New Face, Old Raiment

Vatican Spring? Don't bet the basilica on it.

The Arabs, I was once informed by an orotund Christian Zionist, belong to a culture of shame. To the extent crime is stigmatized in Arab lands, it is more for the dishonor it imposes on family or tribe than the immorality of the crime itself. The west, by contrast, is a culture of guilt, where justice is defined and meted out under codes and systems that evolved from the Enlightenment. As cultures of shame and guilt are irreconcilable, I was told, there will never be peace until one side prevails.

It wasn’t the first time I had heard this interpretation of the global culture war. (A decade earlier, in Seoul, I was told by a U.S. businessman that South Korea’s own culture of shame was the root cause of its rampant corruption.) It thrives to this day, never mind that the criminals of Wall Street, Abu Ghraib, and Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy - to name just a few of the west’s own ecologies of shame - escaped accountability.

I thought of this while watching Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerge from the balcony of St. Peter's Cathedral as Pope Francis. The brand new, 76-year old pontiff will need a thick rug if he's going to pray away the mess that bedevils the Catholic Church. He inherits an ecclesiastical body wracked by endemic child abuse, murky financial deals - the Vatican Bank is becoming to global finance what the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was during the Cold War - the recent resignation of a cardinal who by his own account demanded sexual favors from his acolytes, and revelations of bitter power struggles at the very top of the clergy.

Predictably, the mainstream presscovered the conclave in Rome as part Byzantine pageantry and part Kentucky Derby, as if it really matters who will succeed the retired Pope Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whose enabling role in the Vatican’s industrialized buggery is well known. Nor has there been much talk of the church’s rap sheet generally. The international community has imposed boycotts and staged interventions against governments guilty of genocide, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia and racism. The Catholic Church has a history of all these things. (The Crusades are estimated to have killed some 200,000 Jews, Muslims and Christians from the Rhine Valley to the Levant.) Just this week, the Vatican partnered up with Iran and Russia to block a United Nations communiqué aimed at stemming violence against women because it would prevent governments and religious groups from shirking their human rights obligations for the sake of culture and liturgy. If the Vatican were a publicly listed corporation, its shareholders would have demanded an extraordinary general meeting and voted out its board of directors a decade ago.

Can an institution so corrupt, opaque, factionalized and intellectually inbred survive meaningful reform? In Bergoglio, whose positions on gay marriage and abortion would make him an ideal Republican Party candidate in the South Carolina congressional race, the Vatican has chosen a new face in old raiment, perhaps the world’s most extravagant empty suit. Would any of the Vatican's leading antediluvians change what the Ratzinger imperium did so much to entrench? As with the Soviet Union (and BCCI, for that matter), there may be little left of the Holy See if ever the rot were once and for all swept away. What exactly props up the Catholic Church? Its sole growth market, Africa, is one of the most dynamic economies in the world, with per-capita income levels poised to rise inversely to rates of illiteracy and fertility. It’s only a matter of time before Africans realize they’ve been sold the same bogus wares pedaled for the last 1,200 years from France to the Philippines. (To be fair, at least the Vatican was smart enough to explore new constituencies; for an example of an institution even more hidebound and self-delusional than the Catholic Church, see Republican Party, above.)

One wonders what Jesus Christ, a Palestinian Jew who never presumed priestly authority, might think of Vatican pretensions to evangelize in his name. Like the concept of hell, there is no precedent for a priesthood in the early church nor a meaningful reference to it in the New Testament, as author and Catholic gadfly Garry Wills argues in his latest book. (To the extent that a clerical elite existed, it was remarkably egalitarian. Sixth-century cave renderings in central Turkey depict St. Paul saying mass alongside a woman, in this case St. Thecla. The fresco is believed to have predated New Testament admonitions, retrofitted as Paul’s own, that women should be silent in church and by implication barred from the priesthood.)

All of this begs the question: Does the Catholic Church, the product of eastern as well as western mythologies, derive from a culture of guilt or shame? Its inability or unwillingness to reform itself suggests a failure of institutions as profound as its transgressions. So much for guilt. On the other hand, the cavalier way in which it laundered sexually abusive clerics by shuffling them from one post to another reveals a defiance of shame. So far-reaching are the church’s sources of criminality their provenance defy classification.

Hagel’s Trial By Fire

  If nothing else, last week’s Senate hearings on Chuck Hagel’s fitness to run the US Defense Department exposed the deep divide that separates Washington’s world from the real one. At one point in the marathon session, for example, Republican Ted Cruz aired clips from an Al-Jazeera interview on a large video screen in which Hagel, according to Cruz, allowed that Israel had committed wartime atrocities. As the footage was all but inaudible, Cruz demanded of Hagel directly: “Do you think the nation of Israel has committed war crimes?”

Needless to say, posing such a question to Israel’s neighbors would be like asking if hummus is made from chickpeas. Yet there it was, flapping about the Senate floor like a dying mackerel, leaving Chuck Hagel to dignify it with a response.

Hagel, himself a former Senator who wants to be secretary of Defense badly enough to lie to himself as well as the nation, answered in the negative. Here was the unsavory toll demanded by Congress of decent souls in pursuit of power and influence: betray one’s convictions—particularly when it comes to the Middle East—and suffer fools.

For more than seven hours of testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a star chamber of warmongers, nativists, and Likudnik proxies with blood on their hands from the wars they co-authored, Hagel did just that. The decorated Vietnam War veteran, a twice-wounded US Army sergeant and a Republican Party stalwart, endured bitter and often boneheaded questions from the committee’s most prominent conservatives. They implied Hagel was an enemy of Israel, that he would unilaterally dismantle America’s nuclear arsenal, and that he was too squeamish to use armed might to deny Iran a nuclear deterrent of its own.

Too often Hagel, struck by the force of Republican animosity, disowned much of the foreign policy pragmatism that would make him an ideal Defense secretary. Emphatic assurances of fealty to Israel and the bomb and a loathing of Hezbollah and Iran, however, only emboldened his attackers. The soldier’s feral instinct failed him, and his nomination could be in peril.

What is so striking about these exchanges, however, is how utterly estranged from reality Hagel’s Republican tormentors were, with John McCain, channeling the ghostly energy of an entire Prussian general staff, leading the charge. McCain (another veteran of America’s Vietnam quagmire) and Hagel famously fell out over the latter’s refusal to support the US-led war in Iraq. Specifically, he criticized the Bush administration’s plan to “surge” troops into the country in 2007. McCain, inclined as he is to keep fighting lost wars, demanded Hagel admit he was wrong in opposing the build-up. When the defendant refused, the Arizona Republican accused him of being on “the wrong side” of history.

