WHAT THE PAPERS SAY . Who will follow in the shoes of Mubarak?

(PanamaNewsRoom) Alexander Cockburn is a respected writer, political analyst and  foreign affairs commentator living in the United States.

Writing in the First Post  he throws a spotlight on events in Egypt, raising the question of an orderly transition from Mubarak to what?

President Obama and Hosni Mubarak in the White HouseThe career profiles of the man Obama picked to send to Egypt to talk to Mubarak, and the man Mubarak had just picked to be his vice president, give a useful mini-portrait of US-Egyptian realities, shorn of happy talk about democracy and the will of the people.

The 72-year old Frank Wisner is a former US ambassador to Egypt and a senior fixer in Washington. He has secure footholds in government and corporate America. Until recently he was vice chairman of AIG, which he left to become a foreign policy adviser at the politically powerful law firm and lobby shop, Patton Boggs.
We're talking the Permanent Government here. Wisner's father, Frank Sr., ran the CIA's covert arm, went mad after the failure of the Hungarian rising of 1956 and committed suicide in odd circumstances in a CIA secure house outside Washington DC in 1967.

As ambassador to Egypt, Wisner formed a close relationship with Mubarak and long after leaving Cairo continued to nourish it. In 2005 he celebrated the Egyptian election (Mubarak "won" with 88.6 per cent of the vote), as a "historic day". Wisner promptly headed further into egregious falsehood: "There were no instances of repression; there wasn't heavy police presence on the streets. The atmosphere was not one of police intimidation."

By sending Wisner, Obama bypassed the US ambassador in Cairo, Margaret Scobey, a career official who supposedly took a dim view of the renditions that sent the CIA's captives to Egypt to be tortured, and had spoken on behalf of Ayman Nour and others.
Well known to Wisner was the first vice president Mubarak had ever appointed in his three-decades rule, intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. This urbane fellow has played a pivotal role in the US rendition-to-torture programme.

Shortly after 9/11, Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was captured by Pakistani security forces and, under US pressure, tortured by Pakistanis. He was then rendered (with an Australian diplomat watching) by CIA operatives to Egypt, a not uncommon practice.
In Egypt, Habib merited Suleiman's personal attention. As Richard Neville wrote for Counterpunch: "Habib was interrogated by the country's Intelligence Director, General Omar Suleiman... Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of links with Al-Qaeda.

"As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before 9/11, he was under suspicion. Habib was repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks.
"That treatment wasn't enough for Suleiman, so to loosen Habib’s tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib – and he did, with a vicious karate kick."

After Suleiman's men extracted Habib's confession, he was transferred back to US custody, where he eventually was imprisoned at Guantanamo. His "confession" was then used as evidence in his Guantanamo trial. This is Mubarak’s choice as heir apparent.
Wisner passed on to the Egyptian president the view of Obama and Secretary of State Clinton that he move in measured but reasonably brisk fashion towards retirement, with grave talk about "continuity", and advice against mowing down Egyptian demonstrators by the hundred.

The realities for the White House start with (a) international credibility, and (b) the Israel lobby. After two years, the pledge of a new era of respect and understanding towards the Arab world and Islam, proclaimed by Obama in Cairo, is viewed with derision across the region, since Obama is seen as Netanyahu's errand boy, just as Mubarak is despised as having the role of enabling the myth of the "peace process".
As Daniel Levy writes on the Foreign Policy website: "The truth is that American administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, have provided cover, support, aid, and weapons to repressive Arab regimes, and with increasingly counter-productive results.

"Not only did the US squander credibility with Arab publics and appear hypocritical, the support given to these regimes actually became a valuable recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda. All of these trends and more were being taken to increasingly absurd heights in the case of Egypt. Egypt's heavy-handed security and intelligence apparatus probably created more terrorists than it intercepted. Egypt ended up being a not particularly useful ally to have in the region.

On the other hand the White House is being besieged by the Israel Lobby which is following the script being hysterically written in the press in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, with headlines such as 'We're on our own' 'Obama's betrayal of Mubarak', and 'A bullet in the back from Uncle Sam'.
Aside from the spirit of disinterested patriotism, it's amazing that anyone would want the job of running Egypt. You'd have to be over 60 at least to remember clearly how Egypt was once honoured across the Arab world. Politically, it's a particularly vicious police state.
The Army - on which the US has lavished billions - should not be oversold as a relatively benign force, even though the wretchedly poor conscripts would think twice before shooting their fellow villagers or relatives in the cities.

Mubarak is despised, as he has been throughout his entire career. These days, mutilated by neo-liberal policies forced on it by the usual international agencies, the country is an economic disaster zone, that can only feed its exploding population nine months in the year. The current political explosion has sharply aggravated the economic crisis.
As the Egyptian-American film director Suzy Kassem writes, "A human being can only take so much when their basic rights as a citizen of the earth are being denied to them - or sold at a high cost.
"When you have to pay for clean water, a sustainable roof that won't collapse, a C-class car that costs double because of duty taxes, and have to tolerate bribes and corruption on every level just to get your mail, pay a bill, get a document, buy your bread, or open a business – eventually steaming water starts boiling and whistling loudly. And Egypt has finally whistled to their captain that they've had enough."

The custodians of the American Empire are right to be perturbed. Those crowds in Tunis and in Cairo, facing projectiles "made in America", know well enough the ultimate sponsor of the tyrannies against which they have risen. A belated chirp for "democracy" from Obama or Secretary of State Clinton will not purge that record.
Politically outmanoeuvered and militarily checked in Iraq, the United States is now in the midst of rapid withdrawal. Iran is now hugely influential in Baghdad. Just two US-owned oil companies – Exxon and Occidental – now lease concessions on Iraq's gigantic reserves. Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia are, so to speak, the crown jewels, when it comes to oil reserves.

The Empire has effectively lost Iran and Iraq. What of Saudi Arabia? Already Yemen is shaky. Jordan trembles. Suppose, however unlikely, fissures open up in the Kingdom itself?
I doubt, at such a juncture, that we would hear too much talk from Washington about "democracy" or orderly transitions. The Empire would send in the 101st Airborne, even as Osama bin Laden heads west from the Hindu Kush and the dollar plummets south. That would be more than a tremor. It would be an earthquake.

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Original Source: PanamaNewsRoom

Date Retrieved: February 6, 2011