Reflections on a tumultuous week in Egypt
The Nasserite regime, which took over Egypt in 1952, saw to it that no political structures were developed to accommodate popular participation: parties and associations were banned, Parliament became an empty shell, there are no agreed-upon rules of the road.
Participation in the political process in Egypt is now at an all-time high, yet the level of institutionalization is dangerously low.
Allowing the rag-tag army of protesters to come to power is too risky at this stage of low institutionalization. The United States and other friendly countries should encourage Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafik, and Sami Annan, the effective rulers of post-Mubarak Egypt, to invite the more responsible members of the opposition to join them in creating a robust and agreed-upon political structure in Egypt which would accommodate whatever level of participation the Egyptian people choose.
Too often in the past, the United States emphasized participation over institutionalization. This approach may appeal to our democratic instincts, but as the cases of Iran, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and many other places show, it is a recipe for disaster. Let us do things right this time, and make sure the structures and institutions are in place to accommodate political participation by the masses.
2. Advice to al Jazeera: beware of the pitfalls of participatory observation
Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV operator, has, since its creation in 1996, made many contributions to modernizing Arab public discourse. Its studio discussions touch on topics considered taboo in Middle Eastern politics, especially the endemic corruption of Arab ruling elites, nepotism, the indifference by rulers to the welfare of their people, and more.
Often, the very format of these studio discussions is a sharp break from the past because they allow more than one side — the official side — to be heard. Just one example: an argument is being made that Israeli president Shimon Peres has appeared more times on al Jazeera than on Israeli TV.
Al Jazeera’s reporting from the field, however, has often been more problematic. Journalists and academics who study journalism argue that when it comes to reporting, many of al Jazeera’s reporters confuse editorializing with reporting and, on top of that, add a dose of corrosive, distorting populism.
There are two main criticisms directed at al Jazeera. First, the station ignores acceptable Western standards of video journalism. Thus, when reporting on terrorism or war, al Jazeera shows its viewers the most graphic pictures — unedited, untouched, unmasked — of dismembered and mutilated bodies. Often, al Jazeera TV crews make their way into hospital morgues and make-shift body-collection center, where they lift the sheets off dead bodies to show viewers the bloody, gruesome images underneath.
Al Jazeera’s show-all approach does not even stop with children or toddlers. If a 2-year old baby’s was torn in half by a bomb, al Jazeera would show, unedited, the two bleeding halves, and would include up-close video of the grieving mother, too.
Second. this we-show-it-all approach is exacerbated by a distinct lack of proportion when it comes to certain topics. During the Israeli military operation in Gaza in early 2007, al Jazeera, for practically the entire three weeks of the operation, showed almost nothing else except vivid videos, at ground level, of life in Gaza under the Israeli military assault.
Journalists, even those not particularly sympathetic to Israel, pointed out that this was not journalism, but pure propaganda: showing dead and mutilated bodies of children and adults — and every war produces dead and mutilated bodies — 24/7, without providing the context or a broader perspective does not tell the truth, but is a distortion of the truth. If al Jazeera were to use the same approach in reporting from the streets of Dresden or Hamburg in 1944, after two or three weeks such reporting would have created a wave of sympathy for the Nazis and anger at the Allies.
Many have pointed out that al Jazeera, during the tumultuous two weeks in Egypt, turned itself into a anti-Mubarak, all-the-time TV station. Al Jazeera did not merely report on the events in Egypt: The station’s non-stop, disproportional, unbalanced, over-the-top, Mubarak-must-go coverage has become an integral part of the events themselves. The Qatari TV station egged demonstrators on, urging people to go out into the streets, mocking to pronouncements of regime spokespersons.
Anthropologists, as they go into the jungles to study remote tribes, are always anxious about what the discipline calls “participatory observation.” The fear is that the very presence of Western scholars among the native culture would cause the natives to modify and change their behavior, even if ever so slightly, in order to accommodate the visitors in their midst, thus making it impossible for the scholars to observe and capture the original native culture in its purest, unadulterated form.
Critics argue that what al Jazeera reporters do is not journalism or observations, but the ultimate in participatory observation.
3. What is Qatar’s game?
There are few who doubt that Qatar managed this feat by bribing enough members of the readily “bribabale” FIFA board. Every couple of years, a few members of the board, typically from African states, are brought up on charges of taking bribes to vote this way or that, and are replaced by new members who do not wait too long to receive their own bribes.
This reminds us of a story told by Larry Scott, now the commissioner of the Pacific-10 collegiate conference, but twenty years ago a top tennis official.
