中譯：“倫敦書評”關于埃及的文章

孫捷、彭玉玲

穆巴拉克之后

人民起義是澄清事件，而在埃及，與之相伴的是反抗。穆巴拉克政權——或者延續它的后穆巴拉克政權，也許會在這次挑戰中生存下來，但全面控制國家的幻想是破滅了。解放廣場的抗議事件向穆巴拉克和自1952年自由軍官政變而上臺統治埃及的軍事政權，傳遞了一個信息；向那些尤其依靠西方資助的政權獨裁者，向資助多年后卻一直感嘆在穆斯林世界缺乏民主，如今對一個出現在阿拉伯世界最大國家的民主派運動卻報以不安、怕和敵視的復雜回應的華盛頓、特拉維夫之流傳遞了一個信息。如果這是“新中東的分娩陣痛”，那么它們也完全不同于康多莉扎·賴斯在2006年夏天以色列對黎巴嫩的戰爭期間辯稱的。

第一個破滅的幻想是關于埃及人只是被動接受的神話，它已經產生強大的力量控制埃及人。“我們所有人只是等待某人來為我們工作，”我去年去開羅做報道時，一個埃及記者如是說（LRB，2010年5月27日）。盡管自二十世紀70年代以來社會運動不斷擴散，群眾反抗政權的主張對埃及來說，還是不可思議的。賈拉爾·阿明，埃及著名的社會學家，在最近半島電視臺的紀錄片中聲稱“埃及人并非革命的民族”，這一觀點，很少有人會不認同。直到憤怒日（1月25日）那天，許多埃及人——包括一定數量的民主派改革者，只為了從總統的兒子賈邁勒·穆巴拉克手中拯救自己，聽從于看守政權的情報長官奧馬爾·蘇萊曼。起義帶來的第一個震驚是埃及人自己，在反抗的最初幾天里，2月1日解放廣場就匯聚了百萬人游行，他們發現自己可以掌握自己的命運，克服對警察的恐懼，集體組織起來反抗這個政權。當他們品嘗到權力的滋味時，他們要自己來解決政權的更替。

穆巴拉克政權并非是唯一被反抗運動動搖的阿拉伯政府：這一余震在也門、約旦、約旦河西岸地區也感受得到，在那里，馬哈茂德阿巴斯的警察部隊鎮壓了一個呼應埃及民主派的示威游行。我們在開羅正目睹的的現象是新舊共存。它不僅是一個伊斯蘭起義，而且是一個基礎廣泛、架構在世俗宗教之上的社會運動，一個21世紀版本的阿拉伯民族主義，過去曾認為它已是強弩之末。盡管埃及的反抗者找來了一個臨時的名義領袖穆罕默德·巴拉迪，該運動在很大程度上是群龍無首，與之形成鮮明對比的是阿拉伯民族主義的英雄時代，占主導地位的專制人物納賽爾或布邁丁。

這始于突尼斯并蔓延至埃及的反抗運動是一場阿爾及利亞人稱hogra（即“鄙視”）的反抗斗爭，是一場對專制、酷刑、腐敗、失業和不平，及尊重美國的戰略議程——阿拉伯世界無處不在的避雷針，感到憤怒而引發的社會反抗運動。毫不奇怪，美國官員所擔心的是這場斗爭會在其他的友好國家爆發。當約翰·克里，這位曾坦率要求穆巴拉克下臺的美國官員，被詢問是否期望類似的動亂出現在約旦時，他駁回了這一想法，說“約旦的阿布杜拉國王是非常睿智、有思想、敏感、同他的人民有密切聯系的人。在那里，君主制是非常受尊重，甚至崇敬”。

多年來，阿拉伯的統治者告知他們的西方觀眾，不用擔心他們的人民，就好像他們是聽話的、有時不守規矩的孩子，這些觀眾們很高興地跟進這個建議。埃及人沒有任何可擔心的地方，自從法老時代起，埃及人就已經習慣了生活在專制下。希拉里·克林頓指出，穆巴拉克可能被埃及人所厭惡，但他仍然是我們在開羅這個家庭的人（克林頓和穆巴拉克家庭已彼此接近多年）。只要他向跨國公司開放經濟，實現高增長率，兌現他的外交政策承諾——允許美國軍艦迅速通過蘇伊士運河，作為非常規引渡方案的一部分，允許中央情報局綁架、審問激進的伊斯蘭主義者，維護與以色列的和平，圍困加沙，反對由伊朗領導的抵抗，美國的軍事援助將繼續以一年130億美元的速度流入埃及。

一個正面的委婉用語已經樹立，掩蓋了穆巴拉克政權的本質，而且新聞報道也加強這方面的內容。閱讀一下西方尤其美國，在最近鎮壓前的報紙，人們幾乎無法知曉埃及國內的不滿程度。穆巴拉克通常被描述成一個“專制”但“溫和”和“負責”的領導者，幾乎從不認為是一個獨裁主義者。大眾對酷刑的憤怒——及以上政權的舒適與以色列的關系,很少有人討論。但是，當警方襲擊了整個埃及的和平示威者，特別是在穆巴拉克的暴徒——用手榴彈、刀和汽油炸彈武裝后，穿著親穆巴拉克T恤衫，似乎是為這個場合而設計的，騎著駱駝和馬在2月2日沖過解放廣場之后，政權的真面目露出來了：粗魯、野蠻、一個不知情的東方的滑稽模仿。那些不以對埃及坦率著稱的新聞報紙開始以一個新的、生硬的方式來描述這些事。

埃及的危機對奧巴馬政府而言也是一場危機。不像中東歐的“顏色”革命，黎巴嫩反抗敘利亞軍隊，或者是伊朗的綠色運動那樣，埃及的起義針對的是一個信任的老盟友,而不是一個敵人。支持突尼斯的抗議者，對奧巴馬政府非常劃算，因為不需任何付出。而埃及則不同。因為埃及是美國大中東戰略的一個支柱，尤其是“中東和平進程’”的支柱，處理埃及問題就麻煩的多了。直到上月末,美國還毫不猶豫地稱穆巴拉克為朋友,或極盡禮儀地拜訪埃及軍政權的所有成員。但是當埃及人公開反抗穆巴拉克政權時，美國政府突然對它在在開羅的老朋友變得守口如瓶起來。一個新的話題迅速出現。一些西方官員沒有趕上的轉變：美國副總統拜登被廣泛嘲笑，他說穆巴拉克不是一個獨裁者，因為他同以色列友好；托尼·布萊爾贊美他“非常有勇氣，有力量”——昨天的消息。但當布萊爾說，埃及在過渡期內需要被“管理”—想必由西方來管理，以免傷害“和平進程”，他是想公開說華盛頓相信什么。

奧巴馬無法很好的反對抗議者，他們所體現的價值觀，在他的開羅講話，他聲稱美國將一如既往地支持。但美國政府明確不希望穆巴拉克被驅逐出埃及政府，像阿卜杜拉·本在突尼斯被驅逐那樣。相反，穆巴拉克應被免職，以避免民眾革命取代這個對美、以色列友好的政權，從而失去埃及。盡管奧巴馬向穆巴拉克施壓，勸其退出,但他還拒絕支持抗議者,依然對埃及軍方以贊譽,并堅持華盛頓將不干涉誰來統治埃及這一埃及內部事務。但在民主力量眼中，美國很難稱之為中立，射擊他們的催淚瓦斯罐上標“美國制造”，f-16在天空監測他們。在埃及的民主力量不是僅藐視穆巴拉克而是藐視美國，呼吁更多的內容而不是僅僅在軍事統治下的“管理”過渡。穆巴拉克政權被奧巴馬政府在2月1日“這個過渡期必須現在就開始”，但強調要“順利交接” 的聲明所激怒，暗示美國首選的是連續性，或是由軍隊的背叛者政變：畢竟，任何“人民力量”的表達都不被允許破壞岌岌可危的既得利益。被派去開羅傳遞華盛頓意見的人對穆巴拉克政權而言是為老朋友：Frank G. Wisner,弗蘭克·威斯納克，前駐埃及大使，并為埃及軍隊在華盛頓做說客。

穆巴拉克下臺，并非是被埃及民眾所趕下臺的，他在他最后的執政時光里，是被華盛頓和特拉維夫趕下臺的。穆巴拉克，和奧馬爾·蘇萊曼，現在過渡時期副總統，一直與以色列密切合作，從加沙封鎖到情報收集。他們允許以色列軍艦到蘇伊士運河防止武器從蘇丹走私到加沙，他們竭盡全力在法塔赫和哈馬斯之間挑撥。埃及民眾對這種親密的合作非常清楚，并感到慚愧:民主化可能會結束這種合作。一個民主政府不可能廢除與以色列簽訂的和平協議,甚至一些穆斯林兄弟會的領導人都明確表示,他們將會尊重它。然而埃及人外交政策將在開羅制定而非在華盛頓，特拉維夫了，和平將變得更冰冷。一個民主政府在開羅將不得不考慮公眾輿論，就像在土耳其埃爾多安政府做的那樣，一個前美國附庸國（與埃及形成鮮明對比）越過了美國的監管，在伊斯蘭政府領導下，建立過渡民主時期，追求一個獨立的、為穆斯林世界所廣泛欣賞的外交政策。如果埃及成為了一個民主國家，它會努力實現巴勒斯坦的的統一，解除對加沙的封鎖，改善同伊朗、真主黨的關系：這對以色列來說，不蒂是一個夢魘。

差不多從示威活動開始時起,世界上大部分人對于解放廣場的示威活動表示支持，本雅明·內塔尼亞胡及其他高級以色列官員則敦促西方政治家停止批評穆巴拉克,他們引發了對伊朗伊斯蘭革命的恐懼。多年來，以色列曾表示它可能很難期望在這樣一個危險的不民主的地區做出讓步。但是作為對穆巴拉克政府出口增長作為要求，以色列的高官和評論員開始談論阿拉伯世界的民主，仿佛它構成了對猶太國的另一個生存威脅。“如果，次日[埃及]選舉，我們有一個極端宗教獨裁，民主選舉有什么好處？”佩雷斯說到，而卡察夫阿倫斯，前國防部長，在以色列國土報想知道是否以色列僅僅和像穆巴拉克那樣的獨裁者維持和平。正如一位評論家在Yediot Ahronot以色列說，以色列已經“超越恐懼：民主的恐懼。不在這里，在周邊國家。”

以色列對埃及民主進程的擔心立刻得到他在美國的支持者的回應。華盛頓近東政策研究所的David Makovsky擔心：“1989年的柏林革命什么時候會變成1979年的伊朗革命。”以色列將會發現他就像北方的真主黨，西方的哈馬斯和南部的穆斯林兄弟黨。為避免這種情況的發生，他說，在這個“由埃及民間社會建設性力量帶來的”過渡時期，埃及最好在奧馬爾·蘇萊曼的軍事政權率領下。這些“建設性力量”，對于Malcolm Hoenlein, 美國主要猶太人組織主席會議的執行副總裁，并不包括被他稱為“伊朗走狗”的艾爾·巴拉迪。（艾爾·巴拉迪贏得了以色列游說者的敵意，因為他加沙的封鎖是“每個阿拉伯人，每個埃及人，每個人前額的恥辱標志”，并且反對伊拉克和伊朗的軍事對抗。）“中東的情況似乎從不好變得更加糟糕”，理查德·科恩，華盛頓郵報的專欄作家，警告說：

“一個民主的埃及的夢想一定會造就出一場夢魘…下一屆埃及政府—很可能是由伊斯蘭主義者組成。在這一情況下，同以色列締結的和平將廢除，暴民將在街頭聚集，反對西式民主。…我在意的是民主價值觀，他們甚至不如哪些沒有民主傳統或尊重少數民族權利的社會，我們希望埃及是我們與自己一致的埃及。但,目前存在著一種認同危機。我們不再是他們了。”

