Three Cheers for Serviceable Hypocrisy

June 22:

In response to my most recent post, one of my loyal readers (my only loyal reader, for all I know) asked me to expound on the U.S. policy implications of what is going on in Egypt. I was going to do so in that earlier post, but I try to keep these things relatively short, as befits the genre of the blog. As you will soon see, discussing the policy implications is very hard to do in brief.

But before we come to questions of policy, I think we need a brief update on what has gone on in Egypt over the past few days. The key fact is that the military, in the quaintly termed form of the SCAF (Supreme, or Higher, Council of the Armed Forces; المجلس الأعلى للقوات المسلحة‎, al-Majlis al-ʾAʿlā lil-Quwwāt al-Musallaḥah) has delayed announcing the winner of this past weekend’s presidential election. That announcement was supposed to have been made on Thursday, but the election commission, which is of course not really independent of the SCAF, claimed that there were too many polling irregularities to sort through to determine the winner on time. No doubt there were some irregularities, but that never stopped these guys before. No, something else explains the delay. We know this because as a British parliamentarian once said some years ago, you should never believe anything in political life until it has been officially denied. And the SCAF is denying all shenanigans left and right.

The SCAF has already pointed the finger at presumed Muslim Brotherhood ballot box stuffing. Even worse, now both candidates are claiming victory, which means that when a winner is announced—assuming a winner is announced and the SCAF does not annul the ballot altogether—a lot of people are going to be extremely bent out of shape. All else equal (which in Egypt it never is), that means that the prospect of violence—not between the regime as such and protesters, but between opposing political camps, one of which is extremely close to but not exactly the same as the SCAF—goes up.

Since this is such an obvious observation, it leads one to wonder whether the SCAF is doing this deliberately. Why would it do such a thing? The answer is so that, when it brings down the hammer, it can justify doing so as an act of restoring public order, not as a partisan political operation on behalf of Ahmed Shafik. This would be very popular among many strata of Egyptian society, which today is far more interested in order and economic salvation than in another, likely futile, bout of revolutionary intensity.

Many people in Egypt are interpreting the delay in announcing the winner as a negotiating gambit initiated by the SCAF with the MB. The theory is that in negotiations that have taken place privately between the sides the SCAF has essentially offered a trade: The MB accepts the authority of the SCAF in dissolving the parliament and in diminishing the powers of the presidency (neither of which it had a legal right to do),  and in return the SCAF lets the MB candidate, Mohammed Morsi, win the election.

This puts the MB leadership in a really tough spot. I have no idea, assuming that this construction of motives is correct, what they will do. If they refuse the bargain, and Ahmed Shafik becomes president, they know that any violent reaction they direct will diminish whatever residual second-fiddle authority they may retain in Egypt. They could end up with nothing except a lot of their heads bashed in for their trouble. On Wednesday various news sources reported that the Army had brought lots of soldiers and tanks to be edges of Cairo on Wednesday, and it has to be assumed that the MB leadership, and practically everyone else in the country who has been paying attention, knows this. If the MB leadership does stimulate riots, or if it cannot control its rank-and-file and they stimulate riots, then that is likely to hurt them if and when subsequent parliamentary elections are held. While many Egyptians are deeply religious people and sympathize with the values of the Brotherhood, most are very much indisposed toward chaos. There is an old Muslim juridical maxim that every literate adult in Arab societies knows: “Sixty years of tyranny are better than one night of civil strife” (Ibn Tamiyyah, in  Majmo` al-Fatawi and al-Siyasah al-Shar`iyah). Old as it is, it often proves true as an underlying bias; it is true today in Egypt, and in current circumstances it tends to play against the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood and into the hands of the SCAF.

One final general comment, if I may, before turning to policy questions. What recent events in Egypt show, among other things, is the extremely frail institutionalization of the modern Egyptian state. The Egyptian state has all the trappings of modernity, and it has had them for many decades. It has courts, and it has a body of law that, whatever its eclectic sources, is fairly sophisticated. It has a legal profession that really is a profession. It has a parliament. It holds elections, and it has an election commission. Nevertheless, Egypt does not really have reliable rule of law, does not have actual separation of powers, and certainly does not have procedural popular sovereignty—at least as Westerners understand and have experienced those things. Egypt is a finely cloaked military-bureaucratic dictatorship and has been, without interruption, since roughly July 1952.

Even more important (and this will give us an on-ramp to discuss policy questions), Egyptian politics, as with politics in every Arab country to one degree or another, is highly personalistic. In Egypt, it is downright pharaonic. One can see this simply by noting the popular obsession with the fate of Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak is a dying, if not already dead, 84-year-old has-been. He doesn’t matter anymore in any practical sense. His colleagues threw him overboard to save their own skins. I doubt that even his two closest aides over the years, Omar Suleiman and Osama al-Baz, visit him in the hospital, which is not a very nice Muslim thing to do. I doubt that anyone is inviting the merely 71-year old Suzanne, Mubarak’s wife, to tea or dinner parties these days.

Yet the country is truly obsessed with this man, Mubarak. It seems that until he actually dies, or is proven dead, the country cannot move on. It has a monarchical mentality. It is even possible, though I don’t have any evidence for this, that the SCAF is waiting for Mubarak to die before it anoints Shafik as the next Pharaoh. That would be the psychologically fitting, monarchical thing to do.

