Why Can't Hosni Mubarak Play Hardball?

My apologies, Dear Reader; what I thought was expert analysis-in-advance turns out to be little more than conventional wisdom come a few days early. For instance, see the 8 January piece:

Egypt has to come out of negotiations with a truce that opens Gaza, or Mubarak risks losing his country to the Muslim Brotherhood just when he wants to pass control to his son.(emphasis added)

Now comes the NYT on the mental state of folks in Cairo:

Nowhere in the Arab world is the gap between the street and the government so wide as here in Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel and has refused to allow free passage of goods and people through its border with Gaza, a decision that has been attacked by Islamic and Arab leaders and proved deeply troubling to many Egyptians.

Same as it ever was: Mubarak cannot be trusted, his government came out early against Hamas, the MB is attracting new support, and now government-puppet imams are being told to go on and let off some steam at the Jews.

That was one of the funny parts about Mubarak's apparent response to his street problem: that he sees it as a PR crisis, rather than a failure of policy. Instead of taking the direct route and opening Rafah unilaterally, or sending out Egyptian bulldozers to tear down chunks of wall, or working indirectly and just using the threat of unilateral action in negotiations to get the border open, he's decided that all his people really want is to hate the Jews, and that the cathartic experience of listening to Friday prayers at the state-run mosque will ease their pain.

Is Mubarak loath to jeopardize US aid to Egypt? It is a lot of aid, after all. (Christian Science Monitor has $50B as the figure.) Less than gov't aid to AIG, but a lot per year, billion-plus. Thing is, Hosni's been telling US presidents for 28 years that he's their only shot at peace in the Middle East's largest nation. He's warded off local and national elections, rephrased our appeals for help on terrorism into political street-sweeping, etc. He can tell the US that either he gets what he needs, or he dissolves parliament, Egypt has free elections tomorrow and a Muslim Brotherhood plurality the day after that.

But the really interesting thing is that Mubarak longs for Fatah supremacy, in the way that one would bring '88 back. Seriously, throwback politics will destroy Egypt's tranquility. So here are some notes for the Premier, or the Generalissimo, whatever Hosni calls himself:

Yasser Arafat is dead,

Even if he were alive, Fatah would still be a corrupt edifice with a PR-savvy former revolutionary as its figurehead, like Mandela and the ANC,

And decades of one-party government, anywhere in the world, except perhaps Russia where people have vodka instead of ambition or hope (sorry), causes people to "seethe" as you no doubt read in the NYT today

You cannot simultaneously blackmail the US (as I've basically urged you to do) with the spectre of an MB takeover of Parliament and yet pine for the return of Fatah to Gaza, as if Palestine hasn't already shown its preference, as if it doesn't already have a "street" to be appeased or broken.


And I guess that's the thing. Mubarak wants Israel to break the Gaza street. He expects Fatah to step into a void. And he's wrong. If there is a void in Gaza, Israel will step into it. And the Gaza street won't disappear, it will move somewhere, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, maybe Egypt.

See what I'm saying, Hosni? Either you play hardball now and get your borders open, or next year when the IDF is resettling one and a half million Gazans, you become their unwilling host and they your unwilling guests. And I wonder what kind of wack-ass speeches your trained imams will have to give out then...
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