by Kim Ghattas
One of its members, a young, veiled activist named Asmaa Mahfouz, made a home video exhorting her fellow citizens to take to the streets on January 25 if they really cared about their country. She posted it on YouTube and the video went viral. Thousands of Egyptians discovered they had a voice and took to the streets. In some of the largest demonstrations Egypt had seen in decades, protestors outnumbered police for the first time. But it would take all day for the world’s media to notice something was different about these demonstrations. As the day ended in Cairo, in Washington a reporter sitting in the front row of journalists at the morning press conference asked Clinton about the violence in Egypt. Three people had been killed so far in clashes with the police and forty-nine wounded.
“Is there concern in Washington about the stability of the Egyptian government, of course, a very valuable ally of the United States?”
Hillary was being asked whether a steadfast ally of the United States for the last thirty years, a country of eighty million people, with a powerful army that received more than a billion dollars in American aid every year, was stable. She didn’t seem to think twice.
“We support the fundamental right of expression and assembly for all people, and we urge that all parties exercise restraint and refrain from violence. But our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”
Since Egypt was a behemoth state with a massive army and police force with total control over its territory, it would have been difficult to say that the Egyptian government was not stable, because that wouldn’t have been entirely accurate either. There was unrest, and the United States was certainly concerned, but Egypt was not Yemen. Mubarak’s forces were in charge of every village on the Nile, every slum of sprawling Cairo. Egypt had been stable, it had been a valuable ally, and, through its accord with Israel, it had been (indeed, still was) the cornerstone of the region’s cold peace with the Jewish state. Clinton had known Mubarak and his wife since her days at the White House and described them as friends. But if there was often method to Clinton’s off-script comments, there was nothing to be gained from using the word “stable.” It was superfluous and damaging. A few days later, in a television interview, Vice President Joe Biden said Mubarak was not a dictator and should not step down. Washington just couldn’t fathom letting go of Mubarak instantly: the stirrings on the streets of Egypt did not signal a sea change in the country just yet. Despite the corruption, human rights abuses, and repression by a police state, Mubarak was not a ruthless dictator like Saddam Hussein had been, for example; he was an eighty-two-year-old stubborn, greedy pharaoh. But mostly, the United States was keen not to alienate Mubarak. He barely listened to their calls for reform when the country wasn’t protesting; they couldn’t risk shutting down all lines of communications with him now. But when Clinton next spoke in public, she said nothing about stability. She urged the Egyptian government to implement real reforms and said that the United States supported the democratic aspirations of all people.
Many Egyptian protestors had already drawn an instant conclusion—that America did not support them. They had wanted the United States to ditch Mubarak and take sides with the people unconditionally, immediately, to fulfill everything they believed America stood for, to be on the right side of history, human rights, and freedom. On Tahrir Square, Abdullah al-Murhoni, a middle-aged engineering professor, said he had hoped that the United States, a country that always spoke about freedom and democracy, would have supported the protestors rather than stood by the dictator oppressing them. Past American administrations had happily and quickly voiced their support for popular revolutions attempting to topple dictators that the United States disliked, like in Ukraine, but these Egyptian waters were uncharted, and while Obama recognized that the way the United States approached the Middle East was outdated, there was no instant new script. At this early stage of the protests, Washington was also unsure how far the Egyptian people themselves wanted to go. Did they want Mubarak out, or did they just want radical reforms? Did they want him out now, or would they wait till the next presidential election? Did the hundreds of thousands on the street represent the millions of Egyptians? There was no way of telling, and Obama, who had so carefully avoided the “freedom agenda” of the Bush administration, did not want to get out in front of the Egyptian people. The protests continued to swell through the week as officials in Washington watched closely, trying to take their cue from the streets of Cairo.
In the West Wing, at the Pentagon, in Foggy Bottom, everywhere, there were human beings without all the facts agonizing over difficult decisions. They were euphoric to discover “people power” in the Arab world but torn about how to handle it. Excited and disbelieving diplomats told me they couldn’t peel themselves away from their television screen but that they were also at a loss about what to actually do. When crowds chanted “death to America” around the world, as they had been doing for several decades, American officials took it in their stride; they were used to such sentiment by now, a bizarrely comforting background hum, maybe like the sound of shelling was to me when I was child, scary but familiar. But there was no America in the slogans now; instead the streets echoed with “The people want the fall of the regime.” “This is not about us,” American officials kept telling me. “This is about what Egyptians want.” And yet everyone still wanted to know what Washington had decided about Egypt’s future: Would America drop Mubarak or prop him up? The reality wasn’t that simple.
