Sixty years ago, a group of military officers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, forced Farouk I, an Ottoman leftover who styled himself King of Egypt and Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, Kordofan, and Nubia, to rush to his yacht and seek exile in Monaco. In this effort, they were assisted by the C.I.A., which was dismayed by the decadence and corruption that characterized Farouk’s reign. The operation was known informally as “Project FF”—Fat Fucker. It was one of the many attempts to steer Egypt in what American policymakers think might be the right direction. They must look back at that period with a sense of woe—if, indeed, they ever reflect on history at all.
The tyrants who followed the coup were not as wicked, incompetent, and corrupt as they have often been portrayed, and yet it was their suppression of democratic forces that has placed Egypt in the catastrophic situation it currently finds itself in. Nasser’s charisma and energy awakened the entire region to the postcolonial era, but he failed to find an accommodation with the Islamic trend, and he turned to Israel as a scapegoat. Sadat, his successor, had the courage to reach a peace treaty with Israel. He saw the foolishness of depending on the Soviet Union as an ally and socialism as an economic model. He also tried to find a way to incorporate the Islamists into civil society, at least by letting them out of prison, and they responded by murdering him.
Hosni Mubarak, who now may be dying—Tuesday, he was briefly reported clinically dead—was an excellent military officer, and a capable bureaucrat, but he had no independent vision and no idea how to escape the impediments to progress that the original coup had imposed. Immediately after Sadat’s assassination, in 1981, Mubarak imposed emergency rule, which essentially authorized unbridled dictatorial power masked by a façade of democratic elections. Under his rule, freedom of speech and assembly were tightly constrained. These restrictions on liberty crushed other forms of political expression, so that the Islamists—the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical forms of political Islam—became the only real way to voice opposition to Mubarak’s reign. Military dictatorship and Islamism became the axis upon which Egyptian politics revolved.
When I taught at the American University in Cairo, from 1969 to 1971, it was rare to see a female student with her head covered—even at Cairo University, where Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of Al Qaeda, was then studying. At the time, the U.S. and Egypt had no diplomatic relations at all. Egypt compared itself with other undeveloped nations—South Korea, India, Brazil—each of which has had a democratic revolution that has since paved the way for rapid economic development. But Egypt was stuck, trapped in a political and economic quagmire.
After the Camp David treaty was signed, in 1979, the U.S. began subsidizing the Egyptian military to the tune of $1.3 billion per year—essentially, a bribe to keep the peace. The unintended result was to empower the military at the expense of civilian society. American aid became an enabler in the suppression of democratic expression, which contributed to the economic paralysis and the rising radicalism.
The decision by the Egyptian military to dissolve a freely elected parliament earlier this month—predicated on a court decision by Mubarak holdovers—amounts to a second military coup. Once again, it has been assisted by the American decision to continue to support the antidemocratic forces that have retarded the development of Egypt. A moderate Islamist government, responsive to the social needs of the country, is the best that the U.S. can expect now, and what the people of Egypt have demanded by their votes.
America is unlikely to have any influence on the future of Egypt if it continually opposes and demonizes the longing of Egyptians to achieve real democratic expression, with all its hazards. Sixty years of unaccountable military dictatorship have shown how sterile the alternative is. With Hosni Mubarak now on life support, it’s time to pull the plug on American support of this antidemocratic, military regime.
Photograph of Mubarak, in 2009, by Giorgio Lotti/Contrasto/Redux.