Aziza Sami gives an overview of 30 years of strategic interaction between Egypt and the US From Anwar El-Sadat to Hosni Mubarak, and Richard Nixon to George W Bush -- two Egyptian presidents and seven US administrations have for better or worse negotiated "strategic ties" between their two countries for the past 30 years. Throughout, the Middle East conflict has remained central to the relationship, tensions rising or abating in proportion to the degree of which the two parties see eye to eye on the question. The "rapprochement" with the US, which started under late President Gamal Abdel-Nasser who conducted unpublicised talks with the Americans before his sudden death in 1970, was continued by his successor Anwar El-Sadat, who made a dramatic turn to the US and the West. Between Sadat and his successor President Hosni Mubarak, the styles of negotiating Egypt-US ties might differ but the parametres of the relationship remained unchanged, its cornerstones being the 1978 Camp David Accords with Israel and Egypt's economic and political liberalisation. Head of the Egyptian Council of Foreign Relations and former Ambassador to Washington Abdel-Raouf El-Reedy says that the strategic relationship continues despite the ups and downs "because of the geopolitical reality which became evident after the 1973 October war, that the US cannot attain progress in the Middle East question without Egypt. Egypt also early on realised that the US is indispensable in any negotiations with Israel. The US's geopolitical need for Egypt was as well evident during the first Gulf War, where the US, despite its military might, could not have taken on Iraqi forces in the liberation of Kuwait without the Arab participation of Arab armies, which was spearheaded by Egypt." By virtue of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, over the past 25 years, Egypt has received an annual $1.3 billion in military assistance and $815 million in economic support, this latter component in the process of being phased out since 1998. The current US-led war on Iraq has -- for the time being -- changed military configurations in the region. Qatar and the Gulf region became a base for operations during the war, with the US subsequently announcing its intentions to include countries such as Kuwait as "strategic partners" within NATO. Gamal Mazloum, a military expert and consultant with the Gulf Centre for Strategic Studies, believes that this does not detract from Egypt's position as a primary military and strategic player from which the US continues to benefit. "Qatar or Bahrain, which are small countries located in the north of the Gulf, cannot be compared to Egypt. You can move instruments and troops over there, but they cannot play the role which Egypt does by virtue of its geostrategic position, political role, and demographic weight." Mazloum, however, underscores the disparities between the military assistance provided to Egypt by way of weapons or material, compared to that given to Israel. He adds that there are also contradictions between what the Egyptian military sees as the national interest of its country, and current US policies on Palestine, Iraq and Syria. On the political level, President Mubarak might not receive the same euphoric reception within the US media which Sadat did, perhaps by virtue of the stances adopted by the current Egyptian administration on the Palestinian question and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq, which have not always been in line with US policies. Commenting on this, El-Reedy says that "Sadat, who had a keen grasp of geopolitical realities, quickly engineered a turn to the West and America even before the Soviet Union's collapse. But his often sweeping policy changes in the direction of America seemed exaggerated at times. Mubarak, on the other hand, does things in a more low-key fashion without resorting to the sort of declarations that Sadat did, such as that '99 per cent of the cards [of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict] are in the hands of the US' which greatly provoked the Egyptian and Arab public. He is also trying to build an Arab consensus." Mubarak's visits to the US have often been punctuated -- as was his most recent one on 11 April -- with periodic attacks on his person within the American media. An instance of this was an article written in The Washington Post on 12 April entitled "Our man in Cairo" which argued that "the greatest obstacle to democracy in the Arab region is Hosni Mubarak". Head of the Washington-based Middle East Institute and former US Ambassador to Cairo Edward Walker says that while the editorial policy of papers like The Washington Post is "independent" it has also tended to recently "veer more to the right recently, and could reflect the interests of some lobby groups". Walker himself suggested in an article published by the Middle East Institute also on 12 April, the day Mubarak met Bush at Crawford Ranch in Texas that "Mubarak, who has been looking for a closer relationship [with Bush] is convinced that there is enough common ground between Cairo and Washington to overcome the shouts from both capitals that the relationship is at a low point. But Mubarak may have a hard sell before him unless he finds a way to deal with the president's (agenda for political and democratic reform)". Walker also writes that "it is not an internal or domestic issue if Egypt becomes a failed state and a home to terrorism once more. It was, after all, Egypt that gave us [Ayman] El-Zawahri and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the members of which subsequently became shock troops for Al-Qa'eda ... It is not intervention in internal affairs for us to urge serious economic, political and social reform on Egypt." Such an approach might be said to reveal a new aspect to interactions between the US and Egypt. US economic assistance, because of its current phasing out, no longer effectively fulfills the function it once did, of in addition to being a donor programme, an instrument of political pressure which might ostensibly be used, through threats that it should be "cut off" made by lobbies within the US Congress and media. According to political analyst and columnist Salah Eissa, "The issue is no longer USAID and its continuation or otherwise." Mazloum concurs that the same applies on the military level "where aid is not an issue, because the Egyptian army can diversify its sources of armament". The new pressures exerted by the US, according to Eissa, "now emanate from both the Greater Middle East Initiative which purports to spread democracy in the Middle East, coupled with the perceived threat that the US could use military force in other countries, now that it has occupied Iraq." Walker however, says that his recommendation that Mubarak address the question of reform "emanates from the recommendations of the Alexandria Library Conference, and because it is in the interest of Egypt to undertake such reforms". However, less than 48 hours after Bush met with Mubarak, he announced his assurances to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sanctioning a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza (scrapping the legitimate rights of Palestinians to restore all, or at least most, territories ceased by Israel in 1967 and the right of Palestinian refugees of 1948 to return to their towns and villages). This elicited what may be one of the strongest public condemnations by Mubarak of the US to date, that "never has the United States been so hated in the region". Commenting on what this will imply for the question of 'political reform' on the Egypt-US bilateral agenda, Walker says, "As you are well aware, I did not know what President Bush was going to be doing just as President Mubarak did not know, otherwise, he would not have come". Walker adds that, "President Bush has undermined his credibility in the region by buying so strongly into Sharon's position and undercutting the roadmap." As to the implications of what this turn of events will mean for US expectations that Mubarak should "comply" with its reform agenda Walker says "given what happened, I don't think the US should expect, or require, any commitments from President Mubarak on reform or change. What I was suggesting was that it is in Egypt's interest to undertake reform, and Mubarak's signalling a serious commitment to this would have improved the atmosphere of the meeting, though now, I can certainly see no reason for him to respond to the administration on this issue." But the question of reform remains on the table. Political liberalisation and democracy have been practically "shelved" under both the regimes of both Sadat and Mubarak. Sadat's pro-US stances did not result in democracy, despite the establishment of a multi-party system which remained shackled by a multitude of constraints. Eissa, who advocates the speeding up of democratic reforms and even making use of US or European programmes assisting in this regard, says "If there is criticism in the US media of Mubarak then one must ask: Are not the points raised in these 'critical articles' true even if motivated? You can best know your defects from your enemy who will point them out to you more accurately than anyone else will." Eissa adds that, "If under Sadat, there had been real transformation towards a multi-party system, or if under Mubarak political pluralism had been encouraged, and human rights organisations not so consistently defamed for over the past 20 years we would have had a vibrant democracy by now." Underscoring what he calls "the regime's concerns related to Israel as well as the situation in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and other places, which make it cautious versus any possible domestic 'instability' as a result of reforms," Eissa argues that, "this still does not mean political reform should be put on hold the way it has under both Sadat and Mubarak. There's been a lot of procrastination in this regards." Over the past three years and as more hawkish officials have taken over in the US administration, heated interchanges have sometimes occurred between the Egyptian media and the current US Ambassador David Welch as they also did with his predecessor Daniel Kurtzer. Cynthia Nelson, anthropology professor and director of the Institute for Gender and Womens' Studies (IGWS) at the American University in Cairo, has lived in Egypt for the past 40 years remembers. She remembers Herman Eiltz, the first US ambassador to Egypt after the resumption of its diplomatic ties with Washington. "He was a top-notch professional diplomat with a strong background in Arab culture and history, who knew the country and its language and sensitivities, yet was able to promote his own country's interest. But this was a generation of Arabists, diplomats of a different background, education and philosophy about the world than nowadays". The ramifications of Egypt-US ties are many but one thing does not change: the contentiousness born out of the US's unequivocal support for Israel. "The high points in relations between Egypt and America have been when the US adopted stances considered by Egypt fair to the Arabs and working in the direction of peace. In this, the Palestinian question has been central," Abdel-Rauf El-Reedy said. From a different perspective Nelson says, "I saw the initial goodwill which Egyptians had towards America after the Eisenhower years and never felt singled out because I am an American. There was criticism of the US and its support of Israel, but Egyptians, even during the Nasser years could always dissociate between the US as a government and America as a people. Now, the sore has reached cataclysmic proportions. There is an increasing realisation that whatever party or president is in power in America, they cannot appear -- whatever they claim -- to be honest brokers. In all the time that I've been here, I haven't felt the rage and complexity of anger that there is now."
