Jeane Kirkpatrick on Egypt, Mubarak

Yesterday I called my friend Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations. She was busy leading a contingent of folks speaking with Saint Peter about reducing the media budget of the socialist parties that run a blog called the Heavenly Post. However, she had time to talk.

Former Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick

I asked her what she thought of the cacophony of criticism that the US created Mubarak and his Egyptian dictatorship. And thus because “he served US interests” rather than those of his own people, he must be removed from power immediately.

The ambassador said, “Maybe I can shed some light on things. However, a few things need to be said upfront.”

First, Egypt’s population is now over 83 million with more than 20 million living in Cairo alone. Since 1977, it has doubled.

Now Egypt did support “family planning,” she said, what International Planned Parenthood describes as “the right to have as many children as you want.” “This is precisely why Egypt has over 80 million people” she explained. “This means if you are going to have far more people than your socialist economy can handle, you might as well plan to do it.”*

Regardless, the growth of the labor force skyrockets, and grinding poverty expands relentlessly. That is an unpleasant fact of Egyptian life that cannot be escaped. It is unfortunately also fertile soil for radicalism. This is thus a metaphor for the unpleasant choices now facing the country.

Second, she emphasized, was the nature of Egypt’s economy. Like much of the third world, too much of it remains a largely top-down, socialist, government-controlled type economy. When grafted onto the demographic realities of the country, it is a ready mix for widespread frustration and anger at the lack of economic opportunity. Ironically, recent positive economic changes have ignited hope for a better future which when added to the power of electronic social networks, have greatly expanded the scope and cohesion of opposition to the regime. Therefore, you have hope that a better future can be had, while at the same time anger grows at the lack of opportunity today.

The economic obstacles Egyptians face is reflected in part by the significant size of the underground economy, which is well over $300 billion. While economic reforms initiated primarily by Mubarak’s son have moved Egypt significantly in the direction of a more market, investment friendly economy, these positive reforms have not yet reached most of the population. As a result, even though when measured by such economic indices, Egypt’s economy appears on the surface to be similar to Brazil, for example, too much of its population does not share in the perception that progress is being made.

Moreover, unfortunately, the vast majority of Egypt’s population does not yet see the benefit of such changes. On top of which the state controlled media organs continue to broadcast and publish stale socialist rhetoric that is detached from the very reform policies that have been pursued. In addition, Mubarak has his often-corrupt fingers in everything economic, said the Ambassador. Worse, the economic rules and regulations, despite reform, generally remain archaic in many areas. As it is, millions in Egypt live on no more than $2 a day.

Kirkpatrick noted that she remembered a 1981 Heritage Foundation monograph on Egypt. The head of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Washington was quoted saying, “Socialism is necessary in Egypt, especially in food production, because there are not enough agricultural resources in the third world to make a profit.”

He further explained “Egypt and much of the then emerging market economies suffer the same fate,” but it was, he said, inevitable. “That is why foreign and international assistance is there to make up the difference,” he concluded. Said Kirkpatrick, “Now you can understand why even after thirty years, Egypt continues to face such economic challenges.”

Third, said the ambassador, the population bomb did go off, despite the promises of family planners. Despite myriad claims to the contrary, it is now been transformed into an exploding “labor force.” As we have noted, when grafted onto a corrupt and socialist top-down economy that produces too few jobs, despite the beginning of a growing and vibrant middle class, you have a prescription for the mass unemployment and the chaos and unrest one sees on television in Cairo. For nearly forty years, this has been Egypt’s central dilemma. It cannot be resolved quickly.

Millions of young people, many college graduates, many with professional degrees, believe they have little economic prospects and little hope under the current regime. Major additional free enterprise, trade and investment are what Egypt needs. Nevertheless, however much the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies talk about ending poverty and producing jobs, they will not bring Egypt any of this, she warned. Their contribution to Egypt over the past week was to open the jails and release all the criminals and terrorists.

Fourth, it is true that there is the danger groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, often perceived to be the best organized of opposition groups, will seize power, because no moderate and centrist parties have emerged to channel the country’s large and growing pressure for reform. Such political activity was largely banned especially in the last elections. A critical future goal is to create a society in which “a substantial number of citizens think of themselves as participants in society’s decision-making,” she said.

Unfortunately, the changes in Tunisia and the often panic-like response of the Egyptian government to the demonstrations have fueled a sense that major change can be forthcoming including removing the current government. However, too much change or the wrong kind of change could yield grave trouble. Too often, warned Kirkpatrick, we believe “any change, including a government headed by revolutionaries, is preferable to the present government.”

Fifth, much of this dilemma is being blamed, of course, on the United States. The Ambassador referred to a reflexively anti-American New York Times article in which David Schmitz of Whitman College wrongfully blames this US tendency to support strongmen on our anti-communism: “It used to be anti-Communism,” he says. This is an echo of former President Carter’s National Security Adviser Brzezinski’s 1970 book “Between Two Ages” in which he argued the US should take “a more detached view of revolutionary processes and a less anxious preoccupation with the Soviet Union,” revolutions he assured us “no government can control.”

The argument then and now, is that by backing an autocrat, America often ensures that, as the New York Times quotes the professor, “The political center gets destroyed, giving credence to extremists’ arguments.” Only partially true, said Ambassador Kirkpatrick, but not anywhere near to the extent the critics believe. The great problem, she noted is that this “American commitment to change in the abstract ends up aligning us tacitly with extremists like…Khomeini or, in the end, Arafat.”

She warned, “The US left and its allies wrongly believe the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah and their state sponsors such as Syria, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea engage in and support terrorist violence due to ‘grievances’ against the US and its allies.” She further explained that yes, the lack of economic opportunity in Egyptian society is indeed very high on the list of such grievances. Thus, we Americans assume they share our interest in creating an economically just and prosperous society when they condemn Mubarak. Remember she cautioned, we always hear that the rebels favored by leftists “are reasonable” and how we cannot be against “the forward march of history.”

However, the radicals never mean well. Remember, she cautioned, we continually have “underestimated the strength and intransigence of the radicals.” The great myth is that the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied organizations and state sponsors are not bent on establishing dictatorial sharia measures in Egypt but are only seeking more jobs. Many Americans buy this “fairy tale.” For example, according to one CBS correspondent in Cairo, he had proof they were good-hearted: “Members of the Muslim Brotherhood will give you bus fare if you are short”!

As a result, we fail to see that these groups are part of a totalitarian left that simply seeks absolute power to rule absolutely, warned Kirkpatrick. The Wahhabism of the Taliban and the Khomeinism of the mullahs in Iran allow them to so rule by ridding the streets of opposition by terror, imprisonment, or murder. Getting rid of Mubarak is simply one-step toward the hoped for creation of a new Egyptian Islamic state.

The Ambassador said her wacky socialist friends (“Even some of those folks can get to heaven!”) were watching Hardball, hosted by Chris Mathews. She laughed, “He actually found some analyst who assured his audience that the Muslim Brotherhood was a very peaceful outfit.” Jeane said, “Even the socialists watching television up here cracked up at that one!”

Sixth, she explained, it is thus an imperative of the left’s narrative that it is “always America’s fault.” This is a charge easy to make because we help Egypt with $2 billion annually in economic assistance. It is assumed US assistance is thus American control.

In addition, it is a convenient cudgel to be used to undermine any counter US effort to bring about useful reform or to oