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PDF“From an American perspective, the situation in Egypt is a nightmare,” according to Robert Satloff and Eric Trager, respectively executive director and fellow at of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The newly elected Islamist majority’s plans to implement Shariah law at the expense of political pluralism and religious and minority rights, they contend. Defending such rights – especially for Coptic Christians, “the canaries in Egypt’s coal mine” – will determine the fate of the transition.
“A narrow focus on protecting pluralism and minority rights, rather than a broader and more diffuse effort to grow Egypt’s democratic institutions, is easier to maintain, more conducive to a sticks-and-carrots assistance policy, and more likely to keep open future political alternatives,” they suggest.
But fears that that the Arab Spring has become an Islamist Winter are overblown, says Martin S. Indyk, the Brookings Institution’s Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy. He disputes the conventional wisdom that Arabs cannot sustain liberal democracy and require centuries to develop “democratic culture,” suggesting that recent developments may be to the strategic advantage of the US – and Israel:
In short, what is happening in Egypt confounds expectations and renders dismissive assumptions about its democratic revolution at best premature, at worst both wrong and misleading as a guide to appropriate American (and Israeli) policy. Free elections and dire circumstances have quickly generated a surprising pragmatism among Egypt’s newly empowered political actors. They understand that they need the goodwill of the United States. At a time of supposed decline in American influence in the Middle East, we suddenly find ourselves with new possibilities in democratic Egypt — the largest, military most powerful, culturally most influential, geostrategically most important country in the Arab world.
Although Egypt’s ruling military today transferred legislative authority to the new assembly, it will remain a central player in the new political dispensation, says Georgetown University professor Paul Sullivan – not least because of its economic leverage:
A glimpse of the military’s economic might emerged last week when the government-run media reported that the military had provided $1 billion to the Egyptian government’s central bank to help prop up its faltering currency. It has raised a question by economists and military analysts alike as to how many militaries in the world have sufficient revenue to bail out their own government?
Newly-elected liberals like Amr Hamzawy, a former analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center and political science professor at Cairo University, want greater transparency and accountability of the military’s economic holdings:
This, Hamzawy told GlobalPost, is why “they are keen on securing their economic assets” by trying to preserve the remnants of the old regime that will allow them to continue to avoid transparency and accountability to parliament. …But Sullivan cautions that the US will have to tread carefully in pushing the military to reform.
“It’s a dangerous moment, and the last thing we want to is inject ourselves into a highly emotional and time and create a wave of anti-Americanism. And so if we want to retain a reasonable, productive relationship with Egypt we have to support the democratic movement and encourage the military to be part of that,” he said.
“We should engage cautiously and quietly with the Muslim Brotherhood,” he added, “even if there is legitimate concern about what the Muslim Brotherhood will do when they get a taste of power.”
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A Perfect Marriage of Freedom & Justice: a HOW-TO
(What It’ll Take to Save Syria)
Ranked Ballot (voters ranking candidates in order of preference) will give us (PRACTICABLE!) Instant TRUE Democracy for ALL the World, & even put an end to all war forever.
Because it gives an equal chance of winning to not just all parties, but all combinations of programs, “RB” is the only thing that’s truly both most Just & most Free. Because of the appeal of this great equality to the poor of the world, & because it always elects the candidate most exactly in the middle of all voting, RB is top-dead-center counter extremist, & more anti-terrorist than all the many recent retrenchments combined, such as disallowing the tendency of parliamentary systems to give the top to the biggest gang on the block, sometimes with violently extremist results. RB is the sole unchangeable plank & bylaw of a Ranked Ballot Party, the only practicable third party.) We imagine running on the single issue of RB, promising a citizens’ advisory board based on Organized Communications, “OC”, small randomly assigned discussion groups electing reps to higher & higher randomly assigned levels, by means of RB, ‘til one small group, most exactly in the middle of all voting remains, to guide us in the rest, which by its merest invitation to speak inevitably names the next winner That’s the instant part. You do the same, from the most local on up. By the power of its example alone, RB will give us practicable instant worldwide true democracy. Virtually no democracy has ever been attacked by another. In a world of only democracies, there would no longer be need of the counter-productive wastefulness of armies, war or the preparation for war. RB will bring us that & all else: a real solution to terror, a perfect marriage of Freedom & Justice, Tradition & Modernity, Palestinian & Jew, Free Market & Community, all the fairness, payback & make-up one could wish for, clean back to the Cro-Magnons, ecologically sustainable politics, what’s best for all workers, instant global women’s liberation, world-wide luxury, a rationalization of the drug wars, human unity, the Freedom of Justice & the Justice of Freedom, perhaps the only possible solution to the world’s only real problem, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (once they both are made to have to adopt RB), even integrity. RB is to the horse & buggy two-party system as shopping in the Mall of America is to shopping in Soviet Russia. The majority of the problems we face are due to the heavy-footedness