Instead of doing penance every single day for the rest of their natural lives for the deaths of 4,422 Americans and, according to a survey from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the deaths of at least 650,000 Iraqis, the architects and principal advocates of the Iraq war angrily brayed for more: more aggression, bigger military, more wars. And the non-neo conservatives, the ones who’ve been proven definitively right by history, seemed to just meekly nod along. The DNC didn’t even issue a press release all day. And so all the lessons that could have been learned are unlearned.
It’s been another eventful day in Egypt and more and more this feels like what watching the revolutions taking place in Eastern Europe in 1989 felt like — but hopefully Egypt won’t be another China. The best place to watch it all go down is still Al Jazeera,as the official Wikileaks twitter also acknowledges: Yes, we may have helped Tunisia, Egypt. But let us not forget the elephant in the room: Al Jazeera + sat dishes.
For us watching from the outside in it’s hard to understand what is going on now in Egypt, but one thing is clear: this is a spontaneous uprising, fueled by the despair and anger of the average Egyptian, not something organised by either the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist organisations, or by what’s left of the secular leftwing opposition to Mubarak. This doesn’t stop the western defence analysis community from invoking the old Islamist terror bugbears of course. And as discussed at Blood and Treasure, Mubarak’s new vicepresident and prime minister are both hardliners not adverse to using violence to solve their problems. Which may mean that either Mubarak is preparing to unleashthe army (if it let’s itself be unleashed at this point) or that the security services are mounting their own coup first against Mubarak, then against the protestors. But can they stop this spirit?
(Ignore the horrid music)
Aussie net magazine Crikey reports on one of the more interesting cyberspace aspects of the Tunesian and Egyptian revolutions, the involvement of the 4chan hackers’s movement Anonymous in helping the protestors communicate with the rest of the world as well as attacking government communication channels. However:
It is also profoundly at odds in its ethos and methods with traditional NGOs and activist groups. This is not your traditional protest movement and elements of it would be deeply hostile to more traditional political activism. Anonymous is something that, because it grew organically in cyberspace rather than reflecting the cyber version of existing real world phenomena, looks and works differently to real-world organisations or movements we’re familiar with. Something important and new is happening here.
That’s because, in the final analysis, the US needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one. Whether the issue is Israel-Palestine, Hamas and Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, security for Gulf oil supplies, Sudan, or the spread of Islamist fundamentalist ideas, Washington wants Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous and influential country, in its corner. That’s the political and geostrategic bottom line. In this sense, Egypt’s demonstrators are not just fighting the regime. They are fighting Washington, too.
“So I’m lying on the floor, stomach down, legs up, hands behind my back, my cheek on the floor, and then all of a sudden, the closest thing that I could think of really, to describe it, was someone pouring lava on my soles. That felt like nothing I could describe. I flipped from the pain. I just flipped and grabbed my legs. Of course, during all that time it’s insults, calling me names, kicking me. So they got me back down, but now so that I don’t flip again, one guy stood over my head, one guy stood over my back, and the others were kicking me with their wooden soled shoes, and another guy was beating my soles with the cables he had…â€
What happened to victims of the US’ War on Terror who were sent to Egypt: “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.” – Robert Baer, former CIA case officer. One more reason for the US to keep supporting Mubarak and not be too keen on a genuinely democratic revolution as is happening now to actually succeed. Who knows what will come out…
Despite the Mubarak regime’s efforts to invoke the spectre of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptians aren’t demonstrating for an Islamic government any more than the Tunisians were; they’re demonstrating for an honest government – one that will improve education and infrastructure, reduce poverty and inflation, end the Emergency Law, stop torturing people in police stations, stop doing the bidding of the US and Israel in Palestine, stop rigging elections, and, above all, stop lying to them. And whatever their differences, they are united in the conviction that neither Mubarak nor his son Gamal, who is being groomed to succeed him, is capable of meeting these demands. As one young activist said to me last year, ‘We need a radical shake-up. We have a saying in Egypt that you can’t make a sweet drink out of a rotten fish.’
[…] And so, as police were dispersing protesters in Tahrir Square, Hillary Clinton did her best to scatter seasoning on the rotten fish: ‘The Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.’ Later that day in his State of the Union address, Barack Obama hailed the people of Tunisia, but said nothing about the Egyptians who hoped to repeat their example, and in whose capital city he had delivered a grand speech full of promises yet to be fulfilled.
Once again, it’s the supposedly democracy-loving EU and US that put themselves firmly in the way of actual democratic progress. Imagine my surprise.