正如我寫的那樣，科恩沒有多少擔憂。一個不同的惡夢看來正在埃及展開了：一個殘酷鎮壓群眾民主運動的政權執意保留權力，并相信它的靠山將給予時間做這項工作。西方政府和阿拉伯威權體制之間隱藏的共謀完全顯現出來了。抗議者被baltagiya 雇傭的暴徒所追打，反對派的領袖和外國記者被逮捕。我剛得知，艾哈邁德·塞夫,一個我去年在開羅采訪的人權律師,和其他幾位同事被當局指控從事服務于伊朗的間諜活動而受到監禁。

2月3日,星期四晚上,奧馬爾·蘇萊曼似乎仍然在負責。這位嚴酷、談吐圓滑的人把自己作為這個國家的救主在接受國家電視臺采訪時說，政權要極力把埃及從“混亂”中拯救出來，把埃及從變為”伊朗、哈馬斯代理人的險惡陰謀中拉出來。星期三在解放廣場發生的暴民暴力事件將被調查，他說（他拒絕任何政府責任），并且改革將繼續，但首先示威者必須回家，等待調查的結果。說完這些混合著承諾和威脅的話，蘇萊曼成為那一刻最令人矚目的人。據報道,那天晚上,奧巴馬政府草擬了穆巴拉克立即下臺和過渡政府在蘇萊曼——他們的情報合作首腦控制下的的計劃。

然而，穆巴拉克，極不友好地拒絕了他的雇主提出的合作要求。他想退休。他告訴 Christiane Amanpour，他已厭倦了，但他擔心他的迅速退出會造成大的混亂。實際上，他待在辦公室的時間越長,我們可能會看到的暴力更多。但即使蘇萊曼代替他,那也并非是一個“順利的權力交接”——或一個和平交接,因為埃及的民主力量想要的不是，沒有穆巴拉克的穆巴拉克主義者政權，他們若是為了得到情報頭子的統治，就完全不必犧牲數以百計人的生命了。

從奧巴馬政府，我們所能得到的是，對鎮壓的批評，和平的祈禱，以及呼吁雙方保持克制。仿佛在蘇萊曼的軍政權和廣大手無寸鐵的群眾之間，雙方的力量是平衡的。但實際上蘇萊曼將從中獲得不菲的收益。不像巴拉迪，華盛頓確信蘇萊曼是一位能解決問題的主。在解放廣場歡歌的民眾們很不幸，他們生活在一個與以色列交界的國家，他們不得不與過去三十年來一直向美國提供必不可少服務的軍政權展開斗爭。他們已完全意識到這一點。他們知道，有可能西方會讓埃及社會運動終止，部分原因是“我們不是他們”,并且,我們不能給他們，我們所擁有的，這一信念。但盡管面臨如此不利，埃及民眾正繼續斗爭。

附：原文：

After Mubarak

Popular uprisings are clarifying events, and so it is with the revolt in Egypt. The Mubarak regime – or some post-Mubarak continuation of it – may survive this challenge, but the illusions that have held it in place have crumbled. The protests in Tahrir Square are a message not only to Mubarak and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since the Free Officers coup of 1952; they are a message to all the region”s autocrats, particularly those supported by the West, and to Washington and Tel Aviv, which, after spending years lamenting the lack of democracy in the Muslim world, have responded with a mixture of trepidation, fear and hostility to the emergence of a pro-democracy movement in the Arab world’s largest country. If these are the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, they are very different from those Condoleezza Rice claimed to discern during Israel’s war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

The first illusion to crumble was the myth of Egyptian passivity, a myth that had exerted a powerful hold over Egyptians. ‘We’re all just waiting for someone to do the job for us,’ an Egyptian journalist said to me when I reported from Cairo last year (LRB, 27 May 2010); despite the proliferation of social movements since the 1970s, the notion of a mass revolt against the regime was inconceivable to her. When Galal Amin, a popular Egyptian sociologist, remarked that ‘Egyptians are not a revolutionary nation’ in a recent al-Jazeera documentary, few would have disagreed. And until the Day of Rage on 25 January many Egyptians – including a number of liberal reformers – would have resigned themselves to a caretaker regime led by the intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, if only to save themselves from the president’s son Gamal Mubarak. The first to be surprised by the uprising were the Egyptians themselves, who – in the lyrical early days of the revolt, culminating in the ‘million-man march’ on Tahrir Square on 1 February – discovered that they were capable of taking matters into their own hands, of overcoming their fear of the police and collectively organising against the regime. And as they acquired a thrilling sense of their own power, they would settle only for the regime’s removal.

The Mubarak regime was not the only Arab government to be shaken by the protests: the reverberations were soon felt in Yemen and Jordan, and in the West Bank, where Mahmoud Abbas’s police cracked down on a march called in solidarity with Egypt’s pro-democracy forces. What we’re seeing in Cairo is both new and old: not an Islamist revolt but a broad-based social movement bridging the secular-religious divide, a 21st-century version of the Arab nationalism that had for many years seemed a spent force. And though the Egyptian protests have found a provisional figurehead in Mohammed ElBaradei, the movement is largely leaderless, in striking contrast to the heroic age of Arab nationalism, dominated by charismatic, authoritarian figures like Nasser and Boumedienne.

The revolt that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt is a struggle against what Algerians call hogra, ‘contempt’, a struggle fed by anger over authoritarian rule, torture, corruption, unemployment and inequality, and – a lightning rod everywhere in the Arab world – deference to the US strategic agenda. Not surprisingly, US officials are nervous that revolts could break out in other friendly states. Asked whether he expected similar unrest in Jordan, John Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there is very well respected, even revered.’

For years, Arab rulers told their Western patrons not to worry about their subjects, as though they were obedient, if sometimes unruly children, and these patrons were only too happy to follow this advice. There was nothing to fear from the Egyptians, accustomed as they were to despotism since the Pharaonic age. Mubarak might be hated by them, but he was our man in Cairo: ‘family’, as Hillary Clinton put it. (The Clinton and Mubarak families have been close for years.) So long as he opened the economy to multinationals, achieved high growth rates and honoured his foreign policy commitments – allowing swift passage for US warships through the Suez Canal, interrogating radical Islamists kidnapped by the CIA as part of the extraordinary rendition programme, maintaining the peace with Israel, tightening the siege of Gaza, opposing the ‘resistance’ front led by Iran – American military aid would continue to flow, at a rate of $1.3 billion a year.

A facade of euphemism had to be erected to disguise the nature of Mubarak’s regime, and press accounts seemed to bolster it. Reading Western – particularly American – newspapers before the recent crackdown, one would hardly have known the degree of discontent in Egypt. Mubarak was typically described as an ‘authoritarian’ but ‘moderate’ and ‘responsible’ leader, almost never as a dictator. Popular anger over torture – and over the regime’s cosy relations with Israel – was rarely discussed. But when the police attacked peaceful protesters throughout Egypt, and especially after Mubarak’s thugs – armed with grenades, knives and petrol bombs, some wearing pro-Mubarak T-shirts that seemed to have been designed for the occasion – charged through Tahrir Square on 2 February on horses and camels, the regime’s face was revealed: coarse, brutal, an unwitting parody of Orientalist clichés. Newspapers not known for their candour about Egypt began to describe it with a new, hard clarity.

The crisis in Egypt has also been a crisis for the Obama administration. Unlike the ‘colour’ revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Lebanese protests against Syrian troops or the Green Movement in Iran, the uprising in Egypt targeted an old and trusted ally, not an enemy. Coming out in support of the Tunisian protesters made the Obama administration feel good, but it required no sacrifice. Egypt, a pillar of US strategy in the greater Middle East, particularly in the ‘peace process’, was a harder case. Until late January, the US did not hesitate to call Mubarak a friend, or to extend all courtesies to visiting members of the Egyptian military. But when Egyptians went into open revolt, the US was suddenly very tight-lipped about its old friend in Cairo. A new discourse was rapidly invented. Some Western officials failed to catch on to the shift: Joe Biden was widely ridiculed for saying that Mubarak couldn’t be a dictator because he was friendly with Israel; Tony Blair praised him as ‘immensely courageous and a force for good’ – yesterday’s message. But when Blair said that Egypt’s transition had to be ‘managed’ – presumably by the West – so as not to jeopardise the ‘peace process’, he was only saying openly what Washington believed.

Obama couldn’t very well come out against the protesters; they embodied the values which, in his Cairo speech, he claimed the United States would always support. But the administration clearly didn’t want Mubarak to be chased out of office, as Zine Abedine Ben-Ali of Tunisia had been. Instead, he had to be eased out so that a popular revolution could be averted, and a regime friendly to the US and Israel preserved: otherwise Egypt would be ‘lost’. And so, even as Obama increased the pressure on Mubarak to stand down, he refused to side with the demonstrators, reserved his highest praise for the military, and insisted that Washington would not interfere in the question of who rules Egypt. But in the eyes of the demonstrators, the US could hardly pretend to be neutral: the tear gas canisters fired at them were labelled ‘Made in America’, as were the F-16s monitoring them from the sky. In calling for something more than a ‘managed’ transition under military rule, the demonstrators in Egypt were defying not just Mubarak but the US. The Mubarak regime was infuriated by Obama’s statement on 1 February that the transition ‘must begin now’, but the emphasis on an ‘orderly transition’ was a hint that the US preferred continuity, or perhaps a soft coup by defectors in the army: there were, after all, shared interests at stake which no expression of ‘people power’ could be permitted to sabotage. The man who was sent to Cairo to deliver Washington’s message to Mubarak was an old friend: Frank G. Wisner, the former ambassador to Egypt and a lobbyist in DC for the Egyptian military.

Mubarak, when he stands down, is not likely to be missed by many people in Egypt, where he has pledged to spend his last days, but he will be missed in Washington and, above all, in Tel Aviv. Mubarak and Omar Suleiman, now the interim vice president, worked closely with Israel on everything from the Gaza blockade to intelligence-gathering; they allowed Israeli warships into the Suez Canal to prevent weapons smuggling into Gaza from Sudan, and did their best to stir up tensions between Fatah and Hamas. The Egyptian public is well aware of this intimate collaboration, and ashamed of it: democratisation could spell its end. A democratic government isn”t likely to abolish the peace treaty with Israel – even some of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have said they would respect it. But Egyptian foreign policy would be set in Cairo rather than in Washington and Tel Aviv, and the cold peace would grow colder. A democratic government in Cairo would have to take public opinion into account, much as Erdogan”s government does in Turkey: another former US client state but one that, in marked contrast to Egypt, has escaped American tutelage, made the transition to democracy under an Islamist government, and pursued an independent foreign policy that is widely admired in the Muslim world. If Egypt became a democracy, it might work to achieve Palestinian unity, open up the crossing from Gaza and improve relations with Iran and Hizbullah: shifts which would be anathema to Israel.

Almost from the moment the demonstrations began, while much of the world rejoiced at the scenes in Tahrir Square, Binyamin Netanyahu and other high-ranking Israeli officials were urging Western politicians to stop criticising Mubarak, and raising fears of an Iranian-style revolution. For years, Israel had said it could hardly be expected to make concessions in such a dangerously undemocratic region. But as calls for Mubarak”s exit grew, Israeli officials and commentators began to talk about Arab democracy as if it constituted another existential threat to the Jewish state. ‘If, the day after elections [in Egypt], we have an extremist religious dictatorship, what good are democratic elections?” Shimon Peres asked, while Moshe Arens, the former defence minister, wondered in Haaretz whether Israel could make peace only with dictators like Mubarak. As one Israeli commentator wrote in Yediot Ahronot, Israel has been ‘overtaken by fear: the fear of democracy. Not here, in neighbouring countries.”

Israel”s fears of Egyptian democracy were instantly echoed by its supporters in the US. David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy worried that ‘what starts as a Berlin revolution of 1989 morphs into a Tehran revolution of 1979.” Israel would then find itself with a Hizbullah-led government to the north, Hamas to the west and the Muslim Brothers to the south. To stave off such a scenario, he said, Egypt would be better off under a military regime led by Omar Suleiman during a transition that ‘brings in constructive forces of Egyptian civil society”. These ‘constructive forces”, according to Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, would not include ElBaradei, whom he attacked as a ‘stooge of Iran”. (ElBaradei earned the enmity of the Israel lobby for denouncing the Gaza blockade as a ‘brand of shame on the forehead of every Arab, every Egyptian and every human being”, and for opposing military confrontation with Iraq and Iran.) ‘Things are about to go from bad to worse in the Middle East,” Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post, warned:

The dream of a democratic Egypt is sure to produce a nightmare … The next Egyptian government – or the one after – might well be composed of Islamists. In that case, the peace with Israel will be abrogated and the mob currently in the streets will roar its approval … I care about democratic values, but they are worse than useless in societies that have no tradition or respect for minority rights. What we want for Egypt is what we have ourselves. This, though, is an identity crisis. We are not them.

As I write, Cohen has little to fear. A different kind of nightmare appears to be unfolding in Egypt: the brutal repression of a mass movement for democracy by a regime bent on staying in power, and confident that its backers will give it time to do the job. Seldom has the hidden complicity between Western governments and Arab authoritarianism been so starkly revealed. Protesters are being savagely beaten by the baltagiya – paid thugs – and opposition figures and foreign journalists have been arrested. I have just learned that Ahmed Seif, a human rights lawyer I interviewed last year in Cairo, has been jailed along with several other colleagues, accused of spying for Iran.

By 3 February, Thursday evening, Omar Suleiman seemed to be in charge. A hard, smooth-talking man, he cast himself as a national saviour in an interview on state television, defending Egypt from the ‘chaos” the regime has done its best to encourage, and from a sinister conspiracy to destabilise the country on the part of ‘Iranian and Hamas agents”, with help from al-Jazeera. Wednesday”s mob violence in Tahrir Square would be investigated, he said (he denied any government responsibility), and the ‘reform” process would go forward, but first demonstrators must go home – or face the consequences. With this grimly calibrated mix of promises and threats, Suleiman became the man of the hour: later that evening it was reported that the Obama administration was drafting plans for Mubarak”s immediate removal and a transitional government under his long-serving intelligence chief.

Mubarak, however, gracelessly refused to co-operate with the patrons who now find him such an embarrassment. He wanted to retire, he told Christiane Amanpour, he was ‘fed up”, but feared that his rapid departure would lead to ‘chaos”. The longer he remains in office, the more violence we”re likely to see. But even if Suleiman replaces him, it won”t be an ‘orderly transition” – or a peaceful one – because Egypt”s pro-democracy forces want something better than Mubarakism without Mubarak; they have not sacrificed hundreds of lives in order to be ruled by the head of intelligence.

From the Obama administration we can expect criticisms of the crackdown, prayers for peace, and more calls for ‘restraint” on ‘both sides” – as if there were symmetry between unarmed protesters and the military regime – but Suleiman will be given the benefit of the doubt. Unlike ElBaradei, he”s a man Washington knows it can deal with. The men and women congregating in Tahrir Square have the misfortune to live in a country that shares a border with Israel, and to be fighting a regime that for the last three decades has provided indispensable services to the US. They are well aware of this. They know that if the West allows the Egyptian movement to be crushed, it will be, in part, because of the conviction that ‘we are not them,” and that we can”t allow them to have what we have. Despite the enormous odds, they continue to fight.

4 February

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