Here are some older articles on Democracy in Egypt that I found in a quick search online. I haven't had the chance to go through the various documents but thought I'd post them, so we can try and understand the links between previous movements towards democracy in the country and the current protests.

Living with Democracy in Egypt[i] The Humanist (2005)

[i]Stomping on Democracy in Egypt Time Magazine (2006)

Time to Pursue Democracy in Egypt Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2007)

danivon wrote:All I will say...

When it comes to the well-recognized human virtues, you are over-endowed with persistence. You've not missed one opportunity to explain how little we have to fear from the Muslim Brotherhood. The only people who've been suggesting they've played a prominent role in organizing the Cairo* demonstrations are Sean Hannity, Hosni Mubarak, and Glenn Beck and none of us believe any of the three - why keep harping on it?

But they are active. They make themselves available to the press. (And you never recognize any single one of them as actually speaking for the MB if they say anything controversial.) They're meeting with Hussein in Jordan. They've reportedly been in talks with el Baradei. And they've broken with the Cairo demonstrators, who said they'd not negotiate until Mubarak stepped down; they're meeting with Suleiman. That's a real breakthrough for them. I was listening to the Director of Mideast Studies at George Mason U. on C-SPAN and he said that Suleiman-MB talks are surprising and important.

If they have no power, why would Suleiman talk with them? I have a theory. The MB feel bypassed and overlooked because no one wanted or needed their help in Cairo. They can't afford to be marginalized like that. Maybe they have little appeal to the youthful demonstrators but they might still have credibility with the middle classes and other demographic groups as long-time opponents of the regime. At least it's reasonable to suppose that Suleiman sees them as having some credibility like that. Therefore, if they were to support him in the role of caretaker until "free elections" could be held, he might well be willing to lift the ban on their above-board official activity. They would thus slide nicely into place as power brokers who are anti-Mubarak but also anti-anarchy, and pro-democracy (at least on the surface).

One thing is for sure: they are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs just watching events, feeling powerless, and doing nothing about it. This is an organization that has always taken the long view and acted strategically. They are thoughtful and experienced operators.

* There are reports that they successfully mobilized thousands for a demonstration in Alexandria. [And of course there must be someone somewhere other than the three I've mentioned who have overstated their role so far. I think some Israelis have probably guilty. But I did a google news search about 40 hours ago on "Muslim Brotherhood" and went through five pages of hits without finding any MSM reports that overstated their activity.]

X

If they have no power, why would Suleiman talk with them?

Because they do have support?
There's a pew survey from a couple of years ago that found about 20% of Egyptians supported the Muslim Bortherhood. If thats true then they deserve to be heard, if a workable solution is to be realized.
How accurate that poll was is hard to say in a country where political activity and free speech were hard to come by under Mubarek.
Fundamentalist groups like the MB have a harder time growing their support amongst the educated. In Iran its generally the rural areas where the hardliners have the most support.... Perhaps in Egypt the well educated middle class leading the revolution makes it harder for the MB to grow their message? Especially if Mubreks efforts to repress them had hindered their growth in the past?

Right. But support=power, Ricky. Would you be surprised if they had decided to try a bit of Clintonian triangulating, going for the "responsible center" between the forces of anarchy and Mubarak-style authoritarianism? I think it might be a pretty shrewd move on their part.

Sometimes all it takes is to have a little bit of support, to wield a lot of power. Good example is the religious hardliners in the Israelis Kneesset.

The problem in Egypt is that right now, the expression of "support" is what? Demonstrations? Until there are clear and fair elections .... (or perhaps until there are professional polling companies...) we won't have a reliable measure of support.
If the BBC is right, the Fundamentalist Islamisists are not strong enough to make Egypt a religious nations. And, if my Egyptian coptic friend is right, the minorities like the copts balance their extremism with their presence in society.

I support all people who fight for democracy. But I am cautious. History doesn't repeat itself, but on occassion it has been known to rhyme. No doubt there are interests in the middle east that will try to move this towards their advantage, such as Iran and Hamas.

Per Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidat ... _Farvardin

The Shah of Iran and his regime were overthrown by revolutionaries in February 1979. Iran was in a "revolutionary crisis mode" from this time until 1982 or 83. Its economy and the apparatus of government had collapsed. Military and security forces were in disarray. But by 1982 (or 1983) Khomeini and his supporters had crushed the rival factions and consolidated power. ...

With the fall of the shah, the glue that unified the various ideological (religious, liberal, secularist, Marxist, and Communist) and class (bazaari merchant, secular middle class, poor) factions of the revolution — opposition to the shah — was now gone.[3] Different interpretations of the broad goals of the revolution (an end to tyranny, more Islamic and less American and Western influence, more social justice and less inequality) and different interests, vied for influence.

Some observers believe "what began as an authentic and anti-dictatorial popular revolution based on a broad coalition of all anti-Shah forces was soon transformed into an Islamic fundamentalist power-grab,"[4] that significant support came from Khomeini's non-theocratic allies who had thought he intended to be more a spiritual guide than a ruler[5] — Khomeini being in his mid-70s, having never held public office, been out of Iran for more than a decade, and having told questioners things like "the religious dignitaries do not want to rule."[6][7]

Another view is Khomeini had "overwhelming ideological, political and organizational hegemony,"[8] and non-theocratic groups never seriously challenged Khomeini's movement in popular support.[9]

Still another is that of regime supporters (such as Hamid Ansari) who insist that Iranians opposed to the regime were "fifth columnists" led by foreign countries attempting to overthrow the Iranian government.[10]

Khomeini and his loyalists in the revolutionary organizations prevailed, making use of unwanted allies,[11] (such as Mehdi Bazargan's Provisional Revolutionary Government), and eliminating one-by-one with skillful timing both them and their adversaries from Iran's political stage,[12] and implemented Khomeini's velayat-e faqih design for an Islamic Republic led by himself as Supreme Leader.[13]

Here's the ground view of an Iranian journalist who was a student in Iran in 1979 per NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =111944123

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

There's an old saying in politics: Nothing is ever over. Political fights just go on. That is definitely true in the Muslim work, where many arguments go back centuries. This week, we'll talk about events that shook the Muslim world 30 years ago, in 1979. Those events still resonate today. Just think of two American wars. In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq, and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The event that seized the world's attention in 1979 was Iran's Revolution. Here's how one broadcaster described the scene.

(Soundbite of news broadcast)

Unidentified Man: There might have been tears in the eyes of the shah as he left Iran for what could be the last time. There was nothing but sheer delight on the faces of the demonstrators who took to the streets of the capital in their thousands to celebrate the departure of the man they have hated for so long.

INSKEEP: The ouster of Iran's ruler and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini created the Islamic government that rules Iran to this day, and that now faces its own street protests. BBC journalist Kasra Naji was a young demonstrator then.

Give me an idea. What was it like to be an Iranian on the street of Tehran in early 1979?

Mr. KASRA NAJI (BBC Journalist): It was most exciting. We were university students in those days in 1979. The dominant politics of universities was leaning towards the left, if you remember. And those days, a revolution was something we were all looking for, anyway. And what happened in Iran was exactly what we were looking for. We wanted democracy, and the revolution was promising that.

INSKEEP: And there are images of what looked like millions of people on the streets of Tehran as the shah of Iran, the ruler of that time, abdicated and left the country.

Mr. NAJI: Yes. It was a most popular revolution, you can imagine, throughout Iran, not just the capital Tehran. Even in remote villages, people were up in arms against the shah and were demonstrating. I was part of some of these demonstrations when I was in Tehran. These demonstrations, mostly in central parts of the capital Tehran, mostly, often and invariably descended into running battles with the army soldiers who were in charge of maintaining the security, and they used to shoot in the air and occasionally, very occasionally, into the crowds. They used to fire tear gas at us. We used to run away and sort of regroup down the street. And this is how it went. We used to shout these slogans: Down with the shah. And that was the unifying slogan, if you like.

INSKEEP: You mentioned university students who have leftist ideologies. You mentioned people who wanted democracy. They wanted more freedom. They wanted more openness. They wanted things that sound, to our ears, like Western values. And yet this same giant crowd was the crowd that welcomed Ayatollah Khomeini when he returned to Iran to take control.

Mr. NAJI: He played a very clever game. Those days, before he returned to Tehran, all he would talk about was democracy and freedom. He would not talk about a religious revolution. He wouldn't talk about a religious state, and democracy and freedom worked for us too, on the left, in a sense that we wanted to have a say. And freedom and democracy would provide that.

INSKEEP: How long did it take for a wide group of Iranians, not just student intellectuals, to begin doubting the direction that the country was taking under Ayatollah Khamenei in those early years?

Mr. NAJI: The doubts had begun even before the overthrow of the shah. But, of course, as more people joined this doubt, if you like, had more doubts, and these groups were - the groups that were started to be eliminated from the political process. And Iran became pretty ugly.