This is neither the time nor the place to go into the deeper historical/anthropological reasons for the personalistic bias of Arab politics. Perhaps I will do that in some future post. Suffice it to say for now that this bias has been formed both by the strong patrimonial and tribal foundations of most Arab societies and by the deep narrative of Islam, which both emerged from pre-Islamic social realities and has in turn (along with other influences, of course) both changed and reinforced them over the past 1,400 years. Egyptian society is patrimonial, but it is far less tribal than many other Arab societies. As in many things, Egypt is sui generis among the Arab countries.

***

And so now to policy questions. The United States cannot change Egypt, except perhaps in the most distant and indirect ways. Even Napoleon, whose armies invaded Egypt and overthrew the old order, did not change Egypt in any deliberate way. Therefore, to think in policy terms about the future of Egypt and what it means to the United States and its friends and allies in the region, the beginning of wisdom should be to demote the question of democracy to its proper secondary or tertiary place. Egypt is not a democracy, it has not been a democracy since February 2011, and it is not going to be a democracy anytime soon. It is not possible to lose something that never existed in the first place.

That said, the vast misunderstanding of what has been going on in Egypt over the past 18 months has led many people, including even some in Egypt, to think that democracy is what is really at stake. And the government of the United States is neither capable nor wise to ignore this sentiment. The President of the United States and his cabinet officers cannot speak publicly against the thriving of democracy anywhere. So we must pay lip service to the sadness that now pervades what many thought to be the unstoppable trend toward political liberalization in Egypt.

At the same time, as the Obama Administration’s senior officials have understood from the beginning, the last thing we want is an Egyptian government actually dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood—and there is no viable third alternative. At the beginning of the Egyptian crucible (please forgive the mixed religious metaphor here) the Obama Administration clearly equivocated. Indeed, it changed its tune on a dime at one point, once it had concluded that Mubarak was toast, and poor Frank Wisner, who was in the air at the time heading to Cairo, did not get the message before apparently putting both feet into his mouth. That same equivocation has been present ever since: lip service to democratic progress, but the Administration has never broken ties with the Egyptian military, nor has it been stingy with the money we have grown used to paying each year since the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of March 1979.

Some may say that this is hypocritical. Some may say that it demonstrates double standards. Well, it is hypocritical, and it does demonstrate double standards, and that is what is so wonderful and right about it. Serviceable hypocrisy is indispensable to all shrewd diplomacy. And double standards, as well as triple and quadruple standards, as necessary, are indispensable too. Anyone who is uncomfortable with these realities should find another line of work.

I doubt that any other American administration would have acted much differently than the Obama Administration has with respect to Egypt. The Obama group may have been a little slow on the uptake, and President’s early speeches may have placed the necessary hypocrisy in a somewhat awkward context, but these are mere details. The Obama Administration also realized, as would any U.S. administration I can imagine, that the United States doesn’t have much leverage. Some may think that all the money we give the military should provide a tremendous amount of influence, but actually it doesn’t. It is not possible to use money as a club when the recipient sees the circumstances as posing existential threats. So the leverage gets reversed, in effect: We need to keep giving them money so that we have some links to what they do with it. That is why a lot of the day-to-day back and forth between the United States government and the Egyptian government has been handled by the Pentagon, not least by the Secretary of Defense. This looks a little awkward, and no doubt there are folks over at the State Department who are unhappy with this. But it makes sense under the circumstances.

Beyond serviceable hypocrisy in the orchestration of words and deeds—which is as good a working definition of diplomacy as I can come up with—what should the foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government be doing now? To some extent, this question summons a classical policy planning exercise. Since I hung around S/P for a few years (S/P=Secretary, Policy, or Policy Planning) in room 7311 of Main State at 22^nd and C Streets, NW, Washington, DC, I have some idea of how this ought to work, including some idea of how the Interagency ought to be functioning, as well. Whether what ought to happen is actually what is happening, I cannot say. But in brief, here are some of the things that should be, and probably are, going on.

Above all, somebody needs to be doing a net assessment of the reverberations Egyptian mayhem is causing and will be likely to cause. I’m sure many memos have already been drafted, and many more are in the works. Some of these memos must have to do with the impact of what is going on in Egypt on Israel. Egypt has mattered to the United States since the mid-1970s for many reasons, but not least of them has been the Egyptian connection to Israel. That connection destroyed the possibility of war on a scale of 1967 and 1973, and the related triggering of new convulsions in the international oil market (not that such convulsions could not, and did not, arise from other sources). That connection tore apart the shroud of psychological nihilism when it came to Arab-Israeli relations and in time allowed the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty and relative normalization of relations between Israel and scores of countries. To lose that connection, even in post-Cold War circumstances, is to lose a lot. To go back to a condition of active Israeli-Egyptian security belligerence in present military technological circumstances is a nightmare we definitely should want to avoid having.

Secondarily in this regard, the instability in Egypt has roiled economic exchanges between Israel and Egypt that are part and parcel of their relationship. Not least this concerns gas deliveries from Egypt to Israel. The instability has also gone quite far in turning Sinai into a no man’s land beyond the control of Egyptian authorities. Hamas and other radical Islamist forces in Gaza, and possibly elsewhere, are already using Sinai, in league with some Bedouin tribes there, as a platform to launch attacks into Israel—and note that I said into Israel, not into the West Bank.

From the American point of view, and also the Israeli point of view, the SCAF is far more likely to maintain the treaty—and in time to be able to reassert control over Sinai—than a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government. That’s not a preference; it’s a fact.

But Israel isn’t the only point of contact for Egyptian reverberations. Saudi Arabia matters to the United States as well. The Saudi leadership, which has lately been shaken by several senior deaths and a looming succession crisis, was thoroughly discombobulated over the fall of Mubarak and especially the American handling of it. U.S.-Saudi relations deteriorated further over the upheavals in Bahrain. A U.S. policy that quietly supports the SCAF would help in mending relations with Saudi Arabia. That policy would also be interpreted in Riyadh as American support for the Sunni side of an increasingly fraught and bitter sectarian divide in the Middle East. And that, of course, brings us to Iran.

Understanding what U.S. policy should be about with regard to Egypt presupposes, or ought to presuppose, a larger strategic understanding of how the region fits into U.S. interests broadly construed. The Iranian regime is and has been a thorough pain in the ass for the United States for more than forty years. The dangers that regime poses to regional peace and stability on account of its nuclear program ought to be obvious to everyone (though it does not follow that it is wise to speak in panic-stricken cadences about it). The broader dangers that a dramatic failure of the non-proliferation regime poses for the world as a whole are also worth considering. Egypt is a major ally in this regard, with respect to Iran, and so it is objectively allied with Israeli interests. Sentiment between Israel and Egypt ever since the peace treaty has been “cold”, it’s true; but serious people know how to look beyond sentiment.

The question therefore arises: Who is likely a better ally of the United States against Iran for the long haul: a SCAF-run Egypt or an MB-run Egypt? The Muslim Brotherhood can summon limitless theological energy against the Shi’a heresy, it is true. But it cannot be expected to coordinate effectively or closely with regimes and governments it finds nearly as impious and problematical as that of Iran. And that includes the United States, Israel, Jordan, and a few others besides. And then there is its lack of experience with governing anything or with conducting a serious and professional diplomacy. No, in a pinch I would take the SCAF any day for this purpose; so, I think, would any sober U.S. administration. It’s not that hard. You just swallow once or twice, whistle a happy tune, and get on with it.

Finally, for now, as far as strategic nodal points are concerned (one could go on, and on and on with this—that’s how complicated and fascinating it is—but I won’t), there is a more general issue, or what one might call an atmospheric issue. The entire region is kicking up tons of dust. We see that most vividly in Syria, with serious implications for Lebanon and Turkey and even Iraq. But dust is also rising still in Bahrain, in Sudan, in Libya, across North Africa and into the entire Western Sahel. It is really quite a time. Egypt remains in many respects the heart of the Middle East, so the longer instability and anxiety hover over Egypt, the more it will contribute to general instability in the region.

Now, some may think that such instability over such a wide swath of countries is actually constructive in the long run. Don’t these mostly autocratic and dysfunctional polities need to be shaken up before anything positive can develop? Well, yes, it could be. But this poses the classical dilemma: How do you know if the bulwark you see in the distance is a bridge to the future, or just a pier you can walk off the edge of and drown in the river?

Optimists and idealists see bridges everywhere. But an optimist is, as Archie once said through the pen of Don Marquis, “a guy without much experience.” People who are still optimistic about the course of the so-called Arab Spring after these past 18 months are very special people. I am not one of them.

Now, I am fully mindful that short-term thinking has become the bane of American culture over the past few decades. In many ways the short-term mindset is destroying institution after institution. But when it comes to statecraft and diplomacy (not the same things), you don’t get to the long run unless you survive the short run.

In a way, this is really an easy call, since, as I mentioned, the U.S. government doesn’t really have a lot of choices or much leverage over the outcome. We can’t decide who will be the next president of Egypt, and we shouldn’t want to. We can’t control the Egyptian military, no matter how much money we give them or threaten to withhold. We certainly can’t control the Muslim Brotherhood, nor can any of our regional allies hope to do so. Our intelligence apparatus needs to be learning about the key individuals on both sides (really all sides) of the Egyptian political struggle, and a little bird tells me we are way, way behind in that assignment. In a personalistic political culture, knowing persons is really important in the long run.

Otherwise, until it becomes clearer what is really happening in Cairo between the SCAF and the MB, we would be wise to keep our mouths shut, or at the very least speak only in platitudinous generalities. We should not talk ourselves into a corner against an uncertain future. Once things firm up politically, however, we need to privately and carefully lay out our red lines to the Egyptian powers-that-be. So, right now, we need to be thinking about what those red lines should be. And we need to convey them in a way that is neither counterproductive nor apt to be misunderstood.

Again, several of these red lines will have to do with Egypt’s relationship with Israel, but some will also have to do with other countries in the region. Last as well as least, in my view, some red lines may have to do with domestic matters within Egypt that impinge on what are generically called human and civil rights.

My view here is liable to be unpopular, but I really do believe that how Egyptians organize their own political circumstances is, if not quite none, then very little of our business. We have an investment in the small number of precious genuine Egyptian democrats, and we cannot afford to talk as though they don’t matter to us. The future stretches out far ahead of us, and one day we may need those Egyptian democrats more than they need us now. This, however, hardly means putting human rights concerns on the same level as U.S. strategic interests, which, as I have been at pains to point out, are not trivial.

When Egyptian authorities in recent months characterized U.S.-government funded pro-democracy NGOs as constituting illegitimate interference into Egyptian internal affairs, I agreed with them; that is exactly what it is. (However, that’s not what it is if private U.S. organizations do it on their own dime.) And if we’re going to do that sort of thing as a government, we should be willing to admit it for what it is. There is a case for such interference. Honest people can differ over this question. But I don’t see how honest people in the United States can disagree about what it actually is when U.S. taxpayer money is paying for it.

My main point, however, is that this and all emotional democracy-related debate really is—or should be very close to being—beside the point when it comes to deciding policy questions concerning Egypt. Strategic interests should be trump. I am not privy to what goes on inside the Obama Administration on this or really any other issue these days, but from the outside it looks to me like these guys have this about as right as one could expect from any Democratic administration. Serviceable hypocrisy looks to be firmly in the saddle. So far, so okay.

Drama Ahead

June 20--

One of the commenters in my last post criticized me for misunderstanding the situation in Egypt. I stood accused of exaggerating the revolutionary reality of the post-Mubarak period. Apparently, this commentator is unaware of what I have written about Egypt since January of last year. So let me briefly repeat my original analysis from 18 months ago, since I suspect many have long since forgotten it, if they ever knew it in the first place.

At the time, I argued that the American elite press and most of its political class were guilty of two conflations, both of which stemmed from the characteristic tendency of broadly ignorant people (ignorant about the Middle East, that is) to project their own frames of reference onto circumstances very different from their own. The first conflation was to assume that the ouster of Hosni Mubarak was tantamount to regime change. It wasn’t. The regime has still not changed; it remains the military-bureaucratic apparatus that it has essentially been since July 1952. There was no revolution, therefore—only revolutionary ferment looking for an outcome.

At the time, too, I argued that the struggle to come was profoundly unequal: between a bunch of twittering twenty- and thirty-somethings who were divided among themselves as to what a new Egypt should look like and who had never managed anything, on the one hand, and a group of seasoned military men who are used to getting their way and who resemble Boy Scouts in no way whatsoever, on the other. I did not have to ponder long to figure out who was going to come out on top. And what we have seen over the past 18 months has been a kind of careful pantomime by the military in which it pretended to open space for democratic change, but never in fact did so beyond recall. So when Jimmy Carter said yesterday, representing the Carter Center, that he was “deeply troubled by the undemocratic turn that Egypt has taken”, he was speaking plain nonsense, as usual.

The second conflation was the near universal assumption in the West, though less so in a more cynical Europe than in the United States, that the crowds on the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities represented a democracy movement. As I wrote at the time, Arabs in Egypt and elsewhere have plenty of reasons to be angry with their governments, but that doesn’t mean that high in their priorities is a demand for procedural democracy as it is understood in the West. The ubiquitous references at the time to an Egyptian version of the Philippines’ “people power” struck me as absolutely ludicrous, and I said so. Note, too, that the issue of The American Interest that came out just after the upheavals took root, under my editorship, had on its cover the neutrally analytical question, “What Just Happened?” Inside the covers there was an article, among others, pointing out the desultory history of the once-lauded “color revolutions.” We were, in essence, trying to throw a therapeutic wet mop in the face of all those who had allowed wishful thinking to trump any honest assessment of reality. As far as I know, we were the only major American “thought” magazine to do so.

I also said back then, as did many others, that the space temporarily opened in Arab politics by the so-called, but much misnamed, Arab Spring was far more likely to be filled by radical Islamist forces than by any others. I think that what has happened in Egypt, but also in Libya and prospectively in Syria, bears that out.

Obviously then, this commentator came into my analysis long after intermission. That said, it seemed to me that, in light of the brazen behavior of the Egyptian military this past weekend, the streets would again fill, and that, ultimately, a violent confrontation was likely. I confess to being puzzled that it took so long for the streets in Cairo to show signs of life, and in that puzzlement I was not alone. When I last wrote, it seemed that, though revolutionists never constituted a majority of Egyptians and still plainly do not, there were enough cityfolk capable of making some noise and again creating telegenic scenes for the benefit of the international press corps. But now the crowds have materialized: As of last night there were tens of thousands of protesters on the streets, and that number is more likely to grow than to shrink. One protester guessed that the regime’s insinuation that Mubarak had died of a heart attack was designed to clear the Square. Today’s New York Times ends by quoting Mr. Moustafa: “They would say anything to get us to leave the Square.”

So far the crowds have been peaceful, but the press is full of intimations that things may not stay that way. Everyone seems to be waiting for the regime to announce the official results of the presidential elections. That announcement is due tomorrow. Until yesterday, there seemed to have been a consensus that Mohammed Morsi won the vote. Then out of nowhere a spokesman for Ahmed Shafik claimed that he had won 51.5 percent of the votes. This is an ominous sign—namely that the regime intends to steal the election. As the Times reports it, a protest leader issued a warning to the military forces surrounding the Parliament building to prevent elected members from entering it: “We’re giving the forces now standing in front of the Parliament until the official results are announced. After the official results, if one soldier is standing there…” To which a protester rejoined, “The struggle starts now. The people’s legitimacy will not be canceled out by the greed of old generals.” And the chant in Tahrir Square, reports the Washington Post today, is “If they want it to be Syria, we’ll give them Libya.”

Of course, neither one of these analogies applies to Egypt; all the same, we know what they mean. As I explained earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood is extremely reluctant to burn all bridges with its longtime, respected adversary, the military. The Muslim Brotherhood appears to be genuinely religious in the sense that they have rejected the advice of Satan as channeled through John Milton in Book I of Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” No, they would rather serve than rule—though Egypt more closely resembles Hell than Heaven these days. Or put another way, playing second fiddle is better than playing third or fourth fiddle, and much better than not playing at all. That explains the initial reluctance of the MB leadership to fulminate against the military coup. Indeed, Morsi’s initial victory claim sounded like nothing had even happened. He preferred to emphasize the Brotherhood’s victory in the first-ever reasonably free presidential election in Egyptian history. Only in the past few days has MB rhetoric heated up, and one way to read that rising temperature is as a warning to the military not to steal the election for Shafik, or else…

The problem with this sort of threat is that, as everyone knows, the military has the guns and the money—and also probably at least the tacit acquiescence, if not the support, of a silent majority of Egyptians, particularly those who do not live in cities. The MB can mobilize a lot of people, but in the end it is not capable of tearing down the regime by force. As for those Egyptians who despise both the military and the Muslim Brotherhood (and there are lots more of them today than there were a decade ago), they are in a very tough spot. They may be loved and courted by Western journalists who seek out fluent English speakers, but they face a situation in which advocacy for democracy benefits the Muslim Brotherhood, who themselves, they know, are hardly sincere democrats. And they are hardly about to advocate for a new and improved military dictatorship. But those are their only choices.

So let us leave Egypt for now. We will see what tomorrow brings. But know that the stage is set, albeit more slowly than I expected, for some real drama.

***

As a coda, let me comment briefly on the lead article in Sunday’s New York Times, on the United Nations mission in Syria. Actually, I don’t even have to comment on the article itself; I can limit myself to the main headline, the first sub headline, and the second sub headline––all printed out in black and white before the names of the authors, David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger.

The headline reads, “U.N. Suspends Syria Mission, Citing Increase in Violence.” That’s funny…we thought the reason for the mission in the first place was the fact that there was violence. But moving right along, the first sub headline reads “Blow to Peace Efforts.” That’s even funnier, since the UN’s “peace efforts” never had a proverbial snowball’s chance in Hell to begin with. And then, “The Pressure on Russia and Iran Mounts as Options Dwindle.” So now we have gone from funny to funnier to downright hilarious. I’m sure that the Russian and Iranian regimes are deeply distressed that options have dwindled, so that it now falls to them to bring an honorable and rapid peace to Syria. As if…  It is one thing to let foxes guard the hen house, quite another to invite them in, assuming they are vegetarians. The hens, in this case the Syrian people, know better.

We have already discussed several reasons the Obama Administration has indulged in manifest absurdities over Syria. Is the New York Timesso wedded to the Administration that it feels it must mimic these same absurdities on its front page? As I have said, we will see what tomorrow brings.

The Same, and Really New

June 15--

Yesterday’s events in Egypt are more of the same, but in this case really something new. The dissolution of the parliament confirms beyond all doubt the contention made here in February 2011 that the Egyptian military would not cede power to civilians if it could at all help it. The dissolution, combined with a court ruling that Achmed Shafik could stand for the presidency, now reveals the military’s intention for all the world to see. And the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood, including its presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi, has not reacted with outrage and extremist provocation also confirms the analysis provided here yesterday, that the Brotherhood is maneuvering to remain a favored opposition if it cannot actually take power. It is a sober, patient, and prudent organization. As I wrote, the Brotherhood and the military are mature adversaries.

There is a chance that the military has miscalculated with what many Egyptians are justifiably calling a coup. First, it is strange that the military would choose a Thursday to make such portentous announcements. Friday, after all, is the Muslim sabbath, and the day when people in Egypt gather, especially in and around mosques. Second, the parliament might have served as a focus of protest capable of keeping at least some people off the streets. Now their rage is bound to flow, as is a good deal of blood. Egypt’s police, para-military forces, and intelligence thugs are out en masse. On the other hand, parliament has declared that it will defy the order to disband and plans to meet on Tuesday. Unless something happens between now and then, that could spark an iconic confrontation on a scale similar to Tianamen Square and Boris Yeltsin’s jumping on a tank in Moscow.

No one knows where this will all lead. The satyrs of history are on the loose again. Many say that, after Tahrir Square, Egypt will never be the same. And that is true: Egyptians have dared to dream that things could be different, better, and that their own hands and hearts could make a difference. But most likely, in two or three years’ time Egypt will look for all practical purposes very much the same as it did before the so called revolution.

All the more bitter, then, is this turn of events for true Egyptian patriots. All the sadder, too, that the old ways cannot solve Egypt’s mounting problems. The stage is being set for stagnation followed by the next, even greater convulsion.

