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THE ROVING EYE
Pharaohs and
liberators
By Pepe Escobar
CAIRO - Call it wishful thinking, but there are
insistent rumors in Cairo of a 50 percent chance of a
peaceful solution to the epic Washington-Baghdad
stand-off. Cairo is a key node in a flurry of diplomatic
efforts also linking Baghdad, Riyadh and Ankara. Cairo
today is pure "Casablanca" - with a difference: the
whole gargantuan city, from palace corridors to
ahwas (coffeehouses) has been turned into Rick's
Bar, cloaks and daggers aplenty. And not only the ghosts
of secret diplomacy monopolize the scene: there are
other ominous ghosts lurking in the background.
President Hosni Mubarak - the Egyptian pharaoh
now in his 21st year in power - has admitted on the
record "there are suggestions to send envoys to
Washington and Baghdad and to hold a regional
conference". But he refuses to specifically comment on
two top secret envoys who allegedly will be sent to
Baghdad to talk to Saddam Hussein about his remaining
options.
Instead, Saddam himself took the
initiative, sending a top envoy - Ali Hasan Al-Majid, a
key member of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council (RCC)
- to Cairo last Saturday with a special message to
Mubarak. Cairo and Washington remain in close contact.
Mubarak still insists that George W Bush promised him in
a phone call last October that "he wants to resolve the
crisis peacefully". A top Egyptian delegation is going
to Washington next week to express the concerns of the
whole Middle East about the disastrous consequences of
war.
Mubarak is involved in a classic tightrope
act. After meeting Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, for
instance, he declared that "there is no
Egyptian-Saudi-Turkish coordination or initiative". But
if Washington goes to war "no one can stop it. It is the
only superpower in the world." He also had said that
there were "no more messages I wanted to convey to
Washington or Baghdad. I have sent many messages, I
don't want to repeat myself." Then he changed his mind.
Inter-Arab contradictions are also reflected in
the role of Bahrain. Bahrain currently hosts the US Navy
5th Fleet. And it will host March's summit of the Arab
League - maybe a summit held in the middle of a war.
Even being so close to American interests in the region,
Bahrain's Information Minister, Nabil Al-Hamer, insists
that "all Arab leaders are seeking to set aside the
specter of war".
Based on a comment by Saudi
Crown Prince Abdullah, according to which Arabs should
reach an understanding with Baghdad to try to evade war,
unsubstantiated rumors keep flying about that the Saudis
are trying to foment a coup against Saddam. Diplomats in
Cairo dismiss as ludicrous the idea that Riyadh would
suggest to the UN a sweeping amnesty to the Iraqi
leadership - except maybe to a hundred or so top-rank
RCC members - hoping to solidify the idea of a coup.
Saddam's possible exile is also dismissed as
pure farce. Would-be destinations like Russia, Libya and
Mauritania already took pains to deny it publicly.
Seywan Barzani, a European-based representative of the
Democratic Party of Kurdistan, reminds everyone, "Saddam
is not the kind of man who relinquishes power. He
believes it when he says he is the knight who will
liberate Jerusalem. People on the ground in Iraq are
very much afraid of revenge exacted by the regime in
case Saddam leaves; it would take a missile carrying
chemical weapons falling over a village to make
thousands of victims."
Everyone in Cairo seems
to agree that Saddam's exile would be a sort of defeat
for America: the State Department might be happy with
the arrangement, but the hawks of the
Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz-Perle kind would be left
fuming. Muhamad Al Sayyed Said, deputy director of the
Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, is
adamant, "I don't think Saddam would even consider the
possibility." Walid Kazziha, political science professor
at the American University of Cairo, is of the same
opinion, "All his life Saddam has been very militant,
persistent and persevering."
Said, though,
advances the possibility of an internal exile for
Saddam: he would resign from the presidency and remain
backstage as a sort of grand manipulator in the ruling
Ba'ath Party, which then could adopt some steps towards
a limited kind of democracy. Washington, of course,
would never buy such a scheme.