I remember a few months after the Revolution, they were executing about 100, 150, 160 people a day and they would announce and print their names in the afternoon papers. I used to - I remember, I used to go and get the afternoon papers and just go home and sort of cry because you just, you know, just going through these names of, you know, a lot of people you didn't know, but obviously, you know, the night before 160 people had been executed. And this went on for months on end.

INSKEEP: It's striking to hear you say that the regime, the new regime was not sticking political opponents on airplanes and flying them out and dropping them over the sea, for example, the kind of thing that was done in other countries. They weren't secretly executing people. They were doing it openly and allowing it to be published in the newspaper.

Mr. NAJI: Absolutely. They wanted to make sure that people get the message that leftist groups and secular groups are not wanted and they would not be tolerated.

Minister X wrote:

danivon wrote:All I will say...

When it comes to the well-recognized human virtues, you are over-endowed with persistence. You've not missed one opportunity to explain how little we have to fear from the Muslim Brotherhood. The only people who've been suggesting they've played a prominent role in organizing the Cairo* demonstrations are Sean Hannity, Hosni Mubarak, and Glenn Beck and none of us believe any of the three - why keep harping on it?

Hmm. That's one way to try and shut down debate I guess.

Cheers. Learn that at college?

I'm kind of riffing, I suppose, and not simply responding to only what's been said on here - it's a developing event with a lot of people talking about it.

And Ray Jay's comparisons with Iran since are certainly interesting, are they not? But Iran is not Egypt (one is Arabic, Sunni and republican, with fairly high levels of education; the other was not Arabic, Shia, and a monarchy, with low levels of education). In Iran, the leftists tried to join in with a populist Islamic uprising, and failed. In Egypt, it seems to be that the MB are trying to join a popular uprising, and while the full nature of it is not clear, it can't be labelled as 'leftist' or as 'islamic'. It's different.

One thing is for sure: they are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs just watching events, feeling powerless, and doing nothing about it. This is an organization that has always taken the long view and acted strategically. They are thoughtful and experienced operators.

Maybe. Or they have been Mubarak's useful internal enemy. No other movement in Egypt was allowed to get as many MPs in what have been clearly rigged elections.

Oh, I'm sure they have plans, and I have no doubt that they have not insignificant support, but the it's not simply that they didn't organise much, they haven't really been all that evident either. The people demonstrating seem to be less than impressed that they had talks with Suleiman - the idea was not to negotiate until Mubarak was going.

Naturally they will want to have a part of the post-Mubarak order. No doubt they will be a significant minority in any free democratic elections. But the main power base in Egypt is still the army, and I can't see them putting up with the MB in power.

danivon wrote:And Ray Jay's comparisons with Iran since are certainly interesting, are they not? But Iran is not Egypt (one is Arabic, Sunni and republican, with fairly high levels of education; the other was not Arabic, Shia, and a monarchy, with low levels of education). In Iran, the leftists tried to join in with a populist Islamic uprising, and failed. In Egypt, it seems to be that the MB are trying to join a popular uprising, and while the full nature of it is not clear, it can't be labelled as 'leftist' or as 'islamic'. It's different.

I hope you are right, and I do appreciate the differences. Let's take them in order:

Arabic vs. Persian: Sure, they are different, but why is this difference important in this particular case. Is one culture more prone to Islamic-fascism than the other.

Sunnis vs. Shia: I don't know enough to say. Do you think one branch of Islam is more prone to Islamism than the other?

Levels of Education: My gut is that the Iranians had high levels of education prior to the Revolution. Are you saying otherwise?

Dictator vs. Monarchy: Again, I don't see the distinction as it relates to this particular case.

Here's a difference that works against all of us. The Iranian clerics did not have a foreign government with billions of dollars and substantial weaponry backing them. The MB do.

But the main power base in Egypt is still the army, and I can't see them putting up with the MB in power.

I think you are spot on on this point. The army was in disarray in Iran whereas it has retained cohesion and credibility in Egypt. The US influence over the last 30 years has been positive in this regard, although it is a mixed bag.

rickyp wrote:Sometimes all it takes is to have a little bit of support, to wield a lot of power. Good example is the religious hardliners in the Israelis Kneesset.

The problem in Egypt is that right now, the expression of "support" is what? Demonstrations? Until there are clear and fair elections .... (or perhaps until there are professional polling companies...) we won't have a reliable measure of support.
If the BBC is right, the Fundamentalist Islamisists are not strong enough to make Egypt a religious nations. And, if my Egyptian coptic friend is right, the minorities like the copts balance their extremism with their presence in society.

