After Mubarak, what’s next for Egypt?

Washington Post--The Post asked experts what should happen in Egypt after Mubarak. Below are responses from Michele Dunne, John R. Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Shadi Hamid, Aaron David Miller, Salman Shaikh, and Dina Guirguis.

Senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and editor of Arab Reform Bulletin

After Hosni Mubarak surrenders his powers, a transitional government should oversee a process leading to free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections within six to nine months. Ideally, the transitional government should include respected figures from the Mubarak government, senior judges and members of opposition groups.

The parliament fraudulently elected in November should be dissolved (preferably as Mubarak’s final act as president), the state of emergency in place since 1981 lifted, and a constitutional assembly composed of judges and civil society figures convened to draft significant amendments to the Egyptian constitution. At a minimum, articles will need to be amended to ease eligibility to run for the presidency and to form political parties, establishing presidential term limits, and to form a credible independent commission to administer elections. Other objectionable provisions of the constitution - allowing authorities to set aside human rights protections in terrorism cases, for example - should be amended at the same time.

This is an ideal scenario; actual developments are unlikely to unfold this smoothly. What is important is that Egypt should move toward a fully democratic system rather than a military regime or a slightly liberalized autocracy. Continued…

It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence

Guardian--The nature of any regime it backs in the Arab world is secondary to control. Subjects are ignored until they break their chains

’The Arab world is on fire," al-Jazeera reported last week, while throughout the region, western allies "are quickly losing their influence". The shock wave was set in motion by the dramatic uprising in Tunisia that drove out a western-backed dictator, with reverberations especially in Egypt, where demonstrators overwhelmed a dictator’s brutal police.

Observers compared it to the toppling of Russian domains in 1989, but there are important differences. Crucially, no Mikhail Gorbachev exists among the great powers that support the Arab dictators. Rather, Washington and its allies keep to the well-established principle that democracy is acceptable only insofar as it conforms to strategic and economic objectives: fine in enemy territory (up to a point), but not in our backyard, please, unless properly tamed.

One 1989 comparison has some validity: Romania, where Washington maintained its support for Nicolae Ceausescu, the most vicious of the east European dictators, until the allegiance became untenable. Then Washington hailed his overthrow while the past was erased. That is a standard pattern: Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo-hwan, Suharto and many other useful gangsters. It may be under way in the case of Hosni Mubarak, along with routine efforts to try to ensure a successor regime will not veer far from the approved path. The current hope appears to be Mubarak loyalist General Omar Suleiman, just named Egypt’s vice-president. Suleiman, the longtime head of the intelligence services, is despised by the rebelling public almost as much as the dictator himself.

A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.

A familiar example is Saudi Arabia, the ideological centre of radical Islam (and of Islamic terror). Another in a long list is Zia ul-Haq, the most brutal of Pakistan’s dictators and President Reagan’s favorite, who carried out a programme of radical Islamisation (with Saudi funding).

"The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control," says Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. "With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground."

Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and generalises worldwide, to US home territory as well. In the event of unrest, tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to reasserting control.

The vibrant democracy movement in Tunisia was directed against "a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems", ruled by a dictator whose family was hated for their venality. So said US ambassador Robert Godec in a July 2009
cable released by WikiLeaks. Continued

Iran’s supreme leader calls uprisings an ’Islamic awakening"

LA Times--Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says the upheaval in the region is a defeat for the U.S., and a ’liberating Islamic movement.’ But Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood rejects his statement, calling it the ’Egyptian people’s revolution.’

Iran’s supreme leader called for the end of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, saying Friday that the political upheaval in the Arab world was part of an "irreversible defeat" for the United States and an "Islamic awakening" in the Middle East.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a rare appearance at Tehran’s main Friday prayer venue, compared the popular uprisings against Western-backed autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt to Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979.

"This is a war between two willpowers: the willpower of the people and the willpower of their enemies," Khamenei said. "The Israelis and the United States are more concerned about what would happen to their interests in a post-Mubarak regi