After more than a week of live coverage showing Molotov cocktails, hurled stones, armored vehicles, and screaming protesters using corrugated sheeting reminiscent of the shields Roman legions used to conquer the nation on the Nile more than 2,000 years ago, the cameras are dark or gone completely from their perches high above Cairo's Tahrir Square. CNN's Anderson Cooper, just one of the many journalists assaulted by the crowds as pernicious rumors of Western conspiracies to yet again subsume another populist uprising in the Middle East to the realpolitik of economics and oil spreads like a pestilence through the pro and anti-Mubarak demonstrators, is now hiding in subdued lighting and almost whispering into the microphone to avoid detection. This is Egypt, cradle of ancient civilization and home to the only remaining wonder of the ancient world. It is also the climax of what appears to be the largest revolution in the region since the end of World War II.
People can only be oppressed for so long and the corrupt governments that are the rule in the region are each bearing the brunt of what looks to be near simultaneous eruptions of independence and reform stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the Persian Gulf, the perfect storm of political discord. Egyptians, especially, are acting as though they have been unbound and are free for the first time in more than three decades to truly speak their minds and to defend themselves against the forces that would stifle them, even at the barrel of a gun or crack of the whip held by pro-Mubarak camel cavalry.
But, now that the pictures have stopped streaming from the epicenter of this evolution in Middle Eastern politics, we must ask ourselves what is next. As the violence has ratcheted up, the transparency on both sides of this conflict has become more clouded. We have video of demonstrators announcing their hatred of the West and their contempt for the apparent slowness of action from President Barack Obama, the man they put so much faith in as he traveled to Cairo in 2009, telling the people there that America sympathized with their plight and their aspirations for freedom and self determination. But the truth is that, while Arab leaders have unlimited power in their countries, the President of the United States is constrained by the very forces and political philosophies that the Egyptian anti-Mubarak demonstrators so desperately crave for themselves. Obama can, and should, do little more than he is doing: publicly calling for calm and easing Mubarak into a position where he can leave as gracefully as possible, while doing the behind-the-scenes arm twisting of threatening a suspension of the $1.5 billion in foreign aid we give to Egypt each year, most of which goes to the Army, who are the real power there.
None of that really matters to the people in Tahrir Square, who are coated in dust and grime, hungry, thirsty and longing for a voice in their own destinies. Egypt has nearly doubled in population since Mubarak took power in the confusion resulting from the assassination of then-president Anwar Sadat 30 years ago and, as most of the protesters are younger people, almost none of them has any real memory of a president there other than Mubarak. Nor do they have any real memory of an Egypt not humiliated in war with Israel, or of an Egypt not bordered by an occupied Gaza Strip. In fact, many may still remember the pain of seeing their own Sinai Penninsula overrun by the Israelis in 1956 and 1967, or the Suez Canal, crucial to the region's economy, being seized by the Israelis (with the backing of the British and the French) in 1956. Far from the seat of world power that was Egypt in the early days of civilization, the nation on the Nile has been the pawn of the West for the entirety of modern memory and her leaders have taken advantage of that position to line their own pockets and to foment their hatred of the West within their own people in the process. Is it any wonder that a people with no real experience or understanding of a free press, where all the media are themselves heavily controlled by the Mubarak regime, would see the Western media in the same light and suspect them of plotting to stir up further violence and so then threaten these journalists with assault, kidnapping and beheading?
As much as these demonstrators may detest Mubarak and suspect the reporters who are attempting to tell their stories to the world, they truly hate Israel. They have been taught from birth to loath the "hated occupiers" and the only organized opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood (banned but tolerated as a foil to Mubarak for the West) is already calling for the renunciation of the historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter and signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in 1978. This potentiality becomes even more ominous when one considers the fact that several other countries in the region (Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen) are undergoing their own forms of civil unrest, all are Muslim and all have populations who bear no love for Israel. Add to that the fact that nuclear armed Israel's Prime minister now is the conservative Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and you have a recipe for Armageddon.
Reporting about this saga from my comfortable, if unseasonably chilly, Chandler home I have heard the eyewitness accounts of those Arizonans who have fled the violence in Egypt and are now back here waiting for this storm to blow over. Of particular note is the story of Debra Alcala, a Phoenix woman who lost her home when the housing bubble burst and she sold everything to move to a Cairo suburb and start up a "Curves for Women" fitness franchise. She told me of the gunfire and looting in her neighborhood and of how Egyptian officials threw open the doors of the prison, allowing thousands to escape and pillage the surrounding neighborhoods, including her own. But that is not her biggest fear. Her real concern is that the people that she knows in Egypt, the girls who work for her and her friends from the past four years, will all soon begin to despise her as an American. She is afraid that, when she returns to her life in Egypt, these people that she loves like family will hate her as a Western oppressor. But she tells me that she is hopeful, too, and that she is confident that, in the end, things will get better in Egypt because they can't get any worse.
Millions of people in America and around the world surely share that hope but the state and protester prompted eclipse of the televised coverage of this developing revolution is beginning to ominously foretell a coming disaster. Media is generally excluded from places where secrecy is desired for one of two reasons: either it would compromise positive developments in a story or it would reveal dark secrets that, if exposed, would thwart the machinations of those looking to do harm. Let's hope that this is not an effort to hide more sinister happenings on the ground in Tahrir Square, either to repeat Beijing's 1989 Tianamen Square Massacre that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese dissidents to restore order in that Communist country, or to ensconce radicals bent on resuming the war with Israel in the hopes of accomplishing the goal of so many people in that region over the years since 1948...to wipe that country off the map. Israel has nuclear weapons and would surely use them against anyone near to accomplishing that goal. If I can see this danger in the stories coming out of Egypt and the Middle East, surely President Obama and his advisers can too and they must also be preparing for that contingency as well.
Let us all pray that this crisis ends in a positive outcome for Egypt and her neighbors. A politically vibrant and diverse body politic can only help Egyptians and the world by enhancing stability and reducing the threat of war by reaching a new rapprochement with Israel and the West. With Gaza sandwiched between them, Israel and Egypt could work together in the coming years to finally find a solution to the thorny problem of Palestine that is acceptable to all parties involved and so remove the greatest threat to peace that exists today. The Chinese character for "crisis" means both "danger" and "opportunity." Here's hoping everyone will make the most of the opportunity afforded in this dangerous situation.
