Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (22 page)

“What does all this mean for the United States?” I said.

“That the moment of change hasn’t come yet,” she said. “It was a premature revolution. Mubarak’s regime wasn’t Mubarak’s. It was the regime that was founded in 1952, and it’s still here. The regime’s attitude against Israel is the same. Americans thought Mubarak was with Israel, but it’s not true. Mubarak did nothing to change the propaganda or advance peace. You have to rethink what was happening.”

I saw for myself what kind of message the military regime put out when I visited the October War Panorama commemorating Egypt’s supposed victory against Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973—a war Egypt actually lost.

The North Koreans built that museum, the largest and most outrageous of its kind that I have ever seen. Unlike the Citadel, this place was a cartoon.

Outside, across the street from a Soviet-style apartment complex, fighter jets, missiles and tanks were on display for everybody to gawk at. You could easily see them from the sidewalk without paying admission. You couldn’t even miss them while driving past in a car. That’s how I first found out that the panorama existed. My taxi driver took me past the gate on my way to the airport in 2005.

“What’s that?” I said as I gestured toward old air-force jets propped up on stands and pointing to the skies.

“It’s a museum celebrating our victory against Israel in 1973,” he said as if he actually believed Egypt won. Hezbollah’s empty boast of a “divine victory” at the end of the disastrous 2006 war was part of a preposterous tradition that goes back a long time.

Inside the main entrance I saw a series of murals in the ancient style that showed Semitic slaves captured and tormented by the Pharaonic regime alongside modern Israeli soldiers trampled on and humiliated by 20th century Egyptians.

The set piece, and the museum’s namesake, was an enormous panoramic painting depicting the Yom Kippur War, when Egypt mounted its temporarily successful surprise attack against the Israeli forces in the Sinai before Israel counterattacked and finished the war on its terms.

Visitors sat in theater-style chairs on a raised platform that slowly spun around so they could leisurely take it in.

Bogus history punctuated with bombastic martial music and cries of
“Allahu akbar”
(God is great) played over a single-channel audio track. All the women in the audience wore headscarves, and everyone in the audience, men and women alike, stared at me as though I had purple paint on my face. They must have wondered what on earth I was doing there and what I thought of it all.

The elite in the government and the army knew they lost the war in 1973. How could they not? They lied to puff themselves up. And they never stopped broadcasting the message that Israel and the United States were their enemies even as Israel and the United States described them as friendly moderates. The army blamed all Egypt’s problems during the post-Mubarak chaos on foreign (i.e., Israeli and American) saboteurs and subversives and tightened entry requirements on Western visitors, even tourists. This is not the way a peaceable ally behaves, but aside from the new visa requirements, it was nothing new, really. Mubarak’s government did the same thing.

It was next to impossible to get an interview with anyone in the junta. I was laughed at when I tried. “They won’t give interviews to the Egyptian media, let alone the American media,” my Egyptian colleague Yasmin said.

No one from the army gave speeches. No one from the army went on television to talk about what it was doing or what it wanted. SCAF had little contact with the society it ruled. Its soldiers were not ubiquitous on the streets like those of so many Arab armies. Once in a while the junta sent out a press release, and it did so at least once via Facebook, but the officers were so distant and removed from their subjects, they may as well have been holed up in a bunker in the sky over the horizon.

I asked Hala Mustafa what she thought about the game Mubarak played with the United States, how he claimed the Muslim Brotherhood would only get stronger if he opened up Egypt’s political system as Washington asked.

“The army is trying to prove he was right,” she said and laughed. “His men, his establishment want to prove he was right. He’s gone, but they are still here, and that’s why they’re co-opting the Muslim Brotherhood.”

She insisted the regime had been far more consistently anti-liberal than anti-Islamist. “The army recently released Anwar Sadat’s assassin,” she added. “It’s bullshit.”

The street activists I met were optimistic, but Mustafa was not. “The regime and the Islamists hate liberalism and Westernization,” she said. “This has been the problem since King Farouk was toppled by the Nasserists. Egypt’s liberal bourgeoisie and the liberal thinkers are associated with the imperial power of the moment, so they are rejected. Leftists and Marxists, however, overlap ideologically with the regime because they are anti-liberal and anti-American.” This was also, in her view, part of the reason Israel had to be demonized: “not because it’s Jewish but because it’s Western and liberal.”

That right there is why I couldn’t shake my feeling that no matter what happened, no matter who might win Egypt’s upcoming election, the country’s near- and medium-term future would be grim. Aside from the fractious activists in the square, Egypt was for all intents and purposes a two-party state pitting the army and its supporters against the Islamists. Political liberalism can’t grow in a place where the two main factions are both anti-liberal.

That was the problem from which most others sprang. Egypt need not copy the West down to the last detail in order to flourish, but there’s no getting around the fact that people who reject everything the West stands for are guaranteed to live in poverty with boots on their necks. The only question is which brand of boot.

Chapter Nine

Hanging With the Muslim Brotherhood

Cairo, 2011

My second interview with Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Essam el-Erian in Cairo is one of the strangest of my career. I’m reproducing it here in its entirety so you can experience the Brotherhood raw and unplugged.

First, some context. This interview took place after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and before the election of the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi to the presidency. Morsi was later overthrown in a military coup by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Erian was arrested along with the rest of the Brotherhood’s leadership.

In early 2014, more than 600 Brotherhood members, presumably Erian among them, were sentenced to death at the end of a single show trial, making General Sisi Egypt’s most vicious ruler in decades.

My friend, colleague and traveling companion Armin Rosen joined me in Erian’s office.

Armin Rosen:
Can you tell us about the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for Egypt at this point?

