Egypt: The Gaullist option (update)
The same people who rebelled against the sclerotic Mubarak regime, and who voted for Morsi because his opponent in the run-off was a former Mubarak military confidant, now called on the Egyptian military to oust Morsi and put an end to Egypt’s experiment with political Islam.
Egypt’s experience with former generals as heads of state is not reassuring. Sissi’s predecessors — Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-70), Anwar Sadat (1970-81), and Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011) – did little to modernize Egypt and make it economically self-sufficient and politically stable. Egypt’s today is not much different from the Egypt’s of sixty years ago, when Nasser assumed power: decrepit educational system, stifling bureaucracy, backward agricultural sector, exceedingly poor infrastructure, economic stagnation, and complete dependence on the largess of the Gulf States and foreign aid.
The question now is what would President Sissi do with the power he has at his command, and in what direction will he lead Egypt.
Three-and-a-half years ago, a week or so before the fall of Mubarak, we published an article – “Egypt: The Gaullist option,” HSNW, 31 January 2011 – which asked the very same question about the as-yet-to-be-named successor to Mubarak.
The article pointed to the structural reforms General Charles de Gaulle insisted on when he was called back to power in 1958, reforms which replaced the inherently ungovernable Fourth Republic with the stable and effective Fifth Republic, and suggested that the post-Mubarak ruler or rulers should follow de Gaulle’s example.
The article pointed to three military men — Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafik, and Sami Annan – who were close to Mubarak but who appeared willing to part company with him and lead Egypt in a new direction.
We wrote that “For the sake of U.S. interests in the region, and for the sake of Egypt itself, the U.S. should promote what I would term the Gaullist option.” We then added: “Egypt is no France, but still: the United States should encourage Suleiman, Shafik, and Annan to serve as a collective De Gaulle.”
Today, the United States should encourage President Sisi to consider de Gaulle’s example and use his authority and broad powers in ways that Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak did not – to modernize Egypt and put it on a path leading to economic prosperity, political stability, and social cohesion.
We ended the January 2011 article with a question and an expression of hope: “Is there a viable Gaullist option in Egypt? We should hope there is.”
The question is as relevant today as it was three-and-a-half years ago, and so is the hope that the answer would be in the affirmative.
Quick takes // by Ben Frankel
Egypt: The Gaullist option
Originally published 31 January 2011
The unrest in Egypt, and its consequences, are of great importance to the Middle East and to U.S. interests in it. Here are four quick comments.
1. The center cannot hold
The choice in Egypt — as was the choice in Iran thirty years ago — is not between an authoritarian regime, supported by the military, on the one hand, and a centrist, liberal, tolerant, pro-Western regime, on the other hand.
If there are truly free and fair elections in Egypt, it will be decided not by the few tens of thousands of educated, English-speaking participants in the demonstrations — especially not those eager to be interviewed on CNN. The elections, rather, would be decided by 70 million or so Egyptians who live in small villages or in the dusty outskirts of the larger cities.
They will vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, because they believe that the Brotherhood would be more likely to provide them with drinking water, flour, jobs, and housing than the divided, elitist, liberal parties. In the run-up to the elections these parties may get more time on CNN, but the Brotherhood speaks the idiom of the masses.
2. Abiding tradition
The masses may not be fundamentalist Islamists, but they are Muslims — religiously, culturally. The Brotherhood may be too pious for many, but it speaks a language which is closer to their sensibilities than the various liberal and socialist parties, the appeal of which is limited to the educated circles in the big cities.
It may well be that a post-Mubarak transitional government is led by the liberals — Mohammad el Baradei is one of them — but his fate, and the fate of those around him, is likely to be similar to that of Shapour Bakhtiar and Mehdi Bazatgan in Iran three decades ago. President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance truly believed that these two represented a moderate, democratic, liberal alternative to the discredited Shah, but the ayatollahs swept them from power within months. The lucky ones escaped to Paris. The unlucky ones found themselves dangling from the end of a rope.
3. Calamity
The seizure of power in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood would be, in Leslie Gelb’s words, calamitous for U.S. security. He writes: “What’s more, the [MB’s] current defenders don’t really argue that point, as much as they seem to dismiss it as not important or something we can live with. The MB supports Hamas and other terrorist groups, makes friendly noises to Iranian dictators and torturers, would be uncertain landlords of the critical Suez Canal, and opposes the Egyptian-Israeli agreement of 1979, widely regarded as the foundation of peace in the Mideast. Above all, the MB would endanger counter-terrorism efforts in the region and worldwide. That is a very big deal.”
The supreme U.S. interest is to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of power. This, in the end, may not be possible. We should, at least, not delude ourselves the way Carter and Vance did when contemplating the coming of the ayatollahs to power.
4. The Gaullist alternative
Mubarak has been in power for thirty years, but Egypt is ruled not only by Mubarak, but by the equally enduring senior military and intelligence officials — among them, Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s intelligence chief whom he recently designated as Egypt’s vice president; Ahmed Shafik, the former chief of the Egyptian Air Force and former head of civil aviation, perhaps his closest confidante and now his newly designated prime minister; and Lt. Gen. Sami Annan, the chief of staff of the armed forces, who was meeting with his American counterparts in Washington, D.C. when the protests turned violent and he returned to Cairo.
For the sake of U.S. interests in the region, and for the sake of Egypt itself, the U.S. should promote what I would term the Gaullist option: De Gaulle left power in 1946 and went into retirement after concluding that the political structure of the Fourth Republic was hopelessly dysfunctional. When, in 1958, he was called back to power, he conditioned his return on sweeping constitutional changes to strengthen the presidency and the executive branch; weaken the fractious parliament; and create more of a space between politics and policy making.
Egypt is no France, but still: the United States should encourage Suleiman, Shafik, and Annan to serve as a collective De Gaulle. They should take over power for the purpose of methodically but slowly — I would say five years or so — take measures to encourage the emergence of civil society in Egypt: fight corruption, strengthen the independence of the judiciary, weaken the stifling hand of the bureaucracy, encourage the emergence of parties, civic association, and trade unions; invest in education, electrify rural Egypt, improve health standards, develop micro-lending schemes, and more.
The United States can help by increasing its non military aid to Egypt (we currently give Egypt about $1.2 billion in military aid, but only $250 million in non-military assistance). Moreover, we should make sure that this aid reaches to right programs.
Free and fair election should be the final step in turning a society into a democracy, not the first one. If we make elections the first step on the road to democracy — a proclivity of U.S. administrations from Carter to Bush — we allow the bad, but better organized, forces to exploit the democratic opening to come to power and impose their will.
Is there a viable Gaullist option in Egypt? We should hope there is.
Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire
