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The Cop on the Banks of the Nile

(Wall Street Journal) Fouad Ajami - Where Anwar Sadat openly embraced the distant American power, flaunted his American connections, and savored the attention of the American media, Hosni Mubarak has had an arm's length relationship with his American patrons. There was no need, he understood, to tempt the fates and to further inflame the anti-Western and anti-colonial inheritance of his countrymen. Mubarak was at one with the vast majority of Egyptians in his acceptance of peace with Israel. He hadn't made that peace. But Egypt was done with pan-Arab wars against Israel. Mubarak rules by emergency decrees and has suffocated the country's political life, reducing the political landscape to something barren that he has been comfortable with: the authoritarian state on one side, the Muslim Brotherhood on the other. No democratic, secular opposition was allowed to sprout. In time, Islamists from Egypt, survivors of its prisons, would make their way to the global jihad. They hadn't been able to topple the Mubarak regime, so they struck at lands and powers beyond. But the country has stagnated. The crowded country now is an unhappy, bitter place. Grant Mubarak his due: He has not dispatched his countrymen on needless wars. He has kept the peace, he has been the cop on the beat. The writer, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
2010-07-28 07:54:21
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