Regarding Ricky's 1st sentence, I view it as incredibly offensive. Israel is a stable democracy with individual rights, an independent judiciary, and a strong rule of law. Certainly one could have made the point about Québécoise in Canada or farm interests in Europe, but no, Ricky has to drag Israel into it. What is really going on here? (I give Ricky the benefit of the doubt: his thinking is muddled and he is not at all prejudiced.)

Regarding the 2nd paragraph, I tried to google BBC and Iran 1979 which is where I came up with my BBC journalist quote in a previous post. We are pre-internet so I couldn't find exact quotes by the BBC in 1979, but my guess is that many journalists including the BBC were talking about insufficient Fundamental Islamic support in 1979 as well. How much support did the Bolshevics have in 1917? The reality is that Revolutions take courses that are distinct from the majority view. Just ask the Mensheviks. Again, I hope that the Egyptians achieve a Constitutional Democracy with individual rights, and independent judiciary, and a rule of law. I just think it is premature to predict based on the BBC or the hopeful wishes of various Egyptians. Without a culture of democracy and everything that comes with it, these can be challenging times.

Ray Jay wrote:I hope you are right, and I do appreciate the differences. Let's take them in order:

Arabic vs. Persian: Sure, they are different, but why is this difference important in this particular case. Is one culture more prone to Islamic-fascism than the other.

Well, Persia seems to have been a very deep-rooted authoritarian culture, flowing from the very top. They have also not usually been subjects of invaders. Arabs appear (to me) to be a bit more chaotic, albeit with strong patriatchal traditions.

Sunnis vs. Shia: I don't know enough to say. Do you think one branch of Islam is more prone to Islamism than the other?

Different kinds. Shia Islam is hierarchical and depends on current senior clerics. So Khomeini was already one of, and later the supreme spiritual leader of his people. Kind of like a Pope. Sunni is more about direct interpretation of the texts, and is less about hierarchy. It's like Protestantism, with varying (but less various than in Protestantism) sects and interpretations, and is less united. So while there are Islamist strands in both, if Islamism takes over the top of a Shia group, it perforates down and out more readily than if there are Islamist imams in Sunni.

Levels of Education: My gut is that the Iranians had high levels of education prior to the Revolution. Are you saying otherwise?

In some of the main cities, yes. But not overall. It was also 30 years ago, and a lot has changed since then.

Dictator vs. Monarchy: Again, I don't see the distinction as it relates to this particular case.

I guess you wouldn't. It's more about the type of rule that they represented, actually. So I'll rephrase. Monarchy that were perceived as being installed by outside powers, compared to the third in a line of home-grown dictators who inherited the popular revolutionary ideals of 60 years ago. In the former, it seems that people are reacting (and being conservative reactionaries) to the Shah, but in the latter there is also a sense that the revolution has been betrayed by Mubarak.

Here's a difference that works against all of us. The Iranian clerics did not have a foreign government with billions of dollars and substantial weaponry backing them. The MB do.

Sure. But that can be counter-productive too. Egyptians may not appreciate such foreign interference, and push back. The very fact that the Iranian revolution was not backed by outsiders made it more tenable.

I think you are spot on on this point. The army was in disarray in Iran whereas it has retained cohesion and credibility in Egypt. The US influence over the last 30 years has been positive in this regard, although it is a mixed bag.

Well, yes. It's tough, isn't it. By providing a billion or two dollars a year to the Egyptian military, it is strong and pretty moderate, but it also helped to keep the regime in place as well.

I'm not sure that people were talking about 'insufficient' support from the Islamists in Iran. Khomeini was clearly involved from exile, and it was pretty much described at the time (as far as I've seen) as a coalition of left wing and muslim revolutionaries. The left will have had the dialectic and the propaganda, but the Islamists had people.

Danivon, some of your points are stronger than others, but overall, that all makes sense to me. I hope you are right!

Thanks,

RJ

I hope so too.

Just so I can be sure, are you saying an Islamist regime can't come to power in Egypt, or simply that it's less likely than it was in Iran in 1979 (when it was, obviously, very likely)? How would you compare it to 2006 in Gaza? Or to recent days in Lebanon, where an Islamist regime is slowly gaining ascendancy? Or to Afghanistan, where Islamists are giving NATO all we can handle and more?

Look, I'm not trying to argue that the MB has wonderful prospects in Egypt. And I'm not hanging onto the coattails of idiots like Glenn Beck. Guys like Beck may be doing more harm than good, even by their own standards. If one can't be cautious, concerned, vigilant and informative about the MB without being lumped in with raving loon conspiracy theorists one will be inclined to worry about something else.

Look at it this way: defined and conceptualized in one way or another, we are involved in a "long war". Or at least a long struggle. Or conflict. I consider the MB to be on the wrong side in this conflict - they are the enemy. That's not because I need an enemy because I'm a simplistic twit; it's because for the world to move forward with peace and progress Muslims need to avoid moving backwards to forms of Islam less compatible with moving up the scale of the UN's Human Development Index. The MB's slogan is "Islam is the solution." It is not.

The MB has been around quite a long time. Their ultimate goal, at least originally, was to establish a caliphate from Spain to Indonesia; there's no evidence they've reduced their ambitions. I'm sure they never expected to reach their goal quickly, and I doubt that they care very much about how they reach it. In Gaza, their creation (Hamas) won power via a relatively free and fair election. (There may not be another one there very soon.) I would not be at all surprised if they figured they might mirror that success in Egypt - not this year or next, but perhaps a decade from now. It took Hamas twenty years to grow from nothing at its founding in 1987 to having control of Gaza; the MB is not nothing in Egypt. In Jordan they hold more seats in Parliament than any other party. They are part of the three-party ruling coalition in Algeria. In Sudan their members make "up a large part of the government officialdom". (This is all from Wikipedia.) In Bahrain they are the "joint largest party with eight seats in the forty seat Chamber of Deputies." In Libya and elsewhere they operate underground. I think they are adaptable enough to eschew no opportunities to gain influence or power. In many ways they've been more successful as an influence and inspiration than as a party. They are the wellspring of Islamism, and along with the movement founded by ibn Wahhab via his partnership with the Saud family, have done the most to spread that idea - that not only is Islam the answer, but that only a very traditional and narrow-minded version of Islam is the answer.

Make no mistake; these are not nice people. They want to behead apostates. They respect women so much they want to shield them from all the realities of life. They want to destroy Western civilization. Their economic plans, while certainly not capitalistic, are not socialistic either, at least not the kind of Euro-socialism that is based essentially on the liberal idea that all people have equal value. Traditional Islam, to its credit, has always encouraged and celebrated alms-giving, but that in no way should be taken as a sign that they share Western ideals about human rights.

I don't just want to not see MB making any headway in Egypt; I want to see them defeated everywhere. Defunct. Current events in Egypt, their land of origin and still their intellectual center, will generate changes and create some power vacuums, and MB will be trying to make the most of whatever opportunities are presented to them. If I'm being a bit more vigilant and paranoid about this than I need to be, I see that as a lesser evil than underestimating the MB, and as a much lesser evil than going out of my way to spread underestimation of the MB.

So I hope I can achieve some clarity with Danivon and perhaps find common ground. I say the MB is dangerous even if/when they appear moribund. (Wuz you ever stung by a dead bee?) I say that them gaining political ascendancy in Egypt in the short term isn't the worry; pointing out how unlikely that is amounts almost to the use of a straw man. The worry is that they can work themselves up a few notches, make themselves just a bit more influential in some way or other. The worry is that whereas Egypt now has an opportunity to escape its past and emerge from a culture that retards progress in human rights, human development, human resources, and individual human freedom, the MB cares nothing about that or opposes it, and whatever weight they have will act as an anchor if Egypt is lucky enough to get its ship of state sailing in the right direction.

I ask Danivon what he is saying. Is he saying we can safely ignore the MB? Or if not ignore, at least feel no anxiety about? Is he saying that as a movement they are less regressive than I've described? How much less? Do you see them in any way as some sort of socialist brother, as you do Chavez? Do you see them, because they are against what they call US imperialism, as being in some sense on your side, or closer to you in ideology than, say, Sarah Palin?

Or are you simply saying that various and sundry parties are overstating MB's role in the current uprising? If so, can you point to anyone I've not mentioned as culprits in that regard: Beck, Hannity, Mubarak, and some Israelis? What danger is lurking therein that overshadows the danger presented by the MB itself? (Granted, Glenn Beck in charge of anything would be worse than MB in charge of a caliphate from London to Bali, but other than that...)

Considering that some of us were willing to go to war to bring democracy to Iraq, i think our reaction to the uprisings/popular movments currently happening are shamefull.
We flat out stabilize the autocratic systems because we're afraid of possible islamic regimes instead of applying pressure to get rid of the autocrats.
I'm pretty sure that should they succeed to reform their countries they will remember that we didn't help them much like South America hasn't forgotten the role the West played in their history.
At least we can finally discard the fairy tale that the West is interested in selflessly spreading human rights and democracy.