Mubarak, Walk, like an, well, like a Man!

The lights were against me as I rushed to get to Tampa International Airport. My assignment desk said that there would be an important press conference and that I had to cover it without a reporter. I weaved through traffic on the Howard Franklin (The Frankenstein) Bridge and raced into the airport, parking illegally at the beginning of the drive up. My vehicle was an unmarked news car, but it had five radio antennae on top, so hopefully the cops would think that it was one of their own. In these situations it is good to be a former defensive end. I pushed, just a little, and popped up my sticks, ran my mic to the front and pulled out my sweat towel just in time.

It was 1982 and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young had just taken over as Mayor of Atlanta. He was stopping through Tampa and his press people called all of the media. Now, the local Tampa reporters had to figure out what to ask him. They hemmed and hawed, asking about the civil rights movement and other questions of no news value. I waited until a lull and raised my hand (I was only 25 then and still shy, well, relatively) Young called on me and I asked, “Regarding Nicaragua, why is it that the United States backs dictators until their own people want to kill them and then continues to oppose the people, even though the dictator is no longer a factor?”

These thoughts of course have come back to me from time to time: Marcos in the Philippines in '86 and that same year when I was rolling my camera at gunpoint while the Haitian army took us in, the week that Baby Doc went into exile.

And now it is Egypt and others in the middle east; a domino theory in which I can believe.

What should the United States do this time? What can we, as a nation, do?

The first lesson for me is to learn from the past.

Only the disingenuous among us are saying that we should have known this was coming, as it is turning out.

“It is crucial to remember that almost no one expected the revolution sweeping Egypt today, least of all the people of Egypt themselves,” American University in Cairo associate professor of law Amr Shalakany wrote in the NY Times.

At congressional hearings in the first week of the Egyptian unrest CIA operatives were questioned about why we didn't have more of a heads up on the social explosion. The agency's official on the grill at the hill, Stephanie O'Sullivan said that of course they knew that there was great discord in the Egyptian population and that circumstances in Tunisia might spread, but “we didn't know what the triggering mechanism would be.” In other words, agents on the ground did not know that such an action would escalate to the levels that we have seen.

People are doing some sort of time shift when they comment that it was wrong for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to say “We support the fundamental right of expression and assembly for all people, and we urge that all parties exercise restraint and refrain from violence. But our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.” She said that in a joint press opportunity with the Spanish foreign minister on January 25, the “day of rage,” when Egyptians first took to the streets, before any burnings had occurred. At that time, the scale and determination of the unrest was unknown, even by Egyptians.

And is Egypt still stable? Yes it is, thanks to their constitution, though it is a document that needs to be adjusted. President Hosni Mubarak and the military will have to take a role, and quickly.

The Egyptian constitution needs to be amended so that the will of the people can be expressed through elections. Tarek Masoud, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard has written the recipe, “Mr. Mubarak dissolves Parliament, forcing a new election within 60 days (international observers would be required to make sure the election is fair). Once the new Parliament is seated, Mr. Mubarak resigns, and an acting president, probably the new Parliament’s speaker, takes charge until a new president is elected.” After that the new parliament would have to amend the constitution to ensure that another dictator does not take power, ever.

Some are concerned about what part the Muslim Brotherhood might play in those upcoming politics. Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, of Emory University has a great piece written for the Council of Foreign Relations about what role the Brotherhood will play. She writes that there is very little threat of some kind of fundamentalist Muslim takeover as Mubarak, many on the right in the U.S. and entertainers like Glenn Beck would have you believe. Rosefsky Wickham writes, “No democratic transition can succeed without them.”

So what can the United States do?

First to pick up on the Muslim Brotherhood question, as Rosefsky Wickham points out, “the best way for the United States to minimize the risk associated with the likely increase in its power is to encourage and reward judiciousness and pragmatism.”

On that note, it is important to remember that we hold purse strings, not reins.

We can encourage, through words, a plan such as that laid out by Masoud, but we cannot force Mubarak to act. We should certainly let the Egyptian people know that we are behind such a plan. In terms of the purse strings, they are mostly tied to the Egyptian military. We can use them to shepherd the shepherd, to insist that the military back and facilitate such a plan, or else we will shut the purse. (We should also take a greater role in regulating how our military aid is spent.) Then the U.S. might offer civilian financial aid, aimed at economic development, jobs creation and exchange with the United States, particularly aid that also leads to jobs here.

Senator John Kerry has a column out that emphasizes this, “For three decades, the United States pursued a Mubarak policy. Now we must look beyond the Mubarak era and devise an Egyptian policy.”

As Dr. Louay Safi wrote on Al Jazeera's web site, “it would help distance the US from the final sins of a withering autocrat.”

I submit that we should take that a step further and advance a policy that is for all the people in the Middle East, now and before it is too late and other regional authoritarian's “own people want to kill them.”