Essam el-Erian:
Egypt has changed, and change is ongoing. It has been changing not only in the last 10 years but for 100 years. We have been struggling for freedom and independence for a long time, ever since we were occupied by the British in 1882. During this period we had two big attempts to build a democratic state. Both failed. One was a good attempt after the big revolution in 1919. We had a liberal life, a parliament and a constitution, but the monarchy stopped everything. Then we had a military coup in 1952. We hoped to have a good democratic system, but when the military rules, you can forget about having a democracy.

This is our third attempt, and it’s different this time because the people themselves went to the streets to revolt. No one dares to say he’s a leader of the revolution or behind the revolution. The people are making this happen through their own efforts. We Muslim Brothers were among the people because we represent a sector of the population, but we’d never dare to say this revolution is an Islamic revolution. It’s a national revolution.

MJT:
You guys were completely taken by surprise by this, weren’t you?

Essam el-Erian:
We all need a free and independent democratic state. We have struggled for a strong and independent Egypt not only for 100 years but for 200 years, since Muhammad Ali. He was also supported by foreigners. There was no USA at that time, but the French, British and Germans put him under siege, and this was an insult to Egyptians. We were under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, and we respected Muhammad Ali and the Ottoman authorities, but he wanted reform within the empire and to have a good modern country as a symbol. He never achieved this. In 30 years, he was broken. And ever since we’ve wanted an independent and strong modern state.

MJT:
What do you think of the liberal era before Nasser came to power in 1952? When you look back on that, does it look better than the current era or worse?

Essam el-Erian:
The Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, and it failed. You’re facing disaster there now and don’t know how to escape. [
Laughs.
] A safe escape from Afghanistan will just add another disaster added to the disaster of the occupation. And the Bush administration tried to create a democratic model in Iraq. It also brought a disaster not only to the Iraqi people but to the nation of America and the values of America. And to the economy of America. [
Laughs.
]

This was, of course, not in the American interest, but in the interest of some people who are governing the think tanks and the media. Now that Obama is facing this disaster, the Republicans are putting this burden on his shoulders. This is a big lie. He inherited this.

It is time for you to respect others, to respect your values and to be a real democracy. Respect multiplicity in the world. We are different. This county is different from Saudi Arabia. It is different from America and the U.K. This is the most important lesson of the Egyptian and Arab revolutions. You need to respect their choice. Don’t intervene in their domestic affairs. Treat them as equals, as human beings, not as an oil field. [
Laughs.
] People are not going to drink oil.

I hope after the success of the revolution, if the revolution has an impact in Saudi Arabia, that the Saudis will only produce the oil they need, not what you need. If they keep their own oil for their own future generations, that will teach the Americans to respect others and not to insult the Saudis and the Arabs.

Armin Rosen:
How are Americans insulting the Saudis?

Essam el-Erian:
Yes. Yes. Yes. I’ll give you some examples. Your administrations—while your people are silent—have been supporting tyrants and dictators all over the Islamic world for more than 60 years.

MJT:
The government has, yes.

Essam el-Erian:
You supported the Shah of Iran. You supported Suharto, the generals in Pakistan, all Arab leaders.

MJT:
You do understand that was government policy.

Essam el-Erian:
Yes, but the American government is an elected one. You don’t only vote on your taxes. You also vote for foreign affairs.

MJT:
During our election campaigns, we don’t get the choice between supporting or not supporting Mubarak.

Essam el-Erian:
You insult Arab people.

MJT:
You insult Americans.

Essam el-Erian:
No.

MJT:
There is a lot of anti-American sentiment in Egypt, especially from you.

Essam el-Erian:
Please respect my intelligence. When you vote for Republicans who create wars in the Arab world, and when a million people take to the streets while having no effect on the administration, what can you call this?

The second thing, of course, and you know this from media reports and human-rights organizations, is that people are tortured and killed on American orders. The third is that you never respect the rights of Palestinians. You never give equal opportunities to Palestinians and Zionists. All the time you are biased. You’re biased now and will be in the future. You’re biased.

Hillary Clinton just said Bashar al-Assad is not important to Americans anymore. Before this declaration, he was important! You supported him! People here are intelligent. They consider every word.

How can people here explain or understand the last decision in Congress which prevents Mr. Obama from training the revolutionaries in Libya?

MJT:
What do you think about what’s going on over there?

Essam el-Erian:
Look, sir. It’s a big game. You cannot convince me that the American administration is sticking to American values. Qaddafi is your man.

MJT:
He’s our man?

Essam el-Erian:
Yes.

MJT:
Now, wait a minute.

Essam el-Erian:
Yes.

Armin Rosen:
He bombed a disco full of Americans.

MJT:
He has been an anti-American dictator since the day he took power.

Essam el-Erian:
French people are now having secret talks with Qaddafi and his son. [
Laughs.
]

MJT:
We are not French.

Essam el-Erian:
You neglected everything about Qaddafi when he declared that he’d get rid of so-called nuclear weapons. You neglected to think about him killing people and destroying his country. Your administration neglected everything. So how can I understand that Qaddafi was behind the attack over Lockerbie, Scotland? Megrahi [the supposed mastermind of the attack] is still living in Libya and is a very big symbol of the hypocrisy of the West. All the West.

MJT:
I want to back up for a second. You said that Qaddafi is our man because we restored relations with Libya. Is that all it takes for a dictator to be “our man”? That we have diplomatic relations?

Essam el-Erian:
Sir. Who protected Qaddafi’s military coup d’état? Who protected him? You had all this military power. You could have stopped him.

Who protects all the dictators of the Arab world? Your men are there everywhere, from the king of Morocco to the king of Bahrain. They are your men.