Egyptian Update... From Bad To Worse

From the very first, the coup leaders prioritized the systematic intimidation-- not to mention murder-- of members of the independent media. Independent reporting is the last thing the Egyptian security state and their American backers wanted. As we pointed out before, they had their story down and that is the only story they want out there. Even though their story is patently absurd. And killing members of the media isn't where it ends. Now they're even hauling Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's leading neo-liberal and until last week the "vice president" of the junta's puppet regime and the best known face of the coup to the outside world, in front of a court. He faces trial on the charge of "betrayal of trust" and could get 3 years in prison. The junta is furious because they think his high profile resignation "gave the wrong impression to the international community" that they were using excessive force against the protesters. If they're putting a figure like ElBaradei on trial, this thing has spiraled out of control and is heading into an even worse confrontation.

Without the independent media that the coup leaders have tried to silence, we wouldn't know anything about what's really happening in Egypt except for the propaganda from both sides and the spin from untrustworthy U.S. corporate media. The best summation right now is available in a story from Wednesday's Guardian. It's not very optimistic.

The police lieutenant put his boots up on the desk and casually reloaded his machine gun. "The problem is," he said, nodding at a television that was live-broadcasting the siege of a nearby mosque, "these people are terrorists."

It was mid-afternoon last Saturday, and for nearly 24 hours, the lieutenant's colleagues in the police and army had surrounded the al-Fath mosque in central Cairo, inside which were hiding a few hundred supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi. On screen, it seemed like it was the soldiers doing the terrorising. But for the lieutenant, the terrorists were the ones on the inside. They had bombs, the policeman said: they deserved what they got. And a mob of locals agreed. "The police and the people," chanted a crowd that had gathered to lynch the fugitives as they exited the mosque, "are one hand."

It was a wretched scene-- but one that has become familiar in Egypt. Here was yet another symptom of the widespread hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood, which in the space of a year has gone from being Egypt's most powerful and most popular political group – to fugitives. Here, also, was brutal violence. A shortage of humanity. And above all: scant regard for the truth.

For those inside the mosque were not terrorists. An armed man may have later been filmed on top of the minaret, but the mosque's imam claimed access to it was controlled by security forces who had by that point breached parts of the building. For certain, when I visited the mosque the day before-- shortly before troops surrounded it-- it mainly housed doctors and corpses. After the police fired on nearby Morsi supporters-- who had gathered to oppose not just the 3 July overthrow of the group's scion, Mohamed Morsi, but also the massacre of hundreds of Morsi backers last Wednesday-- the mosque had been turned into a makeshift field hospital to deal with the fallout of Egypt's fourth mass killing in six weeks. "After they finish outside, [the police] will come in here," a doctor, Mahmoud el-Hout, said, "and arrest all the wounded." He wasn't far wrong, with only women and the dead later granted a safe exit.

Inside and outside the mosque, then, two parallel realities existed-- much as they do across Egypt as a whole. The country is largely polarised between, on the one hand, those who believe their livelihoods and way of life were threatened under Morsi's incompetent and divisive presidency, and that his Muslim Brotherhood are violent traitors who must be destroyed-- and, on the other, the Brotherhood and its dwindling Islamist allies, who remained camped in Cairo's streets after Morsi's ousting to defend his democratic legitimacy.

The split is not even. Millions marched on 30 June to call for Morsi's departure, and the vast majority of the country is firmly behind the army who deposed him days later. But perhaps less than 25% of Egyptians now have strong Islamist leanings, if Morsi's quarter of the vote in the first round of last year's presidential elections is anything to go by.

Here and there, activists prominent from the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak reject this binary division and express disgust at both the new fascistic army-backed regime and the authoritarianism of Morsi's own government. Army rule may be counter-revolutionary, they argue, accompanied as it is by a return to favour of figures, institutions and policies that buttressed the Mubarak era. But so too was Morsi, who tried to co-opt corrupt state institutions, rather than reform them-- and who had little interest in building consensus, reigning in police brutality, or increasing social freedoms beyond those of his once-oppressed Islamist allies.

Yet few share this nuance. Most so-called liberals have thrown their lot in with the army, since the current environment has forced almost everyone into a with-or-against-us mindset. When Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's leading liberal politician, resigned as interim vice-president in protest at last Wednesday's massacre of Islamists, he was roundly attacked-- even by former allies. Sayed Bedawy, leader of Egypt's oldest liberal party, told a breakfast show that he didn't want to call ElBaradei a traitor-- before strongly implying that he was. "Mohamed ElBaradei is a son of a bitch," summarised one woman in the mob outside the al-Fath mosque on Saturday.

Haranguing western media's lack of support for the army's crackdown, an otherwise measured psychologist recently told me that he felt Muslim Brotherhood members-- many of whom have obediently remained in the streets on the say-so of their leaders-- were suffering from some sort of collective psychosis. Yet if the Brothers are delusional, then it seems only fair to apply the same rhetoric to their opponents, who seem to be under an equally debilitating spell.

Spurred on by a jingoistic and uninquiring media (some Egyptian television presenters cried with joy on air the day Morsi was overthrown) much of Egyptian society is convinced that the former president's supporters are wholly a terrorist force bent on making Egypt part of some wider Islamic state. "We are not against any protesters-- but we are against terrorists. We have a war with terrorists," says Mohamed Khamis, a spokesman for Tamarod, the grassroots campaign that successfully encouraged millions to march against Morsi in June.

Khamis said he accompanied the police last Wednesday, when security forces murdered hundreds at two six-week-old pro-Morsi campsites. "We asked the police officers to shoot them with pistols and the police officers refused to shoot them," Khamis counter-claimed. "Really, that was what happened. So I am surprised people died. How come so many people died then? I think it was the Brotherhood who killed them-- not the army or police."

But while the Brotherhood is no stranger to violence-- not least during clashes last December outside the presidential palace when Brotherhood members attacked anti-Morsi protesters-- their recent involvement in acts of aggression, to be fair, remains unproved. Certainly, jihadi insurgents outside the Brotherhood's command-- but nevertheless angered by Morsi's removal-- have mounted a terrorist campaign in the lawless Sinai peninsula during the past six weeks. Twenty-five police conscripts were murdered in cold blood by Sinai insurgents on Monday. Undeniably, Morsi sympathisers of some form have attacked dozens of police stations since Wednesday's massacre-- and desecrated at least 30 Christian churches, following prolonged sectarian incitement from some Morsi supporters at Brotherhood-led sit-ins over the past month. And if the crackdown against the Brotherhood and its allies continues, it is hard to see how more extremist violence can be avoided.

But the central charges-- that most Brotherhood supporters are violent, that their two huge protest camps were simply overgrown terrorist cells, and that their brutal suppression was justified and even restrained-- are not supported by facts. My experience during six weeks of reporting at Rabaa al-Adawiya in Cairo suggested the vast majority of protesters there-- including many women and children-- were peaceful. Many may have failed to face up to Morsi's own incompetence and autocratic governance, and some may have turned too blind an eye to sectarian attacks recently completed in their name. Others have actively incited them. On the day of the coup, an imam from Minya, in southern (or "Upper") Egypt, ominously said backstage at Rabaa: "It's going to be a civil war-- and it's going to be very bad in particular for the church in Upper Egypt, because everyone knows they have spearheaded this campaign against the Islamic project." Anti-Morsi sentiment stems from both Muslims and Christians, but some members of the Brotherhood have disgracefully scapegoated and attacked the latter.

But many Rabaa protesters have simple, sincere reasons for their anger: they are upset at the theft of their votes, and fearful of a return to the anti-Islamist oppression of the Mubarak era. "We all voted for democracy," housewife Aza Galal told me last week, six-year-old son Saif in tow. "And then, because some people gathered in Tahrir Square [on 30 June], they put our votes in the rubbish bins." Morsi's government hardly promoted the wider democratic values on which a successful democracy relies-- but Galal's anger is understandable: Morsi or his allies won five consecutive votes between 2011 and 2012.

"If we leave the square, it will be worse than the 90s," added Suzanne Abdel Qadir, referring to Mubarak's treatment of Islamists. "We're back to the days of oppression under Mubarak. If we go home, then the fight is over."

The pro-regime propaganda comes right from the top. On Sunday, Egypt's state information service published a public memorandum to foreign correspondents in Egypt, rebuking western media for failing to acknowledge that the 3 July coup reflected the will of the people, and for being overly sympathetic to the Brotherhood-- apparently unable to distinguish between support for Morsi's disastrous and autocratic presidency, and criticism for the flagrant human rights abuses of his successors. Among many other false claims, it justified the siege of two mosques used by pro-Morsi doctors last week to house, respectively, a makeshift morgue and a field hospital-- on the grounds that they had, in fact, harboured terrorists.

As one journalist noted, such claims would have been amusing had they not further endangered the lives of foreign journalists in Egypt (several of whom have been either assaulted, detained, or even killed last week while trying to cover Egyptian news)-- and had they not flown in the face of the truth. At the Iman mosque, where hundreds of dead bodies were taken from the site of one of the massacres on Thursday, there were no insurgents-- just corpses. Filling the floor of the mosque in its entirety, many of them had already begun to rot, and one was so badly burnt that it looked less like a body and more like a blackened tree stump. Doctors said it was the remains of a boy in his early teens-- and an old woman squatted beside it in the belief it was her lost relative. But only its sunken eye-sockets and internal organs identified the corpse as that of a human.

The next day, at the al-Fath mosque, there were again no obvious terrorists, but simply unarmed and injured protesters, many of whom were bleeding to death. One man, Mohamed Said, was carried in, barely conscious-- a gunshot wound to his back-- and leant against a pillar. Then his head slumped, and doctors rolled his eyelids shut.

Egypt has been awash with cruelty-- from the desecration of Christian churches by Islamists, to the burning of corpses at Rabaa. But perhaps the most heartbreaking sight has been the street outside the Zeinhom morgue, Cairo's main mortuary. Due to the massacres, morgue staff, already severely stretched, struggle to deal with the unprecedented number of bodies arriving for autopsies. As a result, dozens of grieving families have clogged the street outside, their dead relatives rotting in the heat. A curfew is in place in Cairo, but families dare not leave the queue until their relatives are admitted to the morgue-- decomposing though they may be. "Curse the curfew," said Atef Fatih, whose brother was shot dead last week. "We don't care about it. We will wait until they let the body inside."

Some pile the coffins high with slabs of ice to stop the rot. But the ice melts fast, leaving the ground a sludgy mess of mud, blood and corpses. To add to the injustice, many families report that the police have refused to sign off their corpses as murder. Humanity and truth are in short supply.

And nor are they the only virtues to have been sacrificed in Egypt. So too have logic and common sense. Amid the rhetoric about Islamic terrorism, few seem to recognise that most of the terrorising has in fact come from the state. The government justifies the state-sponsored violence as a necessary step towards avoiding civil war. But it does not seem to realise that its provocative brutality is the thing that makes such a horrific outcome more likely-- further alienating and radicalising Islamists, and pushing some towards violence. (One commentator suggests that this may, in fact, be the state's desired outcome-- a heightening of extremist violence, which gives the government more cover to increase their powers.) Similarly, few seem to have seen the irony in appointing a new cabinet whose primary objective is to fix Egypt's economy, but which has since given its full backing to the state massacres that have further frightened away the very investors on which a revived economy would depend.

With the state seemingly unwilling to reign in its violence, the Brotherhood unlikely to curtail its street presence, and unwilling or unable to prevent its allies and harder-line followers from violence, the future looks utterly bleak. Here and there, there are moments of fleeting dark humour. Egypt's leading private broadsheet, al-Masry al-Youm, published last week an interview with a Republican "senator", one Maurice Bonamigo, a man very approving of Egypt's controversial new domestic direction-- but one who also sadly later emerged to have never been elected to higher office.

There have also been moments of unexpected personal kindness. They range from the soldier photographed aiding a grieving woman during last Wednesday's massacres to the police lieutenant who, putting his machine gun to one side and switching off his television, handed me a carton of guava juice-- bringing to an end a two-hour-long detention at the hands of both police officers and an angry mob of vigilantes. "You are welcome in Egypt," the lieutenant said, and smiled.

I suppose if he mentioned the fact that the Egyptian military has a sordid history of burning down Coptic churches to blame it's enemies and curry favor in the West, he wouldn't be as welcome next time. Meanwhile, Obama seems pretty freaked out by how rapidly the whole project has-- as these things tend to-- careened out of control. The New Yorker's John Cassidy asserts that there is, after all, a limit to Obama's pragmatism. "In the 2008 campaign," he reminds us, "Obama talked about reshaping the international architecture, defending democratic values, and ridding the world of things like climate change and nuclear weapons. On receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2009, he spoke of 'bending history in the direction of justice.'" In reality, though, he's been less transformational and more of a pragmatic transactionalist.

Nowhere has Obama’s caution been more evident than in the Middle East, where his rhetorical embrace of the Arab Spring, combined with a reluctance to get involved in messy situations, has outraged interventionists on the left and the right. In Syria, the Administration had, until recently, more or less stood by as the Assad régime killed many thousands of people in a brutal effort to put down an insurrection. Even the recent decision to provide small arms to the rebels was a modest move: few analysts think that it will be sufficient to alter the course of the civil war. Now the focus is Egypt, where a violent crackdown continues in the wake of a coup. According to reports over the weekend, the military-backed government is now considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and banning it completely.

Obama’s refusal to truly break with the Egyptian generals who now control the country, and, in particular, his decision not to suspend U.S. military aid, is being criticized on both sides of the political divide. Last week, after security forces broke up a Muslim Brotherhood-led sit-in protesting the coup, at the cost of more than six hundred lives, the Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who travelled to Cairo two weeks ago in a vain attempt to persuade the authorities to refrain from violence, said that the military-installed government was “taking Egypt down a dark path, one that the United States cannot and should not travel with them.” Senator Rand Paul tweeted, “President Obama says he ‘deplores violence in Egypt,’ but U.S. foreign aid continues to help pay for it.” Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic Senator Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, joined the calls for a cutoff in aid, saying that the Egyptian government had used the unpopularity of Mohamed Morsi’s administration as a license to restore the old military régime.

Obama's response has been criticized as too tepid, but Cassidy insists his pragmatic approach has been "the self-interested approach that the United States had adopted throughout the Middle East for decades until George W. Bush blundered into Iraq." That pragmatic approach tolerates-- to put it mildly-- "autocratic and repressive régimes that agree to promote Western interests... [I]t is Egypt’s official recognition of Israel, and its maintenance of peace with its eastern neighbor, that explains why, for years, it was the second largest recipient of U.S. aid. (Following the misadventures of the past decade, it has fallen to fifth place, behind Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, and Pakistan.) And it is Egypt’s supportive role in the 'War on Terror' that explains why so many figures in the U.S. defense establishment continue to have warm feelings towards the country’s security forces."

The real test of a pragmatic President is whether his policies hold up over time. Looking back on the first Iraq war and comparing it to the still unfolding disaster that followed the second one, most people would agree that George H. W. Bush and Scowcroft made the right decision in leaving Saddam in power and adopting a policy of containment.

In Syria and Egypt, it is too early to reach a definitive judgement on Obama’s policies... If [Sisi and the junta] make the state of emergency permanent, ban the Muslim Brotherhood, and restore the Mubarak era, Obama’s reluctance will look worse than craven. Even then, though, some realists would argue that as long as the Egyptian government sticks with the Camp David accord and opposes Islamic fundamentalism, it is in the interests of the United States to support it.

I don’t think that Obama would go that far. His hope appears to be that once the current crackdown ends, the government will abandon the state of emergency, free most of the people it has rounded up, and set in train a process for rewriting the constitution (one that was endorsed in a referendum, mind you), engaging some of the religious parties, and holding parliamentary and presidential elections. At this stage, it looks like a rather forlorn hope.

And then there's the whole "innocence" of Hosni Mubarak thing.

Egypt's former autocrat Hosni Mubarak was flown from jail on Thursday in a symbolic victory for an army-dominated old order that has overthrown and imprisoned his freely elected Islamist successor.

A blue-and-white helicopter took Mubarak from Cairo's Tora prison, where scores of his supporters had gathered to hail his release. He was flown to a military hospital in the nearby southern suburb of Maadi, officials said.

"He protected the country," said Lobna Mohamed, a housewife in the crowd of Mubarak well-wishers. "He is a good man, but we want (Abdel Fattah) Sisi now," she said, referring to the army commander who overthrew Islamist Mohamed Mursi on July 3.

It's tough to talk sensibly about the situation in Egypt, but it's a snap to talk nonsense

At least I don't kid myself that my opinion of Nobel peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei's suitability as a possible leader for Egypt is either here or there.

by Ken

Egypt is another of those situations I've been keeping my head down on, for the simple reason that I understand that the situation is way too complicated for my understanding, and also far too little under our control anyway. Do I need to note how narrowly such scruples are shared?

Nobody yet has explained to the American public what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know who it is who will be taking the place of [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak. Now more than ever, we need strength and sound of mind there in the White House. We need to know what it is that America stands for so we know who it is that America will stand with. And we do not have all of that information yet.

This is crass imbecility. Oh, that and the very cheapest form of political theater. The woman knows nothing about Egypt, has nothing to contribute to any discussion of the situation there, but by God she sees an opportunity for yet another cretinous broadside against the president.

Now I don't doubt the president knows more than he's let on publicly about the most likely scenarios for the next government of Egypt, but of course there's not much he can say publicly: (a) because we have so little power to influence the outcome, (b) anything we do publicly is likely to produce the opposite effect, and (c) I doubt that he's prepared to make a public statement as to how far the U.S. is prepared to go to perpetuate the present military dictatorship.

And make no mistake, a military dictatorship is what Egypt has been for decades, and the Egyptian military has been tightening the screws. (Not, though, that the military is a monolithic force, as that lost link I mentioned sketched.)

I certainly don't claim to be an expert, which is why I've kept my mouth shut, and while the following deals with only one of the "player" elements I alluded to above, it's so important that it deserves notice. This is Fareed Zakaria in his WaPo column yesterday, "Egypt's real parallel to Iran's revolution":

Egypt is not a personality-based regime, centered on Mubarak, despite reports of his wealth and efforts to establish his son as his successor. Since the officers' coup in 1952, Egypt has been a dictatorship of, by and for the military. The few presidents since then have emerged from the officer corps; the armed forces have huge budgets and total independence, and are deeply involved in every aspect of society, including owning vast tracts of land and hundreds of companies.

Right now, the military is consolidating its power. Mubarak's efforts since 2004 to bring civilians and business leaders into the cabinet have been reversed over the past week - in fact, the businessmen have been turned into scapegoats, sacrificed so that the generals can continue to rule. The three people running Egypt - the vice president, prime minister and defense chief - come from the army. Half of the cabinet are military men, and about 80 percent of the powerful governors are drawn from the armed forces. The military seems to have decided to sacrifice Mubarak but is trying to manage the process of change, to ensure that it remains all-powerful. Egypt, remember, is still ruled by martial law and military courts.

Now I don't mean to minimize the doleful role Mubarak has played at the top of this dreadful regime since he slid into place following the assassination of the previous military dictator, Anwar Sadat. I think it would be especially lovely if some way were found to shake that $70 billion or however much it is that his family has stolen from their country. But Mubarak himself seems hardly an issue anymore. The question is: Can the military retain its control?

Of course much of the American Right, unlike Princess Sarah, who's still waiting for information to strike her (though she does insist that we shouldn't "stand for" a government led by the Muslim Brotherhood, about which, like everything else, she knows nothing -- and of course nobody is imagining the Brotherhood commanding enough support to wind up somehow in control of the government), has made up its mind. Those great champions of international "democracy" and "freedom" in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are all for . . . propping up the military dictatorship in Egypt.

Realistically -- though I don't think this is the information the princess is waiting to hear -- the overwhelming likelihood is that we're not going to like whatever government replaces the present one, the likely question being just how much we're going to hate it, though the reality is that, unless we're really prepared to invest heavily in propping up the military dictatorship, we have next to no influence over what form that next government will take.

For once where a Middle Eastern country is concerned, we actually do have leverage, because of the amount of money we pour into Egypt, to exert some pressure on the present government to do something. But what that something is? Have we really learned nothing from out decades' worth of misadventures in the Muslim Middle East? (Answer: I wouldn't be at all surprised.)

For example, while I find the prospect of Mohamed ElBaradei as Egyptian leader, distinctly intriguing, I have no reason to believe that he commands any sizable support among the Egyptian people, or for that matter that he would be effective at dealing with the country's large problems. Far more important, though, my feelings about him are totally irrelevant to the ones that matter, which is to say those of the various political, social, and religious factions within the country.

And remember, the American Right hates ElBaradei almost as much as it hates the Muslim Brotherhood -- for having done his job as the U.N.'s nuclear-weapons-inspection chief, which meant that (a) he didn't knuckle under to the we're-agoin'-ta-war plans of the Bush regime warmongers, and (b) he was right about Iraqi WMDs. Logically, the right-wing doodyheads should be on their knees apologizing to him for having been so wrong, but logic hardly ever comes into play in right-wing behavior. So rather than own up to their own combination of stupidity, dishonesty, and outright corruption, they vilify the guy who was honest, courageous, and (worst of all) right -- the [expletive deleted] son of a bitch. You'd think the Righties would be used to being proved wrong by now, since they're always wrong. Nevertheless, their wrath against the people who prove it only grows wilder.

I think the final paragraph of Fareed Zakaria's above-cited piece is worth attending:

It's worth remembering what has led to the rise of Islamic extremism and anti-American rage in the Middle East. Arabs see Washington as having supported brutal dictatorships that suppress their people. They believe that it ignored this suppression as long as the regimes toed the line on American foreign policy. If Washington is now perceived as brokering a deal that keeps a military dictatorship in power in Egypt, de jure or de facto, the result will be deep disappointment and frustration on the streets of Cairo. Over time, it will make opposition to the regime and to the United States more hard-line, more religious and more violent. That might be the real parallel to the forces that led to the Iranian revolution.

I just wish Mr. Zakaria had taken his case the obvious and necessary one step farther in terms of a link between the end of the Shah's regime in Iran and the imminent end of Mubarak's in Egypt. The Shah too was a "valued ally," and given the nature of the U.S. relationship with him, there was clearly potential to influence the way he took his leave of a country that was clearly growing increasingly weary of him, even as he himself was suffering the ravages of age and illness. Of course there doesn't seem to have been any strong faction within U.S. politics thinking ahead to the shape of the post-Shah era in Iran.

As far as I know, the U.S. government quietly allowed and possibly even encouraged the Shah to unleash on his people the absolutely most brutal and repressive regime his amply brutal imagination could conjure up in order to hold onto power as his own powers slipped away. The result was that when the regime finally imploded, there was no imaginable alternative to the radical Shiite clerics. Even though at present there's no force in Egypt remotely comparable to Iran's Shiite clerics, could something along those lines wind up being the lesson of Iran?

You know, when the right-wing doodyheads start trying to draw blood screaming about "who lost Egypt"?

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We Should All Walk Like Egyptians

One of my closest friends produced The Bangles' #1 hit "Walk Like An Egyptian," but I couldn't resist posting the cover version above by actual Egyptians Hakim and Cleopatra. Most Americans didn't know much about Egypt beyond this song and maybe the pyramids and Elizabeth Taylor-- other than stuff-to-do-with-Israel. Even the Suez Canal doesn't seem all that important anymore. And Egyptian cuisine... oh God, the worst. Otherwise I'd go out and have an Egyptian meal tonight to celebrate the heroism of the Egyptian men and women of all ages and ideologies who have taken their lives in hand, and in some cases given up their lives, to stand up to tyranny. It's more than most people anywhere ever do. I could barely take my eyes off the English version of Al Jazeera (TimeWarner banned it from the California airwaves, so online) the last few days. Yes, this week we're all Egyptians, unless we watch Fox, in which case we're stupid shitheads with no brains who see al-Qaeda behind every bush.

Back to stuff-to-do-with-Israel. I listened live when Mohamed ElBaradei did his Al Jazeera interview from Cairo today. Here's a piece from YouTube:



Please listen. I don't want to transcribe it, except I do want to say how embarrassed I was when I felt his indignation-- indignation I shared-- when he was asked about the reaction to the uprising, in the form of statements, by the United States and other Western powers. "I'm not satisfied with these statements, which are preaching democracy and social justice. They have two options: to take the side of the people or the regime. We cannot have a middle ground here. These countries should recalculate their agendas. Change is coming, no doubt, and the Egyptian people will look at those countries from different perspectives according to their stances."

The interviewer then asks ElBaradei about what many in the West care about exclusively in regard to Egypt, not counting oil: Israel. Egypt is an ancient civilization with a population of 80,000,000 and a GDP of about half a trillion dollars; Israel, which was founded in 1948, has a population less than a tenth of that and a GDP of around $200 billion. ElBaradei's blood pressure must have gone into orbit.

This is a humiliation to the Egyptian people. It is the people who will decide their destiny. It is the Egyptian people who will hand down their own policies... The outside forces cannot decide the destiny of the people. It is us who will do so.

I hope the poor man isn't watching Fox-- or, for that matter, any American TV-- since one might get the impression that the rising up of tens of millions of Egyptians against a brutal and oppressive tyranny is somehow about Israel or even America. It's about neither, and if Obama backs torturer-in-chief Omar Suleiman to maintain the status quo by succeeding Mubarak, it will quickly turn into something about America, and in a very bad way.

A clueless and senile John McCain, always ready to make anything and everything about him spoke earlier today on CNN about how the Egyptian peoples' valiant struggle really just comes down to how we cannot afford a Tiananmen Square in Cairo. "It's fraught with danger... The longer this unrest the more likely the radicals see openings to take power. The Lenin scenario," continued the raving idiot who Arizona voters should have had the good sense to retire after he helped steal billions, Mubarak-style, in the Savings and Loan scandal.

You can probably imagine that we here at DWT are very excited for the Egyptians (and the Tunisians) for taking their fates into their own hands and ridding their countries of tyranny. But we aren't deluding ourselves into believing that the future of Egypt is now going to automatically be fabulous. Could it be worse than it is now? It could-- although I don't believe it will be, not for the hard-pressed Egyptian people. Right now they're probably far more democratically oriented than, say, the American teabaggers who overwhelmingly hate democracy. As author and Philadelphia journalist Will Bunch pointed out in his newest book, The Backlash, teabaggers are convinced that "the majority was no longer worthy of power in this great experiment of a democratic republic, since the majority was now 'the handout people' from up near Wilmington." We briefly looked at the context he was talking about last week when we discussed why teabaggers are certain Obama is not a legitimate president:

[The] urban nature of Obama's support was exactly the point that the Garcias and Russ Murphy were awkwardly trying to make. When Alex Garcia has finished his monologue [how McCain won more land] about the big states and the small states, you sheepishly note-- more of a question than a statement, really-- that Obama and his native-son running mate Joe Biden actually carried Delaware, did they not? (By a landslide margin of more than 100,000 votes in fact.)

"What it is," said Alex Garcia, "... is Wilmington."

"Wilmington!" chimes his wife, Theresa.

Wilmington, with 72,826 people, an hour north of your diner booth, is the largest city in Delaware by far-- capital of the American credit-card industry and also plagued by more violent criminal enterprises, a crowded world apart from the marshy spaces of lower Delaware. The city of Wilmington is roughly 10 percent Latino and about 35 percent black; in 2008, Obama carried New Castle County-- Wilmington and the surrounding suburbs-- by a two-to-one margin while McCain narrowly won the rest of the state, including small towns that his running-mate Sarah Palin once called "the pro-America parts of the country."

Wilmington?

"They get a lot of influence from New Jersey and New York because a lot of the New York and New Jersey people live in Wilmington, and that's a big influence," Alex is saying, "and they're really into the welfare state-- it's a handout area up there. When you start coming down below the [Delaware] Canal into Kent County and Sussex County, it's a totally different way they voted."

A long silence settles in over the table. Plates clink. Toddlers babble in the background, as soft rock descends from a speaker overhead. The big platters of spaghetti and meatloaf arrive, and the once talkative Murphy is bent over his mound of pasta, handing off to the Garcias the task of further explaining McCain's glorious 2008 victory.

But, you finally stutter, should votes from Wilmington actually count less?

"There's more of them," Theresa says.

"It's population," adds Alex.

"They're in the big cities," says Theresa. "That's what the problem is."

So are you saying that voters from Wilmington aren't the real America?

"They represent the welfare America, the handout America-- what do they call it, the nanny state, everybody is taken care of," explains Alex. "When you get into the big areas like that, everybody is expecting their free handout... You have a lot more of the... how would I put it... a lot more of the welfare recipients, stuff like that."

There is a famous and somewhat apocryphal anecdote about the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael saying from her liberal bastion in Manhattan that Richard Nixon could not have won the 1972 election because every single person she knew voted for George McGovern. Here is the flip side: that looking out on the "pro-America" horizon from the Kirby & Holloway, it is impossible to imagine that someone like Barack Hussein Obama could have won a presidential election-- or even that he is a United States citizen. These things are the pillars of a shared faith.

...Their uprising was something the likes of which America had never seen before-- whiter, older, and more affluent, yet angrier than anyone could have expected, whipsawed into rebellion not by the hormonally raised expectations of youth but instead by a nonstop sedentary couch-potato bombardment of unfiltered fear.

Egypt's revolution is a real one, and a broader one. All segments of the Egyptian population other than regimistas are part of it, or at least praying for it. Revolutions are dicey things, and often eat their own children but if I had to say who I trust more, the teabaggers or the Egyptian people, it's a no-brainer.

Spring Time of The Peoples-- Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen... Is England Next?

The title refers to something that happened in 1848, even before McCain was born. It can be described as series of political upheavals-- or revolutions-- that began in France and spread throughout Europe, including Italy, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Romania, Hungary and then on to Brazil. Russia's relative stability while the rest of Europe was burning is usually attributed to the revolutionary groups' inability to communicate with each other, the czar having shut down Facebook and Twitter, just the way Hosni Mubarak did in Egypt. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Recollections: "society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror."

Fast forward over 160 years and we find that Tunisians have just kicked out their dictator and has issued an arrest warrant to have Interpol bring him back to stand trial. The current Spring Time of The Peoples has now spread-- with a vengeance-- to Egypt and Yemen. Someone in Syria must have read about how effective the czar was in 1848 and has already preempted on-line preparations by shutting down the Internet.

Wikipedia makes the point that the Revolution of 1848 missed Great Britain because the middle classes there "had been pacified by general enfranchisement in the Reform Act 1832; the consequent agitations, violence, and petitions of the Chartist movement came to a head with their peaceful petition to Parliament of 1848. The repeal of the protectionist agricultural tariffs-- called the "Corn Laws"-- (in 1846) had defused some proletarian fervour there." This time England may not be so lightly spared. Instead of nurturing-- or even just placating-- a growing middle class, the British elites are shrinking it and pushing it to the brink. Remember this clip from the U.K. elections that brought in a Conservative government. Well, it's all coming true:



And British working families are stirring out of their lethargy.

Union leaders warned today of a growing mood of militancy over the government's "gamble" on the economy if the coalition refuses to change course.

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, described mounting industrial unrest among normally moderate rank-and-file members across the public and private sectors who are "very angry" at the government's economic plan.

Bob Crow, leader of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers' Union, ramped up the pressure as he warned that there was "no question" that unions would mount co-ordinated action to protect workers' living standards.

But Boris Johnson, the Conservative London mayor, signalled today that the government is planning to hit back by tightening laws against what he described as "vexatious strikes" by workers employed in essential public services.

Kenny issued a broadside against the coalition government as it made clear its intention to stick to its plan of multibillion spending cuts, and rejected calls for a change of economic course in the face of shocking figures that showed the economy contracted by 0.5% in the last quarter of 2010.

The figures, which raise fears of high unemployment and inflation with stagnant growth, mark the first serious challenge to the coalition's political and economic direction.

In an attempt to reassure volatile markets, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, urged the cabinet to stand firm and warned of many shocks to the economy before it settled down to a consistent pattern of growth.

But Kenny said today that the government's strategy was a "gamble" without a "plan B" to adapt to the situation. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We are seeing, frankly, from areas of our membership, areas that have traditionally been very, very moderate and quiet, we are seeing calls for industrial action ballots.

"We are seeing people very angry about the fact that there doesn't seem to be a balance of justice in this. They do not see that there is a strategy that says we are going to win this fight."

He said people wanted to see that the government could adapt to the situation. "There's a growing level of concern that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. It's all bad news," he added.

Kenny said that people who have not had a pay rise for two or three years wanted to see King do more about the "rampant, greedy nature" of the banking industry in the country.

"This is a really important point for people in this country," he said.

Yes... this one too. Do we have unions still?


And what about our own government? American firms may be complicit in the weapons being turned on the Egyptian people and in Mubarak's order to shut down the Internet, but... what about our government? At what point do "we" side with the Egyptian people against the tyrant? Robert Naiman, with a little help from Mohamed ElBaradei, tackled the question very well over at Daily Kos this morning:

If Western leaders, who have backed the dictator Mubarak for 30 years, cannot stand before the Egyptian people today and say unequivocally, "we support your right of national self-determination," when can they do it?

That's the question that Egyptian democracy leader and Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei has put before Western leaders today.

Speaking to the Guardian in Cairo, before the planned protests today, ElBaradei stepped up his calls for Western leaders to explicitly condemn Mubarak, who, as the Guardian noted, has been a close ally of the US:

"The international community must understand we are being denied every human right day by day," he said. "Egypt today is one big prison. If the international community does not speak out it will have a lot of implications. We are fighting for universal values here. If the west is not going to speak out now, then when?"