At the first Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tournament in Qatar in the early 1990s, the country’s head of state, known as the emir, met with the ATP’s president, Mark Miles, for a formal exchange of gifts.
The emir handed Miles a solid gold watch worth tens of thousands of dollars. Miles turned to Larry Scott, his right-hand man, to reciprocate. Scott sheepishly handed over a white T-shirt with an ATP logo.
“Let me put it this way — it didn’t surprise me when they won the FIFA World Cup bid,” Scott said of Qatar.
Al Jazeera operates with money from the emir of Qatar. Qatar, like the Gulf sheikdoms around it, is a hybrid of a feudal system and what political scientists would call paternalistic corporatism. To keep the citizenry in line, the ruling family uses oil money to pay for education, health care, and other services.
Members of the royal family — numbering in the high hundreds — spend their time in casinos on the French Riviera or driving fast cars — accompanied by blond women who are not of Qatari origin — through the streets of European capitals.
The mystery is this: What are the benefits to Qatar and its medieval political system from encouraging, through al Jazeera’s aggressive brand of TV journalism, radical changes in Arab regimes in the region? The two types of regimes likely to emerge from the kind of turmoil now engulfing Egypt — either egalitarian democracy (not likely) or ascetic Islamic fundamentalism (more likely) — are not the kind of regimes which will look kindly at the family-run fiefdom and the hedonistic ways of members of the family.
Advice to Qatar: watch out for the kind neighbors your al Jazeera TV is creating for you.
4. Advice to el Baradei: heed Kennedy’s admonition
There are two mysteries concerning recent Nobel Prize awards. The first is: what, exactly, did President Obama receive a Nobel Prize for? The second mystery: what, exactly, did Mohammad el Baradei receive a Nobel Prize for (he received his in 2005)?
From 1997 to 2009, el Baradei served three 4-year terms as the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The United States was never comfortable with his tenure, and in 2005 actively lobbied against el Baradei election to a third term, but failed.
On his watch, North Korea became a full-fledged member of the nuclear weapons club, conducting four underground tests of nuclear warheads of different sizes. Iran has steadily advanced its own nuclear weapons program.
It was his dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program that finally doomed his chances for a fourth term. More often than not he appeared reluctant to challenge Iran, resorting to legalistic arguments to explain why he was so willing to accept Iran’s explanation for its duplicity on the issue. His conduct became so alarming to the Bush administration, that it instructed the NSA to intercept dozens of el Baradei’s phone calls with Iranian diplomats in order to scrutinize them for evidence of tacit collaboration between Iran and the IAEA. The evidence gleaned from these intercepts was not enough for the administration to force him out of his position.
Which brings us back to the question of the Noble Prize award. It is clear that neither Obama nor el Baradei received the prizes for any meaningful achievements: Obama was not in office long enough to achieve anything, and el Baradei was ineffective and inconsistent (this is the charitable interpretation; as the Bush administration’s surveillance efforts of him show, there were many who ascribed to el Baradei’s more sinister motives for his foot dragging on the Iran problem and his passivity regarding the North Korea issue).
Perhaps the Nobel Prize selection committee decided, in both cases, that it was the vision, rather than concrete achievements — Obama’s vision of a nuclear weapons-free world, and the IAEA mission of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in world politics — that merited the prize. Perhaps.
Why this walk down memory lane? Because el Baradei, again, appears to be too uncritical of the dark forces around him. In the case of North Korea and Iran, the result of his selective moral and political choices is the world having more, rather than fewer, nuclear weapons states. In the case of current Egyptian politics, his strange choices are much more dangerous to him personally.
Last Sunday, on a U.S. TV talk show, el Baradei insisted that any fear of the Muslim Brotherhood was unwarranted. “This is total bogus that the Muslim Brotherhood are religiously conservative,” el Baradei told ABC’s This Week. “They are no way extremists. They are no way using violence.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is not religiously conservative? They have not engaged in violence?
El Baradei may calculate that in order to keep maximum pressure on Hosni Mubarak and the current regime in Egypt, the opposition camp must include the Muslim Brotherhood, the most popular and the organizationally strongest among all opposition groups in Egypt. We have seen this in countless other such upheavals in many different countries: educated, liberal, centrist politicians believe they can ride to power with the help of passionate, extremist, broad-based political or religious movements. They also believe that, once in power, they — the educated, centrist, liberal politicians — will be able to tame and control these movements.
History tells us otherwise. John Kennedy, in his 1961 Inaugural Address, was right when he said that, “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding on the back of the tiger, ended up inside.”
Our advice to el Baradei: Cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood is playing with fire. Beware.
Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire
