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COMMENTARY
March 10, 2004
Bush v. Mubarak
President Bush is an old-fashioned American liberal trying to export the American way of doing things to a world never quite ready. To call him an imperialist is to miss the main point for he has no territorial ambitions. He believes with almost conscious na?vet? that if the Middle East can be democratized it can be made more prosperous more free less violent and most important less of a mortal threat to the existence of Western cities. He is trying to foment a "velvet revolution" in the Muslim world kick-starting with Afghanistan and Iraq. He is thus addressing the "root cause" of terrorism in societies that have failed to cope with modernity; rather than just address the results case by case with fire trucks as his political opponents propose. And though the President's scheme is ludicrously ambitious no one has proposed an alternative to it. It is a hard sell in the U.S. where the longer there is no terror attack the less people believe they are at war. The less they therefore embrace what Mr. Bush is doing abroad for they cannot see the relationship between a good offence and a defence having little to do. As a friend just wrote You didn't have to convince people that they were at war in 1944. Politically war is so much easier to fight than terrorism. Could Mr. Bush win in the Middle East and lose at home? Quite possibly. But meanwhile he is indisputably winning in the Middle East. The proof comes from reading the enemy's mail -- the tone of despair in all recent terrorist pronouncements -- and from the transformations being wrought in such countries as Libya and Pakistan which have given up trying to conceal both terrorists and illicit weapons trading. There are stirrings towards political transformation in Syria Saudi Arabia Iran. But the clincher is Egypt ancestral home of the Muslim Brotherhood the intellectual godfathers of the "post-modern Jihad". Egypt is perhaps overall the most civilized tyranny in the Middle East thanks more to the sweet reasonableness of her people than to her government but thanks partly to that government's self-restraint. It is to my observation the one country in which the older more peaceable mediaeval spirit of Islam still prevails over most provocations. The people not more temperate because they are less religious but because they are more so -- and more religious than political whether they are mainstream Sunni Muslim Sufi or Coptic Christian. President Hosni Mubarak is utterly corrupt and ruthless when crossed; but he is eager to allow the appearance of freedom and the Egyptian people give him room to allow much. Unlike his predecessor Anwar Sadat assassinated in 1981 Mr. Mubarak is not an outwardly religious man; like Sadat he is pragmatic. He is paternal in the better tradition of regional despots. In his heart he thinks apr?s moi le deluge . All dictators believe that. Anyone who tries to democratize Egypt faster than Mubarak -- indeed anyone who proposes to substitute the reality for the appearance -- will plunge the country into blood and terror. Alas we will never know whether it will until it is tried. In a revealing interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica last week Mr. Mubarak dwelled upon the example of Algeria where the attempt to introduce democracy "too fast" indeed ended in catastrophe. But Algeria is another country another people another universe of historical particularities. On the eve of an important and interesting regional meeting in Alexandria Egypt which has drawn academics and businessmen from all over the region Mr. Mubarak is rehearsing his desperate plea to both Americans and Arab intellectuals alike: "Please slow down before we hit something!" What is dazzling in this position is its candour. For Mr. Mubarak is conceding that Mr. Bush has an Arab constituency and that he is making headway with it against rulers like himself. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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