“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation, we cannot help but be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”.
George Kennan, 1948[1]
I’ve just finished reading The Road to Tahrir Square by historian Lloyd Gardner, a decent
account of US-Egyptian relations from around 1945 to the overthrow of Mubarak.
It has helped me understand more clearly the current situation in Egypt, and
has the odd fascinating piece of information about Middle Eastern relations in
general. For Gardner, ‘there is a strong historical thread stretching from the
agreements reached between the CIA and Nasser on Iraq in 1963 to the final days
of Mubarak’s regime in early 2011’ (p.95).
To many, it is hard to contextualise the events of 2011 and
see them relative to the historical ties between the US and Egypt. The US has
invested around $50 billion in military and economic aid in Egypt over the past
few decades, and this has given it no small say in Egyptian politics. During
the 2011 crisis, ‘Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen had
made phone calls to their counterparts almost every day’ (p.195). The Pentagon
spokesman claimed that this was ‘just an example of how engaged we are with the
Egyptians’. Gardner notes how the
Guardian reported days before Mubarak’s downfall that the Obama
administration ‘had refused to cut military aid to Egypt “and is instead
working behind the scenes with the commanders of the armed forces on how to
oust President Mubarak”’ (p.189). Indeed, as Kees Van der Pijl pointed out, the
takeover of the Supreme Military Council was an outcome ‘announced to Congress
by Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA, on February 10, the day before it
happened’ (‘Arab Revolts and Nation-State Crisis’, New Left Review (70), p.27), something also commented on by
Gardner. Earlier both Obama and Biden had refused to call
Mubarak a dictator, or even authoritarian; despite, as an interviewer pointed
out, the fact that 1000’s of people were tortured and imprisoned under Mubarak
and his feared intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Obama even managed to duck the question
with the astonishing claim that he tends ‘not to use labels for folks’. Indeed,
for Obama, Mubarak was a ‘stalwart ally ... a force for stability and good’, a sentiment
echoed by the laughably pathetic Tony Blair.
As Tariq Ali pointed out, Washington tried desperately to
maintain their influence in Egypt, clinging on to Mubarak until it was clear
the pressure was too great and that the whole edifice upon which US influence
had been devised in Egypt was being threatened. When they finally abandoned
Mubarak, Obama was largely lauded by
liberal commentators as having been on the side of the people all along;
another example of the standard ‘liberal’ contempt for facts. The brutal Omar
Suleiman was even ‘at one stage touted as Mubarak’s successor’ (‘Between Past
and Future’ New Left Review (80),
p.63), before the decision was made that all the hated figureheads needed to be
changed, and the army was considered reliable enough by Washington and popular
enough with the people to be the ones to take over.
David Wearing, a SOAS researcher and up-and-coming writer, wrote
an excellent summary and review of Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the
US-Egyptian Alliance by
Jason Brownlee in February; Brownlee generally argues the same thing. Wearing
quotes a passage to sum it up perfectly: ‘Official US-Egyptian relations have
been at odds with domestic public opinion in Egypt. Rather than fostering
democracy in an incremental fashion, US and Egyptian officials have promoted an
autocratic security state that supports a US-led regional order built around
Israeli security and US influence over the Persian Gulf. By contrast, public
opinion in Egypt favours a regional security order less dominated by the United
States and Israel, and a government that respects political competition and
civil liberties’. Gardner compares the way the US provided for Sadat’s own
personal security with the way they helped train and create the brutal secret
police in Iran under the Shah. This is of course unremarkable to anyone with
even a passing knowledge of US foreign policy, but it may seem odd to those accustomed
to the standard line in the media and academia- that the US, whilst it may make
the odd mistake, is fundamentally committed to democracy promotion around the
world. This is no more true than the idea that the Soviet Union was fighting
for the poor and oppressed around the world, or that the Roman Empire had any
interest in the wellbeing of its conquered subjects (or the British Empire for
that matter). Every power in history has been concerned with its own interests,
whilst claiming to follow a higher moral cause, and the US is unremarkable in
this respect. Its rhetoric about promoting democracy in Egypt should be
disregarded; the quote from George Kennan at the start of the article is a far
more honest and accurate portrayal of US policy, from the pen of a man who did
so much to shape its direction after World War 2.
As Brownlee points
out, US policy is heavily at odds with Egyptian public opinion. Gardner cites a
Gallup poll which revealed an ‘“overwhelming tsunami of negative opinions” about
the United States’; more than half opposed any
US aid to Egypt, and three-quarters ‘opposed any aid to specific political
groups’ (p.201). He quotes Gallup’s chief analyst of the poll, who believed
that the reason was simply because US aid was perceived as only serving to ‘perpetuate
the condition of the Mubarak years’ (p.202). The recent uprisings had far more
of an anti-US government flavour to them than the 2011 uprisings- it seems the
Egyptian people offered the US a chance to redeem themselves and have now tired
of extending the olive branch. Perhaps there is a recognition that the US isn’t,
and never will be, on their side.
Anti-US government
feeling across the region is quite easily explained for those who are genuinely
interested, and don’t just want to have an idiotic rant about why
the Muslims ‘hate us because they hate us’. A review article in Foreign Affairs a couple of months ago
detailed a study by Amaney Jamal who found that so-called ‘anti-Americanism’
was the result of a ‘deeper rejection of undemocratic political systems in Arab
countries, which for decades have been underwritten and supported by the United
States’; not to mention more immediate grievances like the CIA and Pentagon’s
global assassination, torture and kidnapping campaigns, and the mass crime
which was the Iraq War (‘The Persistence of Arab Anti-Americanism’, Mark Lynch,
Foreign Affairs, 92(3), p.147).
Most interesting is
Gardner’s claim that the crisis in Egypt has ‘portended far greater long-term
dangers’ for the US government than the debacles in Iraq or Afghanistan,
something he quotes Henry Kissinger (the most powerful National Security
Advisor in US history and former Secretary of State for Gerald Ford) as
agreeing with (p.204). Egypt has been described by US officials as a ‘cornerstone’
of US policy in the Middle East, and that certainly has a lot of truth to it;
today it is second possibly only to Saudi Arabia as a US Arab ally in the
region. The latest upheavals could turn
out to favour or harm the US; it’s too early to tell.
I will continue to write about Egypt in the
weeks to come.
[1]
Quoted in The Road to Tahrir Square
by Lloyd Gardner. George Kennan was one of the major US government planners in
the Post-War period.
