Since the massive street protests began across Egypt January 25, most American observers have had two chief concerns. First is that the extremist Muslim Brotherhood would take power. Second is the Mubarak regime’s own potential for violence, which it finally unleashed last week against demonstrators in Tahrir Square.
It may come as a surprise to some conservatives, but the Obama administration is acutely aware of the former.
“This is not about trying to open up Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood,” one senior administration official told me. “The Muslim Brotherhood is the opposite of democracy. They want to use the democratic process, exploit the democratic process, for their own ends. We have zero enthusiasm for the Muslim Brotherhood. We want a secular Egypt, a democratic Egypt.”
For more than a week after the first protests, the White House avoided taking sides. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Egyptian government was “stable.” Vice President Joe Biden dismissed a suggestion that Mubarak was a dictator. President Obama’s first televised statement made clear that the U.S. government expected to continue working with the Mubarak regime. When the demonstrations grew in size and strength, administration officials called February 1 for an “orderly transition.” But when reporters asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs about the meaning of that phrase, he insisted that the administration was not calling for regime change.
That same day, Mubarak addressed his country for the second time since the protests began. To the American and international observers in his audience, the news out of the speech was that Mubarak had agreed to leave office in September, after Egypt’s previously scheduled elections. But to many Egyptians, particularly those on the streets, a different passage stood out.
To many in Tahrir Square, this meant that Mubarak would not leave power easily. More ominously, the words suggested Mubarak intended to end the chaos with violence.
There had been other signs that things would turn ugly. In the hours before the speech, state-run Nile-TV peddled conspiracy theories suggesting that the demonstrations had been somehow directed by foreigners—the West, the Americans and, of course, the Jews. Nonetheless, the anchor downplayed the antigovernment protests as small and insignificant and insisted that the demonstrators were not representative of the country. He hopefully informed viewers that there were massive pro-Mubarak rallies in the streets—gatherings that somehow managed to escape the attention of the hundreds of independent journalists in Cairo. The anchor suggested that these pro-regime counterprotests would overwhelm the dwindling antigovernment agitators remaining on the streets.
At the time, the broadcasts seemed to reflect the paranoid delusions of a regime losing its tenuous grip on power. In retrospect, they look like a plan.
The crackdown came quickly. Pro-Mubarak elements gathered overnight to challenge the antigovernment groups. Snipers perched above Tahrir Square began to fire on the demonstrators. At precisely 2:15 p.m. February 2, pro-regime forces switched from chants to attacks. Mubarak loyalists, some riding horses and camels, simultaneously charged the square from each of its exits, whipping and beating anyone in reach. The unlucky ones lost their mount and were beaten, their government IDs taken by the antigovernment protesters and shown to journalists. Egyptian police began to systematically round up journalists and human rights activists. Government vehicles were turned into weapons. In one horrifying scene, a truck from the Interior Ministry accelerated into a crowd of anti-government protesters, leaving several bloodied, broken bodies in its wake. In another, a fire engine ran down a protester, crushing him.
Even in the aftermath of the bloodshed, the Obama administration was reluctant to accuse the Mubarak regime directly of condoning the violence. The White House and State Department lamented “coordinated” and “concerted” attacks on protesters but without any indication of who was doing the coordinating and concerting.
Many Republicans withheld public judgment on the matter. Some even offered a soft endorsement of the White House approach. But others spoke out. Representative Thad McCotter, a Republican from Michigan, put out a statement on January 28. “The Egyptian demonstrations are not the equivalent of Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution,” he declared. “The Egyptian demonstrations are the reprise of Iran’s 1979 radical revolution.”
Although McCotter offered no evidence to support his claim, other Republicans on Capitol Hill privately echoed his fatalism. Within days, several of the most powerful voices on conservative talk radio were lamenting Egypt’s coming radicalism and some were even defending Mubarak. Glenn Beck hinted that the demonstrations were the result of cooperation between radical Islamists in Egypt and Obama-supporting radical leftists in the United States. (In 1969, Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground participated in “Days of Rage,” and organizers in Egypt called the first day of protests there “A Day of Rage”—a coincidence that Beck’s “study guide” called “telling.”) On February 4, after Mubarak’s crackdown, Rush Limbaugh responded to a caller who wondered, in the spirit of the Super Bowl, who he should root for in Egypt. Limbaugh acknowledged that “nobody knows who to root for right now.” But, he added, “There are a lot of people on this who would think on this we need to be rooting for Mubarak. If you are concerned about U.S. national interests, Mubarak seems to be who to root for.”
Limbaugh continued, sarcastically: “There are so many people who are portraying this as a big democracy movement. That’s why we in the U.S.—we stand for democracy, we’ve got to get behind it—the Muslim Brotherhood does not equal democracy to me.”
Limbaugh, McCotter, and others are confusing their valid concern about what could follow such an uprising with what has actually taken place. Mubarak and his thugs used extreme brutality to put down a genuine democratic uprising, not the Muslim Brotherhood. By all accounts, the Muslim Brotherhood played only a marginal role in the events of January 25 and in the days that immediately followed. By January 29, they were showing up in greater numbers at the protests in Cairo. They were there. But they were not dominant.
Walid Phares, a Fox News analyst and regional expert, described the early stages of the protests in an interview with National Review. “Those who took to the streets first were students, the middle class, workers, and farmers, and the protest widened from there,” he explained. “The Muslim Brotherhood were last to join, as they were weighing the situation.”
I spoke to a secular, liberal Egyptian Friday after he returned from his daily trip to Tahrir Square. I asked him about claims that the Muslim Brotherhood was a significant presence. “That’s not true. It’s a cross-section of everyone—from the rich to the poor, the conservative to the liberal.”
Later, he emailed:
Those people always surprised me at how politically savvy they were. I would argue that what happened is the best means for a transition of power for an unsustainable system. There’s a nascent middle that could help marginalize any extremists.
Could. If the Muslim Brotherhood did not play a major role in organizing the protests and did not dominate them, Limbaugh and others are correct that it is still a serious concern—the most serious concern in a post-Mubarak Egypt. The White House seems to understand this.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
