Sisi’s wish to be the new Nasser is no way to run a country

August 31st, 2013

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Tom Rollins His face crops up all over Cairo. Stencil graffiti smiling down from the walls lining Talaat Harb. You can buy his poster in Tahrir Square. Around the corner from Qasr el-Nil police station there’s a schoolyard with a balloon-headed bust of Egypt’s folk hero looking down on anyone who cares to pay attention. Now that Egypt’s army has dethroned two presidents in two years the spectre of Gamal Abdel Nasser has returned; maybe he never really went away. Enter the latest epencil-moustachioed visitation, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Some claim that Sisi – army chief, minister of defence, deputy prime minister and (depending who you ask) coup master extraordinaire – wants to become Egypt’s next Nasser, a powerful military leader loved by his people and mandated by the revolution. The historical echoes cannot be ignored. In 1954, Nasser took on the Muslim Brotherhood and won. He effectively destroyed them as a mainstream political force.

The leftist president then moved on to more international matters. In 1956 he flew in the face of prevailing wisdom – Western neo-colonialism in the Middle East – and nationalised the Suez Canal. He became a figurehead of post-colonial resistance, the people of the world taking back what was geographically theirs. For many of his supporters, Nasser’s enduring legacy, a police state, cult of personality and military patriarchy that would survive even the January 25 Revolution, came secondary to the fact that at times Nasser made Egypt look and feel like a great republic.

The choice selection of speeches, interviews and statements he’s left us with (Sisi rarely makes public appearances; when he does they are a big deal) do not exactly dispel this image.

The Egyptian army general has been public in his snubs towards the West, the United States in particular. “You left the Egyptians. You turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that,” Sisi told the Washington Post one week after his call for a revolutionary mandate from the streets to “confront violence and terrorism.” Egypt’s emboldened government has announced it does need an annual $1.3 billion aid package given by the White House as a reward for making peace with Israel and turning its back on the Soviet Union in 1979.

In an essay Sisi wrote at the US Army War Academy in 2006, Egypt’s future de facto leader stressed that democracies in the Middle East should develop “in their own form”, in a way that “may bear little resemblance to a Western democracy.” Maybe this is his intellectual background for some of the statements we’ve been seeing?

In the same essay, Sisi’s criticism of state-controlled, rather than free market, economies, and scattered references to “the common man” make him sound more like – as Eric Trager argued in Foreign Policy – the “boilerplate, nationalistic rhetoric of Mubarak-era Egyptian officials — not the theocratic rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood,” as some had suggested. He certainly didn’t sound like an Egyptian leftist at any rate.

Now Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar have all given a $12 billion grant to the new Egypt. Sisi thanked them personally, with that knowing smile of his, during a press conference recently. The interim government is claiming that it can sustain itself on the Gulf dollars flooding in through the Suez Canal, most of it pledged after the overthrow of Morsi on July 3, as if the Gulf is some new Cold War power bloc against the West. The fact that all three Gulf states receive significant US funding and support sort of ruins the general’s little Nasserite play-acting.

Syria is also a problem. Tamarod, the soul of the June 30 protests that led to Morsi’s downfall, has demanded the Egyptian government to prevent military vessels that could be used in an impending strike on Syria from passing through the Suez Canal. It’s the kind of anti-imperialist grandstanding Egypt might have cheered on in the 1960s, but Sisi will be more cautious.

At home, the smiling army general can afford to grandstand. He has created a counter-terror narrative to bash the Brotherhood with, and it seems to be working. Whether he will deliver on the same threats made to the international community remains to be seen.

Clearly, the general does not want to be well-liked, he wants to be loved. When he is giving a press conference, people crowd round in cafes to listen to the television or radio.

Like Nasser did when the crowds swarmed into Tahrir to beg him not to leave, after offering his resignation following Egypt’s crushing defeat to Israel in 1967, Sisi is playing Egypt like Julius Caesar in Arab army regalia. He has refused the presidency, stressing modestly that he only wants to save Egypt, not lead it, but Sisi could be president if he wanted to be. He knows that. And Egypt knows that.

Thomas Friedman would not have to travel far before he got a worthy quote from a Cairene taxi driver about why Sisi was the right man for the job but one supporter of Hamdeen Sabbahi, the Nasserite and third-placed presidential hopeful in 2012, to whom I spoke put it far more thoughtfully. “Sisi is not a president,” he said. “He is a surgeon.”

There are plenty who disagree. Tamarod’s founder, Mahmoud Badr, said on Friday that he would back Sisi for president if unrest continued in Egypt, although he added that he did not expect that to happen.

When Nasser’s daughter, Hoda, wrote her “Open Letter to Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi” in the wake of the July 26 popular mandate, she invoked the memory of her father as a military-turned-civilian revolutionary leader, an inspiration for Sisi.

“I listen to those talking about military rule and saying that 60 years of power is enough for the military,” she wrote, addressing Sisi directly. “I would request that you do not pay any attention to these people. They are biased.”

Not exactly a model of objectivity herself, the outspoken daughter of Nasser ended with a fairly explicit plea to Sisi to run for president.

“I personally call on you to step forward and take responsibility for the destiny that is yours, without paying attention to malicious criticism you may receive. This is a historic chance that does not come often.” Bloody well jump at it then, she was telling him.

Sisi is not emulating Nasser because he shares his economic ideas, or his geo-politics. It is a scramble for raw power, as well as a precedent for dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood. If that means having your face on balloons and scrawled on Cairo’s walls, all well and good. But is it any way to choose a president and run a country?