# Posted 12:19 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE SEARCH FOR EGYPTIAN DEMOCRACY: The New Yorker has published a mournful but still quite interesting portrait of political life in Egypt. The launchpad for David Remnick's essay is President Bush's bold (if you're an idealist) and foolhardy (if you're a realist) declaration that

The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.

To be sure, contemporary reality offers little in the way of evidence that Egypt is ready for a democratic opening. Then again, after Egypt invaded Israel in 1973, who expected that a peace treaty was just six years away? (That's my point, not Remnick's.)

The moderately good news about Egypt is that the Muslim Brotherhood, the organized face of political Islam, has become a passive, unmenacing and unpopular (albeit still extremist) organization. Ever since the horrific slaughter of seventy tourists at Luxor in 1997, terrorism has been afraid to show its face.

Or to be more precise, Islamist terrorism has been afraid to show its face. State-sponsored terrorism, in the form of pervaisve torture and arbitrary imprisonment is a simple fact of life. Mubarak has no ideas, so he tortures instead.

Nonetheless, Remnicks seems to suggest that it is not Mubarak's brutality but rather America's aggression in Iraq that truly angers the Egyptians. Remnick reports that

In an atomized political culture like Egypt’s, the one issue that has energized, and enraged, the political opposition today is American foreign policy under George W. Bush. I had dozens of meetings in Cairo—with government officials, religious leaders, opposition figures, intellectuals, students, working people—and nearly every session began with a speech on the perfidy of the Bush Administration

I don't doubt that Egyptians hate Bush or even that they hate him much more than they hated Clinton. But is this outpouring of hatred a direct consequence of American behavior, or rather a sublimation of the intense hatred that Egyptians are not allowed to direct at their own government?

After all, there is a fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of Egypt's hatred. Egypt was the first Arab state to recognize Israel and, as a result, has come to benefit from annual, eight-figure infusions of American aid. If the Egyptian people had their say, would their government turn down this aid and sever ties with Israel? Or would Egyptians follow the Gulf states' tradition of declaring their love for Palestine while abandoning the Palestinians to their fate?

Unfortunately, Remnick doesn't provide much in the way of answers. His focus on Egyptians' assessment of US foreign policy and, to a secondary degree, the prospects for Egyptian democracy, consume all of his efforts.

Remnick's article ends on a hopeless note. He suggests -- accurately, I think -- that Mubarak has absolutely no interest in presiding over any sort of liberalization. Thus, it is only a matter of time before Cairo explodes just as Teheran did in 1979.

While I am more inclined than Remnick to believe that the Egyptian people want democracy, I find myself compelled to agree that that Mubarak's repression is paving the way for a radical revolution.
 
CORRECTION: As Gary Farber points out, Egyptian aid is in the ten-figure range, not the eight-figures mentioned above.  Stupidly, I knew that Egypt gets a couple billion a year from the United States, but somehow thought that there are eight significant digits in 1,000,000,000.
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