The Muddle East

The news from the region over the past few days constitutes, as always, more of the same and yet something new. Let me take you on a selective tour, ending with the most attention-arresting story of our time—Syria.

Of all the developments in the Arab world, none come close to being as important as those in Egypt. Egypt is by far the largest Arab country and the most broadly consequential in strategic terms. Yet the American media, while not exactly losing interest in Egypt, seems to have developed a kind of complication fatigue with respect to the country. Ever since the heady days of revolution in Tahrir Square, the actual situation in Egypt has become almost indecipherably complicated for those who never knew much about the country in the first place. (To be fair, it has also become mildly indecipherable even for those who do know something about the country.)

The best the press has been able to do in recent days is to discuss the issue of what sick bed Hosni Mubarak should occupy: either that of the prison where he is now, or a military hospital. The gist of the debate is not about one sick 84 year old. Rather, it is about Ahmed Shafik. The basic idea is that if one prefers the much nicer military hospital, then one prefers Air Marshal Shafik to be Egypt’s next President. If one favors the prison, then by default, if not through enthusiasm at the prospect, one prefers Mohammed Morsi. The timing matters here, because the second round of the presidential election is scheduled to take place this Saturday. And so we have one ostensibly simple matter standing in for far more fraught political matters. So it goes in politics, and doubly so in Egyptian politics.

It has been many months since I wrote in this space about Egypt, but the last time I did I made clear my skepticism that the Egyptian military would ever really turn over power to civilians. I have not changed my mind. Over the past several months the military, guided by Mubarak associate Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, has repeatedly twisted and tweaked an unsettled political environment to guarantee that the outcome of an ostensibly constitutional process would leave military authority and power largely unaffected, even though the appearance of its dominance might be altered. It has done this by shortening the time period for preparing the initial round of parliamentary elections, so that no party other than the Muslim Brotherhood could prevail. It has done this by torquing the makeup and timetable of the constitutional assembly. It has done this by disqualifying several candidates for president, carefully orchestrating the election set-up in such a way that either a Mubarak-regime affiliate wins, or that a pliable MB candidate wins. Where did it get the authority to do all this? It never relinquished that authority in the first place, all the frothy hubbub surrounding Mubarak’s deposition notwithstanding.

What do I mean by a “pliable” MB candidate? The Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood have been circling and sparring with each other for a long, long time. They are old and sophisticated antagonists, to the point where each has learned to recognize certain prudent limits in the relationship. Some decades ago, when the Brotherhood breeched these limits, the military responded by pounding the organization into bloody submission. At the same time, the military knows it can never expunge the Brotherhood from Egyptian society and politics, because it represents the weight of traditional social authority that the Egyptian state has never been able to absorb. This creates the makings of a deal, and in the past that deal has consisted of the following: the Muslim Brotherhood grants the military the position of primus inter pares when it comes to the affairs of state, and the economic penetration of the country as well, and the military grants the Brotherhood the right to Islamicize society insofar as it is able—just so long as it stops short of seeking political power.

This deal has never been completely stable because neither side really trusts the other. This is despite the fact that many members of the Egyptian military are religious people and sympathize broadly with the Brotherhood’s values, and many rank-and-file members of the Brotherhood thus respect the military—and besides, since July 1952 they have known no alternative to it. The two tacit partners have also been pushed together by their mutual loathing of the secularist, Nasserite elements in Egyptian society and politics. That leftwing spectre has been and remains anathema to the military, and hardly less so to the Brotherhood.

Hence, the most likely outcome of Saturday’s election will be the eventual re-institutionalization under new circumstances of that same old deal. If Mohammed Morsi wins, he and his colleagues will probably understand that their formal power must not stretch beyond certain limits. They will let the military go on doing pretty much what it has been doing, while they serve as political façade for it. If Shafik wins, the Muslim Brotherhood, understanding that as the main political opposition it will have new opportunities denied other Egyptian political forces, will probably realize that promoting new mass protests, riots and violence will not be in its interests. And again, that things have reached the current circumstance is a deliberate result of the military’s skillful manipulations over the past year.

So one might say that the fix is in. The problem is that everyone in Egypt knows this, including those who made the Tahrir Square revolution happen. Over the past many months the Muslim Brotherhood and other factions of the opposition have done a very delicate dance around each other. For a long while the Muslim Brotherhood was reluctant to take the political lead, partly because they did not want to galvanize opposition to it among the revolutionary factions, and also because it wanted not to burn bridges with the military. Thanks to the enthusiasm of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rank-and-file, however, the MB leadership very nearly lost control over its own prerogatives. If revolutionary fervor and upheaval breaks out in Egypt after Saturday’s election, it may foil the fix and scuttle the deal—or not. Nobody really knows. But we will soon find out.

My hunch is that when all is said and done, post-revolutionary Egypt will function a whole lot like pre-revolutionary Egypt. It may look a little or a lot different, depending on the density of the constitutional veil now being manufactured, but it won’t really be different. It is as I have said: more of the same, and yet still something new.

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The news from Libya is, as usual, not good—but it is new.  Elections that were supposed to happen this month have been postponed until next month because of logistical problems. But there’s a good chance that next month they will be further postponed because the scale of the logistical problems involved are not soluble in just three weeks because, in point of fact, they are not really logistical at all but fundamentally political.  Officials are trying to lustrate deeply, getting rid of all old regime elements. But as I have pointed out before, aside from old regime elements few if any people in Libya have any idea how to govern or run anything at all—except guns. So this is a problem.

