The most obvious things to say about the raging Egyptian street protests are also the most exhilarating and frightening things you can say: No one is in charge. No one knows what will happen next.
You can read and you can listen and you can watch and yet you cannot know much more than that.
Omar Suleiman, the newly appointed Egyptian vice president, announces that Hosni Mubarak’s government [still in place at this writing] is prepared to discuss political reforms. And the question is not so much which reforms are on the table — if any — but who would even sit at the table.
No one, remember, is in charge. There’s no Nelson Mandela, unfortunately. There’s no Ayatollah Khomeini, fortunately.
There’s no apparent ideology. There is an overflowing of frustration, built over 30 years of Mubarak rule.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, has gotten official backing from some groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate with Mubarak’s government. But according to a Washington Post report, ElBaradei received a lukewarm reception when he addressed the protesters the other day.
No one can say with certainty what is coming. No one has any idea, really, of the relative strength of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the outlawed, unofficial opposition and pro-Islamic
party. No one has any idea, really, whether the young people in the streets have any way to do anything except to demand change.
They don’t do much polling in Egypt. What they do is arrest anyone who gets too far out of line.
For those demanding that President Barack Obama do something more, few have any real idea what that should be. For Obama, it’s more complicated even than the fact of America’s longstanding relationship with Egypt or Egypt’s relationship to Israel or the $1.5 billion America sends to Egypt each year in foreign aid.
If you publicly encourage the protests, what do you do if there’s a serious crackdown? What happens if there’s the Egyptian version of Tiananmen Square?
There’s no choice, though, but to lend support to the protesters. You can’t have run your campaign on hope and change and not offer some yourself.
The smart guess is that Obama is privately trying to push Mubarak to resign. He’s 82. At some point soon, Egypt would reach a similar crossroads, with its future similarly uncertain. It’s one thing for America to be on the wrong side of history. But the truth is, we may not have much to say about where history takes us.
It’s easy to be an idealist from thousands of miles away. But how real does your realpolitik have to be not to side with the people in the streets? And if there’s a symbol worth noting, it’s that the tear gas that has been tossed at the protesters has “Made in the USA” labels.
What they’ve had in Egypt under Mubarak is 30 years of “stability,” which, as Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum points out, is roughly equivalent in this case to “repression.”
Stability has its good points, of course, and particularly in the Middle East. But stability, when it means repression, is still repression. And, in any case, when stability starts to crumble, what do you have left?
What we have now is the Egyptian army announcing – on state-run TV – that it would not fire at the protesters because “freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody.”
In Egypt, of course, freedom of expression isn’t guaranteed to anyone. But the army is apparently the only government entity anyone trusts.
I’ve seen freedom of speech at work in Egypt. I once attended a trial of 87 members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The courtroom was in a military camp in the desert north of Cairo. And the defendants were in a cage. Yes, a cage.
They were charged with “jihad” but, from testimony, it seems they were being tried for opposing the government. One was arrested for owning the wrong books. The undeniable truth of the courtroom was the cage itself and the men who climbed, like animals, along the wire mesh to be able to touch hands with a wife or child.
That isn’t to discount the fact of the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to establish an Islamic state. It’s not to say whether the demonstrations that began in Tunis suggest a Berlin Wall moment or a reprise of the Iranian revolution.
No one knows. What we do know is where we’ve been. And that it’s time to hope for better.
Mike Littwin is a columnist for The Denver Post. He can be reached at mlittwin@denverpost.com