Different Clocks Are Running In Egypt

Political revolutions, even those which are (relatively) nonviolent, have clocks.  This has to be realized not only by the status quo regime--which, of course, has its own clock--but outsiders.  The outsiders have clocks as well, but their timepieces are the slowest running of all.

The people on the streets, the actual fomentors of revolution, the people who have the most direct emotional and physical investment in the process of change, run on clocks which tick very, very fast.  On the street, riding the waves of uncertainty, fear and hope, a standard hour is longer than Christmas Eve to a five year old; a week becomes an unimaginable extent of geological time and months, an unacceptable eternity.

The effect of the fast time mentality has been highly visible in Cairo's Tahir Square, the epicenter of seismic political shock in Egypt.  To the assembled demonstrators, and, in high probability, to others of similar mind connected to the square by television, cell phones, and the Internet, the idea of having Hosni Mubarak soldier on to the end of his current term as president is akin to waiting for the end of the universe.  It may be coming, but not in a time frame that any can accept.

The same dynamic was evident in Tunisia.  The fast clock phenomenon was at work each and every time the status quo offered some temporizing compromise.  No one in the midst of the emotional tsunami which crested in Tunisia could abide the idea of keeping on the crest of change without the orgasm of final relief--the exit of Ben Ali.  The same sort of ejaculatory inevitability has grabbed the minds and bodies of the footsoldiers of change in Egypt.

Leaders, whether of the opposition or the status quo, are but dimly aware of the driving imperative at work in the minds and glands of the thousands of disaffiliated people in or connected with Tahir Square.  Outsiders, the politicians and diplomats of countries ranging from the US to Europe, are also not truly appreciative of the fast time process as they call for an orderly transition and the time required for this to happen.

This implies that the most critical conflict unfolding in the Egyptian Crisis is that between the clocks of the protesters and the outsiders in search of effective influence on the unfolding of events.  At base this conflict is irreconcilable.

The position of the US is both easy to understand and defend.  The probability of a too rapid removal of Hosni Mubarak resulting in a species of chaos easily exploited by advocates of political Islam as well as national entities such as Iran which support these groups is high.  At the same time it is necessary to caution that the anxieties regarding the hijacking of revolution by the adherents of violent political Islam can be overstated with ease.  Mubarak has done so.  So has Benjamin Netanyahu.  Up until a couple of days ago so had President Obama.

Reinforcing the argument in favor of "deliberate speed" is the absence of a clearly acceptable consensual choice of leader by the assorted opposition elements.  Given that the powerhouse of the uprising has been the existence of self-organizing, predominantly youthful, assemblages of the discontented and the disaffected, the leadership problem is inherently pronounced.  The entrance of the Muslim Brotherhood to the open opposition has done nothing to clarify the leadership haze.  Nor has the direct participation of old line opposition political parties.

Mohamad ElBaradei offered himself as leader.  The offer was accepted by a broad assortment of opposition groups including the Muslim Brotherhood, but that did not make it so.  As any number of demonstrators quoted in the international media have made clear, ElBaradei is not their choice.  More, many of those quoted, have seen ElBaradei as part of the old guard or self-interested and remote from the Egyptian realities.  It is easy to get the impression that the several high profile meetings between ElBaradei and other "leaders" of the opposition groups are somehow not relevant to the dynamics in the Square.

One of the major problems of this leadership vacuum is the meetings, the declarations, the demands, the pre-conditions (such as Mubarak must leave before negotiations on the future commence) all combine to accelerate the already fast running clocks in the Square.  Meetings of opposition figures like the demands and dictates create an expectation of success--success being defined by the demonstrators as the sight of Hosni Mubarak getting on a plane.

When no success is seen, the almost inevitable result is an increase in both frustration and action predicated upon frustration.  This, unsurprisingly, means an escalation in violence and concomitant hardening in the positions of both demonstrators and status quo.  This, undoubtedly, is what the perpetual bad boys of the world in Tehran and their proxies in Egypt are hoping and working for.

A drastic increase in disorder will force the hand of the army.  Either the army will have to crack down and do so hard and fast, or its leaders will have to tell Hosni the time to leave has come while deciding who among the opposition the army will choose as transitional leader.

The army would risk very, very much should its leadership order the use of force against the demonstrators.  Not only would it risk its own junior officers, NCOs and enlisted personnel disobeying the order, it would put in hazard its treasured place as the ultimate guarantee of legitimacy for state and regime alike.

Of course, it is unlikely that repression would do more than buy some time at a very high price.  It would not put the incubus of radical political change back in some sealed bottle.  Rather, repression would assure the incubus would reemerge bigger and badder in not too many months--at the longest.  It is most likely that repression would do little other than make the clocks on the street run faster.

It is far safer, albeit harder emotionally, for the senior military leadership to tell Hosni that the game is over.  Should it do so and then offer a high visibility and evidently responsible position to a person well known in the ranks of the opposition as an honest and effective politician, the act would serve to slow the clocks in the Square by giving a very real, quite substantial success to the demonstrators and their supporters.  It would bode well to slow the clocks of Tahir Square to a point they mesh with the always slow watches of the West.

There is even a good choice for the position of politician as army partner.  That choice is not Mohamad ElBaredei.  He is neither well enough known nor trusted by the army--or many of the opposition.  The post of political partner can best be filled by one time foreign minister and more recently head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa.  Moussa has long been a relatively charismatic politician well known not to be a line hewing partisan of Mubara even though he was Hosni's ForMin for much of the Nineties.

Mubarak finally chaffed with Moussa's fits of independence as well as his growing popularity.  The dictator then shelved Moussa over at the Arab League.  His years as foreign minister as well as head of the League mean Moussa is a known and respected commodity internationally as well as in the region.  His appearance in the Square yesterday brought enough cheers to indicate he has not lost his luster with the street.

While the current vice-president, Omar Suleiman, is not acceptable to the fast clock folk in the Square, the addition of Amr Moussa to the ticket might be sufficient.  While the army may not be as happy with Moussa as they are with Suleiman who is, after all, one of their own, they may be persuaded to accept the duo.  At the least, Moussa is better than ElBaradei and, certainly no flaming Islamist.

If President Obama gets over his snit with the spooks for not having gotten Tunisia and Egypt perfectly right in their prognostications (who did?) and his pretense that he has gotten out in front of events in Cairo, he and his foreign policy "team" might take a close look at how the army can bring the opposition on board, smooth Hosni's (rapid) departure, and slow down the clocks in the Square.  As those clocks tick, they are counting down the seconds to genuine disaster and they will not slow by themselves.

So, Dudes, What's Your Alternative?

The superb collection of disinterested statesmen known as the Arab League is wrapping up their annual Moan, Groan, Bitch, Whine, and Threaten conference. This year the fractious bunch convened in Libya whose leader, the Greatest Islamic Thinker in Modern Times, Muammar Ghadaffi (or however his name is spelled in English today), presided.

As usual quite a few heads of state including the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, as well as the aging, ill Egyptian president gave the gabfest a pass. Their absence was barely noticed as the assembled Deep Thinkers of Arabia considered two matters of grave importance. These were, quite unsurprisingly, the (posited) impending failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace "process," and what-are-we-going-to-do about Iran?

The Arab League capo, Amr Moussa, opined that the Arab states have to get their act together and consider the "alternative" when (not if) the current peace "process" comes a total cropper. He represented a consensus to the effect that the "process" is doomed by Israeli obstinacy which in turn had been facilitated by a previous Arab failure. That failure, he averred, resulted from the Arabs, more specifically, the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat, having given the Israelis an open ended process years ago at Oslo.

The diplomatic blunders of the past gave the Israelis time to bulldoze and build in the "Palestinian" portions of Jerusalem. The resultant creation of "facts on the ground" stiffened Israeli political will so that now only the complete halting of construction followed by a total Israeli withdrawal from the purportedly illegally seized "Palestinian" territories would allow the peace "process" to continue.

What made Moussa's views worthy of consideration is his nearly unprecedented willingness to admit that Arabs could or have made any errors in diplomatic judgement. Of course, a less subjective view of the Arabs and diplomacy looking back over the past seventy-five years of talks regarding Jews in the Mideast and their relationship with their Arab neighbors would conclude that the Arabs have an unsurpassed record of diplomatic failure mainly through self-inflicted wounds.

