The US can use Mubarak no longer and so Washington will let him fall, provided that some perk tailor-made transition is in place to accommodate its wide-ranging interests in the region. That means that Egypt’s military will be the broker of the deal. Forget about the people of Egypt who demand freedom. The US is not interested in democracy or free elections. If it were, Washington would have planned for or promoted a smoother transition long ago.
Thirty years ago the US could use no longer Pinochet and Washington let him fall. It was a slow fall, like a slow-motion action scene from The Matrix or two animals copulating in an Animal Planet documentary. Unlike Egypt, Chile had a much more democratic trajectory and Chileans would not settle for anything less than for some form of democracy. Nonetheless, the Chilean military acted like a shadow during the first nine years of the transition just to make sure nothing went off rails. They did not want the people overturning the imposed Constitution of 1982. That tutelage backed by a piece of weapon was over the day Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, pending extradition to Spain under charges of genocide and terrorism. Eventually, the UK sent the octogenarian former dictator and lifetime senator back to Chile. He never stood trial either in Spain or Chile but he could no longer get his dark Italian-fabric suits made on Savile Row.
It works so well to deal with the military, for they have the monopoly of the force but lack civilised manners and so they deal with the country’s dirt, provided they get rank promotions and juicy retirement cheques, whilst the aristocracy and the old money maintain their grip on the economy. Do not look at Mubarak, check for the real pharaohs behind him. By the same token, Pinochet was just the hound sent by Chilean plutocrats to hunt Allende down and his communist sympathisers.
In 40, 50 or 60 years the US government has not changed much. The scenes broadcast from Cairo’s Liberation square tell the same story of US’s backyard: Latin America. Washington preaches democracy and sells the deeds of its founding fathers to the World whilst the State Department shakes hands with brutal and mild dictators alike. Unfortunately for Washington, the world has changed. The on-line dictionary of the cybernaut, especially the youth, registers concepts such as ‘free flow of information’, ‘international justice’ and ‘word-wide court of opinion’. So it is not surprising that leaks that reveal good old-style US dealings produce so much concern in Washington.
When I watch the images beamed from Liberation square I just cannot help going back in my mind to my childhood and teenage days in Chile during the 70s and 80s. All the misery we have to endure in a country in which you could not speak your mind out. The people were dominated by the self-appointed military and backed by a condescending US. Some may say that we had stability and eventually, the nation got back on its feet, economic growth followed and the ghost of Allende’s bankrupt and delusional government was left behind, but I doubt we really had stability, let alone peace of mind. Freedom cannot be traded for security. If fear means stability, we had stability. The same stability the Mubarak regime created in Egypt for 30 years.
I watch those Egyptian men and women on Liberation square on television and I feel the same dizziness I felt for the first time when I took part in a peaceful demonstrations in Santiago against the regime’s restrictions on information or when I was being followed by members of the intelligence. That dizziness, being the product of fear, marks the overcoming of fear. It is the same kind of dizziness I feel when I counter arbitrary power.
Unfortunately for Washington, the world is ahead of the divide-and-rule game this time. Blame it all on Wikileaks, Twitter or Facebook, which are a portrait of social change, not the other way around. This change in social relations cannot be completely disassociated from the force for good that the US represents. The problem the US needs to address is its external-internal schizophrenia. You cannot longer protect the rule of law within your territory and at the same time break international law. US governments will be held accountable for their deeds not in 20 or 30 years, after some CIA confidential documents get declassified, but within 2 or 3. And they will also be held accountable in the court of public opinion that emerges after a few clicks on Twitter. That leaves Washington with a limited repertoire of dirty tricks, like launching civil unrest in a major capital, financially supporting Frankesteinean and corrupt governments, illegally selling weapons or unlawfully invading or bombing a foreign country.
The world is ahead the US. This is the first time a former US president can be held accountable for crimes against humanity 2 years after leaving office. I just learned a few hours ago that waterboarding-fond George W Bush will not be travelling to Switzerland for he can face there the same kind of ordeal Pinochet suffered in London in 1998. Blame it all on sacrosanct globalisation.
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