President Hosni Mubarak’s busy Sunday underlined his prominence as America’s most trustworthy Arab ally. But will Egypt still be our friend after Mubarak?
Washington can no longer afford to just watch Cairo, however intently. For starters, it should force the pharaoh who has ruled Egypt for 29 years to announce his successor.
Over the weekend, Mubarak again played the wise elder statesman, steering the region’s peace process forward. He hobnobbed in Cairo with President Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, and with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — and then sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But those meetings were originally scheduled for a week earlier. When Cairo postponed them for no credible reason, the region’s rumor mill got going. From Beirut to the Gulf, the health of the 82-year-old Mubarak became topic No. 1. (Similar rumors flooded out this winter, after he flew to Germany for a “gallbladder” operation.)
By yesterday, the Washington Times’ Eli Lake was reporting that the CIA and other Western agencies think Mubarak’s stomach cancer is terminal, giving him less than a year to live.
Unlike several of his predecessors, Mubarak has declined to appoint a vice President who would constitutionally succeed him. He’s said to favor his son, Gamal, but has so far declined to announce even that publicly. (Gamal, 47, is tied to the country’s business community but has no military experience, an essential for Egyptian rulers ever since the army deposed King Farouk in 1953.)
Most experts, such as Eyal Zisser of Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center, still believe the succession will go smoothly. In this view, too many Egyptians depend on the government, the army or the centralized economic structure for their living to upset the apple cart. They’ll go along with any successor, either appointed secretly by Mubarak or, after his death, by someone like his all-powerful intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman (who might be the successor).
But what if the experts are wrong? “You never know for sure until after it happens,” Zisser admits.
After all, rosy scenarios about Iran’s future were common in the Carter era. Few predicted the fall of the shah before his overthrow in 1979 — let alone the Islamist regime that emerged in his place.
Like the shah in his time, Mubarak has been an indispensable ally for American presidents since Ronald Reagan. His ties across the region and his dependence on Washington (he gets nearly $500 million a year in US military and economic aid) made him essential for any delicate maneuvering.
While Egypt attacks Israel in every diplomatic forum, for example, it maintains close ties with the leaders in Jerusalem, quietly helping them maneuver against common enemies like Gaza’s Hamas rulers. Haaretz columnist Aluf Benn wrote recently that Mubarak is Bibi’s only ally in the region and beyond — and that the prime minister’s inner circle prays daily for Cairo’s strongman’s health.
But what comes next? Mubarak has stifled Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood — the pioneering Islamist organization that has pushed for establishing a sharia state since the 1940s.
Yet it’s still there — and far from powerless. Indeed, Mubarak has even felt obliged to legalize it, after it officially foreswore the use of violence.
In a region where rumor can be more significant than facts, nothing is more helpful for the Brotherhood types than Egypt’s limbo-like situation.
True, once Mubarak publicly names a successor, he effectively acknowledges that his reign is over. But charting the country’s future — clearly and in public — would help in removing the doubts that the fundamentalists can too easily exploit.
Egypt is the most populous Arab country and has the strongest Arab military. A coup by the Islamists would be a catastrophe for the region. (Imagine: President al-Zawahiri.)
At this delicate moment, America should stop relying on Mubarak to solve all the region’s problems and force him to start solving some of Egypt’s own, instead. beavni@gmail.com