It was a ham-fisted attempt at self-redemption, as if a tactical measure of dubious significance vindicated a war—which McCain himself did so much to promote—that was appallingly ill-advised, fueled a civil war that consumed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, and left Iraq in the hands of a corrupt and authoritarian regime with close ties to Iran.

By several counts, Israel was mentioned at least 166 times during the hearings, Vietnam nearly 170 times and Iran 144 times. Afghanistan, where US troops are still fighting, and along with Iraq is thought to be the principal cause of endemic suicide in the ranks, received only fleeting references. The fighting in Mali and the alleged Islamic radicalization of North Africa—including the instability in Libya for which Congressional hawks, led by McCain, are largely responsible—were mentioned only a half-dozen times. Similarly glossed over was North Korea’s recent veiled threat to nuke the continental United States.

Ignored entirely was the need to reform the Defense Department, America’s largest and most wasteful bureaucracy. Its health insurance and pension fund obligations are unsustainable and its reliance on outsourcing has created a nebula of murky accounting that, according to the Pentagon’s own inspector general, is costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars each year in unsupported outlays.

The Hagel hearings should have provided a thoughtful examination of America’s limitations at home and its commitments abroad, both of which are growing at a pace that makes empire as untenable as it is immoral and self-destructive. With interest rates at record lows, the price of financing American indebtedness has nowhere to go but up. That means military planners, until now awash in resources, must now make choices. Can the US really contain China, its largest creditor, as a ten-year arms build-up in Asia clearly suggests it intends to do? Can it afford to shoulder the national security burden of its allies, almost all of which are rich and industrialized, in Asia and Europe? What are the consequences of the nation’s increasingly militarized economy, in which costly weapons programs that even the Pentagon believes are obsolete are kept alive because they provide jobs in the districts of powerful legislators?

Such questions, informed by real-life imperatives, deserve to be thoughtfully posed and answered. Last week, militarist politicians chose instead to enrich their political fortunes in service to foreign agencies.

Empire Watch - What Next for Obama?

Barak Obama may have earned another four years after stabilizing an economy on life-support and winding down unpopular wars abroad, but the attack ads circulated in his name sullied a leader who presumed himself a brand above the empty suit who opposed him. He won—but he won ugly.

The same US president who first captured the White House in poetry and governed in competent—if lackluster—prose has been re-elected despite an appallingly mean-spirited and gaffe-prone campaign. Barack Obama may have earned another four years after stabilizing an economy on life-support and winding down unpopular wars abroad, but the attack ads circulated in his name sullied a leader who presumed himself a brand above the empty suit who opposed him. Both men cheapened an already squalid political culture more or less in equal measure. Obama, however, directed his billions of dollars worth of vitriol from the same encampment throughout the campaign, rather than switching from one rampart to another like his challenger. That may have made all the difference.

Perversely, the president’s re-election on the heels of such a shabby bid represents something of a mandate for his agenda despite the narrowest of electoral advantages. Having displayed little of the elegance and charisma that propelled him to victory four years ago, it can be fairly said that most Americans are happy enough with his style of governing to elect him anyway. However thin and dubious, it is a mandate worth redeeming. The question is how.

However thin and dubious, it is a mandate worth redeeming. The question is how.

Domestically, he must persuade his political enemies—it would be too generous to characterize them as mere opponents—as to the perilousness of America’s condition. The country lags behind developed-world standards in sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, and social mobility, while leading it in income inequality, gun violence, and criminal incarceration rates. (In some areas, such as infant mortality, the US ranks below countries like Cuba and Greece.) As he struggles with a still-divided Congress to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” that looms in January, Obama must resist Republican pressure to bankrupt civil society in the name of budgetary rectitude. He should assure the nation that, Republican alarmism notwithstanding, the bond market has made clear its willingness to give Washington sufficient time to right its accounts. After all, what use is a balanced budget to a country where adequate schools, health care, and roads are increasingly confined to its wealthiest enclaves?

Overseas, Obama must confront not partisan lawmakers but policy elites from both parties who have a professional interest in preserving America’s empire despite its ruinous financial and diplomatic costs. He should embrace as a starting point the conclusions of his own deficit reduction commission that called for the withdrawal of some US forces in Europe and Asia. He should not stop there, however. Washington’s alliance system, largely a Cold War relic, has become a geopolitical welfare state in which rich countries like Japan, South Korea and Germany are encouraged to neglect their core national security obligations in return for supporting US counter-terror policies and other misadventures. Early in his next term, Obama should revive the Nixon Doctrine that, had its architect not been thwarted by the Watergate scandal, would have effectively emancipated Americans from the moral and financial burden of global hegemony.

More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is time for the US to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and demobilize its ground troops in Asia. At the same time, Obama should work with China for a diplomatic channel aimed at defusing potential conflicts in disputed Asian waterways and use it as the basis for a negotiating round to resolve the thicket of conflicting claims that lurk as the flashpoint for war; he should make it the policy of his administration to convert the Middle East into a nuclear-weapons free zone that, by implying the dissolution of Israel’s atomic stockpile, would deprive Iran of the imperative to develop its own. Similarly, he should make it a top priority to leave as his legacy a Palestinian state with a viable economy—with Palestinian control of its borders, airspace, and ports—as its foundation. In doing so he would earn himself the respect and admiration from the entire non-Likudnik world.

Closer to home, Obama should declare the end of America’s war on drugs, which has militarized US foreign policy in Latin America, and ally himself to the movement gaining traction across national borders and the ideological spectrum to legalize marijuana.

With luck, the recent cycle of positive economic indicators that brightened Obama’s re-election prospects will sustain themselves into a recovery strong enough to fuel enhance his presidential authority and vision for the next four years. Time will tell if the small-bore preoccupations of his first term were the consequence of Republican obstructionism or a crisis of his own imagination. Let us hope it is the former, which—however formidable—can be overcome.

Empire Watch - NATO of the Living Dead

If transatlantic relations were a Hallowe’en party, NATO could come as a zombie.

Like the living dead, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization refuses to expire despite chronic neglect of its security commitments, the facts of which were most recently detailed in a confidential report by the Danish Defense Force (DDF) on last year’s air assault on Libya. The report, accidentally released last week to the press, faulted NATO’s inability “to provide reliable intelligence on targets or to conduct bombing raids” as well as “accurate assessments of collateral damage” inflicted on civilians. As a consequence of NATO’s dereliction, according to the study, allied forces had to restrict the scope of their operations.

Absent significant US help, the report confirms that NATO’s European constituents would have been incapable of sustaining the bombing raids that helped topple Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi. So under-resourced were European forces, the report states, the Danish Air Force was obliged to purchase ordinance from Israel, a fact that is sure to give pause to those calling for NATO intervention in Syria. The defense spokesman for Denmark’s Socialist People’s Party called the study, “embarrassing and revealing,” not least because of its admission that the Danish government “bought munitions from Israel to bomb an Arab-world country.”

