Egypt in the United States

By David Brooks

From La Jornada

It is said that some American politician, justifying Washington’s support for dictators, declared that “Somoza is a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” That phrase, with the surname changed, perhaps more than anything else sums up the relationship between the United States and Hosni Mubarak’s regime over the past 30 years.

And, as was the case with Nicaragua, it now seems to be the case in Egypt – with many other examples in between – where people decided to surprise the self-proclaimed defender of world “democracy” by demanding, well, democracy, and thus provoking a “crisis” for those who handle “geopolitics.”

Egypt is the second-largest recipient of U.S. assistance in the world (about $1.5 billion annually, with more than 85 percent in military aid). The U.S. has trained Egypt’s armed forces, supplied it with Abrams tanks, fighter jets and military equipment, even to the tear gas police fired on demonstrators, on condition it behaves as a reliable “ally” of U.S. geopolitical logic in the region.

But now that “our son of a bitch” loses control, the challenge for Washington is the “management” of the “crisis” which it embellishes with words like “democracy”, “fair and free elections”, “respect for human rights” and everything else that for years the U.S. never required in this way.

In fact, the torture chambers used against dissidents by Hosni Mubarak’s regime were the same as those used as a favor to the U.S. government to torture “suspected terrorists” kidnapped by the CIA in other parts of the world in what was called “renditions” (one of the confessions extracted there by torture was part of the “evidence” used by the U.S. at the United Nations to justify its war against Iraq.)

Suddenly, some politicians now admit that maybe it was a mistake to give priority to geopolitical interests, not democracy.

Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote this week that, over a long period, U.S. funding to the Egyptian military has dominated the bilateral relationship because there was “a strategic understanding that our relationship benefited U.S. foreign policy and promoted peace in the region,” and therefore, he said, there was a policy of support for Mubarak.

But he stressed that the anger and aspirations that drive the demonstrations will not disappear without extensive changes, and therefore warned that “the awakening in the Arab world has to bring new light to Washington as well. Our interests are not served by watching friendly governments collapse under the weight of the anger and frustration of their own people,” he said.

Perhaps the phrase that best summarized the relationship between the United States (and Israel) and Mubarak came from John Rothmann, an American Zionist who, in his radio program in San Francisco, said: “Nobody defends Mubarak. He may be a barbarian, but he’s our barbarian.”

Others in this country denounce the logic that has dominated the bilateral relationship. In San Francisco, as in other cities including Washington, acts of solidarity with the rebels in Egypt have taken place in recent days, with the participation of diverse progressive groups, along with representatives of the Egyptian community in this country.

In San Francisco, a large contingent of the group Jewish Voice for Peace joined the demonstration in solidarity with the Egyptian people on Saturday, prompting an intense and angry nationwide debate in the community. Other Jewish groups accused Voice of being “anti-Israel,” The New York Times reported.

At the other extreme, to some right-wingers in the U.S. the revolt in Egypt is an almost apocalyptic issue. Glenn Beck, the most famous media figure on the right, warned his viewers on Fox News that the Muslim Brotherhood and the American “radical” left operate jointly in Egypt to carry out “the destruction of the Western world.”

He charged that American anti-war groups like Code Pink, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have united to promote a totalitarian leftist agenda, and therefore urged all to pray “for our way of life.”

To Noam Chomsky, the rebellion in Egypt is just because it is against “our way of life” imposed on the people by their government and U.S. policies – especially the neoliberal model – which annuled Egyptians’ most basic aspirations.

In an interview with Amy Goodman on her Democracy Now program, Chomsky said the United States and Egypt are linked not only by the top leaderships but also by what is happening in their societies.

The assessment by U.S. policymakers, he said, was that the most important thing is that “the dictators support us” in the region and that “we can ignore the population because they are silent and while silence prevails, who cares? In fact, something analogous to that applies to the internal situation in the United States, and of course it is the same policy throughout the world.”

Chomsky explained that “the U.S. population is also filled with anger, frustration, full of fear and irrational hatred. The guys on Wall Street, meanwhile, are fine, the same people who created the current crisis … And they are coming out stronger and richer than ever. But all is well while the population remains passive … That is the scenario that has been unfolding in the Middle East also, as it unfolded in Central America and other domains.”

Chomsky concludes that “all this shows a really profound contempt for democracy and public opinion” on the part of the rulers.

Egypt, for the moment, has put all these governments on notice.