Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

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foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • rumblings Due to carefully manufactured quirks in the Egyptian Constitution, the most likely candidate to win is the president’s son, Gamal Mubarak, turning Egypt into a hereditary republic—a “republarchy,” as Egyptian-American political scientist and exiled dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim warned in 2000. Gamal might be acceptable to Egypt’s business class, but he is not popular. If he assumes the presidency, it could easily trigger a coup, be it an old-fashioned military takeover or a nonviolent “velvet” one that parachutes a senior military officer to the top of the ruling party. The irony of Egypt’s predicament is that it is often the self-described democrats of the opposition who advocate such an intervention by the armed forces, thinking that military rule could provide a steppingstone to democracy. Gamal, on the other hand, promises another Mubarak presidency for life. Throughout this troubled transition, Egyptian initiatives in the region, such as Cairo’s attempts to reconcile the Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas and its involvement in the Sudanese peace process, would be frozen. Key allies such as the United States and Saudi Arabia, as well as neighbors like Israel, will worry that the situation could take a turn against their interests and might be tempted to interfere. But they’ll be working in the dark: The U.S. State Department is ill-prepared for Hosni Mubarak’s departure, former officials from George W. Bush’s administration say. When the moment does come, U.S. diplomats will be scrambling to understand the fate of their largest Arab ally, one whose ready cooperation has been central to U.S. designs in the region for nearly three decades. Bad as this all may seem, the alternative could be even uglier: that Mubarak will hang on to power, run for a sixth term in 2011, and go on ruling the country into advanced age. The example of Habib Bourguiba, who remained president of Tunisia for 30 years until he was removed through a “medical coup” at age 84, comes to mind. That may yet be the worst outcome for Egypt: a prolongation of the current uncertainty, with a president increasingly frail and unable to govern—leading a regime whose moral authority erodes and where centers of powers multiply, with no end in sight. Issandr El Amrani is a Cairo-based writer and consultant who blogs at The Arabist. 12
foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • rumblings June 2010: Even Iran’s Regime Hates Iran’s Regime By Karim Sadjadpour Even before last year’s post-election tumult, it was palpable to almost anyone who had spent serious time in Iran that revolutionary rot had set in long ago. While every country has its tales of corrupt clergymen, disillusioned government officials, drug-addicted youth, and rampant prostitution, in a theocracy that rules from a moral pedestal these stories have long served to highlight the government’s hypocrisy and hollow legitimacy. Although Iran’s amateur cell-phone journalists did a heroic job chronicling scenes of extraordinary courage and harrowing government brutality—a record that is “more important than all of the history of our cinema,” as acclaimed filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf graciously put it in a Wall Street Journal interview—what is impossible to capture on video is the dismay of Iran’s traditional classes who continue to believe strongly in Islam, but have lost their faith in the Islamic Republic. Growing up in a household where my devoutly religious, veiled grandmother had an aversion to Shiite clergy, I learned from a young age that piety was not always, indeed not often, an indicator of support for theocracy. Two decades later, based in Tehran with the International Crisis Group, I came to learn through daily interaction with Iranian officials that they, too, had their doubts. While jumping through bureaucratic hoops at the Iranian Foreign Ministry several years ago to retrieve my confiscated passport (a wrist slap compared with what many of my contemporaries later endured), I was taken aback to find that nearly every office I entered had BBC Persian or Rooz— 13
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