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Egypt: The Blame Game Begins. Sigh.
Well, this is depressing, but I guess it was inevitable that in Washington, people would start asking "Who Lost Egypt?" before it was even clear what, exactly, is happening there.*
As I have tried to make clear, I am not an expert on Egypt. (Though not having expertise has hardly kept anyone from going on television and radio to talk about Egypt this week!) I served, though, on the Levant and Egypt team during the 2008-2009 CENTCOM Assessment Team. And looking back on that experience today, one of the things that has struck me is how long ago the U.S. government had identified the fall or death of Hosni Mubarak as a likely contingency to plan toward. Everyone knew this was going to happen eventually. So I think the blame being heaped on the intelligence community here is a little silly. Intelligence cannot predict the future, though it can assist policy-makers in gaming out possible contingencies, and I think our intelligence services did that here. It's hardly the fault of our nation's intelligence agencies that successive U.S. administrations from both parties decided it made more sense to continue backing a strongman than to prod Egypt's ruling party toward real and accountable democratic processes -- even though we all knew Mubarak would not be around forever. Even when administrations have decided to pressure Mubarak, by the way, they have found that the ~$1.5b we give Egypt annually has been a largely ineffective source of leverage. (Though it has, I would argue, helped foster now-invaluable connections with Egypt's military. Those last two sentences should serve as a warning for any legislators out there threatening to cut our aid.)
*If you are one of those people who think debates in Washington are a bit silly and are instead curious about what is actually taking place in Egypt, you could do worse than to follow the reporting of Charles Levinson of the Wall Street Journal, who in my mind has been the outstanding print reporter of these events. (And there have been many, many candidates for that title, from Graeme Wood of the Atlantic to Anthony Shadid of the New York Times.) Charles and I met in Cairo in 2005 and have been friends since, so I am a little biased toward the guy, but ask any journalist on the ground in Cairo which westerner speaks the best Arabic (Egyptian Arabic, no less) and knows Cairo the best, and they'll give you the name of Charles Levinson. Read this report from Tahrir Square that ran in today's Journal and tell me it's not absolutely first-rate journalism, taking you inside the anti-government protesters in a way I have not seen elsewhere. In related news, I passed by the office television a few hours back. The anchors at CNN were chuckling about a turkey attacking a mail truck. And you wonder why Americans are so poorly informed about the world?
Charles rocks. But you have
Charles rocks. But you have to tease him about his Egyptian being gradually replaced by Palestinian. He keeps saying, "wein? wein?"
He has a fantastic story coming out tomorrow, or so I'm told.
Charles is more polite than
Charles is more polite than that. At least he says, "wein, min fadlak?"
Of course we can blame the
Of course we can blame the intelligence community. So we identified Mubarak's regime as unstable - a college student could have done as much: the pharoah is old, without a designated successor. Commodity prices are rising, there is high unemployment. Damned straight there's going to be instability in the regime.
What we expect from our intelligence community, what they're paid to do, is to position sources and other monitoring capabilities so that we can, ideally, get precise, timely warning of the outbreak of the crisis, or, failing that, possess a good capability to track the crisis as it happens - atmospherics, personalities, loyalties, etc. Given that intelligence is inextricably linked with policymaking, some of the blame for our complete and utter lack of contingency planning for Mubarak's fall at the higher levels (as revealed in yesterday's WSJ article) must be laid at the intel community's doorstep as well.
I think you set the bar way too low: by your standard, Pearl Harbor wasn't an intelligence failure - we "knew" the Japanese were "likely" to become hostile sometime between 1940 and 1950. Everything after that, was just the policymakers' fault for not adequately reinforcing the Pacific Fleet.
That is a decent article -
That is a decent article - but it leaves out a rather key point: the role of Omar Suleiman and his secret police in first, sending looters on a rampage across Egypt's major cities in a transparent bid to discredit the protests (that happened a week ago), and second, launching an armed assault on the peaceful protesters in the square. That bodes ill for the Obama Administration's talk about installing Omar in Hosni's place (a ludicrous notion):
Looters — Egyptians of all classes, all socio-economic walks of life, are on the streets as we write; they are protecting their families and their personal property with whatever “weapons” they have — golf clubs, sticks, pistols. The looters? They are largely seen as government “thugs”; indeed, many reports confirm that many are undercover police, the mukhabraat.
http://abcclio.blogspot.com/2011/01/egypt-revolution-at-hand.html
However, the protesters who respond to violence with more violence are simply playing into Omar Suleiman's hands - as Robert Fisk makes clear in his report:
It was painful – it always is when the "good guys" play into the hands of their enemies – but the young pro-democracy demonstrators on the Tahrir Square barricades carefully organised their Cairo battle, brought up their lorryloads of rocks in advance, telephoned for reinforcements and then drove the young men of Hosni Mubarak back from the flyovers behind the Egyptian Museum. Maybe it was the anticipation that the old man will go at last today. Maybe it was revenge for the fire-bombing and sniper attacks of the previous night. But as far as the "heroes" of Egypt are concerned, it was not their finest hour.
Fisk Independent Feb 3
It could very well be time for the Egyptian military to assert a little more independence and move in to separate the Interior Ministry-paid thugs from the increasingly angry pro-democracy protesters. This is what the Lebanese Army effectively did during the street battles in Beirut - (Michel Suleiman is the model there, not Omar) but they also need to tell Hosni Mubarak that it's time to pack up and leave the country - and installing Omar as the new dictator is not an option, either. That would be like giving Stalin the boot and putting Beria in charge - some change.
Incidentally, such a move by the Egyptian military might even preserve a fair fraction of the contractual relationships between the Egyptian government and U.S. engineering firms, right? That's the non-military foreign aid train, of course, that everyone seems unwilling to discuss - probably because it's where the center of corruption really lies. USAID-Egypt has dumped $25 billion on Sadat & Mubarak since 1975, for example. Take it from an original insider:.
Ismail Sabry Abdallah (former Egyptian govt official who negotiated the first USAID contract in 1974, speaking in 2007): "[USAID] is distributed by the Egyptian government in an anarchic way, through personal contacts and political influence."
Source: Global security watch-Egypt: a reference handbook
By Denis Joseph Sullivan, Kimberly Jones (the best short backgrounder on Egypt available, see Google Books)
That's also true in Afghanistan and elsewhere, correct? Our dear corruptly incestuous State Department in action... blech.
The important thing in the event of larger-scale military intervention would be the implementation of a quick election schedule - and it's likely that the Egyptian military clearly understands the difference between the military role and the civilian role in government - one positive effect, perhaps, of the U.S. military's liaison program.
>It's hardly the fault of our
>It's hardly the fault of our nation's intelligence agencies that successive U.S. administrations from both parties decided it made more sense to continue backing a strongman than to prod Egypt's ruling party toward real and accountable democratic processes
Real and accountable democratic processes are what got us the US administrations whose lack of foresight and accountability you routinely bitch about.
That's with a population with an average IQ of 100 and a relatively sane public discourse.
I can only imagine what real and accountable democratic processes will produce in Egypt, a country where the average IQ is 83 (according to Vanhanen and Lynn's IQ and the Wealth of Nations,) where 90% of women have undergone a clitorectomy, and whose denizens' idea of reasonable and righteous protest is pictures of whomever they're protesting against with a star of David on his forehead, horns and fangs. As a result, they can't feed themselves (the yield of an acre of wheat in Egypt is half that of an unirrigated American acre, and one sixth of an irrigated one,) and live off foreign subsidies turned into grain.
Egypt's population overwhelmingly consists of problem creators like the guys you see on COPS. As for the tiny minority of problem solvers, it's all they can do to fix the shit the retarded majority breaks constantly. The only hope for Egypt to have any sort of stability and financial security (i.e., avoid Malthusian dieoffs and Hobbesian endemic violence) is a system that identifies and empowers that tiny minority to do whatever they have to do to keep the majority from descending into its natural state. Which is basically what Mubarak had.
Hint: pretending that the Egyptians are just the same as your D.C. suburban neighbors with some surface differences like wearing man-dresses and having prayer dents in their foreheads will not allow you to adequately predict their future, though it will definitely make your after-the-fact statements palatable for public policy and academic consumption.
How can America loose
How can America loose something that was never ours to loose?
I really have a problem with the US government sticking its nose into other country's business. It is one thing to be on good terms, it is clearly another to expect action.
It is just not for us to decide, we can only offer help.
The 1.5B did have leverage. If it didn't it would not have been an issue to Mubarak in the Wikileak documents. Egypt was asking for more aid as a sweetener. The aid packages were also linked to F16 purchases. One can see the US made tanks in the coverage of the riots. As far as the region, the next discussions with the Israelis were about uping the F16 to F35's......it is all dotted line. The foreign aid comes back as defense purchases. We make our own problems by pushing the ball back and forth.
PS....When Tunisia went, even POTUS should have seen the writing on the wall. He has been spinning the story that he has been advising change in Egypt (which has not been validated). If POTUS believes his own bullshit, he should be taking credit for the riot! He represents America and he really should be more careful. America may have influence, but Obama has no control. Things don't turn out as he has been pushing, that will be an embarrassment that America can not afford to get wrong.
Rather than pissing on Intelligence, POTUS should be collecting information to find out if the Egyptian people are getting a fair deal, then addressing that. There are a lot of players in the region that would like things to go their way.
Hope someone is paying attention to YEMEN and other places.
B...... Roll the clock back
B......
Roll the clock back to 1776..........what do you see?
"If POTUS believes his own
Nobody with common sense believes his bullshit.
Come to think of it, he might just believe his bullshit.
@ Ray and B (and, I think,
@ Ray and B (and, I think, Abu M)
"So I think the blame being heaped on the intelligence community here is a little silly. Intelligence cannot predict the future, though it can assist policy-makers in gaming out possible contingencies, and I think our intelligence services did that here."
1) Read Jervis, "Why Intelligence Fails," or Betts' "Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable."
2) Intelligence might fail in a case like this because we have no catalog of the necessary and sufficient conditions for revolution. Read Eckstein, "Etiology of Internal War." We have factors that might be predictors - consult the Political Instability Task Force - but perfect prediction is impossible. I'm not saying anything would disagree with. Who's going to argue perfect prediction is possible in human affairs?
3) As for Japan and intelligence failure, first albeit less to the point, read Mahnken, "Uncovering Ways of War," on the attache system for tactical- and operational-level failures. As for Japan and strategic intelligence failure or the absence thereof, and how policy (and perhaps intelligence?) can shape the future which intelligence is charged with predicting, perhaps compare Snyder, "Myths of Empire," (Japan could not be deterred) versus Sagan, "The Origins of the Pacific War" (the Pacific War was a case of deterrence failure).
4) I don't know what basis Abu M has for stating what the IC did or did not do in this case (e.g., gaming). Is there an article out there that has been reported which has caught anyone's eye? To bring up an analogy which I *do* think is apropos in this instance, the Iranian Revolution probably constituted an intelligence failure. So, too, perhaps here? Maybe, maybe not, but unless something has been reported of which I am unaware, it seems too early to judge the IC.
5) "Everyone knew this was going to happen eventually." Yes, and no. I'm tempted to say read "Dead Dictators and Rioting Mobs" (Huntington and Betts), because I've dropped enough cites (but not enough content) in this post, but it may be apropos. That Mubarak would eventually leave power was inevitable - whether it would be by death or popular protest, and the consequences thereof, is another matter, though.
Thanks
ADTS
Very well stated. It's
Very well stated. It's always an intelligence failure, never one of policy.
I've quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms2.blogspot.com/2011/02/re-egypt-blame-game-begins-s...
I don't know charles but it
I don't know charles but it would be hard to find a westerner who spoke better egyptian than wp special correspondent samuel sockol
I have read Charles
I have read Charles Levinson's reports. It is good journalism, it is also the stuff that is being brought to the table by other agencies.
One thing that the attachment
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870365210457612166345128894...)
brings to the discuss is the level of organization of the disorganized mob.
Labels of functions? (ie. Other badges read "Committee for the Peoples' Protection," "Gate Security" or "Emergency." One young man, who spoke English, wore a piece of tape that read "Broadcast," )
This sounds more like a political convention than an unstaged event. Who, What, When, Where, and How is behind that? Get that intel for Dear Leader or MzZZ "C" is gonna wak his pp.
Add in other reports from Egyptian state TV where there are pro-government events happening outside Tahrir. The ones that are approved for broadcast on Egyptian TV. This is a story that has not been seen by Western TV or newpaper journalists cause they get their ticket punched at Tahrir....it is where the "change" is happening.
Think there is a lot more to this story than is being told. The milion people in Tahrir are 1/80th of the Egyptian population (I am getting that ObamaCare feeling).
PS....When you start believing in your own BS you are in trouble. It is the defining moment of common sense or lack there of.
AM.....What would you have the American people read? Folks are nornally interested in what effects their lives, cost of gasoline is out of their control.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3F-WM8uK7Y
Gee... has anyone considered
Gee... has anyone considered that maybe the intelligence services should really be focusing on violent terrorist groups and their activities rather than spying on peaceful pro-democracy movements?
The same of course goes for the domestic intelligence services, that is MI5 and the FBI - for example, if the FBI had put "radical Islamic terrorism" at the top of their threat list in the spring and summer of 2001, instead of "ecological protesters" (The "Green Scare") perhaps they would have caught the 9/11 hijackers before they were able to carry out their assault? Maybe it'd be better to infiltrate Al Qaeda remnants, rather than Greenpeace?
If anyone deserves blame for not noticing that their policies in Egypt were actively fomenting dissent, that blame should go to Clinton's State Department - or Condi Rice's State Department, which are one and the same.
Seriously, if they wanted to track the rising tide of dissent, all they would have to have done is read the Arab press - no spooks required:
http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/usaid-funding-channeled-egypts-registered-ngos
Why didn't you pull my head out of my arse, dammit?
Here's another story that's been blacked out by the U.S. and British media, by the way - unrest spreading to Iraq. Did you know that Maliki's salary is higher than that of the POTUS? This in a country where average monthly wages are in the few hundreds of dollars, too.
Hundreds of people gathered in Baghdad on Saturday to demand better basic services. On Thursday, police fired on protesters making similar demands near the southern city of Diwaniya. . . Iraqis complain bitterly about basic services. The national grid supplies only a few hours of electricity a day in a nation where temperatures rise above 50 degrees Celsius in the summer. - Reuters Feb 05 2011
The State Department was also given responsibility for Operation Iraqi by the current administration as the Pentagon moved out. As everywhere else, they put the interests of the people last and those of their cronies first, so it's no wonder the Arabic street is all pissed off:
But the main issue – the oil law was needed to stimulate investment, and the investment is now there. And so they need an oil law for a number of technical matters, but in terms of stimulating investments, I think they’ve found a very reasonable workaround, and I think you will see Iraqi oil production in the next five, ten years becoming very significant - remarks by Ambassador Christopher Hill, Washington DC, Aug 17 2010
Oil service contracts rather than direct ownership is what Hill means - and by refusing to cancel Iraq's Saddam-era debt, State has helped ensure that the cash flows back to their pal's coffers rather than into rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure. Not even the Mafia ever had such an ambitious loansharking program.
