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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 11, 2002
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
While it is true that Hercules cleaned out the Augean stables in a single day most such tasks take longer. President George W. Bush was presented on the morning of 9/11 with stables of extraordinary size and variety spread through a vast geographical region and loaded every night by the region's many autocratic cowherds goatherds and shepherds (to say nothing of their flocks). The regimes of the "Middle East" starting at Morocco and continuing to Pakistan are each squalid in distinctive ways and each has contributed in greater or lesser volume to the massive accumulation of -- terrorism. With the exception of Turkey and Israel none is a democracy; and in none is there anything better than a parody of what we in the West would call the rule of law. I know this sounds like a wild generalization. Not all the regimes are equally bad. Some (chiefly such old-fashioned monarchies as Morocco and Jordan) seem like centres of hygiene compared to what surrounds them. But the fact remains fact as stated. Iran Afghanistan and Pakistan trail off into other linguistic cultures at one end and there is a substantial Berber presence at the other; the rest of this world speaks Arabic (in one dialect or another). It looks spiritually to Mecca; but the great city of Cairo is its metropolitan heart; and it has some attributes of a single nation. The people themselves are diverse; and they are human beings each one with his own unique story. By "Augean stables" I refer to the regimes. There is not one that does not need cleaning not only for its own sake but for the threat beyond its borders. Nor is this a task that anyone could want. With the collapse of the World Trade Centre history handed President Bush the bucket and the brush. The strategy upon which he is at length deciding -- emerging with greater clarity from speech to speech -- more and more resembles that of Hercules. He will tear a hole at the high end of the stables and dig a trench to the low end of the yard and induce the rivers of democracy to flush through. This is the opposite to his first instinct which was to take the stables one at a time starting with the most urgent case. But as even the U.S. experience in Afghanistan is showing as you clean one stable it fills from all sides. The idea that alliance with the "moderate" Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt (the two states most central to the region) is necessary to prosecuting the "war on terror" is in the advanced stages of discrediting itself. Not only the strange impenetrable Saudi regime but increasingly the more transparent Egyptian seem to the clearer eyes in the Bush administration to be central to their problem. Both states persist in creating the conditions in which Islamist fanatacism must flourish and in which the masses are infused with a virulent hatred of America and the West. (Paradoxically in Iran and Iraq where the U.S. is openly opposed to the regimes there is much evidence that Mr. Bush and America are very popular.) It takes time and tremendous energy to divert the equivalent of rivers of history; or even to manoeuvre the position of a huge U.S. bureaucracy to confront new enemies and thus defend new friends. But little by little Mr. Bush is indeed moving the U.S. away from dependence on the Egyptian and Saudi regimes; and putting it into a position where it can openly advocate not superficial but profound democratic reform in these countries. The case of Saad Eddin Ibrahim must be seen as part of this larger picture. Here is Egypt's most prominent advocate of democracy and open government; the chief figure behind Cairo's Ibn Kaldun Centre which was itself the Arab world's most promising advocate of "civil society" and "human rights" (closed by the Egyptian government two years ago). He and his colleagues were also publicizing discrimination against Egypt's Coptic Christian minority and many other failings of Egyptian state and society including presidential nepotism and corruption. Saad Ibrahim was a professor in Cairo's American University with dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship (and an American wife). He thus supplies a "special" U.S. interest. On July 29 he and several of his colleagues were sent to gaol on obviously trumped-up charges (involving chiefly the receipt of "unauthorized" payments which were in fact research grants from the European Union). The political nature of this retrial (he had already spent eight months in gaol awaiting an appeal from an earlier trial) was itself quite apparent: Saad Ibrahim and colleagues being bunched together with 16 unrelated defendants from the Muslim Brotherhood as if they were in league with terrorists. They were tried under laws rarely applied and denied permission to make statements in their own defence. The circumstances of the case leave no reasonable doubt that the instruction to prosecute came down from Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak. Saad Ibrahim was thrown first for several days into a standing-room-only Cairo holding tank with more than 100 prisoners in heat above 40 degrees. He is 63 years old and suffers from physical disorders requiring medication of which he was deprived. He is now I believe after discreet foreign pressure transferred to a private cell where he is recovering from being treated like any other Egyptian political prisoner. There were fairly sharp public criticisms from both the EU and the U.S. State Department. There was the usual official outrage in response to this outrage from the Egyptian foreign minister. In view of the larger picture I think President Bush missed a wonderful opportunity to repeat his performance several weeks ago in Iran; when he sent a broadcast address to the Iranian people declaring U.S. support for the students demonstrating against the regime of the ayatollahs. (It was a great success.) Rather than leave his State Department to deliver the usual limp slap on the wrist Mr. Bush could have expressed his own opinion on the case directly to the Egyptian people. This would have done more to enhance his "Arab street cred" than anything imaginable to his whole bureaucracy. For ultimate success in a labour of Hercules requires something of the Herculean touch. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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