In the meantime, Libyan officials essentially have taken hostage some members of an International Criminal Court team who came to Libya to speak with Saif al-Islam Qaddafi in his jail cell. The transitional Libyan government has refused demands for their release. Its refusal was more than direct; it was downright brusque.

And if that were not all, the discombobulation of the Libyan administration, thanks to the war we and NATO started, has included the suspension of regular locust prevention measures, raising the specter of a plague throughout the Western Sahel. Ah, Libya—the gift that keeps on giving.

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There is also some pretty dramatic news from Yemen.  It seems that the government has driven rebels from two towns in the south of the country.  These rebels are said to be closely associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In one of these towns, Jaar, salafi forces had set up a mini-state ruled by strict sharia law. This would not matter much to us if the same forces had not shown a proclivity to want to blow commercial airliners out of the sky. Alas, they do show such a proclivity.

The chances that the Yemeni government can genuinely suppress radical activity on its national territory run from improbable to absolute zero, for the government is weak and Islamic radicalism is threaded through the tribal structure and religious traditions of the southern part of Yemen. So there will be more news, bringing word of more of the same—back and forth and back and forth we are destined to go.

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We probably should also mention Iraq, even though most Americans probably want to forget all about the place (certainly the Obama Administration does). My colleague Walter Russell Mead recently pointed out Iraq as a bright spot in an otherwise mottled region. Of course the place could be doing a lot worse, and it could be causing a lot more trouble than it is were Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party still in power—so to that extent Walter is perfectly correct.

But “bright spot” is a relative term. How bright could a place be where a Prime Minister of one sectarian affiliation accuses his Vice President of another sectarian affiliation of being a terrorist and tries to hunt him down like a dog, and that Vice President takes refuge in another part of the country (where the Prime Minister’s writ does not extend) where ethnic division rather than sectarian divide defines the key cleavage? The country may be pumping a lot more oil these days, but it still has not managed to pass an oil law delineating the distribution of revenues. That is because passing such a law presumes having worked out a newmodus vivendi acceptable to Shi’a, Sunnis and Kurds. No such thing is anywhere in sight. Without a dictator’s controlling hand, Iraq is a deeply perforated polity. It is, in short, a collapsed-state-in-waiting. Some bright spot.

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What do the situations in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Iraq—and Syria, which we will come to in a moment—have in common? Obviously, though these are all Arab countries they are very different in nearly every respect. Yet they do have one thing in common: a weak state.

As mentioned earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood prospers in Egypt because the modern Egyptian state has not been able to fully assume the mantle of the country’s culture and history. And if Egypt, one of the truly ancient and reasonably coherent states in the region, suffers from such a weakness, what is one to assume about artificial entities like Libya and socially fractured countries like Yemen? In Egypt, state weakness manifests itself in cascades of rentier behavior. The state is unable to actually solve problems at national scale, and the military–bureaucratic regime lacks any semblance of just and legitimate authority, which circles back and contributes to the fact that the state cannot solve problems.

In Libya, Yemen and Iraq the weakness of the state manifests itself against the backdrop of the perduring power of tribalism and, in the Iraqi case, sectarianism. Where society is strong—in this case in the form of tribalism—the state tends to be weak. (Of course, this is true not just of many Arab countries but also of countries like Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo and many others.) And where the state is strong, parochial attachments tend to be weak politically.

The most common manifestation of weak states is their inability to control their own national territory.  States that are ethnically heterogeneous or heterogeneous in terms of sectarian affiliation often find that their heterogeneity assumes a definite spatial form. Thus while the Egyptian government controls its national territory but cannot manage the functions of a normal modern government, the Libyan, Yemeni, Iraqi and most recently Syrian governments do not control their own national territory—just some of it—and what they do control tends to fluctuate with circumstances. One way to think of this, if you like a metaphor, is that the sovereignty of a weak state resembles a colander rather than a pot with an impermeable bottom.  It may hold the bulk of what falls into it, but rather a lot slips through the slots.

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And then there is Syria.  The common knowledge as of today is that Syria is on the verge of full-scale civil war, by which I think people mean a fully militarized politics. The evidence of this is supposedly the use of Russian-supplied helicopter gunships that the regime has now used against civilian populations. Neither one of these developments is new as such. Syria has been on the verge for some months now, really ever since the Saudis, Qataris and others made efforts to level the playing field by supplying weapons to the opposition. And the helicopters are not newly delivered; they’ve been there a long time. So for the Secretary of State to talk like the use of the helicopters is a novel Russian-caused innovation in the conflict is nonsense. The Russians have been supplying the Assad regime with weapons for use against civilian populations for many months, and until yesterday she said nothing about it.

