Cairo Post

I just started interning at the Daily Star Egypt and my first story was Wednesday evening, getting reactions in Cairo to the news that Saddam Hussein is to be executed. Here it is.

SADDAM EXECUTION REOPENS IRAQ DISCUSSIONS IN CAIRO
Some call Bush a terrorist
By Frederick Deknatel
First Published: December 28, 2006

CAIRO: The decision of an Iraqi court to uphold the death sentence given to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein opened the door to many discussions about Iraq among Cairenes with many expressing concern for the deteriorating situation in the war-ravaged Arab country.

Opinions were framed around the dire situation in Iraq and the wider political climate in the region, and responses often included harsh words for US president George W. Bush and his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

The escalating sectarian violence in Iraq, in the minds of many in the Egyptian capital, has rendered Hussein’s fate irrelevant.

"His term is up," said Hamdi abd Al Said, a taxi cab driver. "But with all the people that have been killed, and everything that is happening in Iraq, it doesn’t matter. It’s finished."

Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity earlier this year for the 1982 killing of 148 Shiites in Dujail, in northern Iraq. Earlier this week, a Baghdad appeals court upheld the decision that he should be hanged within 30 days.

Mohammed Hassan, a Khan al-Khalili storeowner who introduced himself as a Robert de Niro fan, disagreed with the execution:
“A prison sentence is better - for Bush. In prison he’s going to suffer, so Bush will feel happy.”

While admitting Hussein’s crimes, Hassan immediately wanted to shift the focus onto the violence in Iraq.

“It is Iraqis fighting Iraqis now, not Saddam or the Americans, and Bush did that, he instigated that," Hassan said.

"They knew everything that was going on. He and his father, before in Kuwait, had everything planned,” concluding that the situation now is the product of American foreign policy plans.

Hassan said Bush was a "terrorist" and asked “what about what he has done?”

But he maintained that he did not like Hussein.

Likewise, Wael Khalil, socialist activist and a member of the opposition group Kefaya, stressed that he doesn’t empathize with Hussein, but does not trust the verdict or the process.

“To put tyrants on trial is good, but it should be done by the public not by another tyrant… the occupation,” Khalil told The Daily Star Egypt when the verdict was first handed in November.

He said he doubts if the Americans are deceiving any one with their achievements in Iraq.

“No one is seeing the rule of law being applied there.” This also includes the unplanned results of the trial. “If [the Americans] are trying to rebuild [Hussein’s] image, they are doing a great job,” he added.

For cab driver Al Said, Hussein’s execution figured into a wider view. “I work from 10 to 7 every night. I sleep through daytime. I don’t have time to keep up with current events, but I still sympathize with struggles in the Arab world,” he said. “Egyptians have sympathy for everything.”

Hussein was a prominent Arab leader for decades and his deposal from power and the subsequent violence in Iraq, according to many in Cairo, reflected the ongoing impact of foreign, particularly American, influence.

Dr Mark Sedgwick, an Associate Professor of History at the American University in Cairo, told The Daily Star Egypt that while Hussein was "no longer very relevant," and that confirmation of his execution was “inevitable,” he was not “totally sure that it was a good thing because, basically, that’s the old story now. He did what he did and that era has finished."

Most of all, Sedgwick believed that Hussein’s trial "might have been an opportunity to show some mercy in a situation where mercy is in short supply."

The view of Hussein as tied to American foreign policy was continually mentioned.

"Saddam destroyed his country and his people," said a grocer downtown who asked that his name not be printed, "but he was a tool of American foreign policy – [like] Kuwait in 1991.”

Al-Said reiterated those sentiments: “It’s American foreign policy – everything he did – Iran, Kuwait – they gave him permission to do. He is not any better than the people who came before him.”

Mohammed Abdel Satar Ahmed, who has been driving a taxi for a year and a half since receiving a degree in engineering, revealed the dynamics of expressing political opinion in Egypt, saying first what he thought the government wants people to say: “I understand that the Iraqi court decided that Saddam would be executed by this date, but they won’t do it. I like Hussein and want to see him live.”

Then he demurred, saying the pressures on public speech from the government cuts off his and others opinions, that “they don’t let people think.” Instead, he said, “Saddam has to die, for all the reasons that are there.”

But he still wavered: “I’m not the one who should say he should or should not die, because he is an Arab just like me.”

Some photos that my sister Anna took on her visit to Cairo. She was on her way to the Citadel; I was in Arabic class.  

Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, who incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tapped to head the Intelligence Committee when the Democrats take over in January, failed a quiz of basic questions about al Qaeda and Hezbollah, two of the key terrorist organizations the intelligence community has focused on since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

When asked by CQ National Security Editor Jeff Stein whether al Qaeda is one or the other of the two major branches of Islam — Sunni or Shiite — Reyes answered "they are probably both," then ventured "Predominantly — probably Shiite."

 
Democrats are lampooned as representing the moneyed-and-educated class — college town liberal or whatever David Brooks calls them. So why then does the new Speaker of the House nominate a Texan who says he’s "acutely aware of al Qaeda’s desire to harm Americans" and completely ignorant of everything else? Where’s Bill Clinton, or better yet, the old men (Jimmy Carter, James Baker, Robert Gates) who are, it seems, the only curmudgeons actually saying anything?

In our national public life these days, if you want to make any realistic recommendation on policy options, you have to be over 75, plenty of money in the bank and with nothing left to lose. Take Jimmy Carter and James Baker. Carter denounces Israel’s "imprisonment wall" and Baker slips Palestinians’ right of return into his Study Group’s road map to peace.

The subject of Israel’s nuclear capability was raised last week by Robert Gates, the incoming US defence secretary, who told a Senate confirmation hearing that Israel had atomic weapons. Gates on Tuesday said that Iran might want an atomic bomb because it is "surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons: Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us [the US] in the Persian Gulf". The remark led Israeli news bulletins with Israeli state-run radio suggesting that Gates may have breached a US "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy that dates back to the late 1960s.

 

Mark Danner writes for the New Yorker and is a professor at Berkeley and Bard. He spoke in Cairo last week as a visiting professor at AUC, days before returning to Iraq to cover the civil war. Hear his lecture here.

Danner’s essay in the current New York Review of Books frames the course in Iraq in the 2002 warning of a then-98 year-old George F. Kennan: "Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

To what end will the exposure of the incompetence and criminality of bureaucratic decisions of the last 4 years lead? The American perception to the war was blinded; it’s more recently that the lethal blunders of the White House and Pentagon are being laid bare, in Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and in reviews/essays like Danner’s and the Economist’s Max Rodenbeck, also in NY Books. Condoleeza Rice didn’t know the chain of command in Iraq and Paul Bremer was stubborn in following orders to De-Baathify Iraq and immediately disband the army — even if the State Dept. knew nothing about the orders and found out about them after the fact, in the newspapers. As Danner writes,

Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider.

The real shocks of the conflict — beyond that the decision makers in the Pentagon and White House were foreign policy amateurs to horrific degrees — are the human costs in Iraq and the dominance of what Danner calls a "War of Imagination" in America since 9/11. Leaders imagined transformation through a dilettante strategy for a new Iraq and a new Middle East; the region would mold itself to evangelical idealism and neocon pet projects, like Ahmad Chalabi, no matter how far apart that view was from all reality in Iraq and beyond. The American public, responding to buzz words and reminders of terror broadcast out of Washington to a cowed, obsessed media, widely believed the image. The bodies of American soldiers and arguments over how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died jolted the dream.

…for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run"—began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.

While Danner, like many others, sees in the midterm elections a public coming-to-grips with reality and a call to dramatically alter the American course in Iraq, I’m still skeptical. This is from the detachment of living in Cairo, but whether it’s the continued controversy of the term "civil war" in American war talk or the insistence, even today, on the benefit of free elections in a country that thousands flee daily, can you say the American public is really outraged?

Will they ever be, or is this Bush’s ultimate Mission Accomplished?

Art work: George Grosz. (American, 1893-1959. Born and died in Germany.). Die Gesundbeter (German Doctors Fighting the Blockade) from Got mit uns (God for us). (1918, published 1920). Via MoMA.