The crisis unfolding in Egypt this week has to be the most captivating televised event since the O.J. Simpson car chase in 1994. A testament to this fact is that only this morning, in a commentary entitled Army Pledges No Force Against Protesters, I vowed to write no more on this crisis until it was resolved. Yet here I am….
As it happened, today’s much-touted “march of millions” turned out to be a march of only hundreds of thousands. Nonetheless, it proved impactful enough to compel beleaguered President Hosni Mubarak to address the nation again tonight.
When word of his imminent address began to spread late in the day, I suspect there was a palpable sense among protesters that he was going to relinquish power and announce his immediate departure from the country; i.e., consistent with their most adamant demand.
Therefore, just imagine how galling they must have found it when he spent 99 percent of his address defending his 30-year reign as one of self-sacrifice – on his part – for the glory of Egypt. When he finally got to the issue at hand, Mubarak informed the nation that he had “exhausted his life serving the people of Egypt” and never intended to run for re-election this year – as was universally believed.
In truth, though, he said exactly what informed sources claim President Obama dispatched special emissary Frank Wisner to Cairo to urge him to say; specifically, that he will not seek re-election when his current term expires in September. He added that he will use his final months in power “to accomplish the necessary steps for the peaceful transfer of power,” including the implementation of all of the constitutional reforms the protesters demanded.
He struck an ominous note, however, by vowing to investigate and prosecute all of those who engaged in the burning and looting that have ravaged so much of Cairo over the past week. He also defied protesters by protesting his own determination to live and “die on Egyptian soil,” making clear that his pride would not allow him to cut and run like Ben Ali of Tunisia.
Notwithstanding its flourishes of self-congratulatory megalomania, Mubarak’s address actually constitutes a very reasonable compromise: what’s another nine months after 30 years after all.
Granted the devil is in the details. For example, protesters have quite warranted concerns about relying on Mubarak’s rubber-stamp parliament to draft and implement constitutional reform. Then there’s the understandable suspicion many of them harbor about his concessions being just a ploy to wait them out.
On the other hand, the protesters clearly have not given enough thought about what follows if Mubarak were to leave immediately….
Frankly, I fear these wannabe revolutionaries have become so intoxicated with their own “people power” that they seem every bit as dictatorial now as they’ve accused Mubarak of being. Accordingly, no concession short of his immediate departure – with his tail between his legs – will satisfy them.
No doubt this is why they ended their damning jeers to his address by declaring that Mubarak must leave the country by this weekend – even announcing a “Friday of Departure” rally to mark the occasion. To reinforce this demand, their putative leader, Mohamed ElBaradei, insists that there can be no discussions about a peaceful transfer of power until Mubarak is not just out of power, but out of the country. He even dismissed the beleaguered president in an interview with NBC News today as:
…a dead man walking.
Not surprisingly, Western reporters are doing all they can to frame this story as one in which the protesters are cast as David versus Mubarak as Goliath. And they have suspended all pretense of objectivity-proselytizing the protesters’ revolutionary narrative as they are without reporting a critical word.
For example, with all of the talk about the protesters representing the will of the Egyptian people, you’d think Western new organizations would have commissioned a scientific poll by now to determine just how many of this country’s 80 million these 200,000 protesters really do represent. My suspicion is that, even though a vast majority would agree that Mubarak must go, no more than 25 percent of them would endorse the protesters’ uncompromising demand that he must go now.
For what it’s worth, President Obama followed Mubarak’s address with one of his own in which he essentially endorsed Mubarak’s concessions. Never mind that he used Clintonian rhetoric in an attempt to curry favor with both Mubarak and the protesters:
What is clear and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful and it must begin now.
(Reuters, February 1, 2011)
This, of course, from a president who had the world thinking he said U.S. troops would withdraw from Afghanistan by July 2011, when in fact he said (and actually meant) that they would only begin the orderly transition of withdrawing by then….
In any event, this means that there’s now an effective impasse which might require the military to intervene: either to force Mubarak out or to contain the protesters’ high-minded rage until it subsides. It might also have to step in to prevent burgeoning clashes between Mubarak supporters (who are now being urged to take to the streets too) and the protesters from escalating into full-scale civil war.
No matter how this plays out, however, a clear message has been sent to all regional dictators: reform or be reformed. A message, incidentally, that those controversial WikiLeaks cables confirm U.S. presidents have been conveying to them – clearly to no avail – for decades. This is why more than a few officials in Washington are whispering that Mubarak has only himself to blame for the mess he’s in now.
King Abdullah of Jordan demonstrated that he finally got this message by firing his entire government today and ordering a new prime minister to do exactly what Mubarak ordered his newly appointed vice president to do; namely, to implement political and economic reforms to redress the people’s grievances as fully and expeditiously as possible.
The problem for Abdullah, however, is that this move will do nothing to quell the galvanizing fury among the vast majority of protesters who regard his wife, Queen Rania, with even greater disdain than French revolutionaries regarded Marie Antoinette.
Fair or not, this stems from the general impression that Rania spends more time shopping, hobnobbing at high-society events, and attending couture-fashion shows in New York, London, and Paris than she spends tending to, or at least sympathizing with, the plight of the poor Jordanians who have now taken to the streets.
And we all know that it was as much Marie Antoinette’s reputation for spendthrift snobbery as King Louis XVI’s political miscalculations that incited the French revolution, which ended with both of their heads in the guillotine.
Likewise President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen demonstrated that he got this message too by announcing that he will not attempt to extend his 32-year reign when his current term ends in 2013, or to install his son as his successor – as all of these Arab dictators were planning to do.
But it remains to be seen if others, including Khadafi of Libya, Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Assad of Syria, will get it. In Assad’s case, protesters plan a “Day of Rage” on Friday to make sure he does.
Until this “Friday of Departure” and “Day of Rage” then….
NOTE: Am I the only one who wonders if the Chinese are whispering in Mubarak’s ear that they would be more than happy to become his new patrons now that the Americans are throwing him under the bus? (Hell, the Chinese would even endorse the Tiananmen-Square style crackdown he’s clearly itching to unleash.) Surely such an overture would be music to the ears of Khadafi, Abdullah, and others.
Beyond this, though, the Chinese have as much strategic, geo-political interest in propping up like-minded dictatorships as the Americans have in pushing for like-minded democracies. Not to mention what an economic coup it would be if the oil-producing countries in this region were to become as beholden to China over the next 50 years as they have been to the United States over the past 50….
Related commentaries:
Army pledges no force…
* This commentary was originally published last night, Tuesday, at 10:35
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