Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS RETHINKING THE MIDDLE EAST TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Maha Azzam Producer: Rosamund Jones Editor: Innes Bowen BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 28.02.11 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 06.03.11 2130-2200 CD Number: Duration: 27’ 35” Taking part in order of appearance: Alexandros Petersen Research Director, Henry Jackson Society, London Khaled Fahmy Professor of History, American University, Cairo Elliott Abrams Council of Foreign Relations, Washington Carl Gershman President, National Endowment for Democracy, Washington Dr Shadi Hamid Brookings Institute, Qatar Shashank Joshi Research Fellow, Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fatouh Muslim Brotherhood, Cairo Jonathan Spyer Senior Research Fellow, Global Research International Affairs Centre, Israel AZZAM: Amid the violence and chaos of recent weeks, one thing seems certain. PETERSEN: The old hypocrisy of supporting authoritarian governments in the Middle East that were friendly towards the United States has to be thrown out the window. And all of a sudden what we’re talking about is how we move forward into a new age where the United States can be still influential in the region while supporting what could be rather unpredictable democratic movements. AZZAM: President Hosni Mubarak was the third dictator to rule Egypt since a military coup in 1952. He was finally forced out on February 11th after eighteen days of protest. (Fx: Tahrir Square) Protestors had many reasons to be in Tahrir Square: despite a growth rate of over 5%, nearly half of Egypt’s citizens live on less than two dollars a day; and many Egyptians under Mubarak lived in a climate of fear. Human rights organisations have Egypt high on their lists of repressive states. State security and a brutal police force routinely tortured not only political activists but abused ordinary citizens as well. Khaled Fahmy is Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. FAHMY: The minute you stepped in Tahrir, the minute I went in, I felt that I had been transposed to another time zone. It’s as if everything that has been robbed from the Egyptians was restored. PROTESTOR: When the people want something, they get it and grab it and insist on having it because we struggled for it. Not the Americans, not the English, not anybody but the Egyptians. AZZAM: As an Egyptian myself, I am proud of the courage shown by the unarmed masses who stood up to the regime. Like other ex- patriots, I felt compelled to return home and join them in Tahrir Square. But were protestors like that man really right to say that Egyptians alone were responsible for the dramatic events in Cairo? It’s not fashionable in the Middle East to praise the United States. But, dare I say it, might the Egyptians have not just themselves to thank, but the Americans too for their dictator’s fall? US interests in the region have long centred around the security of oil and its main regional ally, Israel - seen by America as a stable democracy in a region of instability. US support helped prop up autocrats like Mubarak. This strategy of US self-interest in the Middle East was questioned by the administration of George W. Bush, and most memorably by his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. RICE: For sixty years my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people. AZZAM: That speech, delivered in Cairo, was part of a process of reassessment that had begun several years earlier. The new policy was greeted by a mixture of scepticism and bewilderment. Could the Bush administration really mean what it said about democracy, even if elections in the Middle East produced unpalatable results? Yes, says Elliott Abrams, the man appointed by President Bush to promote the strategy. And this is why. ABRAMS: After the 9/11 attacks, I think President Bush tried to step back and come to an understanding of what was behind them. President Bush came to believe that the frustrations involved in living in countries where there was simply no political freedom were deeply involved in producing support for violence and terrorism. That led to the Freedom Agenda. BUSH: As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends. So America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East. AZZAM: There was a sense that Middle Eastern dictators like Mubarak had become a liability to the United States. The growing anger and frustration of the populations they oppressed was aimed not just at the autocrats like Mubarak, but at the Americans for helping to keep him in power. I heard President Bush promote this policy publicly in the region in 2008. I attended a summit of the World Economic Forum in Sharm el Sheikh - a sort of Middle Eastern Davos - where President Bush warned rulers in the region that they needed to change. The peoples of Eastern Europe, of Chile and the Philippines had overthrown dictatorships, he said. And the 21st century was a time for the Arabs to do so too. Mubarak was essentially being warned that he was living on borrowed time - a message so affronting that he refused to be in the audience for the speech. But US support for Mubarak could not be withdrawn overnight. Alternative political parties and civil society organisations in Egypt would need to be discreetly