The climax, though, was what made This Is Chaos memorable. Fed-up residents of the neighborhood stormed the police station—scaling fences, throwing rocks, and sending the policemen fleeing in terror. Anxious senior police officials facing the crowds even put Hatem under arrest. Or was that just a pretense, like the brief detention of Kabeer’s torturers? “Hatem, don’t you know that we love you? We are trying to protect you!” the police commissioner stage-whispered as he led Hatem away.
Years after the film, a newspaper columnist called Egypt “A Nation of Hatems.” Every reader understood.
* * *
• • •
Washington was a mainstay of Mubarak’s nation of moguls, zookeepers, and Hatems. The American embassy in Cairo was one of the largest in the world. It occupied a city block, looked like a fortress, and oversaw an enormous aid budget. The United States sent $1.3 billion a year in hardware and services to the Egyptian military and another $250 million to the civilian government. New York Times boilerplate called Egypt “the cornerstone of the American-backed regional order.” “Mama Amreeka,” Egyptians called their government’s Western patron.
I had assumed the United States adopted Egypt after Camp David, in 1979, but the story went back to the early 1950s. In those early days of the contest with the Soviets, American cold warriors had worried about the popular appeal of communism across the region and especially in Egypt. Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a senior American spy, wrote an internal government report imagining an ideal Arab ally, one “who would have more power in his hands than any other Arab leader ever had before, ‘power to make an unpopular decision.’” Roosevelt knew Egypt well. He had established the first American intelligence operation in Cairo during the Second World War and then set up a CIA-run military training program. Back in Cairo in February 1952, he met with a small group of officers who included thirty-four-year-old Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. (The next year, in 1953, Roosevelt orchestrated a coup to remove the prime minister of Iran.)
A few months after Roosevelt’s visit to Cairo, in July 1952, Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers wanted to get back in touch with the American government. Some later said they had contacted the United States Air Force attaché in Cairo, David Evans, as early as July 19. And at 3:00 A.M. on the morning of July 23, Abdel Nasser sent an emissary to knock on the door of the Maadi home of the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, with an advance warning: the Free Officers planned to remove King Farouk that day in a military coup. They wanted Washington with them.
“The image of the United States was closely associated in our minds with championing the cause of freedom and supporting liberation movements,” one of the plotting Free Officers, Anwar Sadat, wrote in his memoir, only partly seeking to flatter. “Besides, by establishing such a link we sought to neutralize the British.”
Three days later—on July 26—Ambassador Caffery escorted Farouk to his yacht for a voyage into exile. In the years that followed, the ambassador reputedly referred to the Free Officers almost like protégés: “My boys.”
Abdel Nasser’s men later said that after the takeover Kermit Roosevelt passed the new strongman at least a million dollars under the table in a bid for his loyalty. Legend holds that Abdel Nasser used the money to build the Cairo Tower, a 614-foot-high pillar in Zamalek. Nasserites call it Roosevelt’s erection.
But America stood by Caffery’s “boys” at a critical moment. Four years after the coup, Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. In retaliation, Israel, Britain, and France conspired to invade Egypt, seize the channel, and oust him. Westerners know the episode as the Suez Crisis. Egyptians call it the Tripartite Aggression.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was furious. Although the United States and the United Kingdom had withdrawn aid for the Aswan Dam just a few months earlier, Eisenhower now threatened to cut off vital American financial support and petroleum imports to all three allies if they persisted in their operation. He deployed the Sixth Fleet to face down British and French ships on the way to Egypt, and he hinted that the fleet might blockade Israel.
He was exerting America’s postwar preeminence, but in rhetoric, at least, he sounded like the friend of the revolution that the Free Officers had hoped for. “As there can be no second-class citizens before the law in America . . . there can be no second-class nations before the law of the world community,” Eisenhower proclaimed, invoking the struggle of the American founders. “There can be only one law—or there will be no peace.” Abdel Nasser survived, and he owed his thanks to Eisenhower.
The escalation of the Cold War, though, tempered the American pronouncements about “no second-class nations” and “only one law.” Abdel Nasser tried to cultivate the support of the Soviet Union as well as Washington, and in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson punished Egypt by cutting off crucial imports of subsidized wheat. Johnson backed Saudi Arabia in a crushing proxy war against Egypt in Yemen; Egypt had backed Nasserite rebels there in an ugly war that became its Vietnam. And two years after the wheat cutoff, Johnson joined with Israel decisively in its devastating Six-Day War against Egypt and the Arabs.
“There was one power that ruled Egypt and the world, and that is: America,” Anwar Sadat concluded after he succeeded Abdel Nasser at his death in 1971. In the Middle East, “the U.S. holds 99 percent of the cards.”
Acting on this assessment, Sadat secretly courted Henry Kissinger, who had become national security adviser to President Richard Nixon in 1969 and secretary of state in September 1973. Kissinger worked avidly to thwart Egypt in the opening days of its next war with Israel, in October 1973. But at the same time, Sadat was privately reassuring Kissinger in a secret cable that Egypt had no intention of “intensifying the engagements or widening the confrontation.”
Mohamed Hassanein Heikal had been Abdel Nasser’s adviser, confidant, and ghostwriter from the earliest stages of the Free Officers’ coup, and he continued to play a central, behind-the-scenes role in Egyptian affairs until his death in 2016. (I knew him in Cairo.) Heikal called Sadat’s gambit with Kissinger “the first time in history that a country at war disclosed its intentions to its enemies, and gave them a free hand on the political and military fronts.”
But Sadat won his game. Five years after the war, he stood at Camp David with President Jimmy Carter and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. “I shall sign anything proposed by President Carter without reading it,” Sadat told his aides, to their shock and dismay.
The resulting Camp David Accords did little about the underlying Arab-Israeli conflict and nothing at all about the plight of the Palestinians. But Washington committed for the first time to backing just the kind of Arab autocracy Kermit Roosevelt had proposed in 1951—a leader “with ‘power to make an unpopular decision,’” a leader, as Roosevelt also wrote, who wanted power “primarily for the mere sake of power.”
I met Carter in Cairo, and he said he understood Egyptian complaints about that arrangement: Washington was supporting a dictatorship in Cairo for the well-being of Israel. “I think that is true, we were,” he told me. “And I can’t say I wasn’t doing that as well.”
President George W. Bush tried, for a time, to nudge Egypt toward democracy. That was part of what he called the “Freedom Agenda,” and his prodding may have spurred Mubarak’s decision in 2005 to hold Egypt’s first presidential vote with more than one candidate. (His sole opponent, Ayman Nour, was allowed to win only 7 percent of the vote and then was jailed promptly after losing.) Mubarak had also allowed the spread of a grassroots opposition movement under the banner Kifaya!—Enough!—as in three decades of Mubarak had been more than enough. Almost everyone I met in Cairo who played any role in politics or activism cut their teeth in Kifaya! Its emergence in 2005 was more political freedom than Egyptians had ever known.
But by then the American military saw Egypt as uniquely vital: the guarantor of the peace with Israel, the gatekeeper of the Suez
Canal and strategic flight routes, the crossroads of three continents, and the regional bellwether. I heard the same litany many times from American officials.
Washington now had more urgent concerns than democracy, and even small doses of it could be unnerving. The Muslim Brotherhood had railed against Western dominance of Egypt for nearly eight decades, and it won big in the first round of the 2005 parliamentary elections. The next year, Hamas, the Brotherhood’s militant Palestinian offshoot, won the first legislative elections in the Palestinian territories.
Alarmed, the Bush White House stayed silent as Mubarak cracked down on the Brotherhood to limit its gains in the runoff round of parliamentary voting (the Brothers still took an unprecedented one fifth of the seats). In the Palestinian terroritories, the United States actively backed Israeli intervention to overturn the election and keep Hamas from power.
Ten years later, Obama authorized a secret study questioning the viability of the authoritarian order in Egypt and a few other countries in the region. His National Security Council recognized, in an abstract way, that the autocratic regimes of the previous six decades could not stand much longer. “The region’s foundations are sinking into the sand,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned the leaders of the Arab world in a speech in Doha, Qatar, on January 13, 2011. But she urged only vague reforms. The study about regime viability was not yet complete. Aside from Obama’s speech in Cairo, American policy had not changed much. The “Freedom Agenda” was dead.
“God help us if something ever happened to Mubarak,” a senior State Department official told a group of diplomats heading to the region in 2010, summing up the American view. I did not understand until years later the role that Washington continued to play in the struggle of Egyptians to realize their freedoms.
* * *
• • •
I was studying Arabic full time in the fall of 2010, learning how to order Turkish coffee with the “just right” (mazbut) amount of sugar, or to ask for a bathroom (hammam) instead of a pigeon (hamam). I worked with two tutors, both Cairenes, but from two different worlds.
Jehan was the wife of a rich businessman who lived in a large villa in our neighborhood, Maadi. She had earned a doctorate at the American University in Cairo and become a professional translator of books, working in Arabic, English, and French. She wore a headband, slacks, and pastel-colored blouses, and her housekeeper served us Turkish coffee mazbut as we reviewed lessons at a polished wood table overlooking a well-tended garden.
“Do you know why everyone is always catching a cold in Cairo?” she asked me one day with disgust. “Because Egyptians never wash their hands!” I had not noticed the colds. But I was getting accustomed to the elite repudiations of ordinary Egyptians.
My other tutor, Hatem, was the son of a stable hand at the elite Gezira Sporting Club in Zamalek—the former British Officers’ Club. His father had been an extra in The Ten Commandments, he told me with pride. Hatem came to my villa in a rusty, red Fiat, and he often interrupted teaching me Arabic to vent about his life. He suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes. He shared a two-room, un-air-conditioned apartment with his wife and infant son, and he often lost his temper with them for keeping him awake at night. I suspected he dragged out our lessons to enjoy the cool of my villa. But he was uncomfortable in Western-run houses and always lowered his eyes to avoid looking at Laura. He told me that if I ever used the bathroom in an Arab household, I should keep my eyes on the floor at all times, lest I accidentally glimpse a wife or a daughter.
