Arab News Blog

Shimon Shiffer, writing in Yediot Aharonot today (HT: Laura Rozen):

While standing in front of the cameras, the U.S. vice president made an effort to smile at Binyamin Netanyahu even after having learned on Tuesday that the Interior Ministry had approved plans to build 1,600 housing units in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. But in closed conversations, Joe Biden took an entirely different tone. …

People who heard what Biden said were stunned. “This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden castigated his interlocutors. “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”

The vice president told his Israeli hosts that since many people in the Muslim world perceived a connection between Israel’s actions and US policy, any decision about construction that undermines Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem could have an impact on the personal safety of American troops fighting against Islamic terrorism.

Helena Cobban, writing in The Christian Science Monitor November 24, 2009:

President Obama urgently needs to distance Washington from the provocative – and illegal – actions the Israeli government has been undertaking in Jerusalem.

He needs to do this to save the two-state solution that he supports between Israelis and Palestinians. He needs to do it, too, because it will help protect US troops around the world. Jerusalem is a core concern for many of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, and with US forces now facing tense situations in several majority-Muslim countries, Washington has a stronger need than ever to keep the goodwill of the peoples of those lands…

I also wrote there that Pres. Obama should take concrete action,

by linking US aid to Israel to its compliance with international law in the city, by supporting action by the UN Security Council to uphold international standards there, and in other ways.

It is that concrete action that we have not yet seen. If we fail to see it, then sadly we’ll have to conclude that it is not just the government of Israel that is putting the lives of U.S. service-members at risk, but also Pres. Obama, through the extreme timidity he has shown in his dealings with the government of Israel.

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You could almost start to believe that the Netanyahu Government is not trying to win favor with the Obama Administration.

With US efforts to start new proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority seemingly within sight of at least limited success, and with Vice President Joe Biden visiting Israel, Israel approved 1600 new housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem. Biden actually used the word “condemn” in describing the decision. Biden’s mouth gets the better of him sometimes, but that’s an unusually strong word for a senior US official with a foreign policy background to use against Israel. Unusually strong, but nonetheless appropriate.

Yes, Israel insists it has the right to build in all parts of Jerusalem, but the timing here looks like a blatant “in your eye, Joe” to the Vice President, and it sounds like he took it that way.

Ramat Shlomo is itself a fairly new neighborhood in north Jerusalem that lies just west of the Arab neighborhoods of Shu‘afat and Beit Hanina, not far from the Shu‘afat refugee camp. What’s more, Harat Shlomo is an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) neighborhood. It’s east of the Green Line of course and not far from the East Jerusalem to Ramallah road.

Say what you will about the future of Jerusalem, this really looks like a deliberate affront to Biden. He seems to have taken it as such. It’s as if, “where could we approve new construction that would be the most offensive to the US right now?”

There are a very large number of Israelis who deplore this sort of “diplomacy,” of course, but it seems to be taking hold of this government to an unusual degree. I worry that someday we will see the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 as the moment when Israel began a descent into a policy of undermining its own interests and its own security.

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The Egyptian government is believed to be considering the sale of a portion of its 80% stake in fixed line incumbent Telecom Egypt (TE), Reuters reports. A final decision has yet to be reached on such…
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I was just watching the discussion that Amy Goodman (video here) recently moderated between Omar Barghouti of the Global BDS Movement and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, over the utility and ethics of the BDS campaign.

Waskow criticized the BDS movement without reservation. I thought his arguments were kind of sad: often inaccurate, and off-the-mark, and extremely US-centric. A big part of his argument had to do with the ways in which the situations of White-dominated Apartheid South Africa and today’s Israel are similar, or different. Waskow tried to argue that whereas the Apartheid government got its foreign support mainly from corporations, Israel gets its support mainly from the US government… Ergo, while boycotting or taking other actions against Chase Manhattan Bank were appropriate and useful in the 1970s/80s, over South Africa, today what’s needed is to build a broad coalition of peace-loving Americans to change the policy of the US government.

He also argued that BDS “seeks to demonize an entire people, with a culture and life of their own, etc.” in Israel… (As if the Afrikaners who dominated Apartheid SA had no culture or life of their own?? I’m still not sure what the difference was there.)

I thought Barghouti made the counter-arguments excellently, and was particularly effective when, a number of times, he pointed out that Waskow’s way of arguing seemed to completely ignore the Palestinians’ own agency and the demand for BDS that is so widely supported among Palestinian civil society of all stripes. Waskow really did come across very isolated and arrogant. It was sad, really to see this person who historically did play a good role in U.S. social movements now engaging in special pleading on behalf of the Jewish state.

Dressing up like Tolstoy does not, it turns out, mean you end up acting with Tolstoyan detachment and universalist ethics.

Anyway, it’s great that Amy Goodman hosted this important discussion. It’s a topic we need to discuss a lot more in the US– and also, to put into action.

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Key issues in Turkey will be government-military relations, foreign policy and economic recovery, while Tehran will brace itself for international sanctions. The aftermath of elections will dominate the next quarter in Iraq. Cairo will be concerned about inflation, political opposition and the Middle East peace process.

Strategic summary

• A direct clash between the Turkish government and military will probably be avoided, but polarisation will increase, increasing the risk of instability.
• Tehran will prepare for international sanctions, and leaders of the opposition may move towards a compromise with conservatives.
• Slow government formation in Iraq will ensure that few political decisions will be made in the second quarter, and state oil deals will slow and perhaps stall.
• In Egypt, Mohamed El Baradei’s campaign will increase local and international scrutiny of elections, and continued work on the Rafah wall may provoke border clashes with Hamas.

ANALYSIS: Turkey faces a number of key challenges in the second quarter:

1. Civil-military relations. The first quarter saw intensified political controversy leading to a confrontation between government supporters and the military:

• Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s relationship with Chief of the General Staff General Ilker Basbug was undermined by a series of judicial interrogations of army officers.
• The detention of senior commanders in connection with plots discussed and abandoned seven years ago will spur on the nationalist opposition, and another attempt may be made to ban the Islamist-rooted ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
• The government would probably respond by dissolving parliament and seeking a fresh mandate……. the general elections expected in spring 2011, will intensify in the second quarter.

2. Key policies. Erdogan was unable in the first quarter to make progress in his Kurdish and Armenian initiatives, and on EU accession. Little progress can be expected in coming months on the Kurdish issue. The Turkish-Armenian protocol providing for the opening of the frontier and the establishment of full diplomatic relations will remain a dead letter.

On March 4, Turkey recalled its ambassador to the United States in protest against a congressional committee’s resolution declaring as genocide the killings of Armenians from Turkish Anatolia during the First World War. The Armenian lobby attempts each year to secure such a move from the full Congress, and if it succeeds, US-Turkish relations would come under further strain. There is a small chance of approval by the House of Representatives, but the resolution will almost certainly be rejected in the Senate. A signal of such a rejection will be necessary to prevent a more serious diplomatic fallout.

Presidential elections in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (recognised by Turkey alone) take place on April 18:

• Nationalist contender Dervis Eroglu looks set to defeat left-wing incumbent Mehmet Ali Talat, who is seeking to re-unify the island.
• Faced with the prospect of failure of inter-communal talks, the parties (including Turkey, as a guarantor power) are manoeuvring to gain the moral high ground.
• The second quarter is thus unlikely to witness any progress towards re-unification.

In the absence of progress on this issue, and in view of the likely inability of the AKP government to amend the Turkish constitution in line with EU standards, accession talks will mark time.

3. Economic recovery. The coming months will indicate more clearly the strength of the recovery that began in late 2009. GDP looks set to grow no more than 3-4% in 2010 after a 5-6% contraction in 2009. Risks to growth include weak export demand from Europe, the lingering impact of last year’s job and income losses, and quickening consumer price inflation. The Consumer Price Index reached 8.2% in January, with food and commodity prices leading the way, and it may temporarily surpass 10.0%. Interest rates cannot fall any further, and the Central Bank overnight borrowing rate may remain at 6.5% for several more months. Fixed investment will pick up only slowly.

4. IMF accord. The government has promised to introduce a fiscal rule by May 15, and its medium-term programme and fiscal plan are due to be updated in May and June respectively. If it can agree with the IMF on the details of these and other policy issues (eg taxation, labour market reforms and a privatisation schedule), a standby accord is likely to be signed:

• IMF lending would alleviate the burden of government debt on the domestic financial sector and expand private sector credit opportunities, improving economic activity. However, the government may be cautious about accepting IMF-style stringency ahead of the 2011 election. In January, it increased indirect taxes, contributing to the surge in inflation, but it also announced a one-off increase in pensions.
• A deal would dispel doubts about the sustainability of the current account deficit, expected to widen from just over 2% of GDP in 2009 to 3-4% in 2010. In addition to IMF credit, an accord would encourage foreign investment and lending at a time of low global capital flows, and the lira could strengthen noticeably. It slipped to a rate of 1.55 to the dollar in late February and another bout of weakness is likely in the absence of an IMF accord.

Iran. Tehran will be preoccupied with control at home and defiance abroad:

1. Tightening grip. While the 2009 protests against the contested presidential elections failed to topple President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, a new balance of power has emerged in Iran. Power lies with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Ahmadi-Nejad, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and their clerical and security allies — while the elected institutions have been marginalised and Khamenei’s legitimacy questioned. The momentum of popular protests had faltered by the February 11 Revolution Day rallies. While protests will continue, the reformist leadership of the opposition Green Movement may seek some form of compromise and reconciliation with the conservative establishment later this year.

2. IRGC and the rentier state. Iran’s political economy reinforces the power of the IRGC, as the population relies more than ever on public sector employment and payment from the bloated and inefficient welfare state, financed by oil exports. In the second quarter, the government will move forward in its efforts to cut fuel subsidies, in the face of possible US petrol sanctions, which will hurt ordinary Iranians already suffering from high inflation and unemployment. This will make the population even more fearful of instability that might disrupt their dwindling income, and thus more dependent on the state.

The power of the IRGC will continue to grow as it expands its commercial interests. It is unlikely that the opposition movement will be able to mobilise Iranians to take national action to destabilise the state sector, such as a national strike. Nor is it likely that the IRGC will break with the leadership in the face of public protests, given its economic stake in the status quo.

3. Nuclear programme. With its legitimacy under question at home, Tehran will seek to exploit the nuclear issue for prestige purposes, to demonstrate Iran’s strength as an international actor and Ahmad-Nejad’s confidence and nationalism in defending Iran’s ‘inalienable’ right to develop the full nuclear fuel cycle. There is no consensus in Tehran for a plausible nuclear fuel deal with the UN Security Council (UNSC) permanent members and Germany (P5+1). The second quarter will see intensified US efforts to achieve UNSC consensus on sanctions, although an agreement may not emerge until the third quarter. Iran is bracing itself for further UNSC, US and EU sanctions:

• Due to Chinese reservations, new UNSC sanctions are unlikely to go much further than those already imposed during the past four years. However, they will provide some legitimacy for unilateral US and EU moves.
• Washington is likely to impose sanctions on exports of refined fuel to Iran while the US Treasury will blacklist more Iranian banks, including Iran’s Central Bank, and companies associated with the IRGC, such as the Khatam al-Anbiya engineering and construction firm.
• The EU will probably take parallel measures against the same entities and will also make it harder for European firms to do business with Iran by further limiting commercial credits for such trade.

These sanctions will hurt Iranian consumers by raising fuel prices. However, as long as Iran is able to continue with its oil and gas exports, the economy will remain largely unscathed. Thus, sanctions will antagonise the Iranian regime, without inducing any significant concessions from them on the nuclear programme.

Iraq. March 7 elections will set the landscape for politics and the oil sector in the second quarter:

1. Government formation. Despite tensions, the elections are likely to be relatively peaceful, and to take place on time, with the results accepted by most groups. At least three major coalitions will be needed to form a majority voting bloc in parliament. The Kurds’ ability to deliver 50 or more seats and to marshal their legislators mean that they are likely to be among those forces forming the government. This does not imply an imminent breakthrough in the federal-Kurdish dispute, but it makes a major breakdown in relations in 2010 unlikely — a strained alliance will ensue.

Formation of the new government will be slow, though perhaps not as slow as in 2005. Election results will probably be certified by the end of March, with very small numbers of appeals still outstanding. Parliament is likely to continue struggling to achieve quorum, particularly during summer and early autumn, during parliament’s recess and Ramadan.

Executive branch formation will probably take around three months:

• A package deal will eventually be agreed by four or five major factions, allowing the ratification of a prime minister, president and council of ministers.
• The branch will only begin to operate in mid-summer and will take some time to develop effective capacity.
• Many experienced individuals will be edged out of their positions as new ministers take over their portfolios, resulting in a period of administrative churn.
• For foreign companies aiming to position themselves with new ministers, the first opportunities for engagement will probably come in late summer or early autumn.

2. Investment, oil and gas. With the federal government paralysed for much of the year, few new deals will be negotiated and many current prospective investment deals will become mired and may stall:

• Some oil and gas deals will not survive 2010, particularly the direct negotiation deals for oilfields such as Nassiriya, Nahr bin Umar and Tuba. The federal government has little ability to push forward such deals this year due to the large number of oil deals signed in the licensing rounds. As Iraq’s recovering Oil Ministry has insufficient capacity to service even the licence round deals, new direct negotiation deals are unlikely to materialise this year.
• Moreover, a new government may seek to boost its nationalist credentials by being tough with foreign oil companies. It could require them to commit to terms that are commercially untenable, and that mirror those that Iraq secured for the more mature fields in earlier rounds.

As 2010 will mostly be a ‘waiting year’ for the deals involving the federal government, a more profitable environment for investment may be found among the increasingly well-funded provincial councils, who have ambitious local plans and will continue functioning until elections in 2013.

Egypt. Cairo has a full agenda in the second quarter and beyond:

1. Domestic politics. The Muslim Brotherhood elected a new leader in January following the election of a new Guidance Council, and has taken a sharp conservative turn. The new leader, Mohammed Badie, has not yet signalled major policy changes, but the removal of several key reformist leaders and controversy over internal elections reflect rifts within the group. However, with several senior members arrested in January and February and the Muslim Brotherhood under severe security pressure ahead of May and October elections, the need for unity may trump internal differences.

Former IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei’s frank criticism of the Mubarak regime represents the regime’s most serious challenge to date:

• El Baradei wants to change the constitution — which restricts political activity and eligibility for the presidency — and has created a National Front for Change to carry out this campaign.
• Although such change is unlikely, El Baradei is popular and his activism has introduced a wildcard into Egyptian politics.

Key questions are whether the movement behind El Baradei — for now largely online — will move to the streets, and whether his credentials will allow him to attract other prominent figures to his cause and repair divisions within Egypt’s opposition. The campaign to change the constitution depends largely on his ability to gather mass support and build a grassroots organisation.

Elections will be held for the upper parliamentary house, the Shura Council, in early May, with little competition. Continuing arrests of Muslim Brothers suggest the regime is ensuring it faces no serious challenge. However, in light of El Baradei’s call for free and fair elections, this poll will be under greater domestic and international scrutiny. It will also be an opportunity to examine how a new electoral commission, created by constitutional amendment in 2007 to replace judicial supervision of elections, will work.

2. Foreign policy. The situation in Gaza and the Middle East peace process will remain Egypt’s foreign policy priorities. Facing mounting domestic opposition to its Gaza policy — notably its efforts to curb smuggling at the border — and a deadlock in Palestinian reconciliation and Israeli-Palestinian talks, Egypt will need some sign of progress to deflect criticism. Its relationship with Hamas has rapidly deteriorated in recent months and the construction of a tunnel-blocking wall at the Rafah border could be a flashpoint between Hamas and Egyptian border guards.

3. Economy. The government recently announced initiatives to increase exports and create public-private partnerships for investment in public infrastructure. A law governing such partnerships is expected by June, creating new financial vehicles for investment in infrastructure.

Controlling inflation remains the main objective; expectations that it will fall to single digits after 18 months of double-digit inflation have yet to materialise. Instead, it moved from 13.2% to 13.6% during the first two months of the year.

The Ministry of Finance postponed to 2015 its 2012 target for reducing the fiscal deficit to 3% GDP. The main medium-term challenge is controlling spending while stimulating economic activity, particularly as efforts to implement a new real estate tax and expand sales taxes to increase government revenue are meeting strong opposition and currently are being delayed.

CONCLUSION: In the second quarter, Turkey will face a slow economic recovery, amid continued tensions between government and military. EU accession will make no progress. The Iranian regime will consolidate power at home, while finding itself increasingly isolated abroad. Iraq faces a hiatus in government as post-election wrangling takes place; state oil deals will make less progress than those with provincial councils. Egyptian Shura Council elections will face greater scrutiny than previously, while the Rafah crossing into Gaza may be the scene of violent clashes. Stimulating economic activity will remain a key challenge.

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“… U.S. diplomats I have talked to and Turkish analysts say that if the military really had planned to overthrow the government, it would have hardly written it down in a detailed 5,000 page document. The idea that the military would bomb Istanbul’s historic mosques and shoot down its own planes to precipitate such a coup — as the alleged memo describes — is simply outlandish. The military denies any plans for toppling the government and says much of the document is actually taken from a 2003 war game exercise. It says that the incriminating elements detailing the alleged coup were added to the document.

For the past two years, the Turkish military has been the target of illegal wiretaps and accusations that it is plotting against the government. The question is whether the military will tolerate the assault or strike back, as it has done in the past when it thought the secular nature of the state was threatened.

The Islamist government has also targeted Turkey’s other secular bastion — the judiciary. Last month, a Gulenist prosecutor arrested a secular prosecutor in Erzincan. He was officially charged with belonging to an ultranationalist gang known as Ergenekon, which the Gulenists and AKP claim is trying to overthrow the government. Whether that’s true or not, there is no doubt the arrest solved a lot of problems for the government. Before his arrest, the Erzincan prosecutor was investigating alleged connections between Gulenist fund raising and Hamas terrorists. He was also looking into the armed activities of Ismailaga, a radical Islamist movement….

Hoping to win Ankara’s support for tougher Iran sanctions and more troops in Afghanistan, the U.S. and Europe have so far been hesitant to criticize the AKP-led government. The “pragmatists” fail to realize that an illiberal and Islamist Turkey will be increasingly opposed to Western policies.”

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“An Iraqi government plan to impose restrictive rules on broadcast news media represents an alarming return to authoritarianism, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. CPJ denounced the rules and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government to abandon their repressive plan. CPJ’s review of the plan found rules that fall well short of international standards for freedom of expression and that appear to contravene the Iraqi constitution, which provides for a free press. The new rules would effectively impose government licensing of journalists and media outlets, a tool that authoritarian governments worldwide have long used to censor the news.”

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Iraq’s campaign season will come to an end Friday evening, in preparation for the voting on Sunday. But a special vote was held Thursday for certain groups, such as the military, which was marred by three bombings that left 14 persons dead. Voting begins today, Friday, among Iraqi expatriates in Jordan, Syria and 14 other countries.

Since two important Shiite coalitions are competing against one another in this round, and many Sunnis appear ready to vote for a cross-sectarian secular party, it is unlikely that any party or coalition will get more than 25 percent of seats. There is therefore likely to be a long post-election period of political negotiation and horse trading, during which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will effectively have his tenure extended. There might not even be a new government until August, and it may well be a government of national unity. The majority Shiites will need a partner to get to the 66% of votes required to elect a president, and the Kurds are the most likely partner. If so, the ‘new’ government may look an awfully lot like the national unity government of summer, 2006, with regard to parties represented and politicians in the cabinet, whether or not al-Maliki retains the prime ministership. That the Shiites will need the Kurds may provide an opening for the parties to resolve outstanding conflicts over the future of the northern Kirkuk oil province. The election may therefore reinforce the status quo rather than creating the kind of political instability that foreign investors fear.

It seems to me extremely unlikely that the post-election scene will be so violent or unstable as to call for a revision of the current timetable for US troop withdrawal from Iraq, to which President Obama has committed the US government. Iraq has actually seen much worse violence in recent months than anything it has experienced in the run-up to this election, though it is true that civilian casualties spiked in February. Iraqi authorities have repeatedly said proudly that the Iraqi military and other security forces are capable of keeping basic peace now, and they are in charge of security for the voting stations this time, not the US military. I do not believe the Iraqi parliament that is about to be elected will put up with any foot-dragging on troop withdrawals by the US,and i think the US military officers who speak of slowing down the withdrawal are doing so to discourage radical guerrillas from making trouble during the elections (warning them that attacks will backfire by making it harder to get rid of the Americans).

On to Friday’s voting. About 1.4 million Iraqis are thought eligible to vote overseas. (There are about 17 million voters inside Iraq by my calculation). Even abroad, some voters may be deterred by militia threats from going to the polls. Iraqis in Jordan and Syria are sometimes tracked down and threatened by the same militias who chased them out of their homes in the first place. (The estimate given here of 500,000 Iraqis in Jordan is way too high, based on what NGOs in Amman told me 18 months ago, and if 200,000 Iraqis actually vote there, the ballots and voter registration should be closely examined because I doubt there are more than 100,000 eligible voters in Jordan. Most Iraqi expatriate, perhaps a million, are in Syria.)

Aljazeera Arabic reports that parties are attempting to buy votes among the often penniless refugees:

Al-Hayat [Life] reports in Arabic that over a million Iraqis took part in the early voting day on Thursday, including soldiers, hospital patients and others who cannot get to the polls on Sunday.

The occasion was marred by three attacks that killed 14 persons and wounded dozens, two of them suicide bombings, which targeted two voting stations set aside for the security forces in the north and west of Baghdad. Half of those killed were from the security forces.

Al-Hayat says that some parties expressed suspicion that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of the Islamic Mission Party (Da’wa), which is the core of his State of Law coalition) would use Thursday’s vote for fraudulent purposes benefiting his party. Usamah al-Nujaifi of the Iraqi National List called on NGOs and international observers to monitor the voting closely for such fraud, since, he warned, military elements could simply be ordered (by the prime minister) to vote one way or another.

An official in the Independent High Electoral Commission, Hamdiya al-Husaini, confirmed to al-Hayat that soldiers had been pressured to vote for a certain party, which she would not name, and even that some soldiers arrived at the voting station only to find that someone else had already voted on their behalf. She promised an investigation by the High Electoral Commission.

The voting process was chaotic, and many soldiers’s names could not be found at their voting stations on the registration rolls. Some soldiers even staged demonstrations over being disenfranchised in this way, the the High Electoral Commission promised them redress. Nevertheless, thousands are estimated to have been unable to vote. The High Commission says that they will be allowed to vote on Sunda.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that authorities in the southern Shiite port city of Basra have arrested a group that is printing up counterfeit rulings or fatwas attributed to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf, urging Shiites to vote for a specific party. Sistani has declared his neutrality in this election, though other grand ayatollahs seem to be plumping for the National Iraqi Alliance of Shiite religious parties led by cleric Ammar al-Hakim.

RFE/RL has video on the use of Arabic music videos and Facebook in the parliamentary campaign. .

Aljazeera English covers the campaigning, which ends Friday evening, and clearly throws its support behind the National Iraqi List, headed by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, which has both Shiite and Sunni secular support. This report’s assertion that this time no party or coalition can win without cross-sectarian support is not actually true, and polling suggests that Allawi’s group will only get a fifth of seats, with nearly half going again to Shiite religious parties.

End/ (Not Continued)

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AP – A judge criticized government agents but still sentenced an Arizona man Thursday to 18 months in prison for lying to FBI investigators who were looking into a Muslim charity group that raised money to help the terrorist group Hamas.
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Since the return of Mohamed ElBaradei to Egypt, the official government press has either ignored him completely (see this daily roundup at Al-Masry al-Youm of a day in which the government press ignored him and the independent and opposition papers led with him), or else they have been making fun of him, even in one case basically saying he won’t give interviews with the government press because his wife won’t let him (that’s an English language blogger’s summary; the link was to Al-Gumhuriyya’s home page a day or two ago, and today the link goes to today’s homepage; I poked around briefly without finding the story but it may be archived somewhere on the site). Do they think branding him as henpecked (his wife’s a professional in her own right) will dilute his support?

I’m not surprised, but in the age of the Internet, satellite television, and independent newspapers in Egypt, it seems that the pettiness shown by the state media ought to seem fairly glaring even to Mubarak’s staunch supporters. The fellahin may not know about ElBaradei’s return, but they aren’t his constituency. Does the state press think their ignoring him will make him go away? Does it think making fun of him will make people see him as a clown, a man of whom the state media was itself enormously proud when he was head of the IAEA and one of the most recognizable Egyptians in the Western world (after Mubarak, and of course Zahi Hawass, who is on one of your cable TV channels in his Indiana Jones hat right now)?

It just seems like something out of the pre-Internet era, the pre-satellite TV era, that distant time nearly 30 years ago when the local state media was the only media and Husni Mubarak was President of Egypt.

Oh.

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