The US had long considered Omar Suleiman to be the best bet. In 2006, the Cairo Embassy wrote, “Our intelligence collaboration with Omar Soliman [sic] is now probably the most successful element of the relationship.”
Suleiman saw Iran under the hood of every Brotherhood car. In 2009, he met General David Petraeus in Cairo. Ambassador Scobey wrote a note back to the State Department on July 14. “Soliman [sic] stressed that Egypt suffers from Iranian interference, through its Hezbollah and Hamas proxies, and its support for Egyptian groups like Jamaat al-Islamiyya and the Muslim Brotherhood,” she wrote. “Egypt will confront the Iranian threat, he continued, by closely monitoring Iranian agents in Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and any Egyptian cells.” This was music to the ears of the Washington Hawks. Suleiman was a reliable upholder of Pillar no. 2.
Wisner’s visit to Cairo was not idiosyncratic. It was to put some stick about in the Arab World’s most important capital, Cairo. If Mubarak had to go, then Mubarak’s regime had to remain in place and the public outcry had to be slowly silenced. The Egyptian military, well-funded by the US, came in to do the work, but it had to be pressured. State Department Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Bill Burns and National Security Council’s Senior Director David Lipton hastily traveled to Cairo. They needed to shore up people like Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the head of Egypt’s Higher Military Council (and later the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the SCAF). When the Tahrir Square protests began, Mubarak sent Tantawi to Washington to seek support for his regime, and for anti-riot equipment. Tantawi was an old war-horse of the Mubarak regime, and in 2008 the US State Department said of him that he wanted to make sure that the US would not “reduce military assistance to Egypt in the future.” He is committed, in other words, to the US-Egypt alliance, which means to the dispensation with Israel (the cable from the Cairo embassy said that Tantawi is “frozen in the Camp David paradigm,” good news for Tel Aviv).
Israel’s Supremacy.
The third pillar of US foreign policy in the region is to protect Israel. Israel has faced no existential threat since the 1973 war, when Egypt’s powerful army took it on. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 allowed Israel to pivot its entire security strategy to face off against much weaker actors, such as Lebanon and the Palestinians. Egypt’s withdrawal has allowed Israel to exert itself with overwhelming force against the Palestinians, in particular. As well, Egypt’s volte-face in 1979 allowed Israel to reduce its defense spending from 30% of its Gross National Product to 7% of its GNP.
As part of this deal, the United States has provided each country with a large bursary each year over the past thirty years: Israel receives about $3 billion and Egypt receives $1.5 billion. Most of this money goes toward the military and security services of these two allies. The US subvention and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty create an exaggerated asymmetry between the Israeli armed forces and the Palestinian fighters.
Protests in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood as part of the action, sent a tremor through Tel Aviv’s establishment. If a new government came to power with the Brotherhood in alliance, this might lead to the abrogation of the 1979 treaty. If this were to occur, Israel would once again be faced with the prospect of a hostile Egypt, and its Goliath stance against the Palestinians would be challenged.
In 2008, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak visited the Egyptian leadership in Cairo. When his team returned to Tel Aviv, his adviser David Hacham debriefed the US embassy’s Luis G. Moreno. Hacham said that the team was “shocked by Mubarak’s appearance and slurred speech.” They talked about Iran and Mubarak and Barak agreed, “Israel and Egypt have a common strategic interest in stopping the expansion of Iranian influence in the region, as well as a common view of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.” Then, strikingly, Moreno wrote a parenthetical note, “We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman [sic].”
If Suleiman took the reins, in other words, the third pillar of US interests would remain stable.
The actions of US foreign policy have not progressed much from the inclinations of Teddy Roosevelt. In 1907, he wondered if “it is impossible to expect moral, intellectual and material well-being where Mohammedanism is supreme.” The Egyptians were “a people of Moslem fellahin who have never in all time exercised any self-government whatever.” This was disingenuous. Roosevelt knew of course that the British ruled over Egypt. The Egyptians rose in revolt in 1881 under Ahmed Arabi against the Khedive (the British puppet Twefik Pasha), and once more in Alexandria in 1882. These rebellions, or the urge for self-government, were interpreted cynically by the British as its opposite: a reason to stay, to tame the passions of the population. The British would withdraw, the Foreign Office wrote, “as soon as the state of the country and the organization of the proper means for the maintenance of the khedivial authority will admit it.” This promise was repeated almost verbatim sixty-six times between the early 1880s and 1922. It was Nasser who tossed them out in the 1950s. Roosevelt threw in his lot with the British consul, Lord Cromer. Cromer, he said, “is one of the greatest modern colonial administrators, and he has handled Egypt just according to Egypt’s needs.” This is what Omar Suleiman said in those February days, that Egypt is too immature for democracy in the Enlightenment sense. Wisner whispered just this nonsense in his ear when he was in Cairo.
Tahrir Square burst with enthusiasm and resilience on February 8. The US hastily told the Egyptian authority to make a few more concessions. Anything would do as long as the three pillars remained intact. Joe Biden called Suleiman and told him to make “immediate, irreversible progress.” The US and Israel wanted Suleiman to take the reins at least four years ago. The protests simply hastened the script. The people of Egypt wanted to write a new play. But Suleiman was not to their taste. He had to be jettisoned. It was Suleiman who announced that Mubarak was to leave, and as Vice President he hoped to step into his shoes, to be Mubarak II. It was not to happen. The next day, the Armed Forces Supreme Council, led by General Tantawi, took over. Suleiman was not a member. He had to retire.
Matters were not so easily left to chance. In late February, much to the consternation of the Israelis, General Tantawi’s military council allowed an Iranian frigate, the Alvand, to use the Suez Canal for the first time since 1979. More surprises were to follow. Tantawi chose as foreign minister a very conventional figure, Nabil Elaraby, who has worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since the 1970s (he was ambassador to India in the 1980s). In this period, Elaraby led the legal team to Camp David (1978) and to the Taba Conference (1985–89) to settle the terms of the Egyptian-Israeli peace. Nonetheless, right after the February ouster of Mubarak and the entry of Elaraby into office, the old legal advisor sought out Hamas and began to talk about a new strategy for Egyptian-Palestinian relations. Some of this was driven by the role of Kefaya, one of the core organizations of the Tahrir protests whose own roots are in the Palestinian solidarity work during the second intifada of 2000. One outcome of the talks was the freeing up of restrictions on the Rafah Border Crossing between Egypt and Gaza on May 28. There is pressure on the parties that are now part of the political class to revoke the peace agreement and to pressure Israel to forge a lasting peace with those whom they should really be talking to, the Palestinians. Absent a genuine dialogue, the Egyptian people released their frustrations with the 1979 treaty on the Israeli embassy in Cairo in September 2011. Such a move is obviously detrimental to peace, and a violation of the sanctity of diplomacy. Nevertheless, it revealed an Egyptian public whose views on Israel have been suffocated by the enforced peace deal. There is little public support for the 1979 peace deal, and whatever patience existed in Cairo vaporized when