In the last paragraph of my last article in Al-Ahram Weekly, I concluded that the Egyptian government would not be able to transfer the country to a real democracy and to improve the economy unless the state of chaos ended and the people felt more secure in their homes, something which the Tamarod Movement that led the revolt against ousted former president Mohamed Morsi had failed to do. I also said that short of doing this might cause a new uprising by the millions of Tamarod protesters against the same military that had helped them depose Morsi. This should not be interpreted as ungratefulness from the revolutionaries to the military for its help. There would have been more bloodshed without the military moving to play its role. However, it would be a wake-up call to save Egypt, which is as ancient as the Nile and the glorious ancient Egyptian antiquities, from collapse, to restore real democracy to the country, and to urge the military not to yield to America's threats to cut off its aid to Egypt and other punitive measures, as I explained in my article. This situation has become the subject of many foreign analysts, who have offered solutions to the crisis. They have concluded that Egypt has become a country that is in decay and that Egypt's politics have been dominated, they say, by two powerful organisations, the military, which seems to have claimed the right to rule since the late president Gamal Abdel-Nasser's coup d'état in 1952, and the Brotherhood, which has wanted to set Egypt back to the time of the birth of Islam in 622 CE and has a misguided interpretation of the Sharia that demeans women, belittles democracy and has little respect for other faiths. This picture was presented by the US journalist Thomas Friedman in a late August column in the New York Times. Friedman supported his views by referring to an article by Rami Khouri in the Beirut Daily Star in mid-August, which attributed the chaotic situation in Egypt to “soldiers and spirituality” that are “designed for worlds other than governance and equitably providing services and opportunities for millions of people from different religions, ideologies and ethnicities”. Friedman and Khouri believe that Egypt has faced two bad choices: either the military or the Brotherhood. They wonder whether a third choice would be the solution to rescuing Egypt through the introduction of a constitutional system. But Friedman, who considers himself to be an expert in Middle East affairs, said that the Arab world “did not have the roots of democracy that could quickly blossom or modernising autocrats who had built broad, educated middle classes that could gradually take control,” as had happened in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the abolition of communism and in the East Asian countries. The fact was, Friedman said, that Egypt was not like the Eastern European countries that were liberated from the communist influence of the Soviet Union, and it did not have the presence of NATO or the European Union to help transform it into a democratic and prosperous nation. However, Friedman's is not an accurate description of Egyptian politics, and there are two reasons to rebut Friedman's argument. Firstly, Egypt was the first country in the Middle East to have a modern constitution early in the last century, which, in spite of some weak points, was far better than the ones that followed it. Under this constitution, the prime minister was the leader of the political party that won a majority of the seats in parliament. MPs were independent and free to discuss any issue. Freedom of expression and of the press was protected to a great extent, especially during the reign of King Farouk I. In one incident, the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas Pasha, the head of the then Wafd Party that had gained a great deal of popularity among the people, presented a bill to parliament to allocate millions of pounds to repairing the king's yacht, but the majority of members voted against it, including members of the prime minister's own party, for example. One senator, Mustafa Marei, a renowned lawyer, presented a resolution to the upper house to demand full accountability from the Palace for the defective arms that had been supplied to Egyptian soldiers during the first war between Egypt and Israel in 1948. When they tried to shoot at the enemy, the rifles reversed and killed them, and there was evidence at the time that the Palace had been involved in shady arms deals. At the end of King Farouk's reign, Ahmed Hussein, the head of an opposition party, wrote an article in the party's newspaper with a picture of some poor citizens wearing rags in the middle of winter. The article was entitled “Your subjects, Your Majesty.” Secondly, the United States has never intended to encourage democracy in any underdeveloped country, even in Egypt, its ally. It has been the standard policy of the governments in Washington to ally themselves with authoritarian regimes in Egypt in order to serve US interests in the Suez Canal and to get easy and swift air passage for its military aircraft over Egypt's airspace, preventing Egypt from building up its military while allowing Israel to build an arsenal of atomic bombs. The US has always been more interested in ensuring Egypt's continuing adherence to the peace treaty with Israel than in helping it to achieve democracy, as I demonstrated in my last article in the Weekly. The Egyptian government has become suspicious of the Obama administration's association with the Muslim Brotherhood, and there were reports by the Egyptian Ministry of International Cooperation after the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak that the US was paying the Brotherhood millions of dollars in subsidies. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama's former secretary of state, even made it clear that the US had a strong relationship with the Brotherhood. It also had a good relationship with Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya, the violent Islamist group that assassinated the late president Anwar Al-Sadat. Two members of this group were tried and sentenced to death for the assassination of Sadat, and the group's leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was charged with planning the assassination, was acquitted for lack of evidence. With the help of the CIA, Abdel-Rahman then travelled to Sudan, where he applied for a US visa and was subsequently granted permanent resident status in the US. The CIA arranged his marriage to an American woman, even though he already had an Egyptian wife and US law prohibits polygamy. When the time was ripe, the US then arrested Abdel-Rahman on the charge that he had planned to bomb buildings in New York, and he was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. Suspicions regarding the Obama administration's association with the Islamist groups were reinforced when the conviction spread that the US administration was attempting to destroy Egypt and to separate it into different parts by supporting the terrorism of the Brotherhood and Morsi's plan to let the Hamas group in Gaza take over Sinai and turn it into a homeland for the Palestinians, as per my article in the Weekly in 2012. Obama denied these attempts on 15 August, when he announced sanctions against Egypt. However, this was rebuffed by representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, clips on the Internet showing Gohmert talking about the US giving Morsi's government some $1.5 billion in aid to support Brotherhood terrorism, as was reported in the US media in late August. However, during their visit to Egypt in September representatives Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Steve King of Iowa lauded the crackdown on the Brotherhood, comparing General Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi to George Washington, the first president of the United States and the commander of the American army that defeated the British at the end of the American War of Independence. The view among the Egyptian public that Obama wanted to continue a US alliance with the Brotherhood, however, has been depicted in banners showing him as a Salafi wearing a galabiya and with a long white beard, reflecting the conspiracy theory believed by the anti-Morsi and pro-military forces in Egypt. The banner illustrated this view by including the slogan in English of “Obama — Stop Terrorism”. Rumour has it that the Brotherhood's leadership was even considering appointing Obama to succeed Mohamed Badie as the group's supreme guide, but the idea was dropped on the grounds that Obama was too democratic for them. Although democracy in Egypt is needed to put the country on track, we have to realise that in other countries democracy was not established overnight. The world has been governed by authoritarian systems for thousands of years, and these once also dominated Europe. Only after the American and French revolutions did America get its independence from Britain and France get rid of its corrupt monarchical regime. In both cases, a lot of blood was shed before the two countries started enjoying freedom, with the democratic principles pioneered in America later making their way over to Europe. But there were many mishaps in Western democracy, especially in the United States, before this happened. It took more than 100 years for the US Supreme Court to enforce the first amendment of the constitution that protected freedom of speech and of the press. Moreover, even in the US democratic principles are not always secure. Former president George W Bush went to war against a country that had not attacked the US, for example, in the war against Iraq, and he went against the constitutional right of due process in law when he allowed the detention of those accused of terrorism at Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba indefinitely with no charges against them and allowed their torture by army personnel. He also ordered a system of “rendition” under which the US Justice Department sent terrorism suspects to countries in the Middle East allied with the US, including Egypt, to be tortured until they confessed to committing crimes they were innocent of. He followed a policy of eavesdropping, spying on domestic and international telephone calls, e-mails and the social media used by American citizens without court warrants. President Obama, a former law professor who voted against the war in Iraq when he was a senator, and whose presidential campaign slogan was “Change — Yes We Can”, promised to close the Guantanamo Prison if he was elected president and stop the torture of those who were detained. However, he has continued the practice of eavesdropping and rendition. Obama's secretary of justice, Eric Holder Jr, has said that his department was continuing the practice of the rendition of terrorism suspects to foreign countries “for questioning only” and that the United States was not responsible if they were tortured. Such hypocrisy is shameful. First, why would the US government send a prisoner to be questioned in a foreign country and then bring him back unless it was sending him to be tortured? Second, Obama, by his own declaration, planned the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, the former head of Al-Qaeda, by deploying US navy seals that breached Pakistan's sovereignty and killed him at his home in Pakistan. Obama has also increased the missions of drone planes to kill suspects abroad, leading to the killing of many innocent foreign civilians and of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a United States citizen considered to be a terrorist, and his son in Yemen in separate operations without subjecting them to due process of law. The administration then said that the son had not been targeted. Democracy has several faces, and it requires patience and belief in the system if it is to succeed. Governing a country is different from leading an army: whereas the latter requires absolute obedience, this cannot be required from civilians. However, one cannot equate the democratic systems in the US or in parts of Europe with the systems used in Egypt in the recent past. Morsi, for example, was the first elected president in the country's history, but he was little different from his predecessors in his following of autocratic rule and his breaking of his promises to maintain plurality in the government and to respect human rights, the freedom of the press and speech, freedom of religion, to prevent the demeaning of women by the Islamists and to ensure equality for all. Instead, he became self-destructive, or, as Emad Al-Deeb, an Egyptian TV talk show host, put it recently, he “committed suicide”. Democracy in Egypt will take time. But there can be no real democracy in the country as long as a large percentage of the voters are illiterate. Not only can many people not read or write their own names or the names of the candidates running for president or the parliament, but they are also not able to understand the candidates' programmes and can be easily bribed or brainwashed. Many countries do not allow such people to vote, or stipulate that a candidate to an elected office must have a secondary school diploma as a minimum. Illiteracy is a disgrace for the country and for the candidates to public offices who win their seats by the support of illiterate voters. It should be a national duty to eliminate it within a given period of time and to make sure that a university student should not graduate before teaching at least 10 or more illiterate persons how to read or write. Indeed, one of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's good deeds, and they were very few, was that he eliminated illiteracy in Iraq. In the United States, no permanent residents are granted US citizenship unless they pass a written and verbal test in English, no matter if they have earned doctoral degrees in the United States. I have raised the subject before in the Weekly, and I am repeating it now. Let us start on the right path. I am sure the military will be proud of themselves, and the people will be proud of them, when they lead the country to real democracy.
