Much of the political right and the pro-Israeli camp are fearmongering that the Obama administration should not demand Mubarak’s resignation, which Obama has not done because the “democracy” that the US championed in Iran in ’09 does not apply in the same way to a stalwart ally such as Mubarak, arguing that Egypt could become the next Iran, that should a revolution triumph in Egypt then the regime born of that revolution will mirror that of Iran’s in 1979, which , of course, was a nightmare for American interests in the region. Here’s an article from Foreign Policy that I feel effectively refutes (or to quote our illustrious Sarah Palin “refudiates”) that analogy:
From London to Washington, and as far as Tehran, the question is being asked: Will Egypt of 2011 become the Iran of 1979? Some leading figures in Tehran, as well as Iranian state-run media, are trying to cast Egypt as another country caught up, as is Lebanon, in the region’s tilt toward the Islamist orbit. “I herewith proclaim to those (Western leaders) who still do not want to see the realities that the political axis of the new Middle East will soon be Islamic,” Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a hard-line cleric, said last week at Friday prayers. He also applauded what he called an end to “Western-backed dictators in the Arab world.” Meanwhile, a few European leaders are already sounding the alarm that Egypt’s venerable Muslim Brotherhood, which dates back to the 1920s, could fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Mubarak regime. British Foreign Secretary William Hague told reporters it was not up to foreigners to run Egypt, but “certainly we would not want to see a government based on the Muslim Brotherhood.”
And in Washington, some neoconservatives — the very same circle that not long ago was calling for regime change in Iran based on their reading of the will of the people — are now backpedaling and advising President Obama to tread lightly, so as not to create an opening in Egypt for an Islamist state to emerge from more than a week of mass popular protest. Some Israelis are also making the same recommendation out of fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran. “…Israelis, have been overtaken by fear: The fear of democracy. Not here, in neighboring countries,” Sever Plocker, an Israeli commentator, wrote in the daily Yediot Ahronot. “It is as though we never prayed for our Arab neighbors to become liberal democracies.”
The voices making comparisons with 1979 have failed to understand the seeds of the Islamic revolution, nor do they seem to recognize that today’s Egyptian uprising is a non-ideological movement. As someone who conducted research on the Brotherhood in Egypt for many years, I predicted 10 years ago that the only alternative to Mubarak would be a more democratic state run by the Brotherhood; I have been surprised at just how minimal a role the Brotherhood has played so far — not only in the street movement, but in the consciousness of the young people in Tahrir Square.
Their grievances are aimed squarely at the repression, cronyism, and stagnation that have smothered the Egyptian people for decades under Mubarak and his regime. Both the weakness and strength of their protest movement lies in the fact that they have no prescribed path forward. Of all the slogans chanted in the streets of Egypt over the last week, the Brotherhood’s decades-old cry — “Islam is the solution” — has been noticeable mostly for its absence. There are several reasons the Brotherhood has found itself in the background, even though it has stated that the movement supports Mohamed ElBaradei as a symbolic leader of the opposition, and it is steadily becoming more visible in the protests.
The organization put forth no leader of its own, either to negotiate with Mubarak’s regime or to guide the street protests, because it fears that today’s Egyptian youth — who has succeeded in a short time where the Brotherhood has failed for nearly 90 years — might shun the Brotherhood altogether if it were to become a political liability. The Brotherhood also wants to deprive Western leaders, such as British Secretary Hague, of any ammunition to support warnings that this is another Islamic revolution.
And third, the opposition — which is comprised of middle class, non-ideological youth, workers and the Brotherhood — wants to avoid at all cost giving the military a reason for a violent crackdown against the protestors. To date, the military seems to be preserving the regime while also respecting the rights of the people, who have great respect for the army as an institution. But all parties know the military’s attitude might change drastically if it felt the influence of the outlawed, but semi-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood was becoming too prominent in the uprising.
Some skeptics make the point that the Iranian revolution succeeded because of its diversity of secularists and nationalists, not just the clerical establishment. True enough, but the driving forces of the revolution were Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was clearly the charismatic figure leading the way, and his cadre of clerics, some of whom are still the pillars of the regime today in Iran. There are no clerics or even leaders within the Brotherhood positioning themselves as stand-ins for Mubarak.
If anything, this is a bittersweet moment for the Brotherhood. Although Mubarak appears on his way out, the movement seems to have missed the historical moment when it could have captured a powerful place in the corridors of power. That window began closing in 2005, after the Brotherhood captured 88 seats in the Egyptian parliament only to be targeted aggressively and largely suppressed by Mubarak’s security services ever since. During these intervening years, a new Egyptian generation has arisen that is more secular, more worldly, and not loyal to any particular organization or movement. Though the Brotherhood, in the long term, may still prove to have a profound role in a new Egypt; after all, the skills and tools it takes to start a revolution are rarely those needed to finish it. Ask the Mensheviks and Lenin.
Rather than reaching for false analogies between Iran of 1979 and Egypt today, Western leaders should accept the fact that any new Egyptian government is unlikely to support policies the United States has promoted for 30 years, regardless of whether the Muslim Brotherhood has a small or large share in a new government. The time has come for the West to acknowledge that Egyptian society opposes the country’s 1979 peace agreement with Israel, resents the United States’ close relationship with the Jewish state (a country most Egyptians loathe), and has been historically prepared to end the country’s reliance on U.S. aid. In fact, Mubarak’s image as a puppet of the United States has for years been a political liability.
It is clear the new Egypt in the post-Mubarak era will be self-determined, more anti-American and closer to its Arab and Muslim neighbors. And this will happen whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood takes the driver’s seat in a new government.
Geneive Abdo, director of the Iran program at the National Security Network and The Century Foundation, is the author of No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam.
I beg to differ. The revolutions in Cairo and Tehran have much in common. Both simmered under the rule of corrupt strongmen who had held power for three decades. Both were triggered by new media-audiocassettes in Iran, Twitter and Facebook in Egypt-and both exploded in major regional states, with big populations, strong internal security services and powerful, U.S.-supplied militaries. Both dynasts, Hosni Mubarak and Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi, were regarded in Washington as “family friends,” to borrow Hillary Clinton’s phrase. Both had complex societies, with big swollen cities like Cairo and Tehran containing both the most and least educated people in the country: a relatively narrow educated elite and a broad mass of slum-dwellers. The strategic threat of that-then and now-was outlined by the U.S. ambassador in Tehran in 1970, when he predicted, with astonishing accuracy, just how Iranian demographics would shape the coming upheaval. Since most Iranians were “poorly educated and highly ignorant,” any truly democratic movement would “be in a reactionary obscurantist direction under the clergy.”
The Carter administration was as startled by the revolution in Tehran as Obama was by the wave of revolutions from Tunis to Cairo. Just before the regime began to totter in 1978, Carter’s CIA had predicted that nothing much would change in Iran through 1985: “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation.” As Carter reacted to events in Iran, rifts in the U.S. government confused and demoralized him, and prevented Washington from acting swiftly and decisively to steer the Iranian revolution in a moderate direction.
Iranian generals met with the U.S. ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, and expressed their willingness to launch a coup to keep the shah in power, or even topple the shah, purge the fundamentalist opposition, and set up a moderate caretaker government.
Such a plan, which held the most promise in late 1978, was undone by fights between Cyrus Vance’s State Department and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s National Security Council. State thought the shah was doomed and that Washington needed to reach some accommodation with the Khomeini camp; Brzezinski (joined by Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger) thought the shah might relinquish some domestic authority, but must hold on to police powers and military and foreign affairs. Just as we today worry that fundamentalists might hijack the Tunisian, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese emergencies, Brzezinski spoke of an “arc of crisis” in the Middle East-a wave of unrest in Islamic countries, beginning with Iran-that the Soviets might hijack.
Administration hardliners wanted the shah to “get tough,” to re-arrest political prisoners, to shut down the press, and to flood the streets with troops and tanks. But decades of repression and fake elections had crushed Iran’s secular parties; there was no credible moderate opposition to undergird a generals’ coup. Only the Shiite clergy-like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt-remained intact and powerful as a political force.
In December 1978, Carter appointed 68-year-old George Ball to sift through conflicting reports to determine just what the U.S. ought to do about Iran. Ball worked hard for two weeks, read classified and unclassified reports from all sources, and then met with Carter to render his verdict. The shah was finished, vomited out in “a national regurgitation by the Iranian people.” America’s wisest course now would be to “work out the transfer of power to responsible hands before Khomeini comes back and messes everything up.”
Ball urged Carter to tell the shah to leave Iran, turn affairs over to a reliable government, and serve as a distant “regent” until things cooled down. Carter expressed astonishing diffidence. “I can’t tell another head of state what to do,” Carter protested. “You can tell a friend what you think,” Ball persisted. “One of the obligations of friendship is to give advice, particularly to a man who is cut off from the normal sources, who is surrounded by sycophants.” Carter refused to have that conversation with the shah. Fortunately, Obama is speaking bluntly with Mubarak about the need for change.
Noting Carter’s hesitation, Brzezinski reopened his attack. The president must prop up the shah, to reassure allies and deter the Soviets. “Geopolitics is not a kindergarten class,” he reminded the president. Ball’s moderates were used-up hacks who wouldn’t stand a chance against Khomeini’s mobs. No, the U.S. would have to vest its hopes in the Iranian military, which was still loyal to the shah. Brzezinski drafted a letter for Carter to send to the shah that baldly enjoined him to use force against the demonstrators. Vance was horrified, and warned Carter that Brzezinski was recommending a course that would end in “1,000 deaths,” others thought tens of thousands. The letter was never sent.
Another wave of riots swept through Tehran in January 1979. Carter sent General Robert Huyser to speak with the senior Iranian generals and gauge their attitude. What Huyser discovered was interesting. The generals feared the Islamists, but also moderates, who they assumed would open corruption investigations that would lead back to the military. The seven Iranian generals Huyser met with expressed their readiness to kill “100,000 Iranians” if necessary, to restore the shah or an authoritarian regime. What they needed-all seven declared-was unflinching U.S. backing.
Today in Cairo, President Obama is facing similar hard choices. The error in Tehran in 1979 was one of omission. Frozen by opposing views, Washington did nothing. When the shah left Iran in January 1979 to have his cancer treated, pro-Khomeini demonstrations broke out in every Iranian city. Although Brzezinski and Brown in Washington and General Alexander Haig at NATO headquarters in Belgium were still for unleashing the Iranian military against the ayatollahs- “give the officers a go-ahead,” Brown urged Brzezinski-Carter refused to roll the dice.
Carter decided that Iran was Khomeini’s. It wasn’t. The president still effectively controlled the Iranian generals and might have fashioned a moderate reform coalition under their aegis. Instead, Carter selected a negative program: merely cultivating contacts with moderate Islamic clergy, officers, and politicians in the vain hope that they would counter Khomeini’s radicalism and step in if the ayatollah’s movement unraveled.
Just as Egyptian fighter jets are orbiting Cairo in a show of strength, the Iranian air force did the same in early February 1979. The imperial military’s hour had seemingly arrived. Khomeini’s komitehs-Islamic militias and revolutionary courts-were rounding up the shah’s courtiers. The generals made a last appeal to Ambassador Sullivan for support; he relayed the request to Washington, but Carter remained inert, refusing even to dispatch a carrier to the Persian Gulf.
The Iranian generals threw in the towel. Sullivan cabled Washington on February 27, warning that anti-American sentiment was boiling over in the streets and the press, and that the U.S. Embassy could no longer be protected. He and his subordinates recommended the embassy staff be reduced to “six officers and a vicious dog.” (When the embassy was actually seized eight months later, Carter must have wished he had heeded the warning.) With Washington in retreat, the generals declared “neutrality” ; most were arrested, exiled, or shot. The army stood down and let the demonstrations disarm it. “In Iran, all our investment in an individual, rather than in a country, came to naught,” an American colonel named Colin Powell observed from the Pentagon. “When the shah fell, our Iran policy fell with him.”
President Obama is now holding our Egypt policy in his hands. He must move fast and deal bluntly with President Mubarak. The Egyptian army must be restrained; credible opposition moderates like Mohamed ElBaradei must be empowered to move the country forward without a breakdown in security or an Islamist coup. Mubarak should turn power over to a respected politician bolstered by Omar Suleiman’s reformed security services, who will loosen their grip but not permit the Muslim Brotherhood to knock over a “national unity government” as easily as Khomeini crushed Iran’s first, mixed “provisional revolutionary government.” None of this will be easily accomplished, and America has only an auxiliary role. But the hand we played in 1979 was self-nullifying, and helped usher in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has vexed and weakened American policy for more than 30 years.
Yes, Egypt will be JUST LIKE Iran, get used to it.
So the debate and posturing continues on whether Egypt will end up “like Iran” or not.
One has to ask what is meant when it is said that Egypt could become “like Iranâ€. If by that we mean an Islamic Republic, it is an irrelevant question. The US has no problem with one Islamic Republic (of Pakistan) and is trying to stablize another one (of Afghanistan) and in fact while Iraq is not similarly formally named an Islamic Republic, its constitution does define it as an Islamic federalist republic nonetheless. Leaving formal names aside, the US also gets along fine with repressive theocratic governments (such as Saudi Arabia.) So, all this handwringing isn’t really about whether Egypt will end up an Islamic republic ruled by religious zealots.
However if the definition of being “like Iran” means becoming an independent country ruled by a indigenious government that is no longer a puppet regime and can no longer automatically be assumed to play along with US-Israeli interests and goals in the Mideast, then indeed Egypt is likely to become “like Iran†and I think THIS interpretation is what the Israelis and the US are really worrying about, not whether Egypt will become an Islamic Republic.
Hope to have a government like Iran in Egypt. With all of its shortcomings, Iran does not have a puppet government. It is independent and not tied to Eastern or Western block. Surely, this will be a nightmare especially for Zionists. The whole region is being engulfed in a fire. And the real winner is of course, Iran.
The more or less democratic states of the ME – i.e. Turkey, Lebanon and Iran are all not the best friends with Mubarak, Israel and USA. I guess it means something 🙂
Egyptian Revolution 2011 COMPLETE. World MUST watch this. Freedom for All!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HGfFyqJMrk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDZePjdKQe8