Philip Zelikow: This is not a revolution made in America
[The writer is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. From 2005 to 2007 he was the counsellor of the US Department of State. He was also executive director of the 9/11 Commission.]
On the 20th of June 2005, I stood in a packed auditorium in the heart of Cairo as my boss, the then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, gave a deeply considered speech. She and I had worked together during the revolutions in Europe in 1989-1990. That experience informed her pronouncement that: “For 60 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,” she added, “we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”
Her remarks satisfied no one. Some regional editorial writers congratulated her for trying to “sweep away all of the dust and cobwebs that have limited democratic progress in the Arab world”. But she angered Hosni Mubarak and his elite by going too far. She angered Egypt’s opposition by not going far enough. Others, noticing war-torn Iraq, saw there the nemesis of a hubristic “freedom agenda”.
Yet the confusion then, and now, is the belief that somehow America would offer an answer for Egypt’s future. Ms Rice and aides like me were instead asking a question: “My friend, can you explain your positive vision for Egypt’s future? What we see does not look promising.”
Sadly, the question was never really answered. Ms Rice’s successor, Hillary Clinton, spoke out last month to pose it again. Now, coincidentally, many Egyptians are demanding the answer.
That answer will be uttered first in Arabic. Washington did not choose Egypt’s president and it will not choose the next one. The last popular revolution in Egypt was in 1952, replacing King Farouk with a revolutionary council of “free” military officers. They enacted land reform, wrote a democratic constitution, crushed the Muslim Brotherhood – which then, too, had been a focus of organised dissent. Then they sorted out their own internal power struggle. Muhammad Neguib, the well-liked front man for the revolutionaries, was taken down. In his place arose Nasser ... Sadat ... and Mubarak.
But what does this history say to well-wishing outsiders like my government? Quite a lot...
Read entire article at Financial Times (UK)
On the 20th of June 2005, I stood in a packed auditorium in the heart of Cairo as my boss, the then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, gave a deeply considered speech. She and I had worked together during the revolutions in Europe in 1989-1990. That experience informed her pronouncement that: “For 60 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,” she added, “we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”
Her remarks satisfied no one. Some regional editorial writers congratulated her for trying to “sweep away all of the dust and cobwebs that have limited democratic progress in the Arab world”. But she angered Hosni Mubarak and his elite by going too far. She angered Egypt’s opposition by not going far enough. Others, noticing war-torn Iraq, saw there the nemesis of a hubristic “freedom agenda”.
Yet the confusion then, and now, is the belief that somehow America would offer an answer for Egypt’s future. Ms Rice and aides like me were instead asking a question: “My friend, can you explain your positive vision for Egypt’s future? What we see does not look promising.”
Sadly, the question was never really answered. Ms Rice’s successor, Hillary Clinton, spoke out last month to pose it again. Now, coincidentally, many Egyptians are demanding the answer.
That answer will be uttered first in Arabic. Washington did not choose Egypt’s president and it will not choose the next one. The last popular revolution in Egypt was in 1952, replacing King Farouk with a revolutionary council of “free” military officers. They enacted land reform, wrote a democratic constitution, crushed the Muslim Brotherhood – which then, too, had been a focus of organised dissent. Then they sorted out their own internal power struggle. Muhammad Neguib, the well-liked front man for the revolutionaries, was taken down. In his place arose Nasser ... Sadat ... and Mubarak.
But what does this history say to well-wishing outsiders like my government? Quite a lot...