from Babylon moment: its jailer has departed. It has walked into the light.
For the Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old. Some people already despair, discounting the remarkable victory of ejecting Ben Ali and Mubarak. The military remain in power in Egypt, the older social classes of property and power are not dislodged in Cairo and Tunis. But their figureheads have been jettisoned. Such acts raise the confidence of the people and propel other struggles into motion. The old order might yet remain, recasting itself in different clothes, speaking a different vocabulary. But it knows that its time is at hand. In Gladiator (2000), the Germanic barbarians sever the head of a Roman soldier and toss it in front of the Roman battle lines. One of the Roman generals says, “People should know when they are conquered.” He means the barbarians. The dictators of the Arab world, our barbarians, might yet throw some heads before the advance of the people. But they know that they are defeated. Faith and fear in them has now ebbed. It is simply a matter of time: a hundred years, or ten. ‘U’balna kulna, is the phrase: may we all be next.
The tidal wave that lifted Ben Ali and Mubarak out of their palaces to their exiles inspired millions across West Asia and North Africa. Protests had already broken out on the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen and Bahrain, protests would soon break out in Libya and Syria, and a new energy manifested itself among the Palestinians in exile and in the occupied territories. Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.
V. Bagman of the Empire
Washington was convulsed by Tahrir Square. The tidal wave of protests threatened its prejudice toward stability. Events had run out of control. The main features of US power in the region seemed on the horizon of being compromised. If the Mubarak regime fell, what would this mean to Israel? If enthusiasm about Mubarak and Ben Ali’s ousters escalated the protests in Bahrain and Yemen, what would this mean for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates? Something had to be done to manage what had begun to seem like a revolutionary situation.
From inside the bowels of Washington’s power elite, Frank Wisner emerged, briefcase in hand. He had met the President, but he was not his envoy. He represented the United States, but was not the Ambassador. What was in his briefcase was his experience: it includes his long career as bagman of Empire, and as bucket-boy for Capital. Pulling himself away from the Georgetown cocktail parties and the Langley power-point briefings, Wisner found his way to the Heliopolis cocktail parties and to the hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya. Mubarak (age 82) greeted Wisner (age 72), as these elders conferred on the way forward for a country whose majority is under thirty.
Obama came to Cairo in 2009, and said, “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.” Those words should have been cast in gold and placed in the portico of the White House. Instead, they drift like wisps in the wind, occasionally cited for propaganda purposes, but in a time of crisis, hidden behind the clouds of imperial interests (or those of Tel Aviv and Riyadh). America presumes to know, and presumes to have a say equivalent to those of the millions who thronged Egypt’s squares, streets and television sets (one forgets about the protests of the latter, too tired to get to the square, nursing sick children or adults, a bit fearful, but no less given over to anger at the regime).
The Republicans have their own ghouls, people like James Baker, who are plucked out for tasks that require the greatest delicacy. They are like diplomatic hit-men, who are not sown up by too much belief in the values of democracy and freedom, but to the imperatives of “stability” and Empire. The Democratic bench is lighter now, as the immense bulk of Richard Holbrooke has departed for other diplomatic assignments. He had been given charge of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he found little traction. The Taliban could not be cowered, and nor could the Pakistani military. Holbrooke had much easier times in the Balkans, where, according to Diana Johnstone, he instigated the conflict by refusing the road of peace. Wisner comes out of the same nest as Holbrooke. He is the Democrat’s version of James Baker, but without the pretend gravity of the Texan.
Wisner has a long lineage in the CIA family. His father, Frank Sr., helped overthrow Arbenz of Guatemala (1954) and Mossadeq of Iran (1953), before he was undone in mysterious circumstances in 1965. Frank Jr. is well known around Langley, with a career in the Defense and State Departments along with ambassadorial service in Egypt, the Philippines and then India. In each of these places Wisner insinuated himself into the social and military branches of the power elite. He became their spokesperson. Wisner and Mubarak became close friends when he was in the country (1986–1991), and many credit this friendship (and military aid) with Egypt’s support of the United States in the 1991 Gulf War. The delusions are many. George H. W. Bush calls his presidential counterpart, Hosni, in the afternoon of January 21, 1991. They are discussing their war against Iraq. “How is public support there,” Bush asks him. Mubarak answers hastily, “It is still good.” For Mubarak, “public” meant his clique, not the eighty odd million. Not once did the US provide a criticism of Egypt’s human rights record. As Human Rights Watch put it in their 1992 World Watch Report, the George H. W. Bush regime “refrained from any public expression of concern about human rights violations in Egypt.” Instead, military aid increased, and the torture system continued. The moral turpitude (bad guys, aka the Muslim Brotherhood and democracy advocates, need to be tortured) and the torture apparatus set up the system for the regime followed by Bush’s son, George W. after 9/11, with the extraordinary rendition programs to these very Egyptian prisons. Wisner should be considered the architect of the framework for this policy.
Wisner remained loyal to Mubarak. In 2005, he celebrated the Egyptian (s)election (Mubarak “won” with 88.6% of the vote). It was a “historic day” he said, and went further in a report for the Baker Institute, “There were no instances of repression; there wasn’t heavy police presence on the streets. The atmosphere was not one of police intimidation.” This is quite the opposite of what came out from election observers, human rights organizations and bloggers such as Kareem Suleiman and Hossam el-Hamalawy. The Democratic and Republican specters came together in the James Baker Institute’s working group on the Middle East. Wisner joined the Baker Institute’s head, Edward Djerejian, and others to produce a report in 2003 that offers us a tasty statement, “Achieving security and stability in the Middle East will be made more difficult by the fact that short-term necessities will seem to contradict long-term goals.” If the long-term goal is Democracy, then that is all very well because it has to be sacrificed to the short-term, namely support for the kind of neoliberal security state embodied by Mubarak. Nothing more is on offer. No wonder that a “Washington Middle East hand” told The Cable, “[Wisner’s] the exact wrong person to send. He is an apologist for Mubarak.” But this is a wrong view. Wisner was just the exact person to send to protect the short-term, and so only-term, interests of Washington. The long-term had been set aside.
I first wrote about Wisner in 1997 when he joined the board of directors of Enron Corporation. Where Wisner had been, to Manila and New Delhi, Enron followed. As one of his staffers said, “if anybody asked the CIA to help promote US business in India, it was probably Frank.” Without the CIA and the muscle of the US government, it is unlikely that the Subic Bay power station deal or the Dabhol deal would have gone to Enron. Here Wisner followed James Baker, who was hired by Enron to help it gain access to the Shuaiba power plant in Kuwait. Nor is he different from Holbrooke, who was in the upper circle of Credit Suisse First Boston, Lehman Brothers, Perseus and the American International Group. They used the full power of the US state to push the private interests of their firms, and then made money for themselves. This is the close nexus of Capital and Empire, and Wisner is the hinge between them.
One wonders at the tenor of the official cables coming from Cairo to Washington during January 2011. Ambassador Margaret Scobey, a career official, had been once more sidelined. The first time was over rendition. She
