Interview
| SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2011Taking the Egyptian Crisis in Stride
In a Barron's interview, George Friedman of Strafor doesn't see "enormity" in the Middle East uprisings.
George Friedman's company, Stratfor, has a large clientele of Fortune 500 companies and others interested in the latest global political and economic intelligence. Barron's has consulted him from time to time since just weeks after the attacks of 9/11, and his observations have been right on the mark. For example, he felt the al Qaeda attack of 9/11 was a one-off effort not likely to be repeated on a similar scale. He was quick to see Israel's 2006 attack on Hezbollah and Lebanon as being ill-conceived and a public-relations disaster. Finally, he has long been skeptical about Iran's ability to produce viable nuclear weaponry anytime soon, despite Israel and U.S. intelligence forecasts to the contrary. Israel recently backtracked on its estimates, to Friedman's satisfaction. Here are his views on the uprising in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. As always, Friedman's views are both insightful and provocative.
Barron's: A wave of demonstrations and revolutionary fervor seems to be sweeping the Middle East from Tunisia and Algeria to Egypt, Jordan and Yemen. Are you surprised?
Friedman: I'm not seeing the enormity of the events that most people are claiming. Take Jordan, for example. King Abdullah tends to fire his cabinet, as he has done now, about every two years. The Tunisian uprising was a real event but in a minor country. The Algerian demonstrations were minor. The Yemen event certainly happened, but it was contained.
Surely the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in Egypt appear to be a big deal?
As far as Egypt is concerned, we'll have to see. It's entirely possible there will be no major change in either Egypt's government or policies. There are three things that could occur. The first and most likely, of course, is the departure of Mubarak. The second is that the secular, nationalist regime established by Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1956 gets abolished. And third is that the Muslim Brotherhood takes over.
Lance Rosenfield
George Friedman
Right now the only demand of the demonstrators is that Mubarak step down immediately. The crowd is clearly not hostile to the army, as it was to the police. And interestingly, we were picking up information before the demonstrations started that the army, from whence Mubarak came, was pushing behind the scenes to get rid of Mubarak. So, in a sense, the army is on the same side as the demonstrators.
But Mubarak is one of them, an army guy who goes back to Nasser's seizure of complete power in 1956. What's the army's beef with him?
He has remained in power too long, and because of his age and apparent illnesses won't be around that much longer, anyway. The top people in the army wanted a new general installed before Mubarak died so there would be no destabilizing scramble for power after his death. But what really crystallized the anti-Mubarak sentiment was his plan to hand over succession to his son Gamal. Gamal isn't one of them and hasn't put in his time in the service.
The army is widely regarded in Egypt as a bulwark of order and not a thuggish element like the security services. So what I'm saying is that the current Egyptian uprising isn't a systemic crisis like the 1989 revolts in Eastern Europe.
The great concern in the West is that the Muslim Brotherhood eventually will win out in Egypt and transform the Middle East into a more Islamic society. Do you share this concern?
Such an outcome is possible, but that doesn't seem to be what the crowds of demonstrators are pushing for. But I have a couple of thoughts about the Muslim Brotherhood. It has become a very cautious, splintered group over the three decades that Mubarak has been in power because of repression by his regime. We don't know how radical a group they are now. And it isn't clear to me that they can even win an election when it's called at this point.
You can't look at what's going on in Egypt now as an Islamist revolution—not with the military and the liberal democratic crowd also playing key roles. Power today in Egypt is a three-legged stool, with the Muslim Brotherhood constituting the weakest and smallest of the three legs.
The news media have certainly been harping on the possibility of an Islamic takeover in Egypt and the attendant calls for Sharia law and anti-Americanism.
That's certainly true of Al Jazeera, which has been pushing that theme hard. The Western news media don't have enough people on the ground to really tell what's happening.
Are you worried Egypt will go the same way as Iran did two years after the Shah was dethroned in 1979, with Islamic extremists pushing out the liberal, secular forces?
Egypt isn't a parallel situation to Iran. Mubarak has succeeded in breaking the back of the Muslim Brotherhood. The organization itself split with radical extremists after the assassination of Sadat in 1981 and the tourist killings in Luxor in 1997.
AP Photo/Victoria Hazou
An Egyptian protester throws stones toward a line of riot police in Cairo.
You must remember that Ayatollah Khomeini had great stature in Iran at the time of the Shah's fall and also had much support from the urban bazaars and business class. The Muslim Brotherhood boasts no comparable figure. Also, the business class in Egypt tends to be secular and not interested in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
The strongest institution in Egypt remains the army. And the demonstrators, in the main, respect the army and are willing to negotiate with Mubarak's newly appointed vice president, Omar Suleiman, who has an army background and was most recently head of intelligence services.
Do you see Mohamed ElBaradei, the former U.N. official and Nobel Peace Prize winner, eventually rising to power in Egypt?
I don't know. For one thing, we don't know whom the military will pick to run for president in September or whenever elections take place. The military normally goes about this task quietly. There's no reason at all why the next leader won't come from the military. And I really want to emphasize how angry the military is at Mubarak for creating the situation the country finds itself in now. The military has been saying quietly for several years now that Mubarak had overstayed his welcome. The military complained that Mubarak was trying to turn Egypt into a Syria, where two generations of the Assad family have ruled in succession.
Acting as a pharaoh?
Yes. The Egyptians view themselves as infinitely more sophisticated than Middle Eastern countries ruled by dynasties past or present like Syria and Iraq. One must also remember that Cairo is one of the most secular cities in the Islamic world and has been for a very long time. This is not the same kind of city as Tehran was in 1979.
You have long been skeptical of Iran's nuclear program and the danger it poses to the West. Why?
Because making nuclear weapons is far more difficult than most people realize, and Iran has a long way to go. It's tough enough to build a device that explodes underground. But to produce a nuclear weapon that can be launched in a rocket and delivered to a target is infinitely more difficult. Given the trouble the Iranians are having just to enrich uranium to produce fissile material, they clearly don't have the expertise, technology or advanced electronics that you need to produce a nuclear weapon. We've been saying that Iran isn't anywhere close to even producing a device that goes boom.
So should we stop worrying so much about Iran?
No, I'm not saying that. The Iranians still figure to be a problem, because they have the largest conventional military force in the region and will be in a position to exert tremendous power over Saudi Arabia and the other oil powers in the Arabian Peninsula. This will particularly be the case if the U.S. ends up withdrawing all its forces from Iraq. That's why Iran probably doesn't want Egypt to become a strong Islamist power aligned with Saudi Arabia, because it could undermine Iran's plans for the Persian Gulf.
In your just-published book, The Next Decade, you argue the time is ripe for the U.S. and Iran to reach some sort of diplomatic understanding, despite more than 30 years of mutual dislike. Why?
The U.S. has few alternatives for shaping Iranian behavior other than an entente, repugnant as that may be for many Americans. Iran figures to become a regional power once we withdraw from Iraq, since we are overcommitted in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. Any air attacks on the conventional Iranian military forces or their nuclear facilities would likely result in the mining of the Straits of Hormuz, through which 45% of the world's crude oil passes. That would finish off the global economy. From the Iranian standpoint, they undoubtedly worry about U.S. forces operating in two countries on their eastern and western borders.
Lastly, would Israel be at risk if an Islamist regime takes over in Egypt, abrogates the 1978 Camp David accord between the two nations and begins to remilitarize the Sinai Peninsula?
Not likely. The Egyptian military has almost all U.S. equipment these days. It would take Egypt a generation or more to reconfigure its military into a force capable of taking on Israel. The U.S. and Israel aren't going to sit idly by and let this happen.
Thanks, George. We hope things work out the way you're predicting.
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