In a press conference this afternoon, President Obama denounced the Egyptian government's acts of "suppression" and "violence" during the protests, and called for "an orderly transition process, right now." But, as he has throughout the crisis in Egypt, he stopped short of demanding that President Hosni Mubarak leave office immediately.
Mubarak has said he'll go in September, when elections are scheduled. But for the hundreds of thousands of protesters who thronged Tahrir Square again today, that's not good enough. So why won't Obama call for Mubarak to leave office now? To help answer that question, The Lookout spoke to Daniel Levy, co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.
Levy explained that there are some legitimate constraints on what Obama can prudently do and say. To start, Levy said, he doesn't have the power to make Mubarak leave. "President Obama cannot wave a magic wand and get Mubarak onto a plane or into a retirement home," Levy said. "America has leverage, but it's not decisive leverage."
It's possible that Mubarak will hang on until September. "Right now, it looks like the regime is trying to play a game of digging in and sitting this thing out," he said.
That means a call by Obama for Mubarak to leave office could prove unsuccessful—which would be disastrous for America's negotiating power going forward. "If you play that card unsuccessfully, there's not a lot more you can do," Levy said. "You are very limited in your next escalatory move."
It would also do further damage to America's already diminished reputation on the world stage. "The more assertive America is, but fails to carry the day, the more exposed the limitations of its power become," Levy said. "The reality today is diminished American power. How much do you want to prove it?"
President Obama faces some genuinely thorny problems in weighing how to respond. But Levy said the Obama administration is opening itself to criticism that it has not more enthusiastically embraced the prospect of a genuinely democratic Egypt, and instead is "crouching into a defensive posture."
Why hold back when the values animating the protesters—democracy, freedom, and openness—are so in sync with America's own? In part, Levy said, it's because of what he called "an allergy to Islamists in positions of political participation and power in the Arab and muslim world." Numerous commentators on the American right have lately offered dark warnings about the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's major Islamist political party, but fears of political Islam exert an impact on the administration's thinking, too. These fears are misplaced, Levy argued. "You can't do genuine open democratic reform in the Arab world if you are only willing to accept a democracy that discriminates against political Islamists."
In addition, Levy said, some in the administration see advantages to the Egyptian army continuing to play a leading role in a post-Mubarak government. The United States has long had close ties to Omar Suleiman, the former military man who Mubarak this week appointed vice president. Indeed, in the 90s, Suleiman was the CIA's point man in Egypt for renditions, where America sent detainees to Egypt for brutal interrogations.
Finally, Levy said, Israel is "the elephant in the room." Mubarak's regime has been good for Israel, he explained, and not only because it preserved peace on her southern border. The larger factor, Levy argued, is that autocratic regimes don't need to be responsive to public opinion on issues like Israel's occupation of the West Bank. "You could take a very soft line on what happens to the Palestinians, if you're an Arab regime." By contrast, a democratic Egypt, he said, might look more like Turkey, another democracy, which is far less willing to go along with the current policies of the Israeli government.
And as Israel's main ally, that would put the United States in a difficult position. "Having to be responsive to Arab democracy and Arab public opinion is probably an impossible balancing act for America," said Levy.
(President Obama meets with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Oval Office of the White House, April 2009: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110205/ts_yblog_thelookout/time-for-mubarak-to-go-why-obama-hedges
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