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=> Egypt, Syria, and the dynamics of counter-revolution

Egypt, Syria, and the dynamics of counter-revolution

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Egypt, Syria, and the dynamics of counter-revolution by Max Ajl on November 18, 2011 As elections near in Egypt, the American-Gulf-Israeli counter-revolution gathers strength across the Mediterranean and the Middle East: overwhelming Libya, threatening to beat back the Bahraini upsurge, and vying for power in Egypt, as right wing parties prepare to take power in the face of the irrepressible and amazingly effervescent spirit of struggle that keeps erupting between the cracks in the Egyptian “transition” – a transition increasingly lubricated with the blood of the Egyptian people. There has been a lot of it over the last month. On 9 October 2011 the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) murdered 28 civilians, killing Copts and Muslims alike in a state-orchestrated massacre intended to “manufacture a discourse of conspiracy and sectarianism,” and split the Egyptian working-class along religious lines. The SCAF is learning well from its backers, the American and Israeli governments that are attempting to shatter the region into a jagged mosaic of statelets over which Israel and the Saudi-centered Gulf Cooperation Council can rule unhindered, the Eastern and Western islands of “stability” in a chaos they themselves brought into being. The separation of Sudan into two states is only the most recent example, as are the ongoing attempts to split up Syria along tribal lines-of-division amidst the killing of members of groups linked to the regime such as the ‘Alawites. In Egypt, the state can pose as both the guarantor of stability as well as the provocateur of instability: what Charles Tilly characterized as a protection racket. On the same day as the killings, 30 people were arrested, less than one percent of the 10,000 to 12,000 Egyptians, among them activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, imprisoned by the state security apparatus in the unsettled aftermath of the January 25 insurrection. Novelist Ahdaf Soueif comments, “in attacking this central, charismatic figure they appear to be openly mounting an attack on the very spirit of the revolution…The implications of the jail extension – for human rights and the safety of Egypt's young people – are enormous.” Today a Coptic march commemorating the dead from the Maspero massacre was attacked by assailants of “unclear” provenance – the current euphemism for SCAF mercenaries. Much is still unsettled, with the government still trying to quell the burbles of rebellion upsetting the “smooth transition” the SCAF and its American armorers have envisioned. At the core is the formal appearance, but not the reality, of political democracy – with democracy effectively hamstrung, the state can return to its normal business of preventing or repressing industrial and economic unrest so as to keep Egypt a secure territorial container in which capital can keep piling up. As elections near – elections which the SCAF will certainly try to postpone if a unwelcome outcome seems imminent – electoral coalitions such as the Egyptian Bloc, funded by leading businessmen, are jostling with al-Wafd, the party of Egyptian social elites, dismantled in 1952 after the revolution, and the Muslim Brothers, well-embedded through social service networks across the country but chiefly accountable to its well-heeled leadership, and eager to serve the United States and the Gulf powers that tower over the region’s future. As Nate Wright writes in MERIP, “It was an odd partnership between the country’s most established Islamist and liberal parties. A few prominent members of al-Wafd protested the party’s cooperation with the Brothers by supporting the Egyptian Bloc. Both parties were reluctant to support demonstrations that called on the military to scrap emergency laws giving it wide-ranging powers,” highlighting their stance towards social change. The alliance broke but the social forces that pushed it remain, with former members of the regime pushing for positions in parliament and preparing to reconstitute the ancien regime. A fresh ruling allows National Democratic Party members to take part in the upcoming election, clarifying the obduracy and staying power of Egypt’s traditional elites. The SCAF promised to put forth a document laying out constitutional principles before the upcoming elections. It did. The document prevents any parliamentary oversight of the military budget, the core of the military’s power. It is estimated that the military controls between 10 and 30 percent of the economy, but no one knows and the SCAF is eager to shroud the truth. The document also reserves a strong role in selecting those who would draft the constitution. The emergency laws remain in place, and under those laws 10 to 12,000 Egyptian activists languish in prison after, or awaiting, trial-by-kangaroo-court. It is against those government proposals that Egyptians will protest this Friday in Tahrir Square. Again this uneasy tableau, with the insurrection wobbling to and fro, liberals like Juan Cole are trying to retail a sanitized and simplified version of what has happened in Egypt over the last 10 months. The first move is dissolving the complexities of the Egyptian decade of mobilization – first radical youth and leftists protesting in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada, then against the Iraq War, then an unparalleled wave of labor unrest over the last decade, leading up to a failed try at a general strike on April 6 2008 at Mahalla al-Kubra after which the April 6 Movement, which took a leading role in coordinating the January 25 revolt, was named. What does not make it into Cole’s odd analysis is the ongoing repression in Egypt, the state’s attempts to beat back the surge of labor unrest, and especially the fact that the oil pipeline which exports Egyptian gas to Israel at subsidized rates has now been exploded seven times. The dynamics are regional, the part of the picture Cole takes such care to blot out. It is a pacified and castrated Egypt which protects Israel and preserves a bisected Arab world, with the population centers separated where possible from the oil reserves; where that has proven impossible, pounded into rubble and turned over to outside stewardship – Iraq and Libya. Meanwhile the Gulf States are keeping an attentive eye on the Egyptian uprising. They’re watching out for their investments. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Foreign Direct Investment in Egypt represented 25 percent of the country’s FDI in 2007, a number that has probably ticked up since then, while GCC firms are major shareholders or directly control 9 out of the top 12 major Egyptian banks. Aware that a successful revolution in Egypt would not be containable, the laboriously slow, violent, and repressive Egyptian transition is meant to destroy any such possibility, pathologically uncaring of the human debris lying in these efforts’ wake. Meanwhile Washington has to perform a democratic jig, with Hillary Clinton wagging her finger at her SCAF counterparts about the pace of the transition. As the NYT comments, The shift in tone is part of a difficult balancing act for Washington, which is keen to preserve its ties to the military and its interests in the region, chiefly Egypt’s role in maintaining peace with Israel. But Washington also hopes to win favor with Egypt’s newly empowered political opposition while avoiding the appearance of endorsing the military’s stalled transition to democracy. All things considered, some here have suggested, the change in tone may be intended to placate Egyptian public opinion rather than actually press the military to give up power. Elsewhere, the counter-revolution has taken on an even more reactionary tinge, as Jordan’s King Abdullah on Monday urged Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – certainly more popular than Abdullah, since hundreds of thousands recently came out to pro-regime protests – to step down from the presidency, even though there have been no defections from the regime. As Abdullah, who, in response to popular unrest tends to simper for more loot for internal repression, put it, “I believe, if I were in his shoes, I would step down…I would step down and make sure whoever comes behind me has the ability to change the status-quo that we're seeing." That came after the Arab League suspended Syria, ostensibly over its crackdown on protesters, as opposed to the sea of blood Saudi Arabia has created in Bahrain, the scene of a still flickering revolution, and the 30,000 bodies lying in mortuaries in Libya after their Qatari-led liberation. But the GCC basically owns Jordan: of the top 15 banks, 13 are either directly controlled by the GCC or have a GCC investor as a major shareholder, while the Jordanian stock exchange is utterly dependent on GCC investors—they make up less than 1 percent of shareholders yet represent 20 percent of market capitalization (Adam Hanieh, Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States). Their recent offer to Abdullah to join the formation merely formalizes the relationship. In Syria, the UN has reported perhaps 3,500 deaths. Observers claim that 250 of them were regime loyalists (the regime claims five times that number). That number of deaths doesn’t occur without guns, held by armed militants hiding out in the Turkish border region. Turkey, while preening about the Palestinians and Gaza out of its mouth while busily destabilizing Syria by harboring anti-regime fighters with its hands, knows that they are there. Indeed the neo-liberal Erdogan’s policies are proving so friendly to the imperial opposition, as opposed to the people, that Syrian opposition activist Burhan Ghalioun has said, “I think that we will work together with Turkey, like Arab countries and European countries, to free this country, Syria.” Turkey has more projects in Syria than has any other country, while its trade balance with Syria is positive and exceeds one billion dollars. More importantly, Turkey’s largest Arab export market is in the United Arab Emirates: eight billion dollars in 2008. Given the UAE’s central role in the regional counterrevolution, that Turkey has fallen into line behind it and the American government is not a surprise. Erdogan has nearly turned himself into a Turkish doppelganger of an Arab autocrat: talk left on Palestine while walking right on the economy, and then scurry right on Palestine, too, as soon as attention is averted. It seems clear, then, that as As’ad AbuKhalil comments, the Syrian people are “caught between two counter-revolutions: the regional one spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar (supported by US and its clients) and the local one perpetrated by the Syrian regime (supported by Iran and its allies). It is not an easy task to launch an assault by the Syrian people against two counter-revolutions.” Human Rights Watch has called for an UN-imposed arms embargo, and the European Union has decided to impose sanctions on 18 Syrians. The empire long ago decided on Syria’s fate. If the regional counter-revolution wins out, the result will be a further restructuring of the Syrian regime along lines commodious to the interests of those invested in it: Gulf capital. As Salman Shaikh from Brookings comments, “Syria would just be too tempting a target not to be involved in from the outside, and I’m sure the Qataris will be.” There are voices calling for other options: dialogue with the government, not its violent downfall. They are aware that if somehow the violence spirals to such a point as to take down the government its replacement will be hellish. They are also muffled. The world sees what the loud voices of the opposition and the government wish heard: support for the regime or calls for its eradication. For that reason. Joseph Massad has written, “The struggle to bring about a democratic regime in Syria has been thoroughly defeated. It was the United States that destroyed Syrian democracy in 1949 when the CIA sponsored the first coup d’état in the country ending democratic rule. It is again the United States that has destroyed the possibility of a democratic outcome of the current popular uprising.” Not because the Syrian people deserve their current government, but because they don’t deserve a worse one. The dynamics are familiar. In Iran, threats and militarist posturing from the United States and Israel – the latter, taking firm orders vis-à-vis Iran from the former, against destructive hallucinations to the contrary – have led Ahmadinejad critic Khatami to announce, “If there should one day be any military interference in Iran, then all factions, regardless of reformists or non-reformists, would get united and confront the attack.” The primary task for Western radicals is not to anatomize the social base of support for Bashar al-Assad or to wonder if revolution and democracy can alight down on Syria from B-52s. The correct crucible for revolution is not forged by the Western-imposed economic sanctions that lead to dead children. The task is to try to tie down our government so that its hands are too busy to keep re-arranging the Middle East to facilitate the looting, as it’s been doing for two generations. And, of course, in the process of doing so, we might get it to stop the domestic looting as well. About Max Ajl Max is a writer and activist from Brooklyn, NY, and blogs at www.maxajl.com. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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