Egypt – Page 3 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Jonathan Wright’s great reporting from Cairo

I learned from Issandr that Jonathan Wright, former long-time Reuters newsman now living and working in Cairo as a translator (hey, we former Reuters people end up doing the darnedest things!), has now gotten a return of the journo-adrenalin itch and has started a blog.
Excellent, well-informed stuff.
This, today, on the role of the MB in the protests so far:

This, yesterday, from the near-in Cairo slum of Boulaq Aboul Ela:

I ended up in the lanes because riot police were firing tear gas canisters and other unidentified projectiles along 26th July Street, apparently in response to a small group of protesters who were throwing rocks at them. The lanes gave some shelter from the gas. The group of protesters, who numbered no more than 200 (there were other groups elsewhere in the city), were clearly outsiders, wealthier and better educated than the local inhabitants. Their main chants were political – “Al-sha3b yuriid isqaat an-nizaam” (The people … want .. the overthrow … of the regime – an echo of the similar chant now current in Tunisia). But what struck me most was the evident solidarity of the local people with the protesters and the possibility that at some point the local people too might might come out on the streets. If that happened, the government would be hard-pressed to disperse them by their current methods. The riot police would be overwhelmed and many of the police conscripts (they come largely from among the poorest of the rural poor) would defect or disperse. Without seeing these slum areas at first hand, it’s hard to imagine how many tens of thousands of people live there. The population density is comparable to that in Gamalia on the northeast edge of the old city, where there are up to 80,000 people to the square kilometre. The lanes were teeming like an ants’ nest and the mood was electric. I asked a random selection of about 15 people where their sympathies lay – with the government (as they called the riot police) or the shabab (youth, as they called the protesters)? With one exception (a man who said he was neutral), everyone said they wanted President Hosni Mubarak to go. This time only handfuls of them did appear to join in, but I judged they were fairly close to the tipping point.

In that post, Wright also warned of the danger posed by the baltagiya, the groups of plain-clothes thugs whom the government often sends in to break up demostrations. he wrote,

For the first time ever I noticed some of [the baltagiya] trying on new helmets they had just been issued, and a separate group elsewhere even had riot police shields, though still in plain clothes. The government habitually uses these baltagiya to beat up individually targetted protesters. The logic, I assume, is that if anyone publishes photographs of them in action, then the authorities can dismiss the incident as a brawl between civilians.

Not so easy to do, I would imagine, if they’ve all been issued government-issue helmets and riot shields?
Anyway, Jonathan, welcome to the blogosphere!
Update: More Wright, from Tuesday:

The Muslim Brotherhood, which did not fully endorse the protest but allowed young member to go, was in fact very much in evidence and I saw several Brotherhood members acting as ‘stewards’. When stone-throwing broke out, a group of Muslim Brothers started chanting ‘Silmiya, silmiya” (Keep it peaceful).

Agents provocateurs in Cairo?

Issandr’s reporting on this from 1 a.m. Friday Cairo time is very worrying:

There are, of course, many more ways for the regime to disregard international calls for nonviolence than simply by opening up with guns on protesters.

U.S. diplomacy in tatters– and not from Wikileaks

Our country’s ability to influence events around the world is in tatters– and this was already the case before the latest round of Wikileaks started to dribble out to the public. Yesterday there were “elections” in Egypt and Haiti, two countries deep within the U.S. sphere of influence. Both elections were deeply flawed in terms of the most basic norms of democratic accountability and fairness. And both did much more to reveal and exacerbate the deep social and political crises in the countries in which they were held, than they did to resolve differences peacefully and to establish governments capable of providing real public security and other essential services to their citizens– outcomes which are, to be sure, among the basic benefits of a well-run democratic system.
After the end of the Cold War, remember, there was considerable crowing from many in the United States to the effect that the “victory” the U.S. had won in the Cold War was due to the superiority of the democratic American way of governing. The end of the Cold War would, we were told, inaugurate a new “Third Wave” of democratization all around the world. (And thus, the only sometimes spoken sub-theme had it, American power would be bolstered all around the world. For surely the citizens of all these new “democracies” would hanker only after the American way of life and American way of business?)
In Central and Eastern Europe, the countries of the former Warsaw Pact followed more or less that script. But in 2004-06, when Condoleezza Rice tried to extend the model to Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, she got a rude shock. Citizens in those countries, given anything resembling a free vote, tended to support strongly anti-American candidates. After the relative victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s parliamentary election of 2005 and the outright victory that Hamas won in the Palestinian parliamentary election of early 2006, Washington’s support for the export of formal democracy to most of the Arab world stopped in its tracks and was, indeed, abruptly reversed. In Egypt, the presidential election of 2006 was held under restrictive rules that met no protest from Washington– as were the parliamentary elections held yesterday, which were a mockery of any idea of fairness. In Palestine, after the 2006 election, Washington abruptly joined with Israel and a faction from the losing Fateh party to combat and plot the overthrow of the democratically elected government.
In this context, it was interesting that in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. and the rest of the (U.S.-led) “international community” persisted with the idea that some form of formal democracy should continue to be pursued. In Iraq, Washington’s motivation seemed to be mainly to establishing something– anything!– that could be said to be a positive fruit of the decision to invade the country in 2003. In Afghanistan, Washington evidently felt it needed to conform to the pro-democracy philosophy of the NATO alliance whose military help it so sorely needed. Thus, anyway, we had the November 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan, which was a deeply flawed process. And then in March this year we had the parliamentary election in Iraq, which was procedurally far less flawed than the Afghan election– but which resulted in a tough political impasse that has left the country effectively without a government ever since.
Then yesterday, there were parliamentary elections in Egypt and presidential elections in Haiti. Both are countries in which U.S. influence has been both longlasting and deep. Haiti is a country now mired in multiple, extreme social and humanitarian crises– to which the wide spread of cholera has now been added. Former President Bill Clinton has been the UN’s “special envoy” for Haitian reconstruction ever since the earthquakes of January. But what has he achieved? What has the diplomacy of his wife, Hillary Clinton, and her boss, Pres. Obama, achieved for the people of Haiti?
Yes, there is a deep (and chronic) crisis of governance in Haiti. But it is not one that can be solved simply through holding an election. It is a crisis that most certainly was exacerbated by the policies Bill Clinton himself pursued toward the country back in 1994…
In Egypt, there is also a deep crisis of governance– though thankfully, until now, not one that has had the same dire human consequences as the crisis in Haiti.
But in both countries, the deep flaws in the way the elections have been conducted are a clear mark of the failure of U.S. diplomacy.
When elections held in countries where the U.S. is influential go “well” procedurally, Washington is the first to take the credit. On this occasion, in both Egypt and Haiti, Washington must bear considerable responsibility both for the flaws in these elections and for the deeper crises of governance that underlie them.
(The above short essay does not, of course, even start to note other areas– like Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, international financial governance, Korea, etc– in which U.S. diplomacy also currently lies in tatters.)

Keep watching Egypt

Egypt’s compliance with Israel in maintaining the siege of Gaza has been an essential element in the siege’s inhumane “success” until now.
But as Issandr el-Amrani blogged yesterday, Israel’s lethal raid against the Turkish-flagged siege-busting boat Mavi Marmara provoked broad, spontaneous protest demonstrations in Cairo.
Amrani:

this is the biggest protest about Palestine since the Gaza war, in an atmosphere in which such protests have not been tolerated. We might see more in the next few days, including on Friday after prayers.

The regime led by the ageing, ailing, US-backed president Hosni Mubarak evidently decided to respond to this new pressure by opening up Egypt’s short border with Gaza a little bit. Well, that’s what the Egyptian government reportedly announced– though there are no reports yet that any people or goods have actually passed through the vast transit halls at Rafah, which are nearly always– except at Muslim-pilgrimage time– cavernously empty.
I imagine Mubarak and all the contenders to the power of his throne would like nothing better than to have the whole Gaza crisis simply disappear from the diplomatic radar screen. As I have blogged here quite frequently over the past few years, Mubarak and his country’s other powerful security bosses have worked hard to keep the lid on the Gaza issue by (1) monopolizing the mediating role in all the international/diplomatic negotiations related to Gaza, with the apparent goal of blocking any progress in them; and (2) keeping a very tight lid on any Gaza-related public activity at home in Egypt.
Might one or both those efforts now– in good part thanks to the Israeli government’s never-ending addiction to excessive violence– be headed for chaotic failure?
Keep watching. Gaza may be a “big” issue. But in world affairs, and in the maintenance of the Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East, Egypt is gigantic.

Israel’s flotilla violence changing everything, Part 2

A.
The fact that PM Netanyahu has decided that fallout from the IDF’s gratuitously violent flotilla assault requires him to cancel his planned meeting in Washington Wednesday and return to Israel is extremely important. The Wednesday meeting was supposed to be a rapacious (date-raping) consummation of his new “love affair” with Obama. So it was important.
But clearly, trying to get a handle on what’s been happening back home regarding the flotilla assault is more important. Ynet is already reporting that because the IDF general staff and the political leadership both recognize that the assault was a massive net negative for Israel, they are already blaming each other.
Good. Let them try to start to sort it out. Preferably by recognizing that the entire policy of imposing a lengthy tight siege is just plain wrong— under international law, under Jewish ethics, under any notion of respect of human rights!
Let them lift the siege of Gaza. Period.
B.
By underlining the continuing tragedy (and crime) of Israel’s siege of Gaza, the IDF completely bulldozed any pretense that Israel’s sputtering “proximity talks” with the PLO had any hope, relevance, or meaning at all. Over there in Ramallah the PA/PLO leadership reportedly agreed to a six-point plan as follows:

Of course, at one level this is still merely political theater, as with everything “Fateh” does. But significantly, Fateh/PLO pol Mohamed Dahlan was the one who reported these results out of an meeting held by the Central Committee of Fateh, the movement that dominates both the PLO and the Ramallah-based PA.
Dahlan, of course, is the guy who was the lynchpin of Condi Rice’s plan to dislodge Hamas’s democratically leadership of the PA legislature by force, back in 2006-07.
How credible should we take his new appearance as one seeking to lead the effort to coordinate or perhaps even reconcile with Hamas? Perhaps not terribly credibly. But if he is the one individual whom the rest of the Fateh CC sends out to make the announcement about the six points, then it strikes me they think that Fateh is in big, big trouble.
C.
Further afield, all of NATO except for the U.S. has now come out with some acknowledgment that Turkey, a vital fellow NATO member has had its civilian ship wantonly attacked by Israel on the high seas.
What is NATO good for?
Why would any other NATO member ignore this grievous attack against Turkish shipping– especially given that (a) Turkey is a substantial country, well respected in the world and currently a member of the U.N. Security Council; (b) Turkey is NATO’s only majority-Muslim member nation; and (c) NATO is currently waging a difficult war in a distant Muslim country, Afghanistan?
D.
Issandr el- Amrani has had good reporting about the popular outrage expressed against th Israeli assault in Egypt. Egypt, which is a key U.S. military ally in the Arab and Muslim worlds, is currently entering a very sensitive succession crisis. Watch Issandr’s blog for updates.

The definitive word on ‘confidence building measures’

… comes from Ezzedine Choukri in this great piece in Al-Ahram Weekly. (HT: Abdulmoneim Said Aly at MEI on Thursday.)
Choukri’s piece is an excellent illustration of the thinking by most Arabs on the “CBM” issue that I was describing in this recent piece (and this recent JWN post.)
It’ also a lot funnier and more poignant than what I wrote.
Choukri draws a prolonged analogy between the challenges of Israeli-Arab peacemaking and those of a village elder seeking to mediate a marriage contract between two families in his native Egypt:

the bride’s family gets angrier as they feel they were taken for a ride (again) and eventually lock the bride at home. And those who always opposed the marriage on both sides feel vindicated in their prejudice: “this marriage will never take place,” they say; “if they can’t even agree on these tiny matters, how are they going to face common life with all its challenges?”

This last paragraph represents a viewpoint that’s extremely widespread in the Arab world. In light of the experience of the past 16 years of US insistence on “CBMs” and ridiculous, time-wasting “interim measures” it is the only logical position there is.
Secure the final peace agreements now!

NYT plays catchup with JWN on Mubarak story

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:

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:

there remains no guarantee that the old-timers in the system or the military would go along with his ascension

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.

Mubarak’s hold on power weakening?

There have been several reports in both the Arab and Israeli media in recent days that Egypt’s ageing, 28-year president Hosni Mubarak may be weakening his long-clenched hold on power.
Given Egypt’s pivotal role in all the current diplomacy– over Fateh-Hamas reconciliation; Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange; and consolidation of the Gaza ceasefire– a weakening of Mubarak’s grip could have serious consequences.
At the very least, if these reports are widely believed within Egypt’s often delphically closed political elite, they could easily be sharpening the struggle to succeed the 81-year-old Mubarak.
This struggle is generally judged to pit his son Gamal against the security boss, Omar Suleiman… Who also (not concidentally) happens to be the chief point-man on all those negotiations defined above.
So what is the status of these latest reports?
I am having a hard time finding out exactly. Al-Bawaba website reports that,

Saudi press reports Monday said that that during his recent trip to Jeddah, President Mubarak, 81, notified King Abdullah of his intention to step down soon as president following the upcoming parliamentary election. He also reportedly anticipates moving the presidential election forward to 2009 or 2010, instead of the scheduled 2011.

And the Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported either yesterday or today that,

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will not complete his current presidential term, but will rather retire beforehand and will try to transfer power to his son Gamal. This is the prevalent opinion among intelligence officials in Israel, which they voiced in discussions held recently on the future of the regime in Cairo.

Now sadly I cannot yet get better sourcing/links for either of these reports. The English rendering of the Ma’ariv one was taken from something called “Israel News Today”, a private news service that I don’t think is available on-line.
(If anyone can contribute links to any of the originals of these articles, that would be great.)
Interestingly both that report and the Bawaba one linked Mubarak’s present weakness to the recent death of his beloved grandson. Be that as it may…
Anyway, in terms of the political effects of a pre-succession struggle that may already have started, I would note the security forces’ recent round-up of yet another tranche of high-level Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
Fwiw, when I was in Cairo in february, some well-informed Egyptian friends said they had concluded that powerful trends within the MB there were betting on a Gamal succession.
…. Anyway, Egypt is obviously not the only heavyweight US ally in the Arab world that is facing imminent succession challenges. So is Saudi Arabia.
Thus, many things about the political structure of the region that the US political elite has taken for granted over the past 15-20 years might well be about to thrown into question.
For the sake of the peoples of both countries, my deepest hope is that these succession struggles are not violent or too disruptive, and that they can lead in both countries to the emergence of regimes that are much more responsive to the real needs of their citizens.

“Gaza first” on the horizon?

With respect to the Egyptian-Palestinian-Israeli triangle as it manifests regarding Gaza, I’d add the following general notes:
1. Egypt and Hamas share a strong interest in preventing Gaza’s 1.5 million people from spilling out in any lasting way into Egypt. Gaza is very constrained for so many people, certainly– especially since, under current circumstances, they also need to be growing a lot of their own food there. But the 75% of Gaza’s people who are refugees from inside Israel still have live claims on homes, farms, and arable land inside Israel. Hamas works to keep those claims alive. For its part, the Egyptian regime simply doesn’t want to have additional Palestinians inside Egypt; while a large segment of the Egyptian population actively supports Hamas’s campaign to keep the Palestinian refugees’ claims alive.
2. The Egyptian and Israeli governments share an interest in reducing Hamas’s political power and influence as much as possible. (Hence their collaboration in maintaining the siege.) However, the Egyptian government faces significant constraints from its own citizens that prevent it from going too far to oppress/crush/exterminate Hamas. No foreseeable Israeli government– either the present one, the incoming one, or a Livny government that might replace Netanyahu after a period– will face any such constraints from its own citizens. The dynamic in Israeli society has been shifting rapidly toward support for more and more hardline policies toward the Palestinians in general, and particularly toward those pesky Gazans who refused to bow to the IDF’s will during the recent assault on their communities. Would there be effective international constraints on an attempt by Netanyahu to send the military in to “finish the job” in Gaza? At this point, I do not know.
3. However, just to further complicate matters a bit, I’d note there is also a potential for shared Hamas and Israeli interests with respect to Gaza, including– or perhaps especially– under Likud. Netanyahu has talked about trying to offer the Palestinians an “economic peace”, rather than a real peace. This proposal is far from new; and every time the Israeli occupiers of the West Bank and Gaza have attempted it in the past it has been either a complete sham or a miserable failure, or both. And I still think that, regarding the West Bank, it is a completely useless, actively fraudulent, and dangerously diversionary proposal that should be completely spurned. How on earth can the highly atomized Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank ever be expected to mount anything like a viable economy so long as the Palestinian heartland continues to be quadrillaged by the literally hundreds of IDF-controlled internal checkpoints that choke off every hope of economic opportunity or normal human life? However, in the present circumstances in Gaza, Gaza might provide a focus for something similar to the kind of “economic peace” that Netanyahu talks about. It could do this most easily if Israel simply and sincerely abandoned all its remaining claims to control all the access points into and out of the Strip, and the complete control it currently operates over the Strip’s population register, and allowed Gaza to reconnect to the world economy through Egypt and through Gaza’s own air and sea access points. This, incidentally, is what Mahmoud Zahhar and other strong currents in the Hamas leadership have talked about for several years now. (See e.g. by March 2006 interview with Zahhar.) Egypt is not so enthusiastic about this, seeing a risk that the Palestine Question might bleed more deeply into Egyptian politics under this scenario than Mubarak feels happy about. However, if Netanyahu should prove motivated and able to persuade Washington of the virtues of what would be (effectively) a “Gaza-first option” for the Palestinians– would Mubarak’s agreement to it be far behind? I think not.
… I’ve been thinking aloud, really, in this post so far. “Gaza first” proposals have, of course, been offered to the Palestinians many times over the years, and the main response of the PLO Palestinian leaders has always been to worry that “Gaza first” might all too easily become “Gaza only”… That is, that the “Palestinian state” they sought would be established not in the 22% of historic (Mandate) Palestine that they claimed in the 1988 “Declaration of Independence”, but just in the 1.27% of historic Palestine that lies within the Gaza Strip.
However, there is no way whatsoever that Hamas or any other Gaza-based leadership would sign off on any “final peace” with Israel that would involve giving up on the longstanding Palestinian claims to Jerusalem and to satisfaction on the refugee issue. No way. So if a Palestinian administration did emerge in Gaza that would have control over its internal affairs and over economic affairs including economic and other forms of (non-military) links to the outside world, and would undertake to abide by a reciprocal armistice/ceasefire with Israel for some presumably pre-agreed duration that would not be a final resolution and ending of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
But it could provide some important relief to the people of Gaza (and to the residents of southern Israel, though can say based on my recent visit to Sderot that their lives seem outstandingly good right now, in comparison with those of their fellow-humans right across the border with Gaza)
Meantime, the campaign would obviously continue for a speedy and durable resolution of the whole broader conflict including its important dimensions regarding Jerusalem and the refugees.
Would a new form of “Palestinian Authority” based in Gaza be any less able to negotiate a final peace agreement with Israel’s leaders than the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallastan has been over the past 15 years? We might note that during the 15-year life of the Ramallastan PA it completely failed to hold its Israeli interlocutor to the important, Oslo-based commitment that the terms of a final peace would be completely agreed within five years. It completely failed to halt Israel’s settlement-building project. (Indeed, Arafat gave the whole settling project a completely new lease on life when he agreed that Israel could carve a whole new settlers-only road system deep into the West Bank under the guise of so-called “bypass roads”.) And the Ramallastan PA completely failed to provide any meaningful protection at all to the chronically embattled Palestinian population of occupied Jerusalem…
Actually the list of the failures of the Ramallastan PA’s failures, from a Palestinian-nationalist perspective, goes on and on and on.
Anyway, I’m not trying to second-guess or predict Hamas’s decisionmaking on this point. Just to note that one version of a “Gaza first” option may be on the table under Netanyahu, and that Hamas’s response to it may be surprisingly positive. But who knows? Netanyahu might instead just succumb to the still-high popular pressure to go back in to Gaza to “finish the job.”

IPS piece on Egypt’s diplo challenges

I had a new piece up on IPS yesterday, titled ” Pressure Mounts on Egypt to Deliver Results”. You can find it on IPS here and on my analysis-archive here.
I’ll confess I got two small items of fact wrong in the first edition of the piece– the one I sent to IPS. The number of Hamas pols captured by Israel in the West Bank Thursday was reportedly ten, not 20 as I’d written. And it was presumptive incoming Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, not incoming PM Netanyahu, who said not long ago that Egypt could “go to hell.”
I have tried to have these corrections made on the IPS site but it hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully soon. I have made them in my own archived version of the piece.
They do not alter the analysis in any substantial way. Egypt is under pressure from the Palestinians and many other Arabs for its failure to deliver agreements on any of the three negtiations it is currently running, as well as for its continued collaboration with Israel’s project to maintain the tight siege around Gaza.
In the western MSM, the discourse about Middle East regional politics is still completely dominated by the Iran issue; the policies of regional actors are dissected endlessly for whether these actors are “for” or “against” the US-Israeli campaign against Iran. Shorthand for this is the dyad of terms “moderate” and “extremist.”
However, the vast majority of citizens– and quite a few governments– in the Arab world do not see things in these terms. Indeed, they do not consider Iran to be the main threat/challenge that their region faces. They are more concerned about Israel’s coercive power in the region, and in particular its manifestation with regard to the Palestinian issue.
In addition, there is a whole rich history of inter-Arab dealings that has almost nothing to do with the “moderates/extremists” frame into which US commentators like to squeeze the politics of the entire region.
I tried to capture the “Egypt” aspect of this regional dynamic in the IPS piece. Mubarak really is sitting on a hot potato in these negotiations– and he seems, crucially, to be getting little support in his diplomatic efforts from anyone in Washington.