Speaking of nonsense from the Secretary of State, the entire policy that she has been advocating amounts to nonsense. As of yesterday, at least, Mrs. Clinton still believes in the possibility of a managed transition in Syria, one in which Assad would step down at Russian behest but the administrative core of the regime would remain. She apparently believes as well that if such a managed transition could be arranged that the violence in the country would stop. That might’ve been the case two or three months ago, but it is the case no longer. It is nonsense, based on ignorance, to believe that the Syrian regime could long persist in any form without the Assad clan. Is nonsense to believe that, after all of the massacres and the mutual arming of the sides, that a political announcement is going to stop the fighting. And it is beyond nonsense, all the way to surreal, for the Secretary of State to depend on Russia to save the situation in a way that directly opposes Russia’s own manifest interests, on the one hand, while berating the Russians for supplying arms to Assad on the other. That’s like depending on the services of Monica Lewinski as a marriage counselor.

One at least has to acknowledge continuity here. Just a few years ago, in the Bush Administration, some senior officials apparently believed that it was okay to beseech the Russians to help us in Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere while feeling no compunction against publicly kicking them in the teeth at the very same time over a range of other issues, not to exclude human rights concerns in their own country. Now we’re doing it again, only this time what we want from Russia and what we condemn it for are conjoined in the very same issue: Syria. This is not progress. It is diplomatic malpractice. And it is embarrassing.

It would of course be unfair to blame the Secretary of State for all this. The Secretary of State serves at the pleasure of the President, and as anyone who’s ever worked in the upper reaches of the Executive Branch knows, it is the President’s policy because he is the one who got elected in our democracy. Therefore, ultimately, screwups like this are the President’s responsibility. So why has Barack Obama fathered such surreality and nonsense concerning Syria?

I continue to believe that narrow political considerations are at work here: No dust must fly before November. But, to be fair, Syria is a difficult problem, especially when it is complicated by misconceptions about Iran. The Administration has managed to persuade itself that a deal with Iran that would essentially solve the problem of Iranian nuclear ambitions is possible. It thinks sanctions have softened Iranian resolve. In my view, this is wishful thinking. The Iranian regime is no more likely to trade away what it thinks of as a strategic trump-in-the-hole than the North Korean regime ever was—and it never was. But if you allow wishful thinking to colonize policy, then it stands to reason that a bold approach toward Syria is ruled out: One should not expect Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program while the United States and its allies are actively taking down its only state ally. So it is, possibly, the illusion of a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran that partly explains the Administration’s passivity throughout the Syria crisis. At the very least, this is an illusion that has reinforced a reluctance that stands on other grounds.

This way of thinking, of course, has had it exactly backwards. If the United States could have helped engineer the fall of the Assad regime, that success could have been deployed against Iran to good purpose.  I don’t think it would have produced Iranian surrender, as it were, on the nuclear issue. But it certainly would have made a diplomatically useful impression.

Finally for now, what should we do about Syria? Some months ago, I believe, it was still possible to short-circuit what was even then looking like the on-ramp to a civil war.  Dramatic pressure in the form of an ever so slightly disguised Turkish intervention backed by the United States and NATO could have triggered the necessary coup. Now, as I have noted in previous posts, it is too late. Syrian politics are fully militarized, and the mutual fear and hatred of the various communities has taken on a hideous life of its own. The longer this has gone on the more radicalized all sides have become, making it inevitable that atrocities will occur on all sides (if they have not already), and that shaping and controlling any desirable outcome from afar will be well nigh impossible.

What we should do, therefore, is to think through the implications of a full-scale and protracted civil war in Syria. It will affect Lebanon. It will affect Palestinians in Syria and hence Palestinians elsewhere. It will therefore affect Israel and Jordan. It may affect Kurdish radicalism. It may afford a new staging ground for jihadi terrorism. It will probably inflame sectarian conflict in the region, and it will make the Iranian regime even more unpopular among Sunni Arabs than it already is. It will do nothing for Russia’s reputation in the region, and China’s as well. We need to be in broad damage limitation mode, anticipating negative fallout and acting preemptorily with allies and friends to stanch it. That will be a tall order for the next few months, even if revolution 2.0 does not break out next week in Egypt. Which it might.

Update: After finishing this post at around 5 p.m., June 13, I knew that the morning papers would provide more of the same but also something new. I was not disappointed. Today’s New York Times headline confirms my contention above that the helicopters the Syrian regime has been using in recent days are not newly delivered Russian platforms. So say Department of Defense spokesmen.

More important, today’s papers carry news of a new decree issued yesterday by the Egyptian Justice Ministry giving military police and intelligence officers the right to detain civilians without charge on a range of behavior. The regime is preparing for post-election rioting. TheWashington Post’s headline, however, is deeply oblivious to Egyptian realities. It reads, “Egypt’s military is given power to detain civilians.” Notice the passive voice construction, indicative, as usual, of either logical fraud or thorough confusion. No one gave the Egyptian military anything. The Egyptian military controls the Justice Ministry—there is no independent judiciary in Egypt. The Justice Ministry in Egypt is the Charlie McCarthy to the military government’s Edgar Bergen.

The meaning of this edict, coming not long after the formal lifting of Egypt’s notorious emergency law, is the selective reinstitution of that law. The parliament can complain all it wants; there is nothing it can do about it. The military is preparing the country, step by step, for the return of pre-Tahrir Square Egypt. If Shafik does not actually win the election on Saturday, I would not put it past the regime to steal the election for him, and if the MB dares take umbrage, to break some Islamist bones to show who is boss. In due course, Shafik will be welcome to visit Washington.