Thanassis Cambanis

An obsession with “stability” — and an erroneous, narrow definition of the term — has warped American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Washington’s struggle to adjust to the rapid transformation of the region in part reflects a calcified mindset that for decades had to account for little change. Now, with the Arab political landscape barely recognizable, American policymakers are trying to adjust quickly. Imagine, American client regimes toppling one by one, while absolute monarchies in the Gulf are taking part in military interventions to unseat one dictator in Libya while propping up another in Bahrain. Some people will argue that all this turmoil amounts to an even stronger argument for stability; I’d say events suggest the opposite. That’s the subject of my latest Internationalist column in The Boston Globe.

America’s main goals in the Middle East have remained constant at least since the Carter years: We want a region in which oil flows as freely as possible, Israel is protected, and citizens enjoy basic human rights — or at least aren’t so unhappy that they begin to attack our interests.

In working toward these goals, the byword and the cornerstone of the entire venture has been stability. Washington has invested heavily — with money, weapons, and political cover — to guarantee the stability of supposedly friendly regimes in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The idea is simple: A regime, even a distasteful and autocratic one, is more likely to help America, and even to treat its own people with a modicum of decency, if it doesn’t feel threatened. Instability creates insecurity, the thinking goes, and insecurity breeds danger.

But the unrest and dramatic changes of the past months are offering a very different lesson. An overemphasis on stability — and, perhaps, an erroneous definition of what “stability” even is — has begun harming, rather than helping, American interests in several current crisis spots. Our desire to keep a naval base in a stable Bahrain, for example, has allied us with the marginalized and increasingly radical Bahraini royal family, and even led us to acquiesce to a Saudi Arabian invasion of the tiny island to quell protests last month. To keep Syria stable, American policy has largely deferred to the existing Assad regime, supporting one of the nastiest despots in the region even as his troops have fired live ammunition at unarmed protesters. In a moral sense, this “stability first” policy has been putting America on the wrong side of the democratic transitions in one Arab country after another. And in the contest for pure influence, it is the more flexible approaches of other nations that seem to be gaining ground in such a fast-changing environment. If we’re serious about our goals in the Middle East, “stability” is looking less and less like the right way to achieve them.

Foreign policy shifts slowly, and it’s hard to replace such a familiar, if flawed, approach to the world. But recent events have strengthened the ranks of thinkers who argue that there may be more effective and less costly ways to press our interests in the Middle East. We could take an arm’s length approach, allowing that not every turn of the screw in the Middle East amounts to a core national interest for the United States — in effect, abstaining from some of the region’s conflicts so we have more credibility when we do intervene. We could embrace a more dynamic slate of alliances that allows the United States to shift its support as regimes evolve or decay. Finally, we could redefine stability entirely and downgrade it as a priority, so that we recognize its value as simply one of many avenues toward achieving US interests.

Read the rest in The Boston Globe.

 

C-SPAN’s Book TV is airing a talk I gave at the New York Public Library in February about the historical trajectory of Hezbollah in the context of the rising tide of Arab revolutions. As change-fever spreads across the Arab world, we’ll begin to see answers emerging to the fundamental questions I explore here: What shape will revolutionary politics take as they’re institutionalized in a newly dynamic Arab political space? How will Hezbollah’s rejectionist “Resistance Axis” fare once it has to compete in the marketplace of ideas with a real alternative?

I’ve been in Egypt covering the referendum and the latest twists of the revolution — a juicy and suspenseful saga, although one easily overlooked as the entire world rises up or melts down, gets bombed or washed away. One reason I’ve not been posting my reporting live is the size of my traveling party, which includes Anne and two quite young tourists, pictured above at the Giza pyramids today.

Michael Hanna at The Century Foundation has a smart oped in The Christian Science Monitor about the steps necessary to translate Egypt’s revolution into lasting reforms. He argues that the rushed timeline imposed by the military might thwart the systemic changes needed to institute a credible constitution and initiate electoral politics.

Progress based solely on a hasty electoral transition would be an illusion – which might undercut efforts at real reform. Instead of accepting a transition process implemented and dictated solely by the armed forces,Egypt’s opposition should remain united in seeking immediate actions that will preclude diversion to military-led governance, while allowing for a more realistic transitional period.

The country’s opposition groups are keen to ensure that the armed force’s custodianship is, in fact, temporary, and not a prelude to consolidation of a revamped, military-led regime. This concern – and broader and well-justified concerns about a counter-revolution – are understandable based on Egypt’s history and recent developments. Yet, these very same concerns could lead to support for a transition process that will actually undermine the core goals of the Egyptian uprising and subvert thorough reform. A six-month timetable for popular elections, as was announced by the Egyptian military, will dictate that reform in the interim period will be shallow and that even free and fair elections will not be an opportunity for true representational politics. Read the rest here.

We had a panel discussion at The Century Foundation last week where we discussed some of the implications of the revolution for Egypt going forward and for the Arab world as a whole. My favorite part of the evening came when the Yemeni ambassador to the U.N. Abdullah Al-Saidi diagnosed the central problem of the region as “leaders who have tried to transform republics into monarchies” — a malady from which he did not exempt his own country (you can watch the q & a here). That’s a fair enough way to summarize the ills of regimes in Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. It doesn’t address the failure to govern, which is at root what plagues all the Arab states, including those that are avowedly hereditary monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco). You can watch the event at The Century Foundation here.

In the weeks since I returned from Egypt, I’ve made a number of previously scheduled talks, originally intended to cover Hezbollah and the most recent developments in Lebanon. I’ve made a stab at addressing the tumultuous change more broadly, as three forces are now competing for popular momentum: revolution (the massive and ongoing regional wave), reaction (the old statist regimes and monarchs), and resistance (the axis of empowerment through armed uprising).

It appears that Salve Regina, the small college in Newport, R.I. that hosted one of those talks, has posted the video online. It is with some trepidation that I post the link.

Thanassi at Salve on YouTube

In my latest Internationalist column for The Boston Globe, I explore some of the implications of the Arab revolutions for US policy. It will take a long time for American policy makers to grasp the implications of the popular wave sweeping the Arab world, and if history is any guide, the architects of American policy might never actually figure out what happened, why, and how best to respond. One of my favorite analysts and bloggers, Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist, thinks the arguments I make are at best banal, at worst, completely wrong-headed.

Here’s how the column opens:

The popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and beyond have seized the world imagination like no events since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Regimes are teetering, dictators have fallen, and unexpected coalitions have managed to conjure street-level power seemingly out of thin air. Tunisians took credit for Egypt’s revolution; Egyptian demonstrators in turn claim they inspired people in Wisconsin and Bahrain.

Much remains uncertain, and even the most experienced observers have no idea who will hold power in the aftermath of these uprisings. But already we’ve learned more in a few short months than we gleaned from decades of careful study about the real power base of Moammar Khadafy and Hosni Mubarak, about the balance among armies and tribes, about the relative power of secular and Islamist activists. We’re seeing the true measure of oil money and the Muslim Brotherhood, of popular anger about corruption, and of the real interest in economic liberalization.

But perhaps the most surprising lessons emerging from all the unrest are even bigger ones — insights that extend well beyond the Middle East, and are forcing thinkers and policy makers to reconsider some basic assumptions that have long guided America’s foreign policy. How much impact can America really have on world events? How do our alliances function at crucial moments? Who really has the potential to initiate and control massive change in modern societies? The surprising answers suggested by the Arab revolts might create new options in the minds of American policy makers looking to advance not only US security and economic goals, but also the causes of human rights, transparency, and democratic governance.

Read the rest here.

Watching Qaddafi on Al Jazeera right now – like watching Mubarak in Tahrir Square – was like peering down a sinkhole into a previous century. In this hallucination, men from another time, dressed in fashions long discarded, declaim in a wooden language that no longer has any purchase on our psyche. They don’t realize the disconnect. History has moved on. They are blaming provocateurs, satellite television, foreign plots, the Al Qaeda bogeyman. It’s madness! The delusion would be hilarious were it not so lethal.

“If you don’t follow Qaddafi who will you follow?” he says. “Someone with a  beard?”

The Atlantic has posted my essay about the next gamble for Egypt’s revolutionaries: Can they sustain pressure on the ancien regime?

The euphoria in Cairo already is already giving way to anxiety as Egyptians contemplate the terrifying task of dismantling Hosni Mubarak’s police state and building an accountable Arab democracy in the image of Tahrir Square.

The old order has been decapitated, but still exerts an undeniable gravitational pull over the entire polity. Thousands or possibly millions of policemen, informants, and clients of Mubarak’s state tremble at the prospect of transparency and, perhaps, retribution. If the protesters want to pursue reform, they will have to consider, and maybe even accommodate, those remnants of the old order.

On the morning before Mubarak resigned, I sat poolside with a group of retired generals at the Gezira Club, a members-only holdover of colonial times. A recently retired general from state security tried to interrogate me about the demonstrators; he was still convinced, against all evidence, that it was a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. The police, he was certain, would soon regain control of the nation. “How will the police regain public trust when they are so hated?” I asked. He couldn’t fathom what I was saying. “The majority of people love the police,” he shouted at me. “They will respect the police because they need the police.”

Old Egypt was on display elsewhere as well, in the patronizing and impatient tone in which the prime minister addressed the public in his first press conference after Mubarak’s downfall, in the capricious manner with which soldiers turned away some people at checkpoints while allowing others to pass, in the air of disgust with which some of Egypt’s millionaires, talking to me over cocktails at the Bodega Bar the day after Mubarak’s abrupt disappearance, dismissed the revolution as a failure that would usher in an anti-business government.

The revolutionaries, gambling as they have every step of the way, have gone for broke and demanded complete systemic reform: a new constitution written from scratch and an interim government purged of the Mubarak family and their Cardinal Richelieu, the spymaster and momentary Vice President Omar Suleiman. Perversely, though, the only way toward that goal was another, bigger, gamble: the revolutionaries have asked a military dictatorship to manage the transition in the hope that a committee of unelected generals who have spent a career defending Mubarak’s order will now willingly write themselves out of power.

The prospect may sound crazy, naïve, even delusional – but then again, three weeks ago so did the possibility of millions of Egyptians embracing civil disobedience and successfully castrating the Mubarak regime.

Read the rest here.

Egypt’s revolutionaries suspect the ecumenical and utopian nature of their wave will bless the next phase of their struggle. So many of the people I talked to on the streets today – before and after Mubarak skulked to his summer palace – already were busy imagining a future in their own indigenous vernacular. Mubarak’s cruelty drove them into a frenzy of rage, but once released from their state-induced torpor and timidity, they found themselves more interested in screaming about the things they wanted, rather than the things they wanted to get rid of.

Mubarak was a spark but also a footnote.

“He treated us all as if we were stupid,” said Leila Abdelbar, a staffer on parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “He underestimated us. He should have respected us.” She was angry, at a father who didn’t take his own children seriously. She also was angry at herself, for having acted for so long like she believed him.

“We have to thank our children for showing us the way,” she said, looking with adoration at her daughter Heba.

She and her friends are conservative Muslims, some of them wearing the full-face covering niqab. They’re not in the Muslim Brotherhood and they’re not interested in an Islamic state; they spoke with longing about a new constitution, a reconstituted judiciary, and a state that provided basic rights: rule of law, education, health and safety.

No one in the crowd used the American democracy vocabulary. They spoke with organic idioms, conjuring huriya, liberty, based on citizens who took their own rights, rather than received them as a leader’s prerogative. “We will take our rights,” many people repeated; they meant that they would demand a new compact, in which they would articulate their needs and if those needs went unmet, they would remake their state.

The specifics varied, and some people still drifted in vague hope for something better. Some talked of their right not to be arrested at will by unaccountable secret police. Some yearned for better schools and hospital care for the poor.

Protest leaders feted the moment but kept planning. “We’ll work until the last moment,” said Basem Kamel, one of the leaders of the Baradei civil reform campaign. Youth leaders were meeting at 1 a.m. to coordinate a clean withdrawal from the square and set negotiating terms for their discussions with the army (Kamel is 41 and balding, but youth is also a state of mind).

I have no doubt there will be reversals ahead, but Egypt has written a new chapter in modern history with utter disregard for all expectations for the contrary – their own as well as those of outsiders. There’s every reason to hope that the same millions of Egyptians who drove a tyrant to flee without firing a shot and without calling for the destruction of anything, and who discarded all their traditional corroded institutions to invent a unified popular front, might now manage the parlous task of writing a new constitution, convincing the military to abdicate to a truly civilian order, and crafting a polity dedicated to serving its own citizens’ conception of their right to justice, liberty and security.

“We did it,” Ziad Al-Alaimy said after lifting me off the ground in a bear hug. “Tomorrow belongs to us.”

It’s a long road ahead, surely, but as many people said: Egypt has learned the way to Tahrir Square. They won’t soon forget it, and let’s hope, neither will their new leaders.

On Thursday night in Tahrir Square, the crowds were convinced that Mubarak was about to deliver his resignation speech. Generals had told the crowd that on this day, their demands would be met; the high command had convened without Mubarak; and the head of the ruling party had demanded Mubarak amend the constitution and immediately resign.

Activists had already started discussing transitional governments, and warning the military against getting too comfortable. “We now know the way to Tahrir Square,” said Ahmed Sleem, 25, an activist. “We know how to force the military to stay down.”

Ayman Fareh, a tour guide whose son just turned one Ayman, 35, said he had prayed his son would not live another year under Mubarak, and he felt God had listened. “I was just born today,” he exulted. “There was a wall of terror, and it is broken. It will never be built again. We’ll never go back to this dark age. Tahrir Square is always here.”

The celebration turned out to be premature.

By the time Mubarak had made clear he intended to stay in office until September, angry shouts had broken out and thousands had removed a shoe and held it silently, stone-faced up to the screen where the president’s face was projected.

Ahmed Mohammed, 19, a computer student, shouted over Mubarak’s speech. “He will dig his grave himself,” he said, pumping his fist in anger. “He will get our answer tomorrow.”

Nearby other men chanted “He wants blood!”

Organizers warned darkly that violence was now inevitable. “He set the country on fire,” said Ziad Alaimy, one of the organizers. “No one can control the violence tomorrow. Tomorrow I think a lot of people will be killed.”

The dark mood abated within an hour. After midnight, the crowd at Tahrir was still booming at a time when it normally has thinned out to the most dedicated. Men in headbands led chants and songs. Hawkers at the exits entreated those who left to return on Friday.

People heatedly debated whether protesters would be able to take over the state television headquarters or presidential palace, and considered the merits of other ministries.

“Only God can decide what will happen tomorrow – not America, not Israel and not Hosni Mubarak,” screamed, Abdou Shinawi, 27, a perfume merchant, vowing to sleep in the streets until Mubarak left office. “Martin Luther King changed America with thousands of people. We have millions.”

Late in the night, thousands of people poured past the concrete barriers to demonstrate – and set up camp – in front of the Stalinist state television headquarters, an imposing circular tower on the Nile that looks like a fortress even in normal times. Thousands more were on their way to the presidential palace in Heliopolis.

“I wish that it continues to be peaceful,” said Ahmed Abdrabo, 22, a short story writer, grinning at a member of the presidential guard in full riot gear standing two arms’ lengths away, on the other side of a barbed wire fence. “We don’t want it to be transformed into a violent revolution. Tomorrow will not be a good day for Egypt.”

The lady who answered the Turkish Airlines number at the airport sounded unexpectedly solicitous. Perhaps because I’d just been decked with an unscrupulous $540 data roaming charge from AT&T (their mistake), I was especially charmed.

“I will not charge you to change your ticket even though I am supposed, because you have to Egypt in such a dangerous time,” she said expansively, after a long friendly chitchat.

“Thank you,” I said, genuinely warmed by the gesture.

Then her tone changed. “Unless you’re a journalist,” she said.

Silence.

“You’re not a journalist, are you?” she pressed.

“What if I were?” I said with a short forced laugh.

She chose to interpret my answer as a no, and issued my new ticket home.

The Atlantic has posted my dispatch about last night’s expansion of the Cairo protest to the gates of parliament:

On Tuesday, the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square took over the street in front of Parliament and the building where the presidential cabinet meets. A professors’ march took a few unplanned turns, joined a small group of protesters already in front of parliament, stragglers accrued, the military stood aside and – presto – the revolution had another beachhead.

By 10 p.m., hundreds of reinforcements streamed in from Tahrir Square, just around the corner, bringing blankets and tents. They were there to stay.

A government engineer sat smiling on the curb in front of parliament. Beside him a crowd whistled, cheered and beat a drum while a man shimmied up the iron gates of parliament. The sign he taped there read: “Closed Until the Fall of the Regime.”

“The government said we were just squatting in Tahrir Square having a picnic, so we had to move,” said the engineer, whose name was Tarek. At first he declined to tell me his last name, but then he laughed at the absurdity; he’s already on wanted list, and has been warned that if he goes to work at his government job, he’ll be arrested.

“If this revolution fails, Mubarak will hang me by my neck whether or not you publish my name,” Tarek said.

Organizers of Tahrir Square are playing a numbers game. If more people show up each time they call for a big crowd – as happened on Tuesday, which drew perhaps the greatest amount of people since it all began on January 25 – then the revolution advances. That’s their gamble. Several of them said they believe that success required steady escalation. Tuesday, the parliament. Friday, perhaps the state television headquarters or a ministry. Sunday, the police headquarters. And so on. They are hoping to organize major days of action three times a week, a plan that hinges on drawing more and more people each time. So far, popular response has exceeded their expectations at each turn. That’s no guarantee that the pattern will continue, or that the regime won’t use incalculable brute force or brilliant political maneuvering to shift the power balance.

The ultimate wild card is the Egyptian people. Many outside Tahrir Square complain about the demands of the people inside, which many see as too radical, and say they long for business as usual — especially now that Mubarak has promised to resign before the year’s end.

You can read the rest here.

Anchor Lisa Mullins interviewed me on Tuesday about the day’s protests in Tahrir Square. You can listen to our conversation here.

Last week Mohamed Rifaah al-Tahtawi resigned as spokesman for Al-Azhar, the seat of the Sunni clerical establishment in Cairo. Mohamed Rifaah is twice over an establishment figure. He spent a career in the foreign service as an ambassador and deputy to the foreign minister; after retirement in December 2009, he moved to the office of the grand sheikh of Al-Azhar.

“This youth movement changed our horizon. I didn’t expect it. I underestimated it,” Mohammed Rifaah told me, explaining his decision to renounce his job and join the revolutionaries. “This is a time to take sides, and I have taken sides.”

He invited me to join him on the curb in an alley off Tahrir Square, behind the makeshift hospital. “Welcome to my office,” he joked. “We are all revolutionaries now.”

He outlined four possible scenarios for the current political standoff:

1. Soft transition. Under pressure from the United States and from regime insiders, Mubarak passes power to a more palatable member of the establishment and makes real, but incomplete, reforms to the system. Egypt’s foreign policy would remain unchanged.
2. Tahrir Square becomes Hyde Park. The revolutionaries lose their connection to society at large and are allowed to continue their protest, but with marginal impact. The regime wins a war of attrition, and returns “with all its savagery, to take its revenge.”
3. Tiananmen Square/Paris Commune. The regimes wipes out the protesters and faces no wider nationwide revolt in response.
4. Radicalization. The regime gives no ground and in response the revolutionaries resort to force. The regime falls, along with the system it has built, and is replaced by a popular government after a destructive confrontation.

There are surely other scenarios, but Mohamed Rafaah’s breakdown of the alternatives is instructive. In his view, time does not necessarily favor the regime.

In a sign of how quickly assessments shift, I’m looking here at my notes from yesterday. Thirty hours ago activists in the square were on the defensive, convinced the state had reconstituted and had them on the run. By noon today they were triumphant, and Tahrir Square was so clogged with people it took an hour to walk across it at times.

Here was the grim scene from Monday, when all seemed lost (to some, for a moment).

The world outside the square intruded only sporadically. Undercover intelligence officers circulated filming people with their cell phones, and streams of newcomers walked over the bridge in the afternoon to see if the activists were as bad as they had heard on state television.

“Are they giving out free cell phones?” asked a young math teacher named Fareed, who refused to give his full name and said it was his first, and probably last, visit to the demonstration.

State television has been broadcasting various untruths about the demonstrators, including claims that they receive money and free fast food. “Where is my Kentucky Fried Chicken?” has become a rallying cry for the people staying in the square.

By late afternoon on Monday the numbers inside the square were as high as the previous day, but core activists worried that for every Egyptian attracted for the first time to Tahrir, ten more were being turned off by state propaganda.

“I spend entire nights arguing with my family and posting on Facebook. They have started to turn against the protests,” said Mona Rabie, 28, a human rights worker. Most of her family members dismiss the protesters as radical, although a few have said they would like to take part but fear government punishment. One of her cousins said she was interested in visiting Tahrir but only if Mona would escort her past the military checkpoints. By late evening though she hadn’t arrived. “She’s hesitating. She’s got cold feet,” Mona said. “I think the only way is if I physically go to her house and drag her here.”

“For a while the tide of fear had turned, but it’s started to come back,” Mona said. “The government has too much muscle. I think the people are going to turn against the protesters. They’ve already started.”

She told her uncle that at least a hundred dead had been taken to one Cairo hospital and she had spoken directly with the doctor in charge of the morgue. He didn’t believe her. “If it were true, they would have told us about it on television,” he told Mona.

Still, though, new reinforcements had joined the hard inner core of protesters, spurred on by footage of the violent clashes Wednesday night between government-orchestrated thugs and the Tahrir protesters.

Abdulrahman Mohammed, 34, came to Tahrir for the first time on Monday. “I saw these people on television, and I realized they were better than me,” he said. It was the first time he had joined a protest. “Democracy has a price, and that price is blood.”

The secret police in Egypt usually aren’t very secret. They wear a certain recognizable cut of shabby pants, button-up shirts meant to hang untucked over the belt, and depending on rank a wide-weave sweater or shiny leather jacket.

In Tahrir Square, they parade with the crowds, ostentatiously filming everyone with their cell phones. Some activists who have been arrested and released since January 25 told me their interrogators reference films of them from Tahrir.

No one in the square seems to pay them any mind.

I found this indifference mystifying. Why weren’t the people in Tahrir trying to purge the place of infiltrators, as they had in early days? One organizer explained that there were simply too many, and that it only mattered if they tried to provoke fights. Otherwise, they caused no harm.

Helmy Hassan, a carpenter with no living family members to care for, offered a more compelling explanation. He spends his nights guarding a spur street leading to the square. “The revolution needs people like me,” he said. “That’s why we’re strong. Someone who needs to support his family can be bribed with money.”

Helmy said the scores of people circulating the square, filming with cell phone cameras, couldn’t intimidate demonstrators. “The video is a double-edged sword,” he said. “In the best case, they show the films to their friends and they see what we’re doing. In the worst case, they give the films to state security, and they see that I am defending my country. Let them. It is an honor.”

At the northern end of Tahrir Square, by the National Museum, groups of men sleep in shifts beneath the treads of the army tanks that mark the northern perimeter of Revolutionary Egypt. Demonstrators allowed the tanks so the army could protect the antiquities in the museum, and ever since the army has tried to move them further.

It’s a particularly tough – and diverse – group of men crammed in close quarters beneath the treads. I talked at length to a doctor from Cairo, a primary school teacher from rural Upper Egypt, and a microbus driver from Giza. They break class and religious barriers, and they have profoundly absorbed the ethos of a new Egypt.

Saif Eldeen, 29, a primary school English teacher, joined the protest on Thursday morning, traveling from his home in Sohag, Upper Egypt. He lied to his wife, telling her he had to file some government paperwork, and drove to Cairo. She wept when he called her from Tahrir Square. “She said, ‘You want to leave me and your three-month old baby to die?’ I told her, ‘God will provide.’”

Saif spoke with a gleam in his eye – common to many of the most dedicated protesters – and said he no longer had anything to lose, and therefore, no incentive to compromise: “If we lose, I will spend the rest of my life in prison, or I will be killed.”

He sported a pronounced prayer bump and a grimy dress shirt. He brought no change of clothes, and planned to stay until the government fell or wiped out the protesters.

Beside him sat the microbus driver from Giza with his three-year-old daughter in his lap. “I come when I can afford not to work,” said the driver, Gamal Moghawery ElShimi, 36. Like many of the dedicated protesters, he worried that the silent majority of Egyptians consider the protests a nuisance or worse. Most of his relatives found the entire protest distasteful, and discouraged him from attending. “They think I’ll end up in prison and it’s not worth it,” Gamal said. “I try to change their minds, but mostly they are unconvinced.”

He wiped his daughter’s nose with a kerchief. He said he brought her along despite the risk so that she would not grow up to live like her parents. “I want her to see and feel what it’s like to defy authority,” he said.

(In the bottom picture, Saif is seated on the left, and Gamal and his daughter on the right.)

Out after curfew again on Sunday night (this time, though, only 9 p.m.) I was returning home after a long day talking to protestors. Plainclothes men frantically waved down my taxi at a joint army-police-neighborhood checkpoint when they saw my foreign-looking face (they looked like police trying to dress like civilians, in a style instantly recognizable as mukhabarat undercover). “Journalist?” they asked. “Camera?”

While a soldier affably thumbed through my passport, a police intelligence officer strode over and emitted a theatrical sigh. “You are coming from Tahrir Square?” he said. “You should know that not everyone in Egypt supports them. We are 80 million people. 1 million cannot make the decisions for us all.”

The soldier, who looked half the intelligence man’s age, interrupted the soliloquy about Egypt’s put-upon security state.

“You can go,” he said, with a smile that struck me as far more sincere than his colleague’s.

The soldiers had emptied our luggage onto the street and pulled apart the seats of our taxi. The driver was muttering angrily: “You don’t have to destroy my car.” It was four in the morning on Saturday and Cairo was under curfew, but we had decided to risk the checkpoints rather than wait at the airport until dawn.

The youngest-looking man in the platoon methodically opened every zipper bag and wallet, sniffing my traveling companion’s shampoo and quizzically squeezing the earplugs that came in our Turkish Airlines complimentary traveler’s kit. This turned out to be only the second most invasive search of the night. Triumphantly, he pulled out our books.

Michael had The Girl Who Played With Fire and Eugene Rogan’s The Arabs. Foolishly, I had a brought a copy for friends of my book about Hezbollah, A Privilege to Die.

“What’s this book about?” a military intelligence officer asked me. That’s when he recognized me as the author from the jacket photo. Without a word, he ran to deliver the damning evidence to an even higher officer.

We waited for half an hour, shivering. The soldiers eyed me coldly. None of the usual smiles and chatter I’m accustomed to in Egypt.

A colonel pulled my friend aside.

“You want to know why these soldiers are so jumpy?” he said. “State television has been showing people that look just like your friend there, blaming them for the protests and violence.”

Egyptians have a well-earned reputation for hospitality, which has been a boon to the country’s bread-and-butter tourist trade. Many people seem to enjoy foreigners, normally.

There’s another strand of history that can be summoned though: that of inducing xenophobia in times of crisis. My Greek forebears did it time and again in the turbulent and pogrom-scarred years during which they forged a nationalistic identity after independence in 1821. Egypt has experienced its own periodic bouts of ethnic cleansing since 1919, and a spell of anti-foreigner rioting in the 1950s drove out most of Egypt’s historic Greek community.

This past week’s hysteria about foreigners – engineered by state television and by disingenuous statements from Egyptian leaders laying responsibility for popular unrest on foreign agents – taps into a deep strain of anxiety among Egyptians about their future.

It’s easier to blame foreigners than to confront internal divisions, and today’s rhetoric in Egypt has cast blame far and wide, but, playing on regional political realities, especially on Israelis, Americans, Qataris and Iranians.

In the pre-dawn chill on Saturday, I felt more foreign than I’ve felt at any point in my last eight years reporting in the Arab world. The friendly colonel at the military intelligence checkpoint hadn’t fallen prey to the idea, but his soldiers had.

Our books were returned and we were dispatched into the night.

The most invasive search came an hour later, and just a few hundred meters from our final destination in downtown Cairo. A wild-eyed plainclothes intelligence officer blanched when he saw my Greek passport. “A foreigner? Here? Now?” he screeched. “There is no possible good reason for you to be here.”

He dragged our bags into the storefront commandeered by a sleeping platoon of soldiers. “They have laptops!” he shouted. “Computers! Headphones! Cables!” He flung them every which way across the floor, and woke his bewildered commanding officer, who silently checked our equipment and papers, and cleared us to proceed.

“We must be careful,” he said. “The other day, you know what I found? A Turk with a flash drive. A flash drive! A single flash drive could destroy this entire nation.”

Released from his paranoid late-night fantasy, we finally went home, victims only of a passing, crazy moment. Let’s hope that for Egypt, this state-induced frenzy doesn’t last much longer.

The Atlantic has posted my piece about Tahrir today.

CAIRO, Egypt — Army General Hassan Ruweini came to the barricades of Tahrir Square on Saturday afternoon for a listening tour. He wanted to hear from the protesters, and then he wanted them to shut up and listen. “It’s time for life to go back to normal,” he said. “You can express yourselves without interfering with others.”

The general wanted to clear the burnt cars, corrugated metal sheets, and requisitioned construction material that had kept police, thugs, and now the comparatively benign military out of the free zone declared by anti-regime activists in Tahrir Square on Jan. 25 and held at great cost ever since.

Now Old Egypt had come to call, bringing a kindler, gentler tone along with the old familiar menacing grip.

“We won’t go until he goes,” the crowd chanted in response, referring to President Hosni Mubarak. Demonstrators refused to let General Ruweini move toward the square, linking arms in a human chain to block his way.

Part negotiation, part restrained violence, part intimidation, the choreographed encounter between the general and the protesters was a microcosm of the Egypt emerging from the turmoil of the last week. A faltering state authority is groping for new ways to impose its will; a hardening popular movement is learning how much power it really wields. They are circling each other, risking deadly clashes at every turn.

In this process, some truths once considered absolute have perished summarily, including the impunity of the police and the infallibility of Mubarak. Others are quietly reasserting themselves: many Egyptians are accustomed to order, state security owns most of the country’s streets, and force often carries the day.
Read the rest here.