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

new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to what she described as the ‘cultural and political heart of the Middle East’. 3 Ms Rice believed: ‘A democratic Egypt would change the region like nothing else. It was in that spirit I went to the American University in Cairo to deliver a speech on democracy in the Middle East.’ 4
    Her boss wrote later: ‘I was hopeful that Egypt would be a leader for freedom and reform in the Arab world.’ 5 Ms Rice said she intended to deliver a speech that was ‘bold’, but before she did she went to see Hosni Mubarak at his seaside home in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh. 6 By this stage Mubarak was partially deaf, and so the secretary of state ‘talked loudly and looked directly at him, hoping the elderly leader could hear me or, if necessary, read my lips’. Either way he got the message and replied: ‘I know my people. The Egyptians need a strong hand, and they don’t like foreign interference. We are proud people.’ 7 He was probably talking about himself.
    Ms Rice’s speech was remarkable because it publicly articulated, at a venue in the heart of the Arab world, what everybody knew was wrong with the Middle East. Just as importantly, it was being said by the diplomat-in-chief of the country that had been propping up the whole rotten system.
    ‘For sixty 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 told her audience. 8 ‘President Mubarak’s decision to amend the country’s constitution and hold multiparty elections is encouraging,’ she said; he had ‘unlocked the door for change’. 9 Which was exactly what Mubarak was worried about. Mubarak was furious about the whole idea, but he could draw comfort from the fact that there was still one issue over which he and the US could agree. In a question-and-answer session just after her speech Ms Rice made a point of reiterating who was not invited to the democratic party. ‘We have not had contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood . . . we have not engaged the Muslim Brotherhood and we don’t – we won’t.’ 10 In addition the Bush team followed successive US administrations in turning a blind eye to the way the Mubarak regime persecuted the Ikhwan even after it had clearly steered a path away from violence. Only when non-Islamist politicians were harassed and jailed were they willing to speak out.
    Throughout Mubarak’s rule, after the crackdown in the wake of the assassination of Sadat, the Brotherhood evolved towards a more moderate position that inevitably led it into the political arena.
    The Brotherhood took its first steps into parliamentary politics in 1984 in an alliance with the more liberal Wafd Party. Mubarak eased restrictions on moderate Islamists to counter the radicals he had been fighting earlier on in his presidency. In the years that followed the Brotherhood candidates took part in a series of clearly rigged parliamentary elections, standing as ‘independents’ because the organisation was still banned. It reassured the regime that it would not directly challenge its authority with another Orwellian expression of its pragmatism: ‘participation not domination’. This meant that until Mubarak was overthrown the Ikhwan never fielded enough candidates to actually win power.
    Under pressure from Washington, even before Rice’s Cairo speech, Mubarak announced in February 2005 that Egypt would, for the first time, hold presidential elections in which candidates other than him would be able to run. Parliamentary elections were also being held later that year in which Muslim Brotherhood members would again stand as individuals.
    In those parliamentary elections the Brotherhood did much better than Mubarak had expected. The mood of his regime was conveyed in a confidential briefing to the then