nurtured. In an earlier era, funding for such activities would have come via the CIA. These days it is done more openly through such organisations as the Washington based National Endowment for Democracy - or NED. Carl Gershman, NED’s President, oversaw the new strategy. GERSHMAN: We’ve obviously developed a very significant Middle East programme over the last, especially over the last ten years. Our work is in the range of twenty to twenty-five million dollars a year, which is divided probably equally between funds that go to four institutes. And then in addition to that, we make direct grants to non- governmental organisations - hundreds and hundreds of them; some forty-five in Egypt alone. Egypt has been a priority country for the NED for quite some time. In the case of the NGOs, a lot of them are involved in media, new media - internet and so forth; human rights defence; women’s empowerment; civic education. Those are some of the main areas that you know the NGOs would be active in. The people who went out on the street on January 25th, these are the kind of people, the kind of groups that we were helping. I mean these are just activists and we support such activists all around the world. AZZAM: The sort of groups supported by US money were liberal and secular, and the strategy was evolutionary transition. Rapid regime change, they feared, risked empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, a popular Islamist movement and the most organised opposition. So while the US waited for the secular opposition to gather strength, they continued to give generous financial support to the Mubarak regime. For the last thirty years, the US has pumped two billion dollars annually into the Egyptian economy. The country is now the second largest recipient of US aid after Israel. That gave the US huge leverage. Should they have been bolder in using it? The man charged personally by President Bush with advancing the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East thinks so. Elliott Abrams again. ABRAMS: President Bush was fundamentally correct in this. I only wish we had been more energetic, I guess, in pursuing it. AZZAM: In what ways could you have pursued it more? ABRAMS: If you look at 2005, the Mubarak regime responded to the pressure from the United States. For example, Mubarak, he moved to direct elections. Admittedly he stole those elections, but it was a gesture showing that he understood there was some pressure here. Well in 2006/7/8, the pressure diminished, and I wonder had the pressure instead increased, could we have gotten greater concessions from the Mubarak regime? AZZAM: Abrams has regrets, but just a few. He believes that hopes about democracy were raised and then constantly obstructed when Mubarak rigged elections - particularly in November 2010. This meant that frustrations grew more pronounced. And when Palestinian elections in 2006 produced a Hamas victory, the US refused to accept the result. It’s not clear whether America will pay the price for its equivocation or be given credit for the things it did to help, but one of the issues which will continue to influence Arab attitudes towards the United States is that its pro-democracy activities took place against the backdrop of war in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs marched in protest in 2003 against the allied invasion. (Fx: Iraq War) The level of distrust against the US cannot be overestimated and it derailed Bush’s Freedom Agenda. But the election of President Barack Obama provided a chance for a fresh start. His now famous appeal to the Muslim world in 2009 on a visit to the region was his attempt to heal the wounds. OBAMA: I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, ‘be conscious of God and speak always the truth’. (applause) AZZAM: But there are differing powerful strands within the Obama administration, and sometimes that means the messages are mixed. Former Bush strategist, now of the Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams again. ABRAMS: There are more let’s say traditional views in the State Department that are more wary of quick change, that are more protective of longstanding relations. AZZAM: Those traditional views were exemplified by the decision of Hillary Clinton’s State Department to appoint Frank Wisner as its special envoy to Egypt during the recent uprisings. A former US diplomat and a lobbyist for Mubarak’s business interests, Wisner appeared to find the old habit of supporting the regime a difficult one to break. WISNER: President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical. It’s his opportunity to write his own legacy. He has given sixty years of his life to the service of his country. This is an ideal moment for him to show the way forward. SEGUE: ABRAMS: He was seen to be much too close to President Mubarak and protective of him, and the White House immediately distanced itself and began to say to the press, “Well that was Secretary Clinton’s decision. We had nothing to do with that.” That’s the kind of division I think we are seeing. AZZAM: Had Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama become President, we could be looking at a very different US policy toward the Middle East - one more reluctant to abandon the status quo. President Barack Obama has shown an inclination to speak directly to the people of the Middle East, over the heads of their dictators. And the communication has been two way. HAMID: Many of the signs that we saw in Tahrir Square were in English. That’s not by accident. AZZAM: Shadi Hamid is at the Brookings Institution, an international think tank. He is based in Qatar. HAMID: Egyptians and their Arab counterparts throughout the region know that the world is watching. They understand how critical the international community is to all of this because that’s what puts pressure on regimes. When President Barack Obama gave one of his better speeches, when he said a transition has to begin immediately and so on, that speech was broadcast throughout Tahrir Square in Egypt and it was met with applause. I don’t know if that’s been widely reported, but that is the case. SEGUE: PETERSEN: In some ways, it was the events and the zeitgeist and the momentum of the moment and the way that the media and the American public interpreted the events and was quite supportive of the protestors, which then forced the hand of the administration in some ways. AZZAM: Alexandros Petersen is Research Director of the London based Henry Jackson Society which promotes democracy throughout the world. He travelled back home to the US when protests in Tahrir Square were at their height. PETERSEN: It was a grassroots movement interestingly not just in Egypt, but also in the United States. AZZAM: It’s interesting you say the American public because that’s a shift, is it not? PETERSEN: It’s a shift in that the American public frankly is not that interested in foreign affairs, and certainly not at this time where the economy is the key thing. But Americans have been inspired by what has gone on. And I was on the metro in Washington and hearing people discuss Egypt as if they were discussing you know last weekend’s football game. And that’s not something that you often hear in the United States, and so I think that’s a major change. AZZAM: I was also struck by the English signs in Tahrir Square and the English messages written on the blogosphere by Egyptians. Throughout the non-violent protests, there was a marked lack of anti-American sentiment. The protestors were focused on getting rid of a tyrant at home rather than attacking his allies. Whatever sort of government comes to power in Egypt, the reliance on US aid is currently so great many ordinary Egyptians accept that the Americans will continue to be involved in their country for the medium term at least. By far the biggest recipient of US aid in Egypt is the army. The reason for this can be traced back to America’s deep commitment to Israel. Shashank Joshi is Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London. JOSHI: The relationship is very substantial at around 1.3 billion dollars per year. The F-16 jets that buzzed Tahrir Square were American advanced jets. Many of the M1A1 Abrams tanks we saw on Tahrir Square were not only advanced American weaponry, but also built in Egypt, which is a rare privilege for a foreign military to be allowed. AZZAM: The links between the American state and Egyptian military are far more than merely financial. They are personal too. JOSHI: At the higher levels, there is a link between the joint chiefs of staff in the United States and the senior echelons of the Egyptian Army. In fact delegation of the Egyptian Army was in Washington DC in the Pentagon a week before the revolution broke out in Egypt. Lower level links in a way are as significant because they comprise contingents of Egyptian troops or sailors or airmen travelling to the United States and receiving training in a range of its very best military academies and schools. AZZAM: And do you think that kind of training and outlook helped the Egyptian military not shoot on protestors? JOSHI: It’s reasonable to assume the Americans were sending strong signals to their Egyptian counterparts at the highest levels throughout the crisis to urge restraint. However, I don’t think that was determinative in the military’s comparative restraint. The military was well aware that, with or without American pressure, firing on protestors would have severely diminished it in the eyes of Egyptians and hindered its ability to retain political influence in the subsequent period. AZZAM: The army has been the backbone of successive Egyptian regimes since 1952. Now in post Mubarak Egypt, it presents itself as the guardian of the country’s stability. It has declared that its role is to ensure a transition to a democratically elected civilian government. But over a period of nearly sixty years, the army has built a deep political and economic power base. Many in the army’s upper echelons, by dint of their military position, get a share of the profits from valuable factories and real estate. I worry whether the military elite will be prepared to give up its power and its perks. And will anyone be able to stand up to them if they don’t? So if the military keeps the upper hand, what can we expect? Professor Kahled Fahmy of the American University in Cairo is an expert on Egyptian military history. FAHMY: We don’t know who these generals are. I mean we know their names, but we know very little of them. Again it is something that has a lot to do with Mubarak’s suspicion of anyone, especially the Chief of Staff, staying in power for more than three years. So the Egyptian people don’t really know many of the officers and the generals in any intimate way, let alone knowing what exactly the political outlook is. People are not raising these questions now. AZZAM: And now the mood in the country is changing? FAHMY: The mood in the country is anxious. There is a fear that things can be reversed in any moment. This is a revolution with no leadership, and that of course helped it very much in the early stages because this regime could not pluck out whoever the figurehead would have been. But now there is an expectation or demand in a sense for some kind of unified leadership or even one person who can articulate the demands of the revolution. AZZAM: From where might such a person emerge? The United States’ and Israel’s worst fears is that it will be from the Muslim Brotherhood. It is considered to be the largest political organisation with grassroots support in Egypt. It was associated with acts of violence during the British occupation of the 1940s. And Hamas, which has engaged in terrorism against Israel, has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. But despite a continuous propaganda campaign against it, the evidence is that the Muslim Brotherhood has not been associated with any violence in Egypt for many decades. Playing up the threat helped Mubarak maintain US support. But do they really stand a chance of taking power in Egypt? Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh served on the Muslim Brotherhood’s guidance council for twenty-five years. He wants to reassure the world that the Muslim Brotherhood will not be a dominant force in a future democracy. EL-FOTOUH: Muslim Brotherhood is not more than twenty percent of Egypt. And in the past time, many and many of Egyptian had to give their votes to Muslim Brotherhood not being agree with the ideas of Muslim Brotherhood but because they are against the ideas and the behaviour of the National Party. This under freedom and democracy of course shall change. AZZAM: We know you’re not going to field a presidential candidate … EL-FOTOUH: Yes. AZZAM: … but are you also going to limit the number of parliamentary candidates that can run? EL-FOTOUH: Yes because we want our state ruled by many, many powers of Egyptian, even the independent ones. We hope that Egypt lead the Islamic people and the Arab people, introducing a good and excellent model for Arabs and the Muslims. AZZAM: It’s striking to hear a leading member of a political movement talk down its chances of success. But the Brotherhood knows that if the Egyptian military or the US government becomes convinced that the Brotherhood could win elections, then democracy is less likely to happen. That said, in recent years policymaking think tanks in the US have tried to bring them in from the cold. The thinking is that if they have grassroots support, they need to be integrated into the democratic process. Indeed President Obama did invite them to his historic speech in Cairo two years ago. But concerns about Israel’s security mean that Muslim Brotherhood relations with the US still have a long way to go before they fully thaw. The border between Egypt and Gaza is currently closed, but Israel fears that under the Brotherhood it would be reopened and used to smuggle in arms. Jonathan Spyer is a British born Israeli and a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Centre in Hertzilia, Israel. SPYER: What we can say has taken place in Egypt, I would say is a coup within the regime rather than regime change. What’s happened is not a popular revolution, but rather it is a shift of power within the existing regime - namely the Free Officers regime, of course, which has ruled Egypt since 1952. AZZAM: And that is comforting to Israel? SPYER: Israel really has no interest I think either way in who governs Egypt. Israel has an interest in quiet on its southern border. That really is the extent of Israeli involvement in any of this. We don’t know yet the extent to which they’ll be quiet or not quiet on the borders. The fact that the Muslim Brothers are not in power in Egypt of course is in line with Israel’s interests, yeah? And I think it is fair to consider that in a certain sense there are two really organised political forces right now in Egypt. One of them is the Muslim Brothers and the other is the army. It’s fairly obvious to say that from Israel’s point of view, they’d rather have the army in control than the Muslim Brothers. AZZAM: The problem for Israel - and by extension the US - is that while the Muslim Brotherhood has been vilified for their attitude to Israel, their views are shared by many secular Egyptians. It was evident from my recent time there that many people, from all walks of life, might want to revise the Peace Treaty with Israel and open Egypt’s border with Gaza. Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute. JOSHI: Even a relatively liberal figure seen as a sort of darling of the West, Mohammed El Baroudi, has called the blockade against Hamas “a blot on the forehead of every Arab and every human being.” So the army will have to accommodate that process, but it will have its own red lines because any process which culminated in say the breaking of relations with Israel or the meaningful empowerment of Hamas would result in a curtailment of US aid. It’s impossible to see how congress would be satisfied with what is essentially a large bribe from the United States to Egypt if they were not getting their foreign policy goals out of this process. AZZAM: So in the future the US is likely to face a dilemma. Ideologically it is now committed to supporting popular democracies as they emerge in the Middle East. As a result, it may alienate Israel. It is too early to know how this might play out. The more isolated Israel feels in the region, the more pressure might be put on the US to support its oldest ally in the Middle East even more aggressively. On the other hand US public opinion, on the side of pro-democracy forces, might encourage America to pursue a foreign policy that is less straightforwardly pro-Israel. Established allegiances in US politics are already coming under strain. Alexandros Petersen again. PETERSEN: The split that you see is between what you might call those who have always embraced the Freedom Agenda and who have always been pushing for elections as being very important in the Middle East and political reform being very important in the Middle East - many of those you might call Neo-Conservatives and you might say are sort of the leftovers from the Bush administration - on the one hand; and then a split on the other hand with a group which is both on the Right and the Left in the political spectrum in the United States, which is very supportive of Israel. And this is because of course the changes in Egypt and the changes across the Arab world could in fact engender more of an existential threat to Israel’s existence. Therefore you have a split amongst a group that before was quite unified. It is fascinating to see that what is happening on the ground in the Middle East is causing serious policy changes in Washington. AZZAM: US foreign policy has been tested further as anti-regime protest has spread. Protests that started in Tunisia and have moved on to other US allies - Yemen and Jordan and to the Gulf region which produces billions of barrels of oil every year. NEWS EXTRACT: In Bahrain security forces open fire on thousands of protestors who’ve gathered on the streets of the capital … (fades under) AZZAM: When unrest spread to Bahrain, the US was able to put pressure on the authorities there to do what they could to ameliorate the grievances of the protestors. Protests have also spread to Iran and, even more violently, Libya. The US has very few levers to pull in these countries. These regimes are ones which the US has consistently opposed. And even in countries where America can have influence, such as Egypt, the direction of travel is uncertain. Will the US feel able to allow Egypt to become fully democratic and in so doing give up much of its control? Alexandros Petersen of the Henry Jackson Society again. PETERSEN: I don’t think we can say what will be the policy, but I can tell you what I think will be the debate. And the debate is going to be, number one, between an unfettered support for democratic forces and grassroots movements across the region; and on the other side a sort of Freedom Agenda lite where the principles of supporting democratic change in the region will remain, but always with discussions with groups that could change the situation should it go out of control. A bit like the US relationship with Turkey over the decade since World War Two in which there has been a functioning democratic system which has been quite vibrant, but at the same time the US has maintained a very close relationship with the Turkish military, which of course has had several coups in the past few decades. AZZAM: My own prediction is that a Freedom Agenda lite won’t be sustainable. Pro-democracy movements will end up being too powerful. The Obama administration’s approach so far has been to support protests when they have emerged. It has also called for political reform across the region. But some think the US needs to go further in order to maintain their long-term interests in the region. Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution again. HAMID: It’s easy to be on the side of the winners after the winners have won. I think the real test of US support will be if they’re able to get out in front of this and support the protestors’ demands before it’s too late - before things get violent, before it gets bloody. And I think it’ll also increase American credibility in the region. That I think is in America’s national security interest because these regimes are not going to last forever. They might fall soon, they might fall in two months, they might fall in two years, but it’s important for the US to be with the Arab world’s future leaders instead of just its current leaders who may not be in power that much longer. AZZAM: Until recently it seemed inconceivable that the United States would abandon one of its foremost allies in the Middle East. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The United States gave up on the Shah of Iran in 1979 and now it has abandoned Mubarak. US foreign policy has shifted as the situation on the ground has changed. It is popular pressure that has triggered reform, and if this pressure continues, the military and the United States will be forced to deliver full democracy. The elected governments that emerge will have the opportunity to forge a more balanced and fair relationship with the United States that best serves their own people.