RUTHFULLY YOURS

HOW THE US AND EGYPT WERE BLINDSIDED BY THE REVOLUTION….SEE NOTE PLEASE

Posted By Ruth King on February 2nd, 2011

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703445904576118502819408990.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

How Cairo, U.S. Were Blindsided by Revolution By CHARLES LEVINSON, MARGARET COKER And JAY SOLOMON

IS THAT WHAT YOU CALL IT BLINDSIDED? HARDLY…THEY WERE DELIBERATELY IGNORING THE ASCENT OF RADICAL ISLAM AND PINNING ALL THEIR HOPES FOR MIDEAST STABILITY ON “THE PEACE PROCESS” AS IF THE DISPOSITION OF 2200 SQUARE MILES OF WEST BANK WOUL HAVE BROUGHT “STABILITY”….WHAT COLOSSAL TYROS…..RSK

Two months before Egypt exploded in popular rage, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egypt’s foreign minister, in her seventh-floor offices in Washington.

U.S. officials were miffed that Cairo was ignoring their pleas to make coming legislative elections more credible by allowing international ballot monitors.

But after the meeting, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Aboul Gheit mentioned that disagreement when they spoke publicly. Mrs. Clinton praised the longstanding partnership between the U.S. and Egypt as the “cornerstone of stability and security in the Middle East and beyond.”

Months later, that cornerstone is crumbling. A week-long wave of demonstrations has pushed President Hosni Mubarak to promise he’ll leave—and the repercussions of the tumult in the Arab world’s most populous land have only begun to reverberate around the strategic and volatile Middle East.

A close look at how Egypt’s seemingly stable surface cracked in so short a time shows how Egypt’s rulers and their Western allies were caught almost completely off guard as the revolution unfolded, despite deep concerns about where Egypt’s authoritarian government was leading the country.

From the moment demonstrators began pouring into the street, those leaders have been scrambling to keep up, often responding in ways that have accelerated the crisis.

Just last Monday, few were paying close attention to Egypt. All eyes were on Tunisia, where to much of the world’s surprise, President Zine Al Abdine Ben Ali had been chased from office by a month of rising popular protest. This was something the Arab world had never seen before. But the impact spread steadily.

In Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt, protests started breaking out. Often these were organized by local opposition groups but attended by a surprising number of middle-class professionals—a diversity that seemed to mirror the protests in Tunisia.

In Cairo, a beleaguered collection of opposition groups plotted another in a series of demonstrations, this time to coincide with Police Day, a national holiday to thank Egypt’s police forces. To activists, it was the perfect irony: Almost a year earlier, a young man from Alexandria with no history of political activism, Khaled Saied, had been beaten to death by police. Activists had managed to bring national attention to the case, and they intended to use Police Day to build on that.

Opposition activists rallied around a Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Saied. To call for a protest, Mr. Saied’s death became the focal point for people who hadn’t been involved in the rights movement before, says Ahmed Gharbia, an Egyptian activist associated with the page. “He was an everyman, and it was very difficult for people who wanted to paint him as an outlaw to do that.” In the past week, supporters of the page swelled from 75,000 members to over 440,000.

Other national shocks also incited Egyptians. November elections, widely viewed as fraudulent, had been a complete sweep by Mr. Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party. A bigger shock came on New Year’s Eve, when a suicide bomber killed 30 worshippers at a Coptic church in Alexandria, the second biggest city. Muslims and Christians alike united in protest against sectarianism, and the government’s handling of the assault.

“More Egyptians were more angry than they’ve probably ever been, and not just activists, but ordinary people. And then came Tunisia, and suddenly people saw that maybe they could do something about that anger,” said Ziad Al-Alimi, an organizer for Nobel Prize Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei.

Mr. ElBaradei would return to Egypt to play a key role later. But he, too, failed to detect the early tremors of something new and remained in Vienna.

Despite fresh inspiration from Tunisia, even the organizers of the demonstrations expected them to come off like so many others—with protesters, far outnumbered by police, quickly driven off, beaten up and arrested. “We went out to protest that day and expected to be arrested in the first 10 minutes, just like usual,” said Mr. al-Alimi.

Instead, last week, tens of thousands of Egyptians began taking to the streets, flooding into the central Tahrir Square after pitched battles with thousands of riot police. It became the largest popular protest in Egypt since the so-called Bread Riots against rising prices in 1977.

Mr. Mubarak’s regime was stunned. “No one expected those numbers that showed up to Tahrir square,” said Ali Shamseddin, a senior official with the National Democratic Party in Cairo.

In faraway Washington, the demonstrations were only starting to register. Last Tuesday’s State of the Union address, delivered the day the protests started, had only a short section on foreign policy. President Barack Obama planned to nod to the democratic movement that swept away the ruler of Tunisia, a place “where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator,” the speech read.

Another line was added, according to a White House official. “And tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.” That last clause was again a nod to Egypt, the official said, although an oblique one.

In not mentioning Egypt by name, Mr. Obama appeared to be avoiding the subject, said Robert Kagan, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution. Earlier that day, Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Mubarak’s government was stable and “looking for ways to respond to legitimate needs and interests of Egyptian people.”

By coincidence, an Egyptian military delegation arrived in Washington last Tuesday for meetings that began on Wednesday, for the annual U.S. Egypt Military Cooperation Committee.

Egypt’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Sami Hafez Enan, led the 25-person Egyptian delegation. The senior U.S. official at the meetings was Alexander Vershbow, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said he will step down from power after his term expires this fall, for the first time setting a date to end his three decades of authoritarian rule. Charles Levinson has reaction from Cairo.

The formal meetings on Wednesday and Thursday didn’t include discussion of the street protests. But “it wasn’t ignored,” said Marine Gen. James Cartwright. U.S. officials didn’t offer guidance on how the Egyptian military should handle the crisis, and Egyptian officers didn’t show their hand, either.

By the time the Egyptians arrived back in Cairo early this week, the uprising was on the boil. Tens of thousands of demonstrators were now in their fourth day of battling police. In Suez, the city on the vital canal, violent confrontation raged between protesters and police. Protesters torched the ruling party headquarters there. On Thursday, the army had made its first deployment in Suez to displace the overmatched police, foreshadowing what was to come.

That same night, Mr. ElBaradei had returned to Cairo in a bid to take leadership of the loose coalition of opposition forces driving the protests.

Massive protests were planned for Friday, in what was now clearly the biggest challenge Mr. Mubarak had ever faced. Yet the country’s established opposition parties had played surprisingly little role in the protests.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest and best organized opposition force, hung back. Members participated in the protests, but the organization didn’t come out publicly encouraging them to take part until Thursday evening. It remains unclear whether the leadership’s slow reaction was a deliberate tactical decision meant to exploit the situation. Brotherhood leaders say their organization has always stood for democratic change in Egypt and that they have supported the protests from the beginning.

Across the Atlantic, the Egyptian government’s best and oldest ally fretted but still failed to formulate a concrete response.

On Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden, in an interview with PBS, declined to label Mr. Mubarak a dictator. To many, his caution smacked of support for the regime. But the U.S. was in a bind. It wanted a more democratic Egypt, while administration officials feared what might come next. They wanted something better than Mr. Mubarak’s regime, but they worried if the longtime leader survived the crisis, as he had several others in his three-decade rule, they would have alienated a key ally.

On Thursday night in Cairo, what appeared to be a massive crackdown began. The Internet was shut down in the wee hours, completely and nationwide, by government order. At about 11 a.m., mobile phone networks across Egypt went down, leaving the country with only land-line telephones for communication.

The blackout was aimed at shutting down Egypt’s young and vibrant social media scene, which appeared to be fueling the protests.

“I went to sleep in Egypt and woke up in North Korea,” said Hisham Qassem, an Egyptian newspaper publisher and political analyst.

Armies of riot police took up positions on key thoroughfares around the capital, ready to beat back demonstrators marching from scattered locations around Cairo to the capital city’s central downtown square.

On the West Bank of the Nile River, in the Cairo neighborhood of Agouza, protesters massed at the Mustapha Mahmoud Mosque after Friday prayers and approached police lines manning bridges over the rivers.

The first tear gas canisters started flying at this group of several thousand protesters at 2:20 p.m.

Broad swaths of Egyptian society were now in the streets. In Agouza, families with young children in tow marched into clouds of tear gas, toward the bridge over the Nile that led to Tahrir Square.

“I was shocked to see people on that bridge who had always been apathetic apologists for the regime yelling, ‘No’,” said Mr. Qassem, who himself joined the protesters for the first time in his life. Infuriated, he said he even threw rocks at police after he was tear-gassed and police fired rubber bullets.

As the protests swelled and grew more violent throughout the day on Friday, the central committee of the National Democratic Party was holding constant meetings monitoring events, according to Mr. Shamseddin, the senior party official. But they didn’t seem to grasp the extent of what was happening.

“The central committee decided to let it go at the beginning, because we thought that it would be regular demonstrations and they would eventually disperse,” he said. “We had orders from the central committee not to do anything.”

At 4 p.m., the battles appeared to tip decisively in the protesters’ favor. An order came down from Mr. Mubarak to the Minister of Interior, Habib al-Adly to use live ammunition to put down the protests, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Mr. al-Adly passed on the order to his top lieutenant, Gen. Ahmed Ramzy—but Mr. Ramzy refused, according to this person.

“It was a poor assessment of what [orders] his generals would take from him,” this person said.

When Mr. Mubarak saw that Mr. Adly wouldn’t get the job done, he gave the order for the army to deploy, this person said. Mr. Adly was furious, according to the person. Mr. Adly then gave a sweeping order to pull all police from the streets, from lowly traffic monitors, to prison guards, to the vast armies of truncheon-wielding riot police that had been a ubiquitous presence around Egypt for decades.

“That withdrawal was a disastrous mistake,” said Fuad Allam, a former commander of the country’s internal security forces. “You just can’t do that.”

The deployment orders caught the military by surprise, according to soldiers.

“No one expected it,” a junior officer said on Monday. “The order came and four hours later we were on the streets.”

But in the several-hour gap between the police withdrawal and the army’s deployment, chaos reigned. Protesters in downtown Cairo siphoned fuel out of passing cars and used it to set the headquarters of the ruling party on fire, according to witnesses.

“The government did not think that they would need the army, that’s why it was so slow to deploy,” said the senior ruling party official in Cairo.

On Friday night, Mr. Mubarak made his first public statement since the unrest had begun. He said he would appoint a new cabinet, and on Saturday named a No. 2—and thus potential successor—for the first time in his long rule: Omar Suleiman, former intelligence chief and a longtime trusted ally.

“He blinked,” said one Western diplomat in Cairo.

By then the White House was fully engaged. With Vice President Biden and his national security team by his side, President Obama called Mr. Mubarak after his speech with a clearer goal: transition of power.

Participants told White House officials that requesting that Mr. Mubarak not stand for re-election was necessary, but would not be sufficient to resolve the crisis.

“Mubarak is not going to be the agent of change,” said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. On Monday, he and other Middle East experts joined in a meeting with National Security Council officials. At one point, a participant said, “Please tell me you have contingencies in case Mubarak’s regime collapses.”

The NSC officials had to admit they didn’t.

One day later, after a giant demonstration in Cairo and under pressure from U.S. officials, Mr. Mubarak announced he wouldn’t run in September’s elections. President Obama followed up with a telephone call, a White House official said, in which he expressed some sympathy for the Egyptian president’s predicament, but said the transition “must begin now.”

—Jonathan Weisman contributed to this article.

Write to Charles Levinson at charles.levinson@wsj.com, Margaret Coker at margaret.coker@wsj.com and Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com

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