@gunboat diplomat "Seriously,
@gunboat diplomat
"Seriously, if they wanted to track the rising tide of dissent, all they would have to have done is read the Arab press - no spooks required:"
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/12/how-to-restore/
Thanks
ADTS
Such a benign post ADTS. Are
Such a benign post ADTS. Are you voicing that information is over-classified?
Perhaps the high-dollar cable writing systems and how information is categorized, needs to be revamped? What's your position ADTS? Just don't post a techno-geek magazine http://, (a mag that thinks it knows what it's talking about concerning National Security) and run off.
What's the point you're trying to make ADTS?
Hutch
I admit to 1) I don't know
I admit to 1) I don't know shit about Egypt, 2) I haven't read all the comments - however - it would seem to me that the key question is this: have the Egyptians learned the lesson the South African's learned from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe -- don't trust dictators?
That would seem to be the question, IMHO.
@ Hutch I am not voicing that
@ Hutch
I am not voicing that information is over-classified. It may be, it may not be - I don't work in the IC, so I don't know. Similarly, I don't know enough about "the high-cable writing systems and how information is categorized." My point was pretty simple and narrow, if, perhaps admittedly, benign. It was in response to Gunboat Diplomat's assertion that all one needed to do to predict what is occurring in Egypt was to read a newspaper. The Burundi exercise seemed, if not a case in point, then certainly an example which tends to support the position Gunboat Diplomat is taking. Admittedly, it's not completely on-topic - the Burundi exercise didn't say one could predict a revolution in Burundi (a feat I think would be difficult because of reasons I stated above - we lack a comprehensive list of necessary and sufficient conditions for revolutions, and will never compile one, among, possibly, other obstacles). But it did get to the point that a lot of information is, if not in the actual newspapers, then certainly in the public domain. The IC was bested by a single individual operating under short time (and budget?) constraints. Perhaps that is the equivalent of the IC being bested by newspapers?
ADTS
If people purchased the
If people purchased the "American Made Label"
People would be pulling jobs out of corporate America rather than pushing. It is about the intelligence of the American consumer and POTUS.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEM...
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama says the American government has a responsibility to make the U.S. the best place in the world to do business, but companies have a responsibility to invest in the nation's future by keeping jobs here, hiring workers and paying decent wages.
People are going to ask - Who
People are going to ask - Who lost? Pittsburg Steelers? What exactly happened there?
Final Score 24 -21 Green Bay! Go Starks Go!
Who cares about Egypt... I mean, really?
So in summary, our ties to
So in summary, our ties to the failing military supported dictatorship in Egypt will make it that much easier to influence the replacement military supported dictatorship in Egypt. With a straight face while they beat the hell out of the poor ignorant bastards who are uppity enough to not want to be rules by a military supported dictatorship.
Sorry, but I'm not quite sold on that as the best possible set of choices.
Who lost the National Anthem,
Who lost the National Anthem, speaking of not sold.
Here's the MB in it's own words
http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4970.htm
Of course as it's Memri, it's part of the Zionist conspiracy.
I think I may actually have
I think I may actually have the answer to the question asked in the header. Frank Wissner.Circumstantial evidence, but still:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-envoys-business-link...
You stay classy, US state department, put Mubaraks friscking lawyer in charge of representing. Hey, how about his cousin?
Elf:W ith regards to the
Elf:W ith regards to the Membri quotes, one could make the analogy of selectively quoting republicans to represent the republican party. Remember John mcCain singing "bomb bomb bomb Iran"?
Elf:W ith regards to the
Elf:W ith regards to the Membri quotes, one could make the analogy of selectively quoting republicans to represent the republican party. Remember John mcCain singing "bomb bomb bomb Iran"?
That's 2 cvleer by half and
That's 2 cvleer by half and 2x2 clever 4 me. Thanks!
Hey, that post leveas me
Hey, that post leveas me feeling foolish. Kudos to you!
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