Where Jihan shook her head over the backwardness of Egyptians, Hatem fumed at the venality of their rulers. One of the first words Hatem taught me was fesad—corruption. He always referred to Mubarak’s circle as “that gang of thieves,” the way observant Muslims repeat the words “peace be upon him” whenever they name the Prophet Mohamed.
I read the daily paper aloud to him in Arabic for practice, and we followed the case of Hisham Talaat Moustapha, a ruling party parliamentarian and the millionaire developer behind “Mayfair” and “Virginia Beach Village.” Moustapha, who was fifty-one, had paid a retired Egyptian police officer $2 million to kill his mistress, the thirty-year-old Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim. A trial court had sentenced Moustapha to death, an appeals court had invalidated the ruling on a technicality, and now a new judge had sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. Wasn’t Hatem pleased that justice was served?
No. Moustapha must have run afoul of Mubarak, Hatem reasoned. Surely that was the only reason he had been convicted.
Who knew? Moustapha was transferred out of prison for health reasons three years later. His sister took over his parliamentary seat.
I could scarcely imagine a meeting between my two Arabic tutors. Hatem would look at his feet; Jehan would look for dirt on his hands. They both agreed on one thing, though. Something had to give.
Although I was not yet on duty, I volunteered to help the Times cover the parliamentary elections that fall, and I learned two new words: fowda, for chaos, and baltagiya, for thugs.
Progress on all fronts had seemed to skid to a halt. The global recession of 2008 had interrupted the rise of Egyptian living standards. And Mubarak, no longer under American pressure, was closing down the newly opened political space. He had added new amendments to the constitution that had eviscerated any hope of a fair vote and any right to a fair trial. Cynics guessed that he was laying the groundwork for a succession to Gamal.
I watched the vote on November 28, 2010, from Alexandria, a city I associated with Lawrence Durrell, C. P. Cavafy, and trans-Mediterranean cosmopolitanism. I was curious about the place because I knew that since Abdel Nasser’s coup the city had become an Islamist stronghold. At a polling place in an elementary school, waiters rushed in and out with free pastries for the voters, in boxes labeled with the ruling party logo. But the registered election observer for the Muslim Brotherhood—a balding, portly man in an ill-fitting suit, with a clipboard—was stuck outside. The police guards refused to honor his credentials. As I stood with him, three police trucks rolled by with Islamist anthems booming through tiny, barred windows. Inside were Muslim Brothers the police had rounded up all over Alexandria, to prevent them from getting out the vote.
The local Brotherhood headquarters was squalid and dull. A couple of bearded men were working the phones under fluorescent lights. When I turned on the bathroom faucet, water ran through a drain without a pipe and splashed on my shoes. On a television, a Brotherhood lawmaker from Alexandria was holding up a handful of bullet shells. A minibus of baltagiya had chased his supporters with knives, and a policeman had fired his gun.
“You’re trying to kill us, you tyrants!” he was shouting. “You’re killing us on the streets for not electing you!”
I raced to find the man on TV, Sobhi Saleh, and caught up with him as he was leaving a hospital. He was a clean-shaven lawyer, and he showed me his torn necktie and the streaks of blood on his neck and collar. The baltagiya had beaten him, he said. Then Saleh turned away and began walking down the center of an empty street of tenements, shouting the Brotherhood’s perennial slogan at the top of his lungs: Islam hua el hal—Islam is the solution.
Hundreds of voices echoed back from the windows. Scores of young men poured from the doors and fell into step chanting behind him. I shivered, wondering, what “solution” did these men have in mind?
Nine people were killed that day in clashes around the polls, according to human rights groups. Saleh lost his seat. So did every Islamist. For the first time since 1984, the Brotherhood was shut out completely. Their 20 percent of the Parliament was reduced to no seats at all.
Ahmed Ezz, the steel baron, published an op-ed column in a state newspaper declaring 2010 to be the cleanest election in Egyptian history. The paper identified him as “the man behind the sweeping win by the ruling party.”
Mohamed ElBaradei—the sixty-eight-year-old liberal, former diplom
at, and presidential hopeful—was no Muslim Brother. With his horn-rimmed glasses, balding head, and wispy mustache, he was nobody’s idea of a revolutionary either. But he sputtered with rage at the fraud. “Keep a record of every case of torture and oppression and the violation of personal liberty, because there will be a reckoning,” he urged Egyptians in a videotaped message from his den that circulated over social media. “There will be violence.”
3
Police Day
January 24, 2011–February 11, 2011
A dozen men and women had gathered over sugary tea and Nescafé in a Cairo law office. They were all in their late twenties or early thirties, which made them older than most Egyptians. Some were leftists, others liberals, and others Muslim Brothers. Several had been friends since they were students at Cairo University. They had been organizing together for years—against the Israeli occupation, against the American invasion of Iraq, and always against the Egyptian police. Now they were doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Some had young children. Yuppies, we might call them. None of them had known any other president besides Hosni Mubarak.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 3