Now, Moussa apparently is convinced that the Obama administration is so eager for a peace settlement that it will do the heavy lifting required for the Arabs to achieve their minimum politically acceptable goal, rolling Israel back to the line of demarcation which existed with the armistice ending the active hostilities of 1948-49. This line of demarcation, which was drawn along the line of military force contact was not an international border, nor was it intended to be such by the UN negotiators. The line, famously drawn on a map in green ink, became known as the "Green Line."

When the Israelis rolled over the Green Line in the Six Day War of 1967, the resultant UN Security Council resolutions did not alter the established nature of the Line as a purely temporary, de facto feature identical to the armistice line drawn at the end of the shooting phase of the Korean War. Neither the Green Line nor the later line of contact in Korea was intended to be a de jure international border.

Thus it takes a highly selective reading of the historical record to conclude that the territory in and around the Old City of Jerusalem was unlawfully seized by the IDF from the sovereign state of Jordan. It takes an equally selective and biased reading to transform the relevant UNSC resolutions following the Six Day War into documents creating an international border where none existed before.

The government of Israel moved rapidly to incorporate the territory in and around the Old City of Jerusalem into the State of Israel. The US government understood and, at the very least, tacitly approved the action even though it refused to move its embassy from Tel Aviv. While it can be argued with accuracy that the Johnson administration approval was motivated by domestic political considerations, that is as irrelevant as stating that President Truman moved with haste almost unseemly in recognizing the new state of Israel for identical reasons.

The annexation of Jerusalem is both a fact on the ground and a fact in law. This twin consideration renders the no-settlement demand nugatory. It does the same with respect to the Saudi Arabian 2002 plan which is the preferred diplomatic fall back position of the Arab League. In fact and in law Jerusalem is a part of Israel. This means that the Israelis may choose to give some or all of it away to the Palestinians but they are not under any duty to do so. They may decide to give away some or all of those portions of Jerusalem which are on the "Jordanian side" of the old Green Line to buy their peace, but there is no objective requirement that they do so.

In the messy real world there is no possibility that the Israelis will evacuate their "settlements" on the east side of the Green Line. Least of all is there any probability that Israel will relinquish the Old City. History and its far more potent cousin, myth, militate against that with irresistible force.

Nor is there much likelihood that the government of Israel will accept the other key provision of the 2002 Saudi plan, the acceptance of a Palestinian "right of return" to property they or their ancestors owned and occupied prior to the 1948-49 wars. There is no right of return, nor is Israel under any affirmative duty to "compensate" either those who fled or their descendants for alleged losses. In this regard it must be remembered that most of those who fled did so at the urgings of the sundry Arab governments whose armed forces were attacking the infant state filled with the certainty of impending victory. (This does not relieve the Israelis of their moral culpability for the several atrocities committed against Palestinians by elements of their armed forces.)

The first take away is simple. All parties, Arab as well as American, best get a grip on the inconvenient fact that Jerusalem is part and parcel of Israel, and it is going to remain such unless and until the Israeli public allows a government to purchase peace with some or all of the Old City and environs.

The second take away is equally simple albeit more unpleasant. The only alternative to continuing the peace "process" as currently conceived and structured is war.

While the current process is slow, painful, and, for the Arabs in particular, unlikely to produce a result which is palatable, it is far less messy, infinitely less painful, and not quite as likely to produce a completely unacceptable result than is war. And, no mistake should be made here, the only alternative is war.

That subtext resided quite clearly in the words of Moussa and others at the Monster Rally in Sirte. The war may be open, conventional, or semi-covert, asymmetrical in nature. In either event the highest probability is that the Arab/Palestinian side will come up short. They will lose as their predecessors have lost so often in the past.

It is not improbable that the realization of this dismal possibility undergirds the call for "engagement" of Iran by the Arab League as a collective polity. True the call for collective engagement was couched in terms of concern over the Iranian nuclear program and apprehension regarding the growing influence of Iran in the region.

At the same time the call acknowledges implicitly that only Iran possesses the actual and potential means to defeat Israel in either open or proxy war. The realization that the Shia Persians have capacities lacking in the Arab League members individually or collectively must be bitter in Arab mouths. Nonetheless that is the reality today and into the foreseeable future.

If the only alternative to the current peace "process" recognizable to the Arab states is war then it follows that the only way in which the Arabs can hope to do other than lose is with the enlistment of Iran on their side. In this context the Arab League would do well to recall the hoary proverb about riding tigers: It is far easier to mount the beast than to get off without being eaten in the process.