There were endless interagency meetings as a debate erupted within the administration. The debate wasn’t about whether Mubarak should stay or go but about how and how quickly; it was a battle between the idealists and the pragmatists inside the administration. Some officials were trying to avoid a protracted face-off between the people and their rulers or the total collapse of institutions that would send Egypt into a black hole if Mubarak departed too quickly. Mubarak had often warned that the alternative to his rule was a takeover by Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood, once banned for its espousal of violence, was still repressed by Mubarak and shunned by the United States, even as a peaceful political party. In 2005, Condoleezza Rice had said that the United States had not and would not engage the Islamist group. Egypt’s neighbor Israel was also fretting about the prospect that Mubarak could be replaced by an Islamist government. Their peace with Egypt was cold. Mubarak had only ever visited Israel once in thirty years, but he kept the peace treaty alive. For decades, both the United States and Israel seemed unable to understand that Arab dictators who wore ties or spoke English and warned that the alternative to their rule was chaos were only feeding radicalism with their repression. Israel was at peace with one man, Mubarak, not with eighty million Egyptians. Mubarak himself fed anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment and then used it to justify his control over the country.
Younger, more idealistic advisors around Obama, like Samantha Power, were more carried away by the winds of history: we can’t stop it; we can’t look like we’re trying to hold it back because it could backfire and destroy our credibility. Obama took something from each school of thought. His administration would listen to the people and let them set the tone while trying to coax Egypt’s leaders in the right direction. Clinton and Gates represented the more traditional thinking inside the administration. They were averse to uncertainty and cautioned against pushing Mubarak out too quickly. America was constantly accused of abandoning its allies; this would be the ultimate and terrible proof that America was a fickle friend. The Saudis were already furious that Washington had refused to show unconditional support for Mubarak. King Abdullah called the Egyptian leader to offer his backing. “Some infiltrators, in the name of freedom of expression, have infiltrated into the brotherly people of Egypt, to destabilize its security and stability,” the king said, according to the Saudi Press Agency.
Arab rulers often blamed outsiders—more specifically, the West—for anything that
went wrong in their countries. The Egyptian foreign minister Aboul Gheit was convinced that because one member of the April 6 movement had attended a conference in the United States, the whole revolution had been plotted by Washington. On Tahrir Square, some protestors were also wary of too much public support by America, worried that it would only feed the government’s attempts to dismiss them as agents of the West.
The leaders still believed in this lie of foreign interference, which was their own falsehood, but the people had woken up to the truth. Now, someone had to wake Mubarak up. Clinton suggested sending someone to Egypt to explain to him, privately, that he must start heading toward the exit before the situation got out of hand. Presidential elections were due to take place later that year, and the message from Washington was that they had to be real—not fixed: neither he nor his sons should stand, and there had to be open competition. There was enough time to prepare for a proper exercise in democracy.
Clinton chose Frank Wisner, a former ambassador to Egypt, to deliver the message, and he prepared to fly out to Cairo on a secret mission. Meanwhile, Mubarak sacked his cabinet on Friday evening, January 28. He also appointed his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as vice president, but these were futile gestures. Mubarak was still the boss. At the end of that day in Washington, President Obama made a speech.
“When President Mubarak addressed the Egyptian people tonight, he pledged a better democracy and greater economic opportunity. I just spoke to him after his speech and I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete steps and actions that deliver on that promise.”
On Sunday, Clinton sat through interviews with all five of the Sunday shows on American network television and delivered the next installment of Washington’s policy. On air, she made clear that Mubarak had to listen to his people, that there had to be a national dialogue, and she called for an “orderly transition to democracy.” It was a new term in the diplomatic panoply, though what it meant exactly was open to interpretation, to be defined by the Egyptians themselves. On Monday, the thirty-first, during the briefing, a journalist asked P. J. whether the United States would prefer that President Mubarak not seek reelection. “These are decisions to be made inside Egypt.” In public, the administration was exceedingly careful not to sound like it was driving the process or imposing its will—this was not about what the United States wanted.
Behind the scenes, gentle advice to the Egyptian leader continued. Wisner landed in Cairo and met with Mubarak, delivering his instructions from Washington: the president had to make way, for the good of the country. But the crusty old man had no ears for that. He had no new tricks in his bag. He was ancient and knew how to do things only one way.
At the White House and the State Department, officials worried about the fixation on the streets of Cairo with specific individuals: Mubarak in, Mubarak out, Suleiman in, Suleiman out; the protestors didn’t seem to take into account that there was a massive institution and apparatus that stood behind Mubarak and could remain fundamentally intact and manage the process even without him. On the Sunday shows, Clinton had warned that there was no point removing Mubarak just to have him replaced by a military dictatorship. The United States knew how powerful the military was: just as in Pakistan, the army was a corporation with entrenched interests, underwritten by American money to the tune of more than $1 billion a year—in many ways, a good investment since the army was promising today not to shoot at the people. But who knew what they would do tomorrow? There were limits to how much influence the United States had over a sovereign army.
Democratic and Republican senators were starting to call on Mubarak to step down, pressing the administration to publicly call for his resignation. Some of my American friends were furious it was taking Obama so long to say Mubarak had to step down. If I were still living in Lebanon, I may have thought the same, infuriated by America’s typical reluctance, its pursuit of narrow interests. But after several years with a front-row seat in Washington, I was starting to understand the complex decision-making process and I could see how the United States tried to weigh its actions. I found myself debating with a friend the deliberate approach taken by the administration. Was it the responsible choice? Empower the people but make sure it’s not an American-driven process; don’t say things you can’t deliver on; don’t push people out front only to leave them hanging because you can’t protect them when the police arrest them or beat them to death (or both). In 1991, after the Gulf War, the United States had encouraged Shiites in Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein. But Washington was unable or unwilling to provide cover or help to the rebellion. Tens of thousands of people died as Saddam crushed the uprising.
America was perhaps finally learning the impact of its words. Expressions of support were often misinterpreted. When American leaders winked, strange things happened, like Georgian presidents going to war with Russia thinking America would back them up. The Obama administration believed that a somewhat more neutral expression was best. If the United States had rushed to say Mubarak should step down, but he had stayed and trampled on the protestors further and with greater loss of life, the United States would have been lambasted for not stopping Mubarak when all America could really have done was call for the violence to end. The United States wasn’t going to send in the cavalry, and cutting military aid for the Egyptian army wouldn’t have had an immediate impact and was only a last resort.
In May 2008, when Lebanon had descended into another bout of violence with pro-Western and anti-Western forces clashing on the street, the liberals in Beirut had been buoyed by expressions of moral support from the United States. And when their paltry forces were defeated by Hezbollah, armed to the teeth and backed by Syria and Iran, they accused the United States of abandoning them. But what did they expect the United States to do? I asked around, and responses ran the gamut. In all seriousness, some politicians replied that they had requested the White House to buzz Bashar al-Assad’s palace in Damascus with U.S. fighter jets or, even better, send American marines to Beirut. Lebanon was definitely not the only country with crazy ideas about how American power worked.
While people around the world feverishly speculated about America’s plans for Egypt, officials in the United States were in the dark. “We are entering the unknown. This could be 1989 or it could be 1979,” one of them told me. The fall of the Berlin Wall or the Iranian Revolution: two world events in which the United States had been a player but the consequences and outcome of which it couldn’t and didn’t dictate. The aftermath had been widely different: one event had ushered in an era of openness in Europe, the other had brought a theocracy to Iran. No one knew what the revolution in Egypt would produce, but there were warnings in Washington that America’s influence in the region would be undermined by events. After all, this was an American ally being ousted by his own people, and many read it as a rejection of the American order. Countries that opposed U.S. influence in the region, like Syria and Iran, were gleeful.
In Beirut, some of my liberal friends worried that Hezbollah would emerge more powerful in what appeared to be a battle for the soul of the Middle East, Iran’s influence over Lebanon only growing as America retreated from the region. Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader in Iran, was thinking precisely that and shared as much in a tweet to the world. @khamenei_ir: “Ayatollah Khamenei: the time has come for an end to the dominance of the superpowers & a gradual decline in their power.”
I was particularly struck by how, despite all the talk about the end of the American empire, no one seemed to be curious about what the Chinese were saying to Mubarak. The Chinese of course had even less leverage over him than the United States did, but the protestors craving outside recognition were neither asking nor getting it from China—or from Russia for that matter. Beijing was quiet, too busy blocking the Internet at home to make sure the Chinese didn’t see what people power could do to autocrats in the age of Twitter and twenty-four-hour news. Reacting to a major international c
risis by looking inward with paranoia was not exactly the stuff of a superpower. Even the European countries barely uttered a word. Somehow what America said, what it did or didn’t do, still mattered, even if people’s grasp of what made up American power was out of touch with reality.
“This is the irony here,” an American official complained to me. “On the one hand, we’re being accused of dominating everything and dictating everything. On the other hand, we’re being accused of not dictating everything and dominating everything. These are choices to be made by the Egyptian people.” No matter what Washington did, the world expected something different.
The truth was somewhere in the middle between dominating and not dominating. And so every day, America waited and listened to the people on the streets of Egypt. When the crowds roared, the tone in the United States toughened. When the anger ebbed, Washington spoke more softly. Every day, everyone in Washington called everyone in Cairo, and they waited for the next speech. But Mubarak was always one step behind.
* * *
On February 1, Mubarak announced that he would not seek reelection. But he said nothing about whether his son would stand. He gave some hints about reform and dialogue. On the streets of Cairo, opinions were divided. The president had made a gesture. He had listened. Some didn’t trust him. Others did. In Washington, there was a sense that perhaps things were calming down. The pharaoh had announced he was going to retire, and perhaps Mubarak should be given a bit of time to make those changes. There was no point making him grovel.
Obama, however, wanted to hold Mubarak to his word. He wanted to clarify exactly what Mubarak needed to do to make sure the political transition was real, started right away, and didn’t last forever. No one wanted months of protests on the streets of Egypt. Mubarak and Obama spoke on the phone in English for thirty minutes. Obama was respectful of his elder but firm. You are a leader who has served his people for a long time, Obama told Mubarak, someone who is committed to serving his people. But this isn’t going to work this way, you are going to have to accelerate the transition and hold talks with a full range of opposition leaders. Obama appealed to Mubarak’s sense of pride and love of his country. After committing his whole life to Egypt, surely the last thing Mubarak wanted was instability.