Has the U.S. Abandoned Egypt’s “Impatient Patriots?”

What a difference 18 months makes when it comes to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Add to the mix an Iraq going to hell and moribund Israeli-Palestinian relations and you cannot say backtrack quickly enough.

To truly appreciate those foreign policy flip-flops, look no further than the words of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the importance her country attaches to democracy that she delivered during two trips to Egypt, 18 months apart.

Firstly, in a speech at the American University in Cairo on June 20, 2005, she told her audience:

“For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people,” she said.

“Today, liberty is threatened by undemocratic governments. Some believe this is a permanent fact of history. But there are others who know better. These impatient patriots can be found in Baghdad and Beirut, in Riyadh and in Ramallah, in Amman and in Tehran and right here in Cairo.

“All free nations are your allies,” she said.
Secondly, at a news conference with her Egyptian counterpart in Luxor on January 15, 2007, Rice told reporters:

“Obviously, the relationship with Egypt is an important strategic relationship; one that we value greatly.” She went on to mention Iraq, Israel, the Palestinians and Lebanon. Not a word about democracy or its advocates.

Has the U.S. forgotten Egypt’s “impatient patriots”?

If U.S. foreign policy is tilting once more towards the pole of stability, or damage control in the case of Iraq, abandoning the “impatient patriots” – whose pursuit of liberty and justice Rice hailed during her 2005 Egypt trip - in favour of Egypt’s aging dictator (in power for more than 25 years, how’s that for stability?)

President Hosni Mubarak might seem to be a reassuring return to business as usual but it is surely nothing but a temporary stop-gap.
American professions of support for democracy in the Middle East are usually paid little heed but some of the region’s “impatient patriots” who dared to take to the streets throughout Cairo, Beirut, and other cities thought things were a little different in 2005.
Some took the Americans at their word, such as the Egyptian who told me quietly that he had sent U.S. President George W. Bush a letter of congratulations for winning a second term in office. He was happy the Americans had overthrown Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and thought that meant a warning to the region’s dictators.

He told me this after Ayman Nour’s last stop on a campaign to challenge Mubarak for the presidency in September 2005. Now Nour is in prison after his conviction on forgery charges in a trial that was clearly aimed to torpedo his political career.

Even those less inclined to celebrate a Bush victory could see when pressure from the Americans had an impact. The first demonstration I joined was in June 2005, just two days after Rice’s speech at the American University, at which she also said peaceful democracy supporters should be free from violence,

I went with two of my favourite “impatient patriots”, activists and bloggers and husband-and-wife team Alaa Abdel-Fattah and Manal Baheyy El Deen who run the site “Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket”.
When we arrived at the working-class neighbourhood of Shubra, joining around 300 fellow Egyptians to shout "Down down with Hosni Mubarak", riot police that had confined previous demonstrations to one spot were nowhere to be seen.

Emboldened, protesters who had begun the demonstration on a street corner pushed ahead and for the first time since the anti-Mubarak protests began in December 2004, took their message to the street.

"You might have a point about Rice's speech," Alaa said, grinning and taking pictures.

I had asked him over lunch if he thought U.S. pressure would help Egypt's reformers. He said he was less concerned with simple regime change to replace Mubarak than with changing Egypt's political system from the bottom up. Only Egyptians could do that, Alaa said.

True, but that did not stop demonstrators from injecting their chants with the humor we Egyptians pride ourselves on: "Give Mubarak a visa and take him with you, Condoleezza."

Alaa too was imprisoned, along with dozens of pro-reform activists, in 2006. Our second lunch took place in November of the same year, a few months after his release. It was good to see he was ever the “impatient patriot” of Rice’s speech although he did say one of the hardest things he learned in prison was patience.

Neither Alaa nor the Egyptian man who had sent Bush the congratulations note wanted the sudden jolt of regime change in Egypt. Instead, they want more space and freedom for the opposition in Egypt. How ironic that the only opposition group to gain that space so far has been the Muslim Brotherhood, officially outlawed but allowed to contest 2005 parliamentary elections that won them enough seats to comprise the largest opposition bloc.

And it was that very victory shortly followed by the one by Hamas in Palestinian elections that first turned the Americans’ stomach against their dalliance with democracy in the Middle East.
Mubarak, the leader of a Sunni Muslim Arab state, is like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, America’s other best friends in the region uniquely positioned to aggravate rather than placate Iraq’s sectarian woes.

The three countries have long lamented Iran’s growing influence in post-war Iraq and have not hesitated to state their case in crude sectarian terms, from King Hussein of Jordan’s warning of a “Shia crescent” running through the Middle East to Mubarak’s statement that Arab Shia were more loyal to Iran than to their respective countries. The Saudis have been anything but kind to their Shia minority who reside mostly in the oil-rich Eastern Province.

Iraq and the U.S. have asked Egypt to stop broadcasting Al Zawraa television station, the face of Iraq's Sunni insurgency, on an Egyptian government-controlled satellite provider but apparently the Egyptians have refused, citing concerns over freedom of expression – a rich irony considering the recent detention of an Egyptian producer for al-Jazeera and the countless other incidents of harassment of journalists and media workers in Egypt.

One would be hard put to see how the leaders of any of these countries will deliver stability for an America rattled by sectarian violence in Iraq.

If democracy was always going to lose out to stability, then Rice should have also taken time to meet another of the Middle East’s dictators by making a stop in Damascus. At least Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite who rules a country seemingly comfortable with its sectarian mosaic, has a better understanding of how Sunnis and Shia can get along.

The U.S. never forgets Syria’s “impatient patriots”, and it never should. But to bemoan the crackdown of a dictator in Damascus while ignoring that of another in Cairo is hypocritical at best and dangerously short-sighted at worse.

As long as the dictators whom America supports realize they can get away with torture, corruption and their usual litany of repression, the stability they purportedly provide will always be half-hearted at best.

Were the U.S. to push for a greater space for opposition to those dictators and truly support the “impatient patriots”, it would help to pave a future of democratically elected governments whose main concern would not be how long the leader can remain in power but what is best for the country. Surely a better definition of stability than the Mubaraks, the al-Sauds and the Husseins have offered so far?
Rice seemed to have grasped that during her June 2005 trip to Cairo.

“The day is coming when the promise of a fully free and democratic world, once thought impossible, will also seem inevitable. The people of Egypt should be at the forefront of this great journey, just as you have led this region through the great journeys of the past,” she said.

“A hopeful future is within the reach of every Egyptian citizen -- and every man and woman in the Middle East. The choice is yours to make. But you are not alone. All free nations are your allies. So together, let us choose liberty and democracy -- for our nations, for our children, and for our shared future,” she told her audience at the American University in Cairo.

It is a shame the U.S. has chosen Mubarak over the Egyptian citizen Rice so eloquently promised to support.
Mona Eltahawy is a New York-based commentator and international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues. Her website is at www.monaeltahawy.com. This first appeared on www.saudidebate.com