On the Egyptian Situation

Based on the headlines that I have seen on my Facebook news feed, posted by politically liberal people on my friends list, the mainstream media appears to be making the demonstrations against President Mubarak as a struggle for freedom against dictatorship and tyranny.  Yet, as with all things regarding the Middle East, it's never as simple as the liberal press would like to us to believe.  Lurking behind the scenes could well be forces that are advancing a dialectical process that progressives in the press are so familiar with, a process that they have deceptively coat with a veneer of morality (good vs evil) in order to hide the truth.

For those who think that Mubarak is a hideous dictator oppressing a freedom-loving people, one may want to consider the following passage from this source:

Nine out of ten Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation. US President Barack Obama said Jan. 29, “The right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny … are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.” Does Obama think that genital mutilation is a human rights violation? To expect Egypt to leap from the intimate violence of traditional society to the full rights of a modern democracy seems whimsical.

In fact, the vast majority of Egyptians has practiced civil disobedience against the Mubarak regime for years. The Mubarak government announced a “complete” ban on genital mutilation in 2007, the second time it has done so - without success, for the Egyptian population ignored the enlightened pronouncements of its government. Do Western liberals cheer at this quiet revolt against Mubarak’s authority? 

[...] In the most fundamental matters, President and Mrs Mubarak are incomparably more enlightened than the Egyptian public. Three-quarters of acts of genital mutilation in Egypt are executed by physicians.

What does that say about the character of the country’s middle class?

And while the mainstream media has portrayed the demonstrations as a manifestation of the people's frustrations with many issues including rising food prices, it's not hard to observe that the poor people who are really hurt by such things are not the ones demonstrating, but rather the educated middle-class people.  So again one has to ask whether there are forces behind the scenes trying to manipulate the situation to their advantage.  This perspective was considered by the private intelligence service STRATFOR.

In one of their Intelligence Guidance notes, the following was written:

What we have to find out is who is behind this. It could be the military wanting to stage a coup to keep Gamal Mubarak out of power. They would be doing this to preserve the regime, not to overthrow it. They could be using the demonstrations to push their demands and perhaps pressure Hosni Mubarak to leave voluntarily.

The danger is that they would be playing with fire. The demonstrations open the door for the Muslim Brotherhood, which is stronger than others may believe. They might keep the demonstrations going after Hosni leaves, and radicalize the streets to force regime change. It could also be the Muslim Brotherhood organizing quietly. Whoever it is, they are lying low, trying to make themselves look weaker than they are — while letting the liberals undermine the regime, generate anti-Mubarak feeling in the West, and pave the way for whatever it is they are planning.

I don't have any particular views about the situation in Egypt.  Just like the folks at STRATFOR, I am more interested in finding out whether there are larger forces lurking behind the scenes that may have more global impact.