As anti-government demonstrators in Midan Tahrir found their peaceful protests interrupted by Molotov cocktails launched from nearby buildings, President Mubarak proclaimed that Egypt had a stark choice between “chaos and stability.” Mubarak today explained the need for him to oversee an orderly transition, while pro-Mubarak forces widely reported to include undercover security forces demonstrated the government’s understanding of “stability” to the Egyptian people, escalating their attacks to target journalists and human rights activists.
The fast-changing events unfolding across Egypt over the last ten days have been nothing if unpredictable. A foreseeable aspect of the current upheaval in Egypt, however, is the decades-old “stability” argument unfortunately driving the Obama administration’s cautious handling of the situation in Egypt.
Despite Vice President Biden’s comments to the contrary, the Mubarak dictatorship’s repressive policies over the last thirty years have been well-documented. Egypt was recently ranked 138th in an index of democratic freedom, behind countries like Cuba and China. Yet many political commentators argue that Mubarak is the only force preserving the stability of a country vital to American national interests. Without Mubarak’s autocratic regime, they claim, Egypt would descend into a virulently anti-American, Islamist state, led by the “only” alternative power center — the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Obama administration needs to move past this policy of “stability” and embrace the Egyptian protesters as it embraced the Iranian protesters in 2009. Although President Obama has shifted his rhetoric over the last week to increasingly critique Mubarak, his reluctance to call for Mubarak’s immediate ouster affirms the Egyptian people’s perception that the United States is enabling the repressive regime. The very real fear is that by continuing to support Mubarak, we are quickly losing the faith of a whole generation of Egyptians — Muslim and Christian, religious and secular — a much greater concern than our misplaced fear of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Often inaccurately equated with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood has never been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist group, and was recently described as “hated” by al-Qaeda. The organization was founded in 1928 by Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna to combat Egyptian youth’s drift away from Islam and the perceived corrupting influence of British imperialism. The tenuous links made between the Brotherhood and the rise of global jihadism are usually localized in Sayyid Qutb, an Islamist political thinker who popularized the notion of international violent jihad. Yet these commentators fail to mention that Qutb left the Muslim Brotherhood because of his radicalism, and helped to establish militant Islamist groups like Islamic Jihad that directly challenged the Brotherhood’s moderate and gradualist approach.Since the 1970’s, the Muslim Brotherhood has further moderated its aspirations and rhetoric, explicitly advocating for change through the existing political system and civil society. A new cadre of moderate leaders such as Abdel Moneim abu el-Fotouh and Essam al-Eryan have emerged who express the desire for the Muslim Brotherhood to operate as a democratic political party with Islamic inspiration, in the mold of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).Yet the Muslim Brotherhood’s image as an extreme jihadist group persists because it effectively serves the interests of the existing government. Being the only credible opposition that survived Mubarak’s slow evisceration of social and political institutions, the Muslim Brotherhood was the greatest threat to the Mubarak regime. Using a savvy lobbying operation that played on the American government’s fear of radical Islam, the Egyptian regime has been able to persuade administration after administration that the only alternative to the status quo was another Iranian Islamic Republic.
The current demonstrations have clearly proven that the Muslim Brotherhood is not the only alternative to the existing regime. Millions of young Egyptians, previously disengaged from the seemingly immutable political system, have taken to the streets to call for the removal of the government and a freer society. When chants of “Allah Akbar” began, crowds of protesters chanting, “Muslim and Christian, we are all Egyptian” soon drowned them out. The Muslim Brotherhood itself has recognized that it has become merely one component of the opposition, and has rallied behind the leaderless movement.
While the West has previously justified Mubarak's security crackdowns as preventing the rise of militant Islam, no similar justification now exists for President Obama and other Western leaders, as protesters cutting across all ideological and religious lines face the brutal repression of the regime. By remaining hesitant to directly call for Mubarak’s removal, the American government is only strengthening the hand of the radical, anti-democratic opposition we fear.
The Obama administration must firmly and publicly announce support for a rapid transition without Mubarak towards free and fair elections, and implement a policy of direct engagement with the entire opposition movement, including the Muslim Brotherhood. If this policy shift occurs in time, the American government may be taking the most significant step towards establishing the permanent, democratic peace that has long eluded the region. Otherwise, the U.S. will be sitting on the sidelines as the Egyptian people endure violence on the streets in the pursuit of the same values and ideals that we claim to hold so dear.
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