Tag Archives: Egypt

Middle East Quicksand

 

The Middle East has embroiled U.S. presidents since the end of World War II. Harry Truman’s administration recognized the establishment of the modern day state of Israel.

Under Dwight Eisenhower, the United States aided in the overthrow of a popular leader in the country of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. This action has influenced Iranian sentiment against the U.S. ever since.

John F. Kennedy attempted to mend ties with Arab leaders while maintaining strong relations with Israel.

Lyndon Johnson, though involved with the Vietnamese conflict, pushed Israel to a cease fire agreement following the 1967 war between Israel and Arab nations.

Henry Kissinger worked under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford to effect agreements to end the Arab/Israeli war of 1973.

Jimmy Carter’s sponsorship of meetings between Israeli and Egyptian leaders led to the Camp David Accords and eventually to Egypt’s recognition of Israel, the first for an Arab state. In 1979, the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, resulted in the hostage taking of American diplomats. This event haunted the rest of Carter’s administration literally to the last day of his stay in office, when they were finally released.

In Ronald Reagan’s administration, a truck bomb killed sixty-three people at the U.S. embassy in Lebanon. Later, the bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon killed 241 military personnel. Though promising not to negotiate with terrorists, the Iran-contra affair revealed that negotiations were nevertheless carried on between the Reagan administration and Hezbollah for the release of hostages taken by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

George H. W. Bush led a coalition which pushed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

Bill Clinton’s administration shepherded the Oslo Accords, an agreement between Israeli and Palestinian leaders that promised peace between the two sides. The agreement fell apart in 2000 during failed meetings at Camp David. A terrorist called Osama bin Laden formed groups that began attacking American interests around the world. The Clinton administration responded by raids on Afghan camps of the terrorists.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, on U.S. targets by bin Laden led to U.S. military campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush.

Barack Obama’s administration has struggled to extricate the U.S. from the military campaigns in these countries and has withdrawn troops completely from Iraq. However, the events in Libya and Egypt and especially the horrors in Syria bedevil his administration and promise no easy exit from Middle Eastern problems.

 

Egypt and Syria: Worrying Prelude to the Future?

 

Are the Egyptian and Syrian conflicts typical of the near future for the Middle East? Good guys, bad guys, sometimes on the same side? Ethnic and religious attacks? Plenty of villains but no clear heroes? The Syrian conflict, especially, now involves nearby countries: masses of refugees, arms shipments, and occasional spillover of armed forays. Are these preludes to larger conflicts? What does past history tell us?

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, a war forgotten by most of us, is called by some a prelude to World War II, which began a few months after the end of the Spanish conflict. The more traditional Spanish citizens, including many in the Catholic Church and landowning and business classes were called nationalists. Many urban workers, middle-class liberals, and some Communists were called republicans. The nationalists received support from Nazi Germany. The republicans received support from the Soviet Union.

Both sides committed atrocities. The town of Guernica was pounded to rubble by incendiary bombs. A third of its population was reported killed or wounded.

The United States was not directly involved, but some Americans joined the republicans, most in a youthful desire to liberate. Earnest Hemingway wrote about one such fictional character in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story ends tragically for the hero just as the war did. For almost four decades afterward, Spain was ruled by the dictator Francisco Franco.

At the time, European countries had been in a state of tension caused by the horrible brutality of World War I and its unresolved ending. Hatred, pride, and humiliation all played a part in the inability of Europeans to come together to prevent World War II. This hatred was evident in the Spanish conflict. Unfortunately, a failure to understand hatred’s consequences prevented the compromises necessary to resolve the differences.

At this chaotic time, we follow the promise of talks between Israelis and Palestinians. All parties suggest that any progress will be difficult. Bitterness, grievances, and brutalities haunt the process. A look into history should convince us to try anyway, to understand, this time, that only forgiveness offers hope.

Religion’s Major Role in the New World Order

 

In the late 1970’s, Iranian students, inspired by Islamic leaders, seized the United States embassy in Tehran.

444 DaysThumbing their noses at international law, they held U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days. Religion entered as a major actor on the world stage. Over three decades later, the murder of American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, by religious terrorists indicates that the religious script is still in play.

What happened? Though at the time of the Iranian revolution, the Soviet Union would not tumble for a few more years, the Cold War was thawing. The United States and the Soviet Union signed agreements limiting nuclear weapons. Egypt and Israel endorsed the Camp David accords. Optimists saw glimpses of an upward march to worldwide peace, individual freedom, and economic advancement.

Not all were buying in. The money from Iran’s oil industry allowed Western-style consumerism that seemed empty to many Iranians.

Iran hostage crisesThe student revolt was nationalistic, an attempt to root out foreign influence and government brutality, but it included yearnings for a less secular culture. Now recent revolts in Tunisia and Egypt have dethroned secular governments and elected Islamists.

How can the United States, which prizes freedom of religion for all its citizens, deal with states whose laws favor one specific religion?

In recognition of the need for more understanding, the U.S. State Department created the position of an Ambassador for International Religious Freedom in 1998. Its mission is to promote religious freedom as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy. The report for religious freedom in 2011 is now public.

 

Diplomacy by Tweets

 

During recent attacks by mobs on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, the American staff passed warnings to American citizens in Egypt through the embassy’s Twitter network. American embassies lead the diplomatic world in their use of Twitter, Facebook and other digital tools.

Contrast this communication system with the one used during the first conflict in the Arabian peninsula against Saddam Hussein of Iraq in the early 1990’s. I served at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during that time. We set up telephone networks to pass information to American citizens in the region. No one owned a cell phone.

By the time of the second war with Iraq in the early 2000’s, I had returned for another tour in Saudi Arabia. We had graduated to emails for notification of events to our American citizen community. Only a few years later, our communication tools have advanced light years even from those times.

Besides using tweets to notify their citizens, U.S. officials abroad also monitor the tweets of foreign governments and political parties. These includes tweets in the native language as well as any English language tweets. During the Egyptian attacks, the U.S. Embassy noticed differing messages by governing Egyptians, depending on the language. A message in Arabic called on Egyptians to support the demonstrations against the Americans. A message in English offered sympathy and support to the Embassy.

The Embassy responded with its own tweet: “Thanks. By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those, too.”

Democracy Is Like the National Football League; Only One Team Wins

 

As I write, the Egyptians have discovered that their new-found road to democracy is a rough one. The electorate has chosen between several candidates in two different elections and finally picked the man who will head the new government. The supporters of the ones who lost express bitter disappointment. Welcome to the hard truths of democracy. Like the NFL each year, only one team wins the championship.

Losing is part of the democratic process. Many candidates lose. How they lose is one determinant of the democracy’s success. A first step toward democracy is accepting the loss. The losers vent their frustration by working for the next election, not engaging in violence. Obviously, the winners must follow the rules as well and allow a next election. In addition, corruption and power (including military power) must be contained.

Conceding an election is particularly hard when the contest draws on deeply held beliefs. We fear that if we lose, the country is lost. Perhaps we place too much faith in winning at the ballot box. How we live will influence our fellow citizens more than how we vote. The early Christians, a decided minority, influenced the generations after them as greatly as the imperialistic Roman Empire.

The best candidate doesn’t always win. Political experts complain that emotion rather than reason may carry the day. Injustice has sometimes been voted in at the ballot box. Once in a while, an NFL team wins by sheer luck.

 

After the Revolution Comes the Hard Part

 

Social media played a decisive role in kindling the recent revolutions in the Middle East. Now the hard part begins.  A revolution requires courage, to be sure, but a courage more often based on emotion than on reason.

Today’s revolutions accelerate with the instant communication of Facebook and text messages. Building a new nation requires a quieter courage: a patience to examine complex issues and an ability to find compromise between competing views of a nation’s future.

The revolutionists in Egypt and Tunisia vanquished corrupt dictators. Now can they survive the hard slogging? Compromise on cherished views to include the views of others? Set up impartial courts and rules of law that discourage the same corruption that bedeviled the old regimes?

Thomas L. Friedman, writing in the New York Times (June 9, 2012) compared the different processes as Facebook meeting “brick-and-mortar” politics.

Our country formally gained independence from Great Britain in 1783. But the first structure we accepted for the new country, the Articles of Confederation, failed. After a fierce struggle between competing factions, we began again with the creation of the U.S. Constitution, ratified by Rhode Island, the final former colony to do so, in 1790. It’s an amendable document, meaning that the founders of the nation knew it wasn’t perfect and never would be.

As Egyptians pick themselves up from an election that proved less than ideal, can they go to work with what they have so far produced?

Can we Americans survive our own paralyzing politics?

He May Be a Brutal Dictator, But He’s Our Brutal Dictator

 

The Cold War between communist nations led by the Soviet Union and anti-communist nations led by the United States fades into memory, buried during the late twentieth century revolutions in eastern Europe. Yet similarities linger in the more recent revolutions, the ones where citizens are revolting against tyrannical leaders in the Middle East.

In those earlier times, the U.S. was accused of supporting dictatorial regimes in certain African and South American countries because the regimes touted themselves as anti-communist. Now the U.S. is accused of propping up former dictators like Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt. These men clamped down on the growth of Islamists in their countries, so we supported them even if they employed brutal methods. Egypt, especially, became a huge recipient of U.S. aid.

Have such policies backfired as newly-freed citizens elect their own governments, seemingly more attuned to the Islamists? Was it better when we supported corrupt leaders who became wealthy by showering their cronies with public largesse? Who didn’t quibble at torturing their own people?

