The New Middle East by Paul Danahar Read Free Book Online Page A

young people who led the Egyptian revolution wanted, but it was what they had feared they might get. It was not what the most powerful man on earth had been hoping for from the start either. ‘What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become president. What I think is that this is going to be long and hard,’ said President Obama to an aide at the time of the uprising. 1 He was referring to Wa’el Ghonim, a Google executive and Internet activist who was held by the police for eleven days during the protest. President Obama did not get his wish, and it was longer and harder than anyone imagined.
    The second year after the revolt was full of anger and protest too. The army and the Brotherhood were still dancing around each other looking for weaknesses. Each knew a decisive moment would come. As they did so they trampled over the rights and ambitions of the Egyptian people who had led the revolt. The decline in quality of the officer corps had been hidden under Mubarak, but now it was there for everyone to see as the army bungled its way through a period of direct rule. For years promotion in the military was about stepping into dead men’s shoes, but the top generals had just lived on and on. They were totally out of touch with the generation that had taken to the streets. These old men were publicly abused from the outside and privately cursed from within.
    The Brotherhood’s leaders were no spring chickens either, and their power structures were almost as top-down as the military’s. But they adjusted quicker to the new political landscape, because that was something they had been learning to do for decades just to survive. They would claim victory in a major battle of their long war with the army, though not without suggestions of a bit of match fixing. Flush from that, they would immediately square up against a new opponent: the People. In July 2013 that was a battle the Ikhwan would lose.
    As the second anniversary of the Egyptian uprising drew near, the title of ‘Pharaoh’ long associated with Hosni Mubarak had been resurrected to describe President Morsi. He had launched a power grab by issuing a decree that put himself and his office above the courts. He claimed he did it because the legal system was still stuffed with Mubarak regime counter-revolutionaries. Everyone else saw it for what it was, an attempt to force through the completion of the new constitution being written by the Islamist-dominated assembly before the courts could stop it, and driven by the Muslim Brotherhood’s not entirely unjustified and by now institutionalised paranoia that everyone was out to get them. Then Morsi rushed through a referendum on the hastily completed constitution, which as expected was approved because of the Brotherhood’s ability to mobilise its huge membership. Two years after Egyptians had got rid of Mubarak, the man in the Presidential Palace once again seemed to think that he and his party were bigger than the nation they presided over.
    ‘New pharaoh?’ Morsi laughed. ‘Can I be? I’ve been suffering. I’ve been suffering, personally.’ 2 He was referring to his imprisonment by the old regime. Now he had swapped places with the man who originally put him there. Hosni Mubarak was at this stage sitting in jail, because of the life sentence he had been given in June 2012 for complicity in the killing of more than 800 protesters in the uprising against him. As the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood presidency started revealing some rather undemocratic tendencies, Mubarak must have been shouting: ‘I told you so!’ to anyone who would listen. He was right, he had, from the very moment his best friends in Washington presented him with the novel idea that he might allow his people the chance to choose their leaders for themselves.
     
    If President George W. Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ had a high-water mark, then it was in the city of Cairo in June 2005. That was when he sent his