By Sahar Aziz and Derek Clinger, Special to CNN
Editor's note: Sahar Aziz is president of the Egyptian American Rule of Law Association and a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Derek Clinger is a Law Clerk at the Egyptian American Rule of Law Association. The views expressed are their own.
Upon taking office, President Mohamed Morsy vowed to eliminate corruption in Egypt. Indeed, corruption was among the first issues he identified as posing the most serious challenge to the Egyptian economy. Yet despite his rhetoric, little has changed under his administration – so far, at least.
By the end of last year, Egypt had dropped six spots in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index, a measure of the perceived level of public sector corruption. Similarly, the Global Defense Sector Corruption Index ranked Egypt among the countries most susceptible to defense sector corruption.
By Steven A. Cook, CFR
Editor’s note: Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This entry of From the Potomac to the Euphrates originally appeared here. The views expressed are his own.
Egypt is a mess. Just two short years after the uprising that brought Hosni Mubarak’s long rule to an end, the country is paralyzed politically, protests have become increasingly violent, sectarian tensions are high, the public health system is in total disarray, and the economy is near collapse. Nothing has gone right in this country of 84 million people that has traditionally been the most influential in the region – for good or bad – and since the mid-1970s a pillar of U.S.-Middle East policy. It is not only the peace between Egypt and Israel, but also the U.S. Navy’s access to the Suez Canal, the many daily U.S. military over flights critical to the United States in confronting the Iranian threat, and Egypt’s logistical assistance for U.S. operations in Afghanistan and until not too long ago Iraq that are of paramount importance to Washington.
As a result, an objective observer might come to the reasonable conclusion that Egypt needs help and that the international community should do what it can to help pull Egyptians back from the brink. That is certainly the view of most analysts from across the political spectrum, yet in one corner of the commentariat, they are actually hoping for Egypt to fail.
By Jonathan Adelman, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Jonathan Adelman is a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. The views expressed are his own.
The rapid rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt after the deposing of Hosni Mubarak last year prompted many observers to see an Islamist Egypt as inevitable. After all, the Muslim Brotherhood was the best organized and most popular political party in Egypt, the opposition was divided, there was little Western support for the secular opposition and the United States welcomed Muslim Brotherhood delegations to meet White House officials. Most recently, it worked openly with President Mohamed Morsy to achieve a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. All this seemed to many to be a rough replay of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Yet, as the mass demonstrations against the Muslim Brotherhood recently in Tahrir Square and across Egypt have shown, an Islamic Egypt, while still likely, is far from inevitable.
Successful revolutions are usually led by charismatic leaders with strong political intuition – think Mao, Lenin, Tito, Castro and Ayatollah Khomeini. All personified their revolutions and drove the masses on to victory. But Morsy is no Ayatollah Khomeini, who embodied revolutionary mysticism and spent a lifetime steeped in political thought. The reality is that Morsy lacks charisma, and spent his life gaining a PhD and chairing an Egyptian engineering school until 2010. His abrupt and radical moves belie a lack of political savoir faire.
By Isobel Coleman, CFR
Isobel Coleman is a senior fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy and director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. This entry of Democracy in Development originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own.
Egypt’s constitutional assembly pulled an all-nighter last week to hastily approve a controversial draft of a new constitution. However, the constitutional battle is far from over. Yesterday, protests rocked the country, and a crowd of some 100,000 people staged a so-called “last warning” demonstration near the presidential palace against President Morsy’s heavy-handed tactics. In addition, hundreds of journalists marched on Tahrir and at least a dozen of the country’s independent newspapers did not publish to protest against Morsy’s “dictatorship.”
The battle now moves to December 15, when Egyptians are slated to vote on the constitution in a national referendum. Liberal and secular opponents of Morsy, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the draft constitution are urging widespread civil disobedience to derail the vote; on the other hand, the Brotherhood and its allies are portraying a “yes” vote as crucial for restoring stability to the country and moving forward. Given Egyptians’ weariness of nearly two years of political paralysis and economic dislocation, the Brotherhood’s arguments for stability could easily carry the day.
Fareed Zakaria discusses Egypt’s political crisis with Harvard University’s Tarek Masoud and the Council on Foreign Relations' Steven Cook.
When you look at the struggle, is it essentially the Islamists versus the secularists? And is it fair to say, as everybody does, while the Islamists have greater appeal, they're better organized, they're going to win this?
Well, I think it is, right now - there are basically three groups here that are contending for the loyalties of the great undifferentiated mass of Egyptian people. The one group are the Islamists. The other group are the revolutionaries, the kinds of photogenic people that we remember from Tahrir Square a couple of years ago. And then the third group are the Mubarak loyalists. And during the revolution of 2011, it was really the Islamists and the young revolutionaries against the Mubarak loyalists.
Now, because the Islamists have been so heavy-handed in the way that they've governed the transitions, particularly since Mohamed Morsy's election, it's now really the revolutionaries finding themselves uneasy allies with these Mubarak loyalists. And their big grievance is this constitution, which they find to be very retrograde. It takes Egypt a significant step more toward an Islamic polity.
Watch the full panel on "Fareed Zakaria GPS" this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET.
By Isobel Coleman, Special to CNN
Isobel Coleman is a senior fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy and director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. This entry of Democracy in Development originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own.
Well, at least President Mohamed Morsy knows when to retreat. Last week, basking in the glow of having helped broker a cease-fire in Gaza, Morsy issued a decree that in essence gave Egypt’s president power over the judiciary. But in the face of growing street protests, he now appears to be backpedaling away from that brazen push for broad new powers.
