, and Thesis 5 then says “to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step.”
    Question: Where are the organs of people’s power – the equivalent of the Soviets – in Egypt today? Without centres of power that are at some remove from the existing state institutions, how can a revolution be effected? How can a reversion (i.e. a “default” in computer terms) back to the previous programme be avoided?
    Every day brings me several lists of demands from or on behalf of the Egyptian Revolution. The most vacuous statement was El Baradei’s “if we don’t go forward we will be going backward” – a notorious revolutionary cliché. None of the lists of demands appear authentic in the way that the April Theses immediately did on its day, or in the way that “tasks” listed by the Tunisian Patriotic and Democratic Labour Party did most recently.
    Agency currently remains with the masses, the popular Subject of History. Revolution is the fastest educator. Reaction is tangibly present. Decision is still ahead. Please continue to describe the drama truthfully.

  7. Sorry, that’s “Lenin’s “April Theses”, first given verbally at the Finland Station, Petrograd, on 3 April 1917…
    1917, not 2011.
    I suppose that’s the point, anyway.

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