of the two-party system. RB lessens the power of the extremes, whether authoritarian, economic or sectarian, except through what they can gain by persuasion, which is only what’s just. While it would be equally useful for all else, RB’s real power is perhaps most clearly shown in the case of Iraq. Unless its Parliament comes to select the Prime Minister by means of RB, it may not hold & the country, region & world will be in danger of going to war over some ancient grudge, oil well, multi-ethnic city, or sabotaged pipeline. While the new constitution does call for the selection of the President by a 2/3 vote in the first round (even if only by the parliament & not the people) (who may then decide who will form the new government) & then by a run-off between the top two vote getters in the second round, if that fails to move all three tribes to nominate centrists, then the resulting handful of old men in a back room will fall far short of RB’s ultimate retail politics. RB would be equally useful for all electoral systems (parliamentary or presidential, the parliaments choosing their PMs by RB from among their members, lest they produce another Hitler) coops, collective leaderships, tribal groupings, religious confessions, political parties, associations or, even cabals. Whoever gets there first wins. For leaders to best represent their country, or district, whether chosen at large or by a representative body, they must be the perfect compromise, most exactly in the middle, as is given by RB. Yet because it gives minorities a real say in which member of the plurality/majority gets chosen, RB is the only thing that will lead Iraqis, or anyone else, to support any plan more than inadequate confederation. It will result in “phantasmagoric subtlefaction”, real-time alternatives to all proposals, from wherever: market, coop or social, or tribal, theological or universal, answering infinitely more questions at a time than the two party system’s “who is least bad”. Both more Liberty & Justice can be found in RB than in any ideology. With brakes & reverse comes no more need to suppress popular movements around the world. RB will give us subtlety, responsivity, light-footedness, long-sightedness, objectivity, economy, unity, accountability, integrity & victory over extremism. Palestinians & Jews will give up fighting over a sliver of desert & become members of global cooperatives, all the various forms of hegemonism, whether up front, subterranean or unconscious, will be given up, in exchange for leading the world to the light, & America will finally realize the need for an adequate, howsoever minimal, safety net as the price & foundation of a free market. Help put this idea, in time, to as many as possible, before “Clockwork Orange” (overpopulation), “1984” (high-tech dictatorship), cosmic collision, tectonic, economic or environmental collapse, or literalist or criminal contretemps. The cost of a full page national US ad (sufficient to put RB to virtually all the world) would be repaid in no time, once all that money gets put to actual productive use, at pre-9/11 US annual defense spending of ~$10,000 per family. Ten to the power of ten (ten levels of groups of ten) would be sufficient to organize & unite all mankind. RB is very freeing. Because it always chooses the one most in the middle, all who support it are perfectly top-dead-center, with no more need to fear self expression. Politics will become a family discussion around the kitchen table, with no more jumping back & forth between extremes, or absence of the economists’ requirement of predictability for growth. All that’s needed is to let go of the nut & get your fist back out of the knothole, to free yourself, & to rest in the knowledge that RB will give us perfect Freedom & perfect Justice, at one & the same time, even if not necessarily in the form imagined, as if anyone would then care. Unless all the world’s women have total control over their own bodies, no program or condition will ever amount to anything, because over-population will just eat it up. No woman ever got pregnant to have an abortion. Good enough for New Zealand, Australia, Kerala India, Iraq, London, Ireland, Cambridge Mass, Burlington & 95% of the townships of Vermont, Pierce County Washington, St Paul & Minneapolis Minnesota, the Utah Republican Party for the selection of statewide candidates, the platforms of both the Green & Libertarian Parties & 50 college student bodies across the US with more places coming every year, but not good enough for the rest of us? It must be in somebody’s interest! How can any wish it of others if they do not have it themselves? Having spent every spare moment from the invasion, to the vote on the constitution emailing every Iraqi we could find about RB, we would like to claim some little credit for the reforms they did adopt. The only imaginable definition of Freedom (& Morality) is “Do as you wish, but harm no other”. The maker & sustainer of this world (& cosmos!) could have no need of one bit of it. The fiercer the history of the planet, the sooner it would have been blissed out behind ethnic homogeneity, & thus democracy. Tax consumption, not investment, & spread the productivity around. All powers to their lowest appropriate level. All human evil is due to the out of phase fluctuation of population & food supply, so no-one alive is responsible for the mess we find ourselves in, except for what they do now. Justice is the redress of past violence, Freedom the current absence of violence & Nonviolence the only basis of all Morality. Just go out & collect signatures, asking those who sign to collect them for you as well. The more the merrier. (The “additive” form of RB is to count the first choices & if no-one has 50%, to add in the next choices, & so on until someone finally does.) Imagine the condition the world would be in today, if Hitler had never come to power, there was no need, or possibility, of using the fear of the theft of democratic revolutions to suppress democracy itself, all the parliaments of the world, as well as the US, had been using RB right along & perhaps the Bolsheviks hadn’t managed to steal the Russian Revolution. “Men do not light a light & set it under a bushel.” zoe morgan sydney z, preferentiality@gmail.com, preferentiality@yahoo.com.