Egypt: Bush embraces repression - course correction

IHT: By extending emergency laws that were put in place after Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Islamist extremists, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has brought the curtain down on a political farce that he had been staging at the behest of President George W. Bush.

Egypt is in dire need of the reform that Mubarak promised last autumn during his campaign for a fifth six- year presidential term. His promise to lift draconian laws suppressing civil liberties was to be the cornerstone of a liberalization policy meant to placate Bush, who had been promoting democratization in the Arab world as a formula for curing the rage and frustration thought to be the spawning ponds of Al Qaeda and similar terrorist cults.

Sadly, it now appears that intervening events have cooled President Bush's ardor for liberalization in Arab countries governed by clients of the United States. The relative success of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in last winter's tightly controlled parliamentary election and the outright victory of the Brotherhood's Palestinian offshoot, Hamas, in balloting for the Palestinian Authority legislature seemed to shock Bush and his advisers. Suddenly they noticed that years of autocratic rule in much of the Arab world have emptied the political playing field of all serious competitors save the established elites and their Islamist foes.

Mubarak was able to go back on his pledge to begin opening up Egypt's political system because Bush ceased hectoring him to end his repressive ways. Bush's course correction reflects an incoherent policy rooted in a superficial, highly ideological notion of political reality in Egypt and other Arab societies. Read more

db: OBL smiles knowingly, whispers "come to me".