We don’t know if the new Islamists will continue to support democratic elections once in power. We don’t know if they will allow religious freedom. Perhaps if we had been less supportive of the former dictators who tortured them, the new governments now would be more supportive of our policies. In that earlier confrontation with the Soviet Union, at least the eastern Europeans knew we were on their side and became our friends once they gained their freedom.

We should question both the wisdom and the morality of giving support to inhumane governments. (As we now accuse the Russians of doing with Syria.) It can lead to disastrous consequences later.

 

A Concern Beyond American Idol

 

In my novel Singing in Babylon, the female protagonist, Kate, moves to Saudi Arabia from her native Tennessee to teach. She travels for her first time outside the United States. On a drive with her friend, Philip, an American journalist on assignment to the Middle East, she notices a veiled and gloved woman pushing a child on a swing in a public park. The woman glances at the unveiled Kate, and Kate wonders how the woman feels about this Western female’s intrusion into her world.

Later, she and Philip explore a seaside camp for Western expatriates on the shores of the Red Sea. She compares the women in bikinis with the veiled woman she saw earlier. For the first time, Kate understands the struggles of an ancient civilization to come to terms with the strange culture thrust into their lives by oil money.

Fast food restaurants, unveiled women, and automobiles bring unprecedented freedom and rapid change to a nation in one or two generations. These changes arrived in a country accustomed to centuries-old merchant towns, Bedouins herding camels and goats, and ancient tribes familiar with the customs of generations.

Kate’s exposure to other cultures allows her further understanding of her own country, what is of  value and what is neglected, and what directions it should take. Her experiences mature her perception of the world.

Travel to other countries is not the only path to an informed view. We have easier access to news reporting about world events today than at any time in the past. If we confine ourselves to the latest celebrity stories, however, and ignore the in-depth news, the advantage of this wealth of information will do us no good.

The unrest in the Middle East, for example, has a direct bearing on our future. The current brutality in Syria, where unarmed women and children were murdered this past weekend, and the unrest caused by Egyptian elections will affect us. When desperate millions thirst for security, they will choose whoever promises it: dictators, Islamists, or al-Qaeda.

Our response to such challenges will be wiser if we understand the problems. Ignorance and uninformed politics can lead to disastrous decisions.

 

Freedom of Religion and the Religious

Sectarian violence flared this week in Egypt. Coptic Christians, who comprise about ten percent of the Egyptian population, wonder if the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s corrupt but secular regime will help or hurt minority religions like Christianity. Will a more religiously oriented state lead to less freedom of religion for non-Muslims?

The Muslim Brotherhood, with Islamist leanings, may win greater political power in Egyptian parliamentary elections scheduled later this year. Members of the Brotherhood suffered under Mubarak. Such suffering, some analysts say, has produced a more committed membership, organized to campaign more effectively than other groups, including secular ones.

Must one be secular to practice tolerance?

As Christians in this country become increasingly aware of hostility and the decline of their influence, the temptation grows to seek political power. I not only lived as a minority Christian in several countries, but I’m a descendant of Baptists who struggled for religious freedom.  I do hope we American Christians do not follow the path some are suggesting for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt: What About a Public Servant?

I read the news headline this morning: “Egypt: Explosion of anger decades in the making.”

Long-established dictatorships in the Arab world are threatened. Ben Ali, Tunisia’s leader since 1987, has fled to Saudi Arabia. Some take bets on how long before Egypt’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak, will follow Ben Ali. (Still in power as of this writing, but the situation changes hourly.) Others under the microscope include Algeria, Yemen, and even Saudi Arabia.

Does anyone remember 1989, the year countries of eastern Europe, beginning with Poland, threw off the yoke of Soviet Russia? Or a couple of years later when the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist? How about when Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, leading to eventual reunification of East and West Germany?

Is that ancient history now or is the Arab unrest a delayed extension of those movements? And what will it mean to U.S. interests in the Middle East, since Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia have been our allies in the fight against terrorism?

Why do leaders become so enamored with longevity, power, and wealth? Ben Ali’s party had been in power since 1956; Ben Ali is only the second leader to run the country. His relatives used the family connection to amass fortunes. Mubarak has been in power since 1981 and reportedly was grooming his son to take over after him. Others come to mind: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Kim Jong-il of North Korea.

Our own country has seen corruption and political scandals, but through the centuries since its birth, most Americans have professed belief that elected officials are chosen to serve us, not themselves. We often use the term “public servant.”

Perhaps a belief in servant-hood is the key to government that works for citizens instead of ignoring them. As long as most Americans believe this, our government may function reasonably well. And if those Arab demonstrations lead to servant leaders, those young Arabs who wave flags and shout slogans may be responsible for governments truly for the people. If not, the chances are great that the new leaders will be the old leaders with new names.

Of course, servant-hood may be more kin to spiritual grace than political savvy.