Egyptian soldiers attack protesters in Cairo / Reuters
Who Will Be Egypt's Prime Minister?
Habla Espanol, Mushir Tantawi?
The Miscalculations of Egypt's Military
Turkey and Israel's Strategies
Thursday's Cairo raids on human rights organizations were not
an attempt by the Egyptian military to crush Egyptian extremists or to
weaken the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafist party after their recent
election victories. They were instead an effort to weaken and demonize
centrist and liberal forces. The raids on Freedom House, the National
Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute, the
Adenauer Foundation, and other groups helping Egyptians move toward
respect for democratic politics and human rights were of a piece with
the practices of Hosni Mubarak--only bolder and more repressive.
In
his thirty years in power, Mubarak did not crush the Muslim
Brotherhood. He made deals with it, setting for example how many seats
it could have in parliament, while crushing the moderate, centrist
parties. The Egyptian government refused time after time to allow the
establishment of a moderate Islamist party that would have competed with
the Brotherhood. And when a non-Islamist named Ayman Nour had the
audacity to run against Mubarak in the 2005 elections, he was jailed.
The policy during the Mubarak years was to attack and weaken the center,
and then tell the Americans and others that the only choice was Mubarak
or the Islamist radicals.
Given recent election returns this
seems to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy-and this is the real crime
of Hosni Mubarak against his country. I recall vividly meeting with an
Egyptian democracy activist at the White House in 2002, when I handled
the human rights and democracy portfolio at the Bush NSC. This person
surprised me by saying he was not in favor of a free election in Egypt.
No, he said, I don't want a free election tomorrow, I want a free
election ten years from tomorrow--if you give us ten years to organize
freely. Otherwise, he said, the Brothers will win. That ten years brings
us to now, and he was right: these Egyptian elections, after thirty
years when Mubarak and the army played footsie with the Brotherhood
while attacking the center, have brought the Islamists to victory. And
now, as in the Mubarak years, the army will be posing as the only
bulwark to radicalism.
In fact the only real bulwark is the work
of Egyptians who seek a genuine democracy that respects human rights. We
may not be able to stop the army from attacking them, just as yesterday
it attacked American and European groups helping promote democracy and
human rights in Egypt. But we should not pay for it. It is ludicrous to
listen to army and other government spokesmen inveigh against dark
forces who take money from foreigners--when the army takes $1.3 billion
every year from the United States. Those payments should be suspended
right now, and not resumed until everything seized in the raids is
returned and we get promises from the military that these raids will not
be repeated.
The Egyptian military plays positive and negative
roles in Egypt, but the most significant single thing it did under
Mubarak was to guarantee an Islamist victory once he left the scene.
Mubarakism was a system that perpetuated military rule and American aid
by arguing that the military was the only alternative to the Brotherhood
(and groups worse than the Brotherhood) while in fact it created
perfect conditions for the Islamists to thrive. We now see the result of
those decades of repression and we should reject the invitation to
continue the Mubarak system, this time with a collective military
leadership replacing the dictator. The struggle for democracy and human
rights in Egypt will be long and hard and we cannot determine the
outcome, but we must at the very least let all Egyptians know which side
we are on. For now, we must let the army know that if it is their
policy to crush democracy activists, there is a price they will pay.
It's $1.3 billion a year.
This article originally appeared at CFR.org, an Atlantic partner site.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/should-the-us-cut-off-aid-to-the-egyptian-military/250726/