The scandal of NATO deficiency dates almost to the genesis of the alliance, though it was obscured by the expediencies of the Cold War. It was not until 1999, during the US-led bombing campaign against Serb forces in Kosovo, when the magnitude of the problem was finally revealed. NATO so badly lacked the means to transport men and material into battle it had to rent cargo aircraft from Russia, its old Cold War nemesis. NATO armies could not deploy as a single, cohesive force as their weaponry and command-and-control systems operated on different standards. Intelligence networks were wholly inadequate or non-existent.

Reporting in Brussels at the time, I interviewed many NATO bureaucrats who vowed that the Kosovo debacle would jolt the alliance into reforming itself. Exasperated US officials assured me their patience was wearing thin. Within months, a flurry of new initiatives were unveiled that committed both sides of the Atlantic to reform NATO into an well-oiled, interoperable force that could operate in distant theaters independent of a dominant US role.

The Libya campaign exposed such pretensions. In response to the DDF report, a NATO spokesman said the shortcomings it outlined would be addressed as part of the alliance’s “Smart Defense project and redesigned command structure.” Among the issues to be reconciled, he said, was “the stockpiling of sufficient precision munitions by partner nations.”

History suggests this is nonsense. So does a consultant who works closely with NATO and its arms suppliers, who told me recently that US defense contractors are still waiting for their European clients to refresh stocks of ordinance spent during the Libyan war.

Instead of expiring gracefully along with the Soviet empire it was created to deter, NATO has been kept alive unnaturally by Washington, which is willing to subsidize its partners’ indolence in exchange for basing rights and diplomatic cover for its next Middle East war. NATO, the undead alliance, shuffles on.

http://www.majalla.com/eng/2012/11/article55235299

Difference in Degree, but not in Kind

The final debate between America’s two presidential rivals made one thing painfully clear: U.S. foreign policy under President Barak Obama’s second term would deviate only marginally from a first term under Mitt Romney.

Republican challenger Romney all but endorsed his incumbent rival’s competent, if uninspired record as commander-in-chief, though we may never know if that reflected his true convictions or his decision to re-animate himself as a moderate in the campaign’s decisive final weeks. What is certain is that both candidates lack the vision and courage needed to demolish the canned reference points that have sucked the imagination out of U.S. foreign policy over the last six decades.

Republican challenger Romney all but endorsed his incumbent rival’s competent, if uninspired record as commander-in-chief

The candidates’ respective world views may differ in degree, but not in kind. Though both would likely launch a pre-emptive assault on Iran – Obama, after all, has committed his government to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and the mullahs show no sign of backing down – a President Romney might give the order sooner and with relish; while Obama’s support for a viable Palestinian state may be sincere, he’d lack a second-term mandate strong enough to resist a Likudnik-controlled Congress eager to entrench Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land; throughout the campaign, both men have promiscuously bashed China, apparently unaware that Beijing is too busy with its own leadership transition to parse America’s political theater from its reality.

A fiscal abyss, Americans are told, is poised to swallow the U.S. economy should automatic spending cuts kick in early next year if Congress cannot pass a budget. Yet neither Obama nor Romney have signaled they are prepared to dismantle Washington’s infrastructure of empire abroad in order to revive its economy at home. Neither Democratic nor Republican leaders have displayed a willingness to share the burden of global security with its allies, many of which are now among the world’s richest countries. Despite alarmist talk about how the Obama administration’s proposed defense cuts will leave America dangerously exposed – to whom or to what is never clearly spelled out – it is easer for Washington to cut funding for education and health care, particularly in urban areas, than military bases overseas.

Throughout the campaign, the visions expressed for America’s role in the world have been maddeningly small-minded. The country’s diminution as a superpower should be embraced rather than disparaged as an opportunity to consolidate its resources, reinvest in the homeland and contribute to the world as a wiser, if less militarized nation among others. Sadly, and at ruinous cost, Washington’s foreign policy elites would rather America be feared than respected, a bipartisan myopia that has done as much as anything to hasten the country’s growing irrelevance.

Better Late than Never

No, I’m not referring to political contortionist Mitt Romney’s pivot back to the moderate middle. Rather, I refer readers to French President François Hollande’s celebration in Senegal this week of Africa’s independence from colonial (and specifically French imperial) rule. The era of “Françafrique,” he declared in Dakar, is over. “There is France and there is Africa . . . the continent of progress and the future of the global economy.” Of course, there were baser motives to Mr. Hollande’s visit, coming as it did a half century after Charles de Gaulle dissolved what was left of the French empire in the 1960s. Like many world leaders, the French president is angling for pole position in the race to exploit Africa’s vast reserves of precious minerals and energy supplies, as well as its huge, underdeveloped consumer markets. If today’s industrialized giants are not quite as ruthless in their pursuit of Africa’s riches as their nineteenth-century forebears, they are just as covetous of them.

Still, the congress in Dakar between former ruler and formerly ruled is a refreshing reminder that empire is by no means a terminal affliction and that imperial powers can leach themselves of the urge to unilaterally subdue resource-rich states and menace emerging rivals. Empires die hard, however; France lorded over its colonial possessions for centuries before war and overstretch ended its mission civilisatrice. Similarly, it may well take an economic crisis to relieve Americans of their imperial burden.

On the same day that Hollande’s visit to Senegal was reported in Le Monde, the Financial Times featured a short article about how a small delegation of US military officials and diplomats had arrived in Myanmar to negotiate a normalization of military ties that will no doubt include officer exchanges, arms sales, and frequent calls by US naval vessels. Thus Myanmar—which until only recently was run by a brutal military dictatorship—becomes the newest link in the Pentagon’s ring-fence around China, a barbed cordon that can only lead to conflict.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration was deploying military trainers to Libya to set up a counter-terrorist force to pre-empt the kind of attacks that killed four US diplomats, including ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, in Benghazi. (Speaking of which, it was good to see US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally take responsibility for a tragic consequence of her own neglect.) The elite force under consideration, according to the Times, would be the centerpiece of “a broader package of American security assistance.” If history is anything to go by, such assistance will mushroom along with Tripoli’s dependence on US largesse, a reliance that will foster weakness rather than self-reliance and will guarantee America’s new African-Arab ally an unlimited supply of adversaries.

By itself, there is nothing pernicious about Washington engaging with and enhancing the armed forces of friendly nations. Such commitments, however, when regarded within the context of America’s ambition to control the “global commons”—a pleasant Beltway euphemism for most of the known world—tend to become ends in themselves rather than the means of fostering ally self-sufficiency. (Prominent examples include the Pentagon’s smothering embrace of Japan, South Korea, and members of NATO.)