Morsy’s camp argued that this decree was just a stop-gap measure to allow the transition to proceed more smoothly and ensure that the constitution gets written. But history has few examples of leaders grabbing power in the course of a revolution only to hand it over to someone else “later.” Egyptians rightly took to the streets to protest against the coming of a new pharaoh. Some carried posters of Morsy’s face morphed with that of Mubarak.
CNN speaks with former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who also more recently served as a special envoy to the Middle East, about the Israel-Gaza violence and what role Egypt could play.
What do you think about the possibility of a ceasefire?
Well, the Egyptians are now working hard as they have in the past to establish a ceasefire and a truce. Over the past several years most of the time, the two sides have had an uneasy truce that’s been broken several times. I think for both sides there is an interest in continuing and interest at some point in stopping.
By Evan Fraser, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Evan Fraser is an associate professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Canada and author of Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. The views expressed are his own.
With this summer’s terrible weather decimating America’s corn crop, pundits are suggesting that a food crisis is brewing. This isn’t an idle concern. In 2008, soaring food prices prompted sometimes violent unrest in dozens of countries. In 2010, drought and wildfire destroyed 25 percent of Russia’s wheat; the Kremlin banned grain exports. This sent food prices up, too, triggering the first protests in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt that ultimately formed the Arab Spring. Now, drought in the United States has wiped out between 20 percent and 30 percent of what corn farmers thought they were going to harvest, while corn prices have soared to all-new highs.
Will this year’s events send crowds into the streets to topple governments?
Two U.N. reports published earlier this month shed contradictory light on this question. The first report is optimistic. The September Food Price Index published by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)shows that the price of food did not rise between July and August. More importantly, the price of cereals, when taken as a whole, remained stable. This is very good news. And while cereals are still expensive relative to historic levels, prices are a bit below those that sparked riots in 2008 and 2010. One reason for this is that thanks to good harvests last year and the year before, we have a fair bit of food stored, and hence have a bit of a buffer. Jose Graziano da Silva, the director general of the FAO, stated “This is reassuring…although we should remain vigilant, current prices to do not justify talk of a world food crisis.”
By Christopher Preble and Malou Innocent, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Christopher Preble (@capreble) is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, and Malou Innocent (@malouinnocent) is a foreign policy analyst, at the Cato Institute. The views expressed are their own.
In the wake of violent protests in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, as embassies and consulates scramble to beef up security, the focus here in the United States has shifted to the U.S. presidential campaign. As the candidates trade shots over apology tours and ham-fisted reactions, their partisan bickering obscures an uglier truth: both of the major parties have supported policies that have failed to deliver tangible benefits to the American people and made the United States look weak.
Whether it is economic assistance to authoritarian allies, or wars of liberation and nation-building, the most powerful country in the world conveys the impression of begging for cooperation from nations of marginal importance. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have pursued such misguided policies. It’s time to stop, and the appalling response to a low-budget film mocking the Prophet Mohammad should prompt such a change.
Editor’s note: Zeynep Tufekci is assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of North Carolina, and she is a visiting scholar at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School. She blogs at technosociology.org and can be found on Twitter @techsoc. The views expressed are her own.
By Zeynep Tufekci, Special to CNN
The recent protests over a crude and offensive anti-Islam video serve as a lesson about cultural clash in the Internet era — not necessarily between extremists on both sides, but rather between cultural understandings of free speech and the public sphere.
It used to be that you needed to travel someplace new to experience culture clash. But by creating immediate connections between people, the Internet can create a culture clash without anyone leaving their couch.
The chasm I’m most worried about is not the one among the makers of the film and those who might have reacted to it with violence. In fact, one may argue that the hate-mongers who made this video and those who use the provocation as a pretext to kill are in a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship.
The gap I’m most concerned about is the one between the vast majority of people in the Middle East and North Africa who watched the violence in Libya with horror and disgust and yet still find the existence of the video troubling and disturbing, and everyday Americans who see the story as just a few marginal, hateful people putting this video on YouTube.
To understand why this particular narrative of free speech is deeply unsatisfying to many people in the Middle East, you have to keep in mind significant historical differences between the rest of the world and the United States.
America’s free-speech culture and its legal framework are unique in the world — and genuinely baffling to many.
As outrage over a video that characterizes the Prophet Mohammed as a womanizing buffoon spread across Muslim countries, details emerged about the killings of a U.S. ambassador and three others this week at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
So, what's next? Fareed Zakaria weighs in on extremism and freedom of speech, why a President Obama apology would be absurd and the future of the U.S.-Egypt relationship in this edited conversation: FULL POST
Editor's note: Daniel Kurtzer is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East policy studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. During a 29-year career in diplomacy, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt and to Israel. The views expressed are his own.
By Daniel Kurtzer, Special to CNN
Some years ago, while on a trans-Atlantic flight, I was reading a thriller novel when I came across a stunning passage: the American ambassador in Cairo was assassinated by the villains in the novel. What was so disconcerting personally was that I was the American ambassador at that time!
The novel got me thinking about the day after such an assassination: that is, the reactions of family, friends, colleagues and American government. Surely, there would be favorable obituaries and fond remembrances. There would be outrage over the murder and calls for bringing the perpetrators to justice. Over time, the personal sense of loss among family members would linger, while the professional friends would naturally move on.
These ruminations of long ago came back to me upon hearing the news of the assassination of Chris Stevens and three of his colleagues in Benghazi at the hands of heavily armed militants. This was an act of terrorism — horrific, inexcusable, intolerable assaults against a prominent diplomat — and a message to all Americans. FULL POST
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