Among all the
rumors and rhetoric shrapnel from disinformation
campaigns, a group of Arab intellectuals and artists -
most of them based in Beirut - is about to release an
open letter to Arab newspapers asking for Saddam to go
into exile. These intellectuals include Chibli Mallat -
a Lebanese lawyer who charged Ariel Sharon with war
crimes in a court in Belgium - and Kamel Labidi, a
Tunisian, former director of Amnesty International's
Beirut office. Labidi also does not expect Saddam to
make such a move, but he considers this would give
post-Saddam Iraq a chance for democracy free from
Western interference. Mallat insists that the letter
calls for an international, NGO and human-activist
monitoring force to manage Iraq while it encourages
positive steps towards democracy - and not an occupying
foreign army.
But the Saddam-in-exile option
simply won't go away. Even Egypt is being considered, on
the grounds that Cairo has already hosted King Saud of
Saudi Arabia when he was forced to abdicate in 1955;
Yemeni President Abdullah Al Salal when he was deposed
in 1966; Sudanese President Gaafar Numeiri when he was
deposed in 1985; and the Shah of Iran after the Iranian
Shi'ite revolution in 1979. The shah, by the way, is
buried in Cairo.
Osama bin Laden, as the world
knows, has called George W Bush "the pharaoh of this day
and age" (in his audio communique broadcast by Al
Jazeera in November last year). It's unlikely that Bush
will consider a future as a mummy alongside King Tut in
the Egyptian Museum, surrounded by camera-clicking
busloads of tourists. But as the pharaoh mulls his next
war, his greatest enemy, a mysterious specter who
remains in the shadows, has other plans. The greatest
enemy, as we know, is not Saddam Hussein, but Osama bin
Laden.
Asia Times Online has confirmed that
Islamist lawyer Montaser Al Zayat received a crucial
e-mail in the beginning of January by none other than
Ayman al Zawahiri - alias "The Surgeon", the Egyptian
who is al-Qaeda's number two. In the e-mail - which was
sent to the website of a study center run by Al Zayat -
Al Zawahiri praises September 11 as "the blessed
September conquest" that "exposed the ugly face of
America".
Muhamad Salah, Cairo bureau chief of
the respected London-based newspaper Al Hayat, and an
expert on radical Islam, says that the e-mail is really
from "The Surgeon". "The terminology used in the message
is his. And Al Zayat is a top Islamist. He would never
make up such a story and jeopardize his reputation."
It's not the first time that Al Zawahiri and Al Zayat
have exchanged correspondence. This e-mail apparently is
an answer to a previous one sent by Al Zayat shortly
before the first anniversary of September 11, when he
asked Al Zawahiri the reason for the attacks and invited
him to participate in a conference in Cairo on the
future of political Islam. Al Zayat claims that Al
Zawahiri is definitely alive and only answered the
e-mail now because of the tremendous security risks he
faces. Al Zayat also considers that "as the US is
preparing for war against Iraq, Al Zawahiri may have
found the time was ripe to agitate the masses against
the Americans".
The instructions to "the masses"
are pretty clear. The e-mail says that the Egyptian
Islamic Jihad - which was run by Al Zawahiri himself and
then merged into al-Qaeda - has decided to suspend any
operations inside Egypt. Gamaa Islamiya - Egypt's
largest hardcore Islamist group - had already declared a
ceasefire in 1997. Incidentally, Al Zayat for years was
the unofficial spokesman for Gamaa Islamiya. And he was
one of the major sponsors of the ceasefire.
Up
to now, Islamic Jihad refused to endorse the ceasefire.
But the message now from Islamic Jihad - and al-Qaeda,
for that matter - is clear: all the efforts are
concentrated on fighting the US. So the global script
now goes like this: If Bush, the "pharaoh of this day
and age", attacks the very visible, not-to-be-exiled,
and self-styled liberator of Jerusalem Saddam Hussein,
the shadowy and mysterious specters bin Laden and Al
Zawahiri will not strike pharaoh minions in Arab
regimes, but the interests of the pharaoh himself.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contactcontent@atimes.com for
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