That is why Hollande’s remarks in Senegal this week were significant: they provided a competing narrative to the American conceit for absolute hegemony and the endless war that sustains it.

The Turnaround Specialist

As the founder of a hugely successful private equity firm, Mitt Romney is a well-known turnaround specialist. This week, by trying to associate his hair-trigger worldview with the American statesman George Marshall, the Republican presidential contender revealed himself as a bait-and-switch artist. Opening his speech on foreign policy at the Virginia Military Institute, Romney paid tribute to George Marshall, the sage VMI alumnus who went on to become America’s chief military planner during World War II and the admired Secretary of State whose post-war European recovery plan bares his name. General Marshall’s commitment to peace, Romney said, was “born of his direct knowledge of the awful costs and consequences of war.”

Romney then sketched the contours of an aggrandizing, militarized foreign policy that would have horrified Marshall, a model of restraint and a skeptic of entangling alliances and the huge deployments of force that go with them. As a junior officer stationed in pre-revolutionary China, for example, Marshall and his comrades sniffed at the enforcers of England's empire as “treaty-port Brits.” In the Red-baiting 1950s, Marshall fiercely rejected calls by right-wing Sinophobes—the neoconservatives of their time—to wage war on communist China. Such a campaign would require a half million men, he told an aide, “and once I get them in how will I get them out?”

Yet there was Romney, ticking off a list of national security threats—China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela—and calling for a vastly-enlarged military budget when even the Pentagon has acknowledged that the most formidable threat facing the country is fiscal dissolution.

Romney punctuated his address with references to Israel and what he regards as America’s scared obligation to defend it. Yet it was Marshall who, as secretary of state, emphatically opposed then-President Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the infant state of Israel in 1948 for the danger it would create for US interests. George Kennan, a senior Marshall deputy at the State Department, blamed pro-recognition forces for forcefully advocating “objectives which could scarcely fail to lead to violent results.” Marshall famously admonished the president for politicizing foreign policy by appealing to pro-recognition groups, which he told Truman during a staff meeting was reason enough to vote against him. (As a civil servant loyal only to the institutions he served, Marshall did not vote.)

Romney argued that America’s foreign policy should be invested with its “values” and he assured listeners his policy proscriptions were not the brew of perpetual conflict. Marshall, in contrast, dismissed indulgent talk of American exceptionalism and he understood that unqualified military commitments assume lives of their own. (He would have demobilized the bulk of U.S. forces after World War II had Truman not opted for the ruinous policy of containing the Soviet Union and China.) Like Dwight Eisenhower, one of the Republican Party’s most popular twentieth-century presidents, Marshall’s hard-boiled realism would be irreconcilable with the party’s imperial ambitions of today.

What is most disturbing about Romney’s manifesto is not its deviations from current US foreign policy but its consistencies. Despite efforts to distinguish himself from his White House rival, there was little in Romney’s speech that distanced himself from the policies of President Barack Obama, who in his own way has done as much to militarize America’s posture abroad as any of his predecessors. This is not surprising, given how US foreign policy is charted largely by the Defense Department except in the Middle East, where it is driven by the voting patterns of Christian Zionists and their Jewish counterparts in thrall to Israel’s Likud Party.

It would take political reformation led by citizen-soldiers like George Marshall to change that. Sadly, we will not see his kind again.

A Failing Drug War

While in Washington last week I served as a panelist at a conference about the Obama administration’s Latin American policy, the defining element of which is a quarter-century old war on drugs. Like its war on terrorism, the U.S. is fighting the drug trade by meeting the enemy at its source, deploying expeditionary units to far-flung places for indefinite periods of time. It works closely with proxy regimes, which are often illiberal and corrupt. Success is elusive; when one front is pacified, another opens elsewhere and resources are diverted appropriately. The war’s human costs are born largely by innocent victims of drug-related violence while the financial burden is underwritten with borrowed money from rich developing countries like the People’s Republic of China.

The day before the conference I joined a group of fellow panelists – human rights monitors and journalists from Miami, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile and Argentina – as they met with senior Congressional aides, diplomats and military officers to discuss the consequences of Washington’s drug war. The U.S. is so consumed with smashing dope rings, they said, it overlooks the endemic crime and corruption abetted or committed outright by regional governments, many of which are on Washington’s payroll. Meanwhile, marijuana, cocaine and heroin remain as cheap and plentiful in the United States as they were when Congress declared the war on drugs in the 1980s.

At the time, the Defense Department had no appetite for drug interdiction, considering it the domain of law enforcement officers, and it took on the mission with great reluctance. Today, however, it is the war’s most enthusiastic proponent. Pentagon officials have negotiated with Latin American governments for a growing network of purpose-built bases, airfields, and seaports. It has also trained local police and paramilitary groups in the art of interdiction and counter-insurgency. Indeed, U.S. officials are so pleased with the Colombian government’s anti-drug efforts that they are promoting that country’s initiative to train neighboring crime fighters. This despite the fact that Bogota’s efforts to stem drug trafficking has managed mixed results at best. Though Colombia’s rate of cocaine production and related violence has declined, it is still the world’s no. 1 cocaine producer and its murder rate is double that of Mexico’s. Warlords continue to thrive alongside a high frequency of extrajudicial killings, kidnapping and rape.

A senior Defense Department official who served as a panelist at the conference acknowledged Colombia’s record in the drug war was less than spotless even as he hailed Latin America’s “opening market for security services.” In an era of tight budgets, the official suggested, what better way to carry on the struggle against narcotics than by outsourcing interdiction work to pliant allies?

Later, a conference cosponsor told me that both the Pentagon and the State Department have invested so much of their resources and credibility in anti-drug programs that they’ll seize upon anything they can claim as a dividend. Here is the next generation in the militarization of U.S. foreign policy: compromised by budget constraints, the Pentagon is conceding slices of its global hegemony to proxy states who are committed to sustaining U.S. policies even at the expense of their own people.

The Threat of Sequestration

What common sense could not kill, something called “sequestration” might at least tame.

Under this arcane but conclusive budgetary mechanism, the U.S. government will endure automatic and draconian spending cuts if it can’t cobble together a budget by January. Even the U.S. Defense Department, the epicenter of empire, will not be spared. As the largest government agency, the Pentagon is expected to suffer dearly under the sequestration sickle, and that has concentrated minds in a city that has made a survival instinct out of inertia. For the first time in a generation, security planners are wondering aloud if the world could survive a diminution of American military might.

“We never had to prioritize,” a retired intelligence officer and an old Cold Warrior told me in Washington this week. “Now we do. This threat of sequestration and all it implies is changing everything. It’s forcing everyone to compromise on roles and missions.”

