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I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Bradshaw, welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're here every Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Of course, we're on in Santa Barbara, San Diego, Ridgecrest, China Lake, and all over Southern California.
You can find the archives of all my radio interviews on this show and others at antiwar.com/radio.
And of course, at antiwar.com all week long, we've been covering the Intifada in Egypt, along with a great many other stories.
So please feel free to drop by antiwar.com and check out all the bad news there.
And now I'd like to introduce our guest.
It's Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan.
He teaches history there.
He's the author of Napoleon's Egypt, Invading the Middle East, and Engaging the Muslim World, which is now out in a revised paperback edition.
Welcome to the show, Juan.
How are you doing?
It's great to be on with you, Scott.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
So today's day 11, the day of departure, they called it.
And from what I could tell in the short moments I had to check out Al Jazeera English's live feed today, it seems like the numbers came way back up again from the last couple of days.
There had been a lot of violence over the last couple of days.
And it seemed like the number of protesters in Tahrir Square there in Cairo had gone way down.
And I guess reports were saying across Alexandria, across Egypt and other cities as well.
And yet today was the real thing again, right?
Another million people outside?
Well, it's very difficult to estimate those crowds, but they're very large all throughout the country.
And it should be remembered that Friday in Egypt is not a work day.
It's a day of worship.
And people mostly have off.
Of course, shops would typically be open.
But for people who have to earn a living and whose businesses are still open, it's harder to get out on a Wednesday or a Thursday.
So Friday is an ideal time for a big demonstration.
The other thing is that people go to Friday mosque in the early afternoon.
And after it gets out, then they've already been assembled.
So it's easy for them to go out onto the street and demonstrate.
And all throughout the last 1,400 years, Friday afternoon has been a time when there have been popular manifestations.
All right.
Well, and then also, of course, I guess one of the important things was that the secret police were not allowed into the square by the military today, which makes today different than the last two days there, right?
That's right.
The Egyptian government seems to have tried out an experiment of having the crowds forcibly repressed by the Ministry of Interior, by the secret police.
We saw horrible violence on Thursday in particular.
And I think there was a strong international outcry.
Moreover, the violence didn't work.
The goons of the secret police weren't able to take over Liberation Square in downtown Cairo from the protesters.
They weren't able to cow them into declining to come out again.
And so the regime switched back to having the army protect the crowds from the Ministry of Interior.
Just to be clear on this minor point, Liberation Square is the new name of Tahrir Square, or that's a different place?
No, it's just the English translation of it.
Oh, I see.
Tahrir means liberation.
I got you.
In Arabic, it's called Tahrir Square.
Yeah, well, I'm monolingual over here.
I don't know.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, so now you wrote about on your blog how the military, I guess, pretended to apologize about the attacks by the secret police and said, oh, well, you know, Jenkins over there at the Interior Ministry did that.
That wasn't our fault.
And yet you explain how that couldn't possibly be true.
Yeah, the newly appointed prime minister, who's conveniently an Air Force general, came out and said, oh, he's very sorry about the violence that broke out.
And, you know, the Egyptian state press and television was attempting to suggest that these were just ordinary, everyday Mubarak supporters who were just outraged at the lies being told about their dear, beloved president, and so forth.
But it seems clear to me that these were enforcers.
They were either planes closed, secret police themselves, or they were people who were hired by the secret police.
And we should be remembered that the police force in Egypt, as in a lot of other places, sometimes actually bribes criminal gangs to snitch and to act as enforcers in neighborhoods.
So there's this kind of network of petty criminals that work for the government part-time.
And it seems likely to me that a lot of those were enlisted in this attempt at repression.
Pro-government forces, pro-government protesters, they were called on CNN.
A bunch of torturers worried about losing their jobs, it sounds like to me.
So, now the military, one of these generals, and I'm sorry I can't keep them all straight over there, Juan, maybe you can help me out.
But he said two days ago, okay, you made your point.
Mubarak announced that he won't run for president again.
You had your nice little protest.
Now everybody go home.
Then we had two days of violence by these thugs coming in and trying to drive the protesters out of Liberation Square there.
But now they're back again, and apparently the military today kept the thugs out.
So does that mean that, do you think, that they're going to continue on like this and wait until Mubarak is finally driven from power?
What do you expect the military to do in this situation?
Well, the military, I think, indicated on Monday that it wasn't going to attack the crowds itself.
It should be remembered that the Egyptian regular army is a conscript army.
It's 450,000 men under arms, but most of them are in for three years, and they're just village boys or local young men from city quarters.
And asking them to fire on the crowds is asking them to fire on their brothers, their sisters, their cousins, and so forth.
And so it's dangerous for the officer corps to try to deploy that kind of conscript army in a civil disturbance.
And the officer corps seems to have just told Hosni Mubarak that, no, we're not going to do that.
My interpretation of what happened midweek was that Mubarak and his fellow rulers came back to the regular army and said, well, look, we want to try this thing out of repressing the crowds with the interior ministry.
You don't have to be involved, but we do want you just to stand aside.
And I think they tried that out, and it didn't work, and the army was starting to look bad.
And so they went back today to the army's preference, which is to protect the crowds and just let them demonstrate, if they want to demonstrate, on the grounds that, you know, what harm does it do?
Well, and I guess that really is the question.
What harm does it do?
Is it not the case that if it goes on like this, he's going to be driven from power this week and not this fall?
Well, it's not clear.
You know, it seems to me Mubarak is trying to pull off for himself what Ali Khamenei pulled off in Iran.
It was just wait them out, be steadfast, tell them no, let them demonstrate time to time if they want to, and go on with business.
Right.
Oh, that's how it is in America, too.
We don't even bother protesting anymore.
The problem for Mubarak is that he's constrained in two ways that Khamenei wasn't.
Egypt is not an oil state, so it needs tourist revenue, and the economy is being devastated.
They're losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day by these demonstrations.
So there's going to be a lot of wealthy people and shopkeepers and people dependent on the tourist industry, and we're talking about like 11 million visitors a year, so it's an enormous industry in Egypt, that are going to be putting pressure on the Egyptian government to do whatever is necessary to restore normalcy.
And if that means Hosni Mubarak has to step down, then so be it.
Or if he has to clamp down on the protesters who are disrupting all the economics, they might go with that, too.
Well, they tried that, and it didn't work.
Too late for that now.
The other thing is that unlike Khamenei, who is running an oil state, he has his own income, and he's independent.
He's not beholden to anybody.
Egypt gets a billion and a half dollars a year from the United States.
It has strong relations with Western Europe, and all of those rulers will be pressuring Mubarak not to let the country fall into chaos.
And, of course, a lot of people are afraid that if Mubarak drags this thing out, the Muslim Brotherhood and sort of more Muslim fundamentalist forces will take advantage of that and come to power, whereas if you have a smooth transition, you might be able to keep the more secular and pro-West forces in power.
So I think Mubarak will receive that foreign pressure to step down, and you can see it coming from the United States, and he'll receive internal pressure from people whose livelihoods are being disrupted, and he just doesn't have the cushion of an independent oil income that Iran had.
Right.
Well, now, the New York Times is reporting tonight, I guess for tomorrow's front page, that there is a lot of internal pressure on Mubarak to step down at the highest levels of his government, and, of course, they were reporting on today's front page that the Obama plan is to push for Suleiman, the new Vice President, to replace him.
What do you know about him?
Omar Suleiman was the head of Egyptian military intelligence, especially concerned with foreign intelligence gathering and also dealing with the radical Muslim threat, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad of Ayman al-Zawahiri, which joined up with al-Qaeda, ultimately.
The Islamic grouping of the blind sheikh, who's now in prison in the United States, was involved in the first World Trade Center bombing.
These are radical groups that roiled Egypt in the 80s and 90s, which were successfully repressed by the Egyptian security apparatus.
Omar Suleiman played an important role in that.
So, you know, if there was anybody who was trying to track down Ayman al-Zawahiri and arrest him or kill him, it was Omar Suleiman.
Well, so I kind of like him.
He's the guy that George Bush exported all the innocent kidnapped to be tortured to, right?
Well, it is alleged, and Jane Meyer has done excellent journalism on this at the New Yorker, that there were rendition subjects, people that the U.S. intelligence kidnapped, who, you know, they kidnapped them because they suspected them of being al-Qaeda and planning to do something horrible.
They made mistakes, but they did kidnap people, and they sent them to Omar Suleiman to have them tortured.
Well, so what do you think that the protesters, the April 6th movement, and the rest of these people are going to make of Suleiman taking Mubarak's place, if he does indeed step down?
Well, the Twitter feed coming out of Egypt suggests that the protest movement is divided on Suleiman.
There are those who think that it would be all right as long as Mubarak was out to have Suleiman form a transitional government and move to free elections.
There are others who feel that Suleiman is too close to Mubarak and that he's unacceptable.
It's a similar kind of debate that you had in Tunisia.
Well, I guess we'll see what happens, of course.
Well, first of all, let me stop and say I'm talking with Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan.
The informed comment blog is at juancole.com.
The latest book is Engaging the Muslim World.
And I think you make the case pretty well, not to put words in your mouth, Juan, but you seem to be saying on your blog informed comment at juancole.com, today or yesterday, I forgot which entry it was, that this is really all about Israel.
And this is about, at least to a great degree, the reason that America is so involved in propping up this tortured dictatorship in Egypt all these years is to bribe them into not having a conflict with the Israelis.
Yes, certainly the U.S. Congress began voting a couple billion dollars a year to Egypt annually as a result of the Camp David Peace Accords.
Israel gets about $3 billion directly and a lot of indirect aid.
And Egypt gets, it was $2 billion.
It's now down to about $1.3 billion, I think.
But about half of it is military aid.
And it's a combination bribe and reward for Egypt having made a separate peace with Israel and kind of sort of cooperating with the Israeli blockade of Gaza, for instance, and not intervening in the Israeli incursions into Lebanon.
So the elite around Mubarak made this deal that they'd ally with the United States and they'd feather their own nests and they'd have this kind of cold peace with Israel in which they just don't get involved.
And this cold peace with Israel allowed them then to have the kind of security for themselves that encouraged the growth of the tourist industry.
They get Suez Canal tolls, and, of course, that requires peace.
So they've benefited economically, and the elite has benefited most of all.
Those top Egyptian government officials are often billionaires, and they're in bed with private businessmen to whom they throw government contracts or to whom they give insider government information about economic decisions.
So there's this clique of multimillionaires and billionaires around Mubarak that have done very well off of this cold peace with Israel.
Well, and so this is why the Israelis this week are flipping out, terribly afraid, apparently, of what's next.
The Israeli president, Shimon Peres, denounced Barack Obama for betraying Hosni Mubarak, like we owe allegiance to this guy or something, rather than the other way around, which perhaps that much is true.
It's pretty disheartening that the major figures in Israeli politics have greeted this outbreak of democratic fervor in Egypt not with words of welcome but with fear-mongering.
And, you know, it's hypocritical, because the first thing that any Israeli would tell you for years was that, you know, why aren't these Arabs capable of democracy?
Now they're striving for it, and the Israelis are saying, no, no, we don't want that.
Right, the only democracy in the Middle East, because we cancel Algeria's elections and we really don't like the results of the Lebanese ones, and if the Egyptians want a democracy, we'd prefer it be crushed.
Yeah, that seems to be the message.
Here's what I don't understand, though.
Hosni Mubarak is 82 years old.
How do you have a national security strategy that's all wrapped up in this 82-year-old dictator who's going to live forever and everything's going to be fine?
I mean, don't they have another idea, you know?
Yeah, Mubarak, you know, was entrusted to handle his own succession, and everybody knew that he would eventually be outgoing, although he's hale and hearty, apparently.
He had health problems the previous year, but operations seems to have fixed them.
So he could go on for a little bit, but he was setting things up to be succeeded by his son, Gamal.
Well, that's part of what got everybody so angry a few months ago, right?
Right.
Well, Gamal, you know, had been a kind of playboy figure, and then he got married and tried to become more respectable.
He was being promoted to be the head of the National Democratic Party, which is Mubarak's kind of one-party state.
And Gamal is in with all of the young billionaires who are getting rich on this system.
And so he was extremely unpopular with a lot of the working-class people and the ordinary Egyptians, and the idea that Hosni would turn the thing over to Gamal just drove people crazy.
And even it is said that in the WikiLeaks cables that Omar Suleiman, the current vice president and former intelligence chief himself, detested this idea.
But if it had happened, if there had been a transition from Hosni Mubarak to his son Gamal, and it had gone all right, and the National Democratic Party and the army had gone on ruling the place in an authoritarian way, Washington would have been perfectly happy with that.
Right.
Well, but I wonder, I mean, the Israelis don't have a plan B or C, huh?
Well, the preference of the Israelis and of the American right wing, and I'm afraid to say even of a lot of centrist and left-of-center American politicians, would have been for Egyptian autocracy just to go on like it was, because you were sure under these conditions that the Camp David peace accords would be honored, and you were sure that the Muslim fundamentalist parties in Egypt would be repressed.
And those were the two things that the West wanted from Egypt, even if it meant crushing the hopes, aspirations, and lives of millions of ordinary Egyptians.
Well, same thing, different day, look at Iraq or any one of these countries around the region.
And in fact, that's where I want to take this conversation next, Juan Cole, is the rest of the region.
Looks like, just scanning the headlines, some of these I've actually had a chance to read, some not, but I know that there's been protests even in Saudi Arabia.
The king of Kuwait had to raise everybody's welfare payment to $3,500 a month.
The government in Jordan has been sacked.
The president of Yemen said that, oh, I never meant to be president for life, and is at least for now claiming to back down from that.
I wonder whether we're just going to see that global democratic revolution those neocons wanted so bad, only against all of our puppets instead of in favor of them.
You know, what do you think?
Morocco, Algeria, Libya, that's an American puppet dictatorship again, right?
I mean, what chances do they stand?
Libya is a hard one to figure, but certainly it's getting back into bed with Western oil companies, and is in from the cold with regard to American diplomacy.
I wouldn't say it's really close to Washington.
But, you know, Muammar Gaddafi, the old revolutionary from the 1970s, sounded like a right-wing autocrat.
He upbraided the Tunisian people, said that they were being immature and impatient, and they should just have waited for Ben Ali to go out of office.
And he's obviously afraid of an uprising against himself.
But look, Libya is an oil state, and like Kuwait, they can just bribe people to be quiet.
And, you know, it's not that they don't have the wherewithal.
The question is, you know, how much is left over for the king?
So, you know, he might take a little cut in salary.
All right, well, so what about King Abdullah over there, I mean, in Jordan?
King Abdullah II in Jordan faced a lot of popular protests against his prime minister, and he did sack the prime minister, but he replaced him with a military man.
And the first phase of reaction to these popular protests that have broken out in the region, in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Jordan, has been to turn to the security forces who are part of the problem.
They're part of the reason for which people are so upset.
But I think it's more of a threat than anything else that, okay, you've come out into the streets.
We've gotten rid of the politician that you said you didn't like.
But if you go on, here's the former minister of – the former head of military intelligence, or here's a former general, and that's a threat to them to cut it out now.
Well, so, I don't know, if you were, you know, deputy to Hillary Clinton or something, what would you advise her to do right now?
They've got to be completely besides themselves up there at the State Department, right?
Yeah, and, you know, I respect a lot of the people that I've met in the State Department.
They're informed people.
They're people of the world.
They're trying to do the right thing often.
And I don't mean to be glib in describing the dilemmas that the U.S. State Department is now facing in Egypt.
It's really tough.
You've had a long-term dictatorship, which has been on very favorable terms with the United States, from which the U.S. has certainly benefited a great deal, and U.S. foreign policy objectives have benefited.
And on the one hand, you don't want to risk saying something rash that might, you know, spark a revolution and bring the worst elements in Egypt to power.
On the other hand, you don't want the local elites in Egypt to be so sure that you will back them to the hilt that they refuse to move in a timely way and so create further contradictions and the specter of radicalism.
So President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have an extremely difficult task.
I don't envy them at all.
But I would say, as an outside critic and not an insider, that some of the policy objectives that they are trying to uphold are themselves rotten.
The policy objective of having Egypt going on, cooperating with a blockade of the civilian population of Gaza, that's a rotten policy objective.
And it would be all to the good if a new government in Egypt came to power that refused to cooperate with that objective.
Well, I mean, does it seem to you like the precedent is set for, you know, the precipitous decline of American influence in the region?
Pat Buchanan, I think it was, said that the high tide of American empire was at Fallujah in November of 2004 and it's all downhill from here.
It looks like it's getting fast.
Well, I would argue that the whole Iraq war was not a high tide, that it was a demonstration of American weakness because the U.S. invaded and occupied a major Arab country and was never able to rule it.
It faced constant rebellions, Fallujah was only one of them, all throughout the country, including in the Shiite areas, and ultimately had to withdraw, had to agree to pull out.
So I think that what Iraq was, was a demonstration that the U.S. was already passed.
Yeah, well, I guess, you know, you mentioned Ayman al-Zawahiri earlier.
It seems like someone could let him know that he won, right?
The whole tactic of striking the far enemy and getting us to overextend ourselves and blow our own empire up so they can have their own revolution seems to be taking place right in front of our eyes here, Juan.
Well, luckily for us...
I'm sorry, very quickly, we're almost out of time.
Yeah, luckily for us, Ayman al-Zawahiri's kind of politics has just lost big time.
The people who are in the streets in Egypt, they want democracy.
They don't want Al-Qaeda.
And we've got to act very wisely if we're going to keep it that way.
Okay, so it half worked.
They're getting rid of the American empire, but they never did succeed in winning people over to their side.
Right.
All right, well, thank you very much.
We're all out of time, but I really appreciate your time.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan.
He keeps the blog, Informed Comment, at juancole.com.
His latest book, out in paperback now, revised edition, is Engaging the Muslim World.
See you all next week.
