Cowboys in Cairo

My last "Cowboy" post didn't directly highlight American unilateralism, though the implications were strong. In the same vein is Jackson Diehl's op-ed piece on a budding Egyptian daily - aptly called the Daily Egyptian (al-Masri al-Yom) - which has taken an objective stance towards the Mubarak regime. Why now? Unilateral American pressure.

"From 1993 to 2003 Mubarak was criticized once," [liberal publisher Hisham] Kassem told me last week. "He closed down the newspaper, as well as the political party that published it." Kassem himself published a spirited paper called the Cairo Times, but it was in English and appeared only weekly...

...Kassem brushed off the inevitable threats from the mukhabarat, or state security, and never looked back. In the past year the paper's daily circulation has grown from 3,000 to a peak of 40,000...

How did this space for press freedom open? Kassem doesn't hedge: "U.S. pressure on the Mubarak regime has been the catalyst for most of the change we have seen," he said. He traces the turning point to an April 2004 summit between Mubarak and President Bush in Crawford, Tex., at which the aging Egyptian strongman heard for the first time from an American president that political liberalization would be necessary to maintain good relations. After stalling a few months in the hope that Bush would lose the 2004 election, Mubarak reluctantly concluded that he must take some visible steps, Kassem says. One was the allowance of greater press freedom; another was the conversion of his reelection from a referendum into a multi-candidate competition.

After twenty-five years of alliance between the U.S. and Egypt, nothing had changed in Egyptian polity. Now, things are changing. Cowboy up!