Not so fast. This is about the Pentagon after all, which shrewdly allocates production lines of its major weapons systems throughout the nation, the better to insulate itself from cuts by jobs-minded legislators. It has been targeted by budget hawks before, only to dodge the bullet. The relatively modest reductions in defense spending that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the raison d’etat for America’s Cold War hegemony, were restored within a few years. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Defense Department’s budget has more than doubled and the U.S. military’s reach has never been deeper or more deadly.

Under sequestration, the Pentagon’s budget could suffer a nine-percent decline in spending over a ten-year period in addition to some $490 billion in cuts authorized by the Obama administration. That would indeed be a significant reduction. But assuming the military’s proxies in Congress fail to secure an exemption for defense spending, is prioritizing such a bad thing? Freed from the burden of restraint after the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon not only enlarged its arsenal, it established new bases, expanded old ones and financed agreements for greater access to vital air corridors and sea lanes. What it couldn’t control before the attacks it assiduously tucked under its dominion soon afterward.

And to what end? In the Arab world, American interests are as vulnerable as ever and the country’s credibility, always compromised by its militarized relations with Israel, is at an all time low; Washington continues to underwrite European security even as its rich NATO allies reduce their own defense spending to a pittance of gross domestic product; in Asia, where the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars over the last decade for the sake of containing China, has only deepened alliance commitments that should have been reduced after the Soviet collapse and which now threatens to drag the U.S. into a Sino-Japanese war over underwater energy supplies and minerals.

By itself, of course, sequestration will not end a superfluous empire and reacquaint America with its nineteenth century republican ideals. The post-sequestration era may, however, finally expose the fraud, peddled by a vast array of monied interests, that the only way for Washington to keep the nation safe is to outspend the known world on arms and the means of administering them. Having fed the beast unconditionally for more than a decade, automatic spending cuts may represent the first step towards reducing and domesticating it.

Roots of the Arab Uproar

The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole, so goes an old saying, is to stop digging. And yet, scorched by an inferno of Arab outrage, Washington refuses to deal honestly and intelligently with its source. Instead, it just keeps on digging. Muslim anger, conservatives bloviate, is the harvest of President Barak Obama’s failure to stand up for friendly dictators. From Rabat to Baghdad, U.S. diplomats will continue to huddle inside walled embassies, estranged from their host peoples. Back home, American lawmakers indulge the worst instincts of Likudnik Israel, abetting an occupation of Palestinian land that remains the wellspring of Muslim antipathy to the West. Though holding firm against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demands for a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear program, Obama has staked his credibility on his promise that the mullahs will never be allowed a bomb, which makes a U.S. strike all but inevitable.

The motivations behind this week’s protests, which included a tragic and inexcusable attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya that killed the American ambassador and three other diplomats, range from the cynical to the sincere. Certainly Islamist groups, now empowered politically by the Arab Spring and expert in the black arts of cultural warfare and the politics of fear, seized upon a primitive anti-Muslim video as proof that Islam is under an apostate siege. (In America this is called “red meat for the base.”) Others are simply tired of Westerners defiling their faith, be they oafish film makers or lunatic preachers burning copies of the Koran.

The roots for this most recent Arab uproar, however, extend well beyond a puerile depiction of the prophet Mohammed. A century ago, European governments partitioned the Levant to control its oil and to create a Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world. In doing so it extinguished a city-state based system of trade and commerce that dated back to the Roman Empire. Gradual economic decline was hastened by the political chaos that followed the West’s war on Arab nationalism along with the Non-Aligned Movement generally. Dispossession and occupation, residuals of the Arab world’s failed wars with Israel, discredited what was left of the nationalists and created a vacuum for political Islam. To counter the Islamists, Washington bankrolled a fraternity of secular autocrats who plundered their nation’s treasuries and criminalized dissent. Much of the region’s secular professionals and intellectual elites – Jews and Christians as well as Muslims – emigrated, taking their wealth and expertise with them and leaving behind a desiccated and Islamized Middle East.

Sadly, the politicians and pundits in America who interpreted last week’s violence as proof that Arabs are congenitally incapable of ruling themselves are as politically potent as they are historically illiterate. The notion that President Obama or any other U.S. president can manage events in that benighted land, compromised as he or she may be by the nation’s close association with an aggrandizing and increasingly illiberal Israel, is absurd.

If nothing else, the asperity expressed in Arab cities last week provided a sample of what may come should Obama make good his pledge to attack a nuclearized Iran. Imagine the specter of U.S. Marines deployed throughout the Muslim world to protect American embassies and to evacuate their non-essential personnel on the eve of such an attack. It may well happen. Largely because of pressure from its political right, the hole that Washington has dug for itself in the Middle East may as well be a bottomless pit.

A Gordian Knot in Egypt: Mubarak ruling puts Shafik on the backfoot

The sentencing of Hosni Mubarak has put Ahmed Shafik on the defensive in the presidential race, but will Mohammed Morsi have what it takes to press his advantage? It was a good verdict for the Brotherhood.

Not only was Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s despised ex-dictator, sentenced to life in prison, bribery charges against his equally loathed sons were dropped while a handful of regime trigger-men, facing murder counts, walked away with a slap on the wrist. The result was a torrent of outrage against anything associated with the old government, including Ahmed Shafik, a Mubarak crony and the rival candidate in this month’s presidential ballot to senior Brotherhood member Mohammed Morsi.

Nothing could awaken the revolutionary gestalt faster than a reminder of how deeply corrupted the Egyptian government remains after three decades of Mubarak’s rule. Within hours after Mubarak was sentenced for taking bribes and ordering a lethal response to peaceful protests last year, Mohammed Morsi declared that he was at one with the revolution while implying that Shafik, as Mubarak’s last prime minister, withheld evidence that would have convicted the regime of murder. If an insinuation like that can’t keep Shafik on the defensive, nothing can.

Historians may note that it took a miscarriage of justice to salvage the Morsi campaign from not one but several occasions of inept decision-making. An accidental contender after the Brotherhood’s first choice was forced from the race on legal grounds, the field may now be clear for Morsi to become the first president of a newly democratized Egypt. The question is how long he can hold it together.

The next president will face a Gordian knot of fateful challenges in which the resolution of one will create another. Increased spending to stimulate economic growth, for example, which the military-led interim government has already tried without success, will drive borrowing costs higher while spending cuts will stifle demand and destabilize the country politically. To complicate things further, the Brotherhood is on the record in support of the very neoliberal policies – privatization, free trade, currency deregulation – that are associated with the former regime’s endemic corruption. Should a President Morsi authorize the sale of a state-run bank, for example, he may please the International Monetary Fund and its conditional offer of a $3 billion bailout package, though he will certainly antagonize a large share of the electorate.

Morsi, his supporters point out, will have at his disposal the Brotherhoods’ vast resources, including the fraternity of white-collar professionals that forms its backbone. Himself a respected engineer who did time in Mubarak’s jails, Morsi is nonetheless an unspectacular public presence at a time when Egypt is deeply divided and in need of inspired leadership. It would take a leader of Nasser’s charisma, the healing powers of a Mandela and the guile of a Franklin Roosevelt to rebuild Egypt before the end of the president’s first four-year term. Since no one person can claim possession of such qualities, it would be all the more urgent for the new president to form a broad coalition so he can leverage talent from the whole spectrum of Egyptian demography. Given the magnitude of the task ahead, he’ll need as much bandwidth as possible.

Yesterday's Egypt

Egypt's rich history bears little relation to the dismal realities of today. The choice facing Egyptians, between Ahmed Shafik and Mohammed Morsi, is a false dilemma.

Shortages—of petrol, electricity, hard currency, patience—plague Egypt. But there is an abundance of ghosts.

Egyptians are consumed with the estrangement of their dismal present from their glorious past. Nostalgia, either for the Arab Caliphate, the relatively light touch of Ottoman rule, or the secular idyll that prevailed before the era of Israel, is the baseline for progress. It is a high bar, and for the last sixty years Egypt has had little to offer that the citizens of yesterday’s Egypt would find enviable. (Though one could argue that decades of oafish, autocratic rule has vastly enriched the Egyptian instinct for ironic humor.)

I think of this whenever I enter a Cairene apartment building or office tower that was built before the war, with their grand, art-deco lobbies, open elevators and sleekly elegant stairways. Most of them have gone to seed; where opulent chandeliers would have been hung, there is now fluorescent tubing. Once gleaming parquet floors are dull, damaged and strewn with trash.

At the stock exchange in downtown Cairo, a beautifully restored Victorian relic, I lingered over a photo gallery of board members dating to the turn of the last century. They wear linen suits and bowlers—a few don the Ottoman tarboosh—and posture proudly before the trading hall of what was then the world’s third-largest securities market. There is not a beard or skullcap in sight.

Here was the most secular of temples in a famously secular Egypt. There is no badge or insignia about these men that would distinguish them by faith, sect or ethnicity. By the ecumenical standards of the day, however, they could be alternatively secular or pious, Jewish, Christian or Muslim, and Arab, Greek, Armenian, French, British, Swiss or Maltese.

One can imagine what these men, these specters of a lost age, would say about the two candidates who are contesting Egypt’s first genuine presidential elections. One of them, Mohammed Morsi, is a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive, hierarchical order that rewards obedience, punishes dissenters and thrives in the politics of identity. His rival, Ahmed Shafik, is the creature of a predatory regime who would drag Egypt back to the wrong side of history with the support of those who, to quote Benjamin Franklin, would trade liberty for security and are thus deserving of neither.

There is little about Morsi and Shafik that the elites of yesterday’s Egypt would recognize, except as something alien, odd, and fatally wrong about our Egypt today.

Credit Egypt: Access to affordable credit would help rejuvenate the Egyptian economy

Presidential hopeful Mohammed Morsi is well versed in the economic malaise of Egypt, but the Muslim Brotherhood's ambitious economic plan is hamstrung. Without overhauling the Egyptian banking sector it will be extremely difficult to effect a turnaround.

A decade ago, while researching a book about the failure of the modern Arab economy, I spent a day with Mohammed Morsi, then a member of Egypt’s parliament and a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi represented the Nile Delta town of Zakazik. An engineer by training, he was also a lecturer at the local university and as we strolled through the campus he lamented the dire mismatch between the demands of Egypt’s young population and the diminishing returns of its economy.

“When these students graduate,” he said, gesturing to the students around us, “where will they go? There are no jobs. We have 200,000 graduates in the market … and it’s hard for them to find any work.”

Since then, that number has risen to 700,000 and Morsi, one of two candidates in Egypt’s first genuine presidential election, is uniquely suited to answer his own question. The Brotherhood’s political wing, the Freedom & Justice Party, has unveiled an ambitious master plan to revive the country’s troubled economy and employment along with it. It promotes Egypt as a regional hub for manufacturing, calls for a revitalized tourist sector and robust new investment in the country’s dilapidated infrastructure. But there is nothing about enhancing the country’s banking sector, presumably because of orthodox Islam’s proscription against usury.

That’s a shame, because the single biggest obstacle to modernizing the Arab economy is not the fact of interest bearing loans but the lack of them, particularly to the small-to-mid-sized enterprises, or SMEs, that form the backbone of commerce. As the Arab region’s largest market, Egypt should be a major financial center. Instead, it is burdened with some of the laziest bankers in the world. According to Egyptian economist Tarek El Ghamrawy, credit for new investment is worth a mere 3.5 percent of the total, compared with an average 12.8 percent for the Middle East-North Africa region. Only 4.2 percent of that amount is held by SMEs.

A few years ago, the Central Bank of Egypt allowed banks to effectively lend from their reserve requirements if the money was earmarked for SMEs, but little came of it. Shunned, business owners either borrowed from family members or turned to independent lenders at usurious rates of interest. Not long after that, a grass-roots rebellion overthrew the regime. Coincidence? Not according to Magda E. Kandil, executive director of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, who told me last week that risk-averse banks “contributed to the revolutionary environment” by “deliberately avoiding SMEs.”

Bankers should duly take note. Unless Egyptian entrepreneurs and businessmen are provided with access to affordable credit, the prospect for another revolution will intensify along with the nation’s economic and social malaise.

Trouble Brewing: The polarized run-off between Ahmed Shafik and Mohammed Morsi leaves many Egyptians with grave concerns

The prospective presidential run-off vote between the ‘feloul’ Ahmed Shafik and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi has done nothing to quell political tensions in Egypt. There is hope that large concessions will be made by the eventual victor, specifically to avoid dominating the drafting of a new constitution. The night before the results of Egypt’s presidential election were announced last week I had dinner with a close friend. She had voted for the leftist Khaled Ali because she admired his message about the need for all Egyptians to make sacrifices in the name of economic and political renewal. Ali had never polled beyond the single digits and when I told my friend she was wasting her vote she replied that voting one’s conscience in an election was more important than the results.

“Unless,” she added, “it turns out to be Morsi and Shafik.”

Before the election it seemed anything was possible for New Egypt. Now, with the vindication of Old Egypt’s two most relentless warring tribes, it appears to be a good time to stock up on canned food and bottled water. Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and Ahmed Shafik, a golem from the ancien regime, are twin reminders of Egyptians’ inability to once and for all scrape autocracy off the souls of their shoes. A contest like this requires only one name on the ballot: Least Bad.

As the reality of the poll results sunk in I paid a call on Mohammed Habib, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood before he lost a power struggle for the top spot in late 2010. Habib had declared his support for Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh in the presidential race and he scorned the Ikhwan for fielding a candidate despite earlier assurances it would do no such thing. But he said it was vital that Morsi prevail over Shafik in the final round of voting next month. The Brotherhood had made many mistakes, he acknowledged, “but it has done nothing to compare with the crimes of the old regime.”

Habib applauded the Ikhwan’s decision, announced that morning, that it would invite leftist Hamdeen Sabahi and Aboul Foutoh, who finished third and fourth respectively in the ballot, to serve as deputies in a coalition government. But the group should go a step further, he said, by assuring the nation that neither Brotherhood nor Freedom & Justice Party members would dominate the drafting later this summer of a new constitution. “Unless they do this,” Habib said, “Shafik will win and that would be a catastrophe for Egypt.”

Habib was right, though I wonder if such a gesture will be enough to defuse the potential for violence between the two competing visions vying for Egypt’s future. Shafik owes his resurrection to the ham-fisted way in which the Brotherhood went about scaring one constituency after another with its habitual instinct for control – of the syndicates, of parliament and now the president’s office. Unless it can check its appetite, it will sustain an anti-Ikhwan alliance of secularists, Coptic Christians and pious Muslims uncomfortable with the prospect of single party rule. By making the election safe for a warmed-over cadre like Shafik, the Ikhwan dragged its thirty-year feud with Hosni Mubarak through the garden party of Egypt’s young democracy. It has a lot work to do before it can reclaim the public trust.

The Presidential Agenda: Whomever wins a prospective run-off in the Egyptian presidential election, they will be faced with an intimidating to-do list

The polls suggest that a run-off is likely in the Egyptian presidential race. While the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, will probably face the representative of the old-guard, Ahmed Shafik, the challenges facing the victor will be similar. If independent polls are correct, the second round of Egypt’s presidential election will pit Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom & Justice Party against Ahmed Shafik, the last prime minister appointed by the country’s former dictator, Hosni Mubarak. For the moment, let us set aside the finalists’ relative merits and focus instead on the Pharaonic theft and neglect of the Mubarak era and what must be done to reverse its consequences.

Whomever is elected shall become the steward to a population of some 86 million people, many of whom are illiterate, unemployed or both. As the final round is bound to be closely contested, the new president will enjoy the slimmest of mandates to revive Egypt’s inert economy, modernize its bureaucracy and rebuild its failing national infrastructure. To prevail, he must commit himself to the following to-do list:

• Conduct a national census for an accurate accounting of the number of Egyptians, their birth and literacy rates, income levels and age demographics. • Flush to the surface, audit and tax an underground economy thought to be worth several times official estimates of economic output. • Replenish the public accounts, beginning with a lopsided balance of payments and an exhausted foreign exchange reserve. Persuade a truculent and adversarial parliament that the International Monetary Fund is not an agent of Western imperialism but a badly need source of hard currency. • Revive foreign investment despite significant political risk and a likely devaluation of the local currency. • Domesticate and professionalize a corrupt military that, for the last eighteen months, has entrenched its influence over the nation’s security and intelligence agencies. Convince the public, to say nothing of the general staff, that its controlling stakes in everything from pasta factories to resort hotels are superfluous to, and a distraction from, the nation’s national security needs. • Reform a network of subsidies that promotes waste and is heavily biased in favor of big business, such as cement and fertilizer manufacturers, at the expense of social welfare agencies and programs. • Reduce and rebuild an obstructionist civil service, for decades the sinecure for an idle class of mid-level functionaries. Devolve authority away from the capital to the district and municipal level for the sake of efficiency and responsiveness. • Establish an agricultural policy so the nation can, for the first time in decades, feed itself. Impose order on the farm belt by organizing the nation’s small growers, a potentially large source of employment, into collectives and prosecute those who forcibly evict them from the land. • Provide incentives for both private and state-run banks to make credit available to small and mid-sized enterprises, the backbone of the economy. • End the speculative construction of low-income dwellings, which have encircled the capital and other major cities with unsightly, shoddily built apartment blocks. Begin the process of dismantling and replacing them with integrated housing developments, complete with access roads, street lighting, sewage facilities and clean water.

Absent a relentless, multi-pronged assault on the Mubarak legacy, Egypt’s first freely elected president will most certainly be deprived of a second term. More importantly, the nation’s faith in democratic governance will be shaken, creating space for the worst of all possible outcomes: a man on horseback with seductively simple answers to unmet challenges.

The Inconvenient Truth: Distrust of political Islam may hold back spirit of inclusivity in Egypt

Political Islam's status as a legitimate fixture in Egyptian society does not sit well with many in the country. Stephen Glain met with prominent businessman, Naguib Sawiris, and discovered that a certain antipathy towards religious governance may hinder Egypt's nascent plurality.

Yesterday I paid a courtesy call on Naguib Sawiris, the forlorn face of non-Islamist Egypt.

Naguib is one of three brothers, the sons of a successful Coptic businessman, though he staked out a fortune of his own by taking bets in the telecommunications industry that no one else could stomach. On a table in his office antechamber is a framed photograph of him strolling along a marble corridor with Kim Jong Il, the late dictator of North Korea, where his company installed a cell phone network.

The Sawiris clan and its conglomerate enterprises, the Orascom group, are lynchpins of Egyptian society, particularly now amid chronic joblessness and flat growth after the ouster last year of dictator Hosni Mubarak. When Naguib spoke out early and aggressively against the regime as the anti-Mubarak revolt erupted last January, he was putting both himself and Orascom on the line. Vindicated, he launched a political party that stands for a liberal, secular order.

If informal polls are anything to go by, the man Egyptians elect in this month’s presidential election is liable to be neither liberal nor secular. Hence it was a deflated if combative Sawiris that regarded me from behind his cluttered desk in the Orascom office building.

“If the Islamists win it’s the end of the civil state,” he said, referring to Mohammed Morsi, the candidate fielded by the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, and Abdel Moneim Abu Fotouh, the ex-Brotherhood leader who split from the group to mount an independent campaign. “I’ve never been so pessimistic.”

The election, said Sawiris, was not about capitalism or socialism but human rights. An Islamist president, marching in lockstep with the country’s Islamist-dominated parliament and its Islamist-led syndicates, would impose a new constitution that would steamroller the revolution’s humanist ideals. “If there is a religious reign,” he said, “it will be about my relationship with God, what I wear, what I can drink, what art I can buy, and what movies I can watch.” Pointedly, Sawiris said the Western powers should not support an Islamist government in Egypt until it proved its commitment to ecumenical democracy. He admonished Western journalists, (and by implication this one), who have characterized Ikhwan leaders as practical men who would govern from the center so as not to antagonize the moderate Egyptian middle.

I can sympathize with Naguib, who has far more at stake in this election than I do. But to pre-emptively isolate a freely elected government for its religious identity would likely arouse its most illiberal instincts. And truth be told, since the Ikhwan has assured the US government of its respect for Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and its contracts with foreign investors, it is more or less free to harass women, Christians and dissidents with nary a peep from Washington.

For Naguib, and for those who have invested their hopes in people like him, the inconvenient truth of political Islam is its legitimacy as a fixture of the very civic society they fear will crumble under its authority. When Sawiris says, as he did in our conversation yesterday, that he will resist the Islamist tide “until his last breath,” he is placing himself in opposition to a plurality, if not a majority, of his fellow Egyptians. That is a losing gamble, even for someone who built an empire beating the odds.

Here’s Hoping: Economic hopes are fixed on the presidential election in Egypt

The economic travails of Egypt have barely been addressed in the run up to the historic presidential election. Stephen Glain discovers that hopes are pinned on a spectacular turnaround once a new president is in place.

Conspicuously absent from Egypt’s presidential elections—the first round of which ends today (Wednesday)—has been a serious discussion about the flagging economy. Last week, when Standard & Poor’s declared that a depreciation of the Egyptian Pound was inevitable and that it was reducing its credit rating on the banking sector, there was nary a mention of it in the local press.

Among the many businessmen, party leaders and economists I’ve spoken with there seems to be a faith-based notion that the election of a new president—albeit one whose powers remain undefined by a constitution that has yet to be written—will almost by itself revive foreign direct investment, worker remittances, Suez Canal traffic, and tourism arrivals. This for an economy that suffers from an acute liquidity crisis and is expected to grow by less than one percent this year, if at all.

Khairat El-Shater, deputy supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood and himself a highly successful businessman, laid out for me a compelling plan to modernize Egyptian tourism, rebuild its failing infrastructure and establish a world-class industrial base. When I asked where the financing would come from given Cairo’s depleted foreign exchange reserves and absence of investment from abroad, he said it would come surging back after the election.

On Tuesday, Tarek Shaalan, who heads the economics committee for Egypt’s largest Salafi party, told me the economy would be saved by the post-election enabling of Islamic banking and investment funds that would flush to the surface the country’s vast underground economy, where it could be audited and taxed. All this would happen by the end of the year, he said, once the new president is sworn in.

It’s not just the Islamists who are stirred by the presumption of a post-election idyll. With few exceptions, Cairo’s investment banks are seizing on isolated signs of recovery—mainly an extraordinary rise in worker remittences from Libya, a modest increase in foreign reserves of $100 million and a slight rise in local-currency deposits—as the basis of sanguine growth estimates.

None of this is to disparage Egypt’s historic elections nor enthusiasm among the people who boldly struggled for them. And it is entirely possible that political stability, or at least a facsimile of it, will revive investment and the tourist trade. Structural problems that impair the economy run wide and deep, however, and expectations of their speedy resolution could ultimately render Egyptians cynical and dismissive about the very democratic system that can redeem them after thirty years of oppression and neglect. While they are rightly proud of having deposed a dictator, the popular notion that “the hard part is over” makes for a dangerous conceit.

A New Napoleon: The Ikhwan "behaves as if there never was a revolution."

Stephen Glain meets with former Muslim Brotherhood figure, Kemal Helbawi, and assesses the implications of an MB success in the presidential elections.

On Saturday I met with Kemal Helbawi, who was an esteemed member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood before he angrily resigned from the group after the toppling of dictator Hosni Mubarak last year. He blamed senior leaders in the Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, for abandoning the ideals of the movement for the sake of controlling it.

“They were slow to join the movement and once they did they declined to sustain it,” said the 73-year-old Helbawi, who joined the Ikhwan at the age of twelve. “They had the resources to uphold the revolution’s demands of dignity and social justice but instead they invested in their own interests. They behave as if there never was a revolution.”

As Egypt embarks on historic presidential elections, criticism of the Ikhwan, even among those who respect the group for its opposition to decades of Egyptian dictatorship, is as common a refrain as the mullein’s call to prayer. They scorn its leaders for allegedly cutting back-room deals with the army generals who have been running Egypt since Mubarak’s departure, contesting and winning half the seats in parliament after declaring they would limit themselves to a quarter or so of the chamber, and fielding a candidate in this week’s presidential election after foreswearing any desire for executive power.

Established in 1928, the Ikhwan is the world’s largest Islamist movement with its own political machine, social welfare service and business empire. Having outlasted Mubarak’s autocracy through a dogged campaign of peaceful resistance, it emerged as a political powerhouse in the post-revolution era. Instead of playing the long game that was the key to its survival, however – lying low and reading the political terrain while coexisting peacefully with secular and non-Islamic society – Brotherhood leaders estranged themselves from many swing voters by promising one thing and doing another.

As voters prepare to vote in the first round of elections on Thursday, Mohammed Morsi of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Development Party has emerged as a frontrunner less for his vision and charm than for the immense logistical resources available to him. The Ikhwan is thought to have hundreds of thousands of members, each of whom have sworn fidelity to its leader, the Supreme Guide, as shock troops in the campaign. Morsi, an engineer by training, is widely tipped to survive the first round of the election and perhaps become president. There, he would face an economy in disarray and the crush of high expectations from an electorate that is eager to redeem the profits of its hard-won democracy. Few expect Morsi or the other campaign leaders – the former diplomat Amr Moussa, for example, or the exiled Brotherhood leader Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh – to be anything but one-term presidents.

Should Morsi prevail, the Brotherhood would control the executive and parliamentary branches of governments with all the responsibility for success or failure such power confers. It would become the political equivalent of a new Napoleon, another of Egypt’s many conqueror-kings, who famously said he would rather fight against a coalition of forces than fight with it.

And we all know what happened to him.

On Foreign Policy, Romney More Like Nixon than His Own Father

U.S. News & World Report  2011-10-13 To reject Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate solely on the basis of his faith is to be in contempt of the First Amendment. To do so for the content of his foreign policy address last week, however, is perfectly acceptable.

Read the entire post on the U.S. News and World Report website.

Washington's China Debate Is About Caricature, Not Reality

U.S. News & World Report  2011-10-7 Recent posts on the National Interest's website offer divergent yet refreshingly sober-minded assessments of China's growing assertiveness in Asia. Bruce Gilley, an assistant professor of political science at Portland State University, argues that a red tide of nationalism within the increasingly modern Chinese military, to say nothing of the country's netroots, makes some kind of conflict with the West likely. Gilley expects Xi Jinping, the senior apparatchik who is expected to become China's president within the next few years, will side with the military in response to challenges at home and abroad and is not prone to conciliation with the U.S. or Asia.

Read the entire post on the U.S. News & World Report website.