At least part of what is driving the protests in Egypt is the casual use of torture and brutality by Egyptian security forces -- manifested by the murder of Khaled Said in June. Human Rights Watch issued a report on the situation in 2004: "While torture in Egypt has typically been used against political dissidents, in recent years it has become epidemic, affecting large numbers of ordinary citizens who find themselves in police custody as suspects or in connection with criminal investigations." Lawrence Wright wrote in The Looming Tower that al-Qaeda's birth can be traced in part to the brutal suppression of Islamist dissidents in Egypt through torture: "Egypt's prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution -- they called it justice -- was all consuming."
Waiting for the United States to call for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down misses the point. U.S. support for an autocratic leader of an American client state depends on that leader's ability to stay in power -- what the U.S. does ultimately depends on whether or not they expect Mubarak to prevail. Calls for democracy aside, the Obama administration would probably prefer the known continuity of Mubarak to the unknown of what might follow, and in that sense, they're no different from any other administration. The reality is that American politicians have talked like neocons while acting like realists for decades, supporting autocratic regimes in the name of stability and security while rhetorically extolling the virtues of democracy.
The U.S. has shifted toward more aggressive calls for democracy in Egypt, but I view that less as a statement of values and more as an assessment of Mubarak's chances of remaining in charge. Mubarak's appointment of Omar Suleiman as vice president, a man who, according to Jane Mayer, as head of Egypt's intelligence services facilitated the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects on behalf of the United States, indicates that Mubarak understands the above dynamic very well. Indeed, this morning, several reporters from Al Jazeera, the news organization that has played the biggest role in bringing the protests to the world's attention, were detained by the Egyptian military.
While the Obama administration has been quietly pressuring Egypt on human-rights issues behind the scenes, it's not hard to understand why neither Mubarak nor the leadership of Egyptian security forces would take this too seriously. For years, the United States has implicitly asked Egypt to violate human-rights laws on our behalf. Why would they take U.S. calls to respect them seriously now? From his point of view, if Mubarak remains in power, the U.S. will have to deal with him -- regardless of what he's done to stay.
