Category ►►► Nile Nuttery

February 11, 2011

Mubarak Regime Dead Pool - Place Your Bets! - Results - Bumped

Hatched by Dafydd

The pool is for (1) the date (all dates on U.S. time) on which everyone agrees the regime of Hosni Mubarak has fallen and can't get up. Side bets:

Will Mubarak himself be arrested, killed, or will he escape?

Will Egypt veer towards Democracy (Middle-East style, like Iraq) or full-blown theocracy under the Muslim Brotherhood or Egyptian Islamic Jihad?

And how soon after the fall will Obama filtch credit for the collapse? (Perhaps quickly to be retracted if (3) goes the opposite of how I predict.)

As the instigator of the dead pool, I'm picking (1) Monday, January 31st, 2011; (2) Mubarak will escape into Jordan or Libya; (3) the Brothers will try to seize power, but it will turn into a civil war, which democracy will win; and (4) Obama will try to grab credit for the revolution by Wednesday, February 2nd, retract the next day (as the battle begins), and when the forces of pseudo-democracy win, will again reassert his own central role, without ever acknowledging his previous back-tracking.

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets! Winner gets super-ultimate bragging rights (or rites).

Breaking! Results of the Mubarak regime dead pool:

Resignation: February 11th, 2011. On the date, the closest winner was Bart Johnson, who had February 6th as his pick.

Mubarak's fate: Has removed himself to Sharm el-Sheikh, still in Egypt; as Drudge would say, "developing..."

Egypt's fate: For the moment, secular military rule. I don't know why I forgot to include this option above; it was always one of the likely scenarios. All I can say in exculpation is... doh!

Mubarak's "resignation" was in fact a coup d'état, which was demanded by protesters: Yesterday, they pleaded with the military to force Mubarak out after his shocking announcement that he still intended to stay on until September, after hinting all day that he would resign immediately.

At the moment, GW and Geoman have the inside track to win this part of the pool; but my scenario of a civil war between those demanding democracy and the Muslim Brotherhood is still possible. Developing...

And how long will it take for Obama to claim credit? Ah... the very same day! Bart Johnson and I definitely lose this one; but nobody else ventured a guess, so there is no winner.

I'm surprised he held off as long as he did -- Mubarak, I mean, not Obama, who could hardly have grabbed credit any quicker; but in the long view, it has been but eighteen days since the mass protests began. Indeed, it has been only two weeks exactly since this post was originally published on January 28th! That is a remarkably short time for a multi-decadal dictatorial regime to completely unravel.

And it's not just Mubarak himself; the entire regime appears to have vanished in a puff of smoke. Yahoo is reporting that the Egyptian military plans to implement democratic reforms, then turn control to a new civilian government:

The question now turned to what happens next after effectively a military coup, albeit one prompted by overwhelming popular pressure. Protesters on Friday had overtly pleaded for the army to oust Mubarak. The country is now ruled by the Armed Forces Supreme Council, the military's top body consisting of its highest ranking generals and headed by Defense Minister Field Marshal Hussein Tanwawi.

After Mubarak's resignation, a military spokesman appeared on state TV and promised the army would not act as a substitute for a government based on the "legitimacy of the people...."

Earlier in the day, the council vowed to guide the country to greater democracy. It said was committed "to shepherding the legitimate demands of the people and endeavoring to their implementation within a defined timetable until a peaceful transition to a democratic society aspired to by the people.

It still remains to be seen whether they mean it, and also what "democracy" entails in an Arabic-Moslem country like Egypt, home of the Muslim Brotherhood. But that's a subject for another post.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 11, 2011, at the time of 11:58 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 2, 2011

A Thought on the Muslim Brotherhood in Post-Mubarak Egypt

Hatched by Dafydd

I've been utterly unsatisfied by the speculation on Egypt after Dictator Not-Quite-for-Life Hosni Mubarak exits, stage left. Both the jubilant exultations from the Left at the incoming heaven on Earth and the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Right about the looming apocalypse seem simplistic, overblown, and facile; more than anything else, such quotidian quote-mongering bespeaks an appalling lack of imagination.

A train or thought occurs to me. The MB has been at war with the Egyptian government since at least the 1940s, accelerating in the 1950s as Gamal Nasser's "Pan-Arabism" threatened to de-Islamicize Egypt and other Arabian countries. The MB is more Pan-Islamist than Pan-Arabist, even though it mostly focuses on the Arab states; its goals are sharia, and its methods are "dawa" at the very least, sometimes inspiring other groups to engage in actual jihad, and occasionally engaging in jihad itself. The Brotherhood sees all the presidents of Egypt from the coup e'etat of 1952 to the present day as a seamless, anti-Islamist tyranny.

Nasser overthrew Gen. Muhammad Naguib, the public face of the coup, and took control in 1954. Nasser's protégé was Anwar Sadat, who succeeded to the presidency upon Nasser's death; similarly, Hosni Mubarak was Sadat's supporter and vice president, and he too succeeded to the presidency upon Sadat's assassination. Thus there is a clear regime continuity from Gen. Muhammad Naguib, the public face of the coup, to Nasser, to Sadat, to Mubarak today.

I suspect the Egyptian people cannot help but see the Muslim Brotherhood as the chief enemy of the regime that has brutalized and repressed Egyptians for more than half a century, hence the chief ally and/or representative of anybody who hates Mubarak. While that seemingly puts the MB in the driver's seat for seizing power when the Mubarak regime is ousted, there is a contrarian response that should be noted as well: Much of MB support may be solely due to its role as a counterweight to Mubarak; therefore, when that brutal regime dies, that portion of the Muslim Brotherhood's support may diminish as well.

There are three legs of support for the Brotherhood:

Radical Islamists who fully support the ultimate goals of the MB, including turing Egypt (and all Arab countries) into a caliphate under sharia law;

Anti-regime activists who see the MB as their best chance of overthrowing Mubarak and his followers;

And those who have been helped, or whose friends or loved ones have been helped, by the MB's "charity and relief" efforts to Egyptians impoverished by the socialist policies of the regime.

Nothing whatsoever can change (1), unless the Muslim Brotherhood itself changed and became too mainstream, which strikes me as unlikely. But both (2) and (3) will be affected by the fall of the regime:

First, anti-regime activists (some of them pro-democracy) will no longer need the MB to fight the government, and likely will see them as rivals anyway; they won't be required to maintain the alliance of convenience with the Brotherhood after the fall.

And when the regime collapses and is no longer able to hijack and interfere with relief efforts, then for the first time, other groups besides the MB should be able to enter and distribute relief, thus diluting the Brotherhood's current monopoly on smuggling food, medical aid, and other necessities to the poor. (If we're smart, when Mubarak and his regime fall, we'll make a point of smuggling in food and medicine ourselves, clearly identified as coming from America. Of course, we're not smart, "we" (the administration of Barack H. Obama) are ideologically pure and politically correct.)

Regardless, the collapse will bring about an opening not only for the Brotherhood but also for many powerful groups of Egyptians who oppose the MB, either ideologically or more likely due to their own self interest.

My bottom line: The contest between the Muslim Brotherhood and the forces within Egypt that are actually pro-democracy (if not exactly pro-liberty) may not be as one-sided as so many conservatives gloomily predict; the fact that the MB is talking about power-sharing at all indicates they may not be as confident of short-term victory as the Right seems to be on their behalf.

Just a thought.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 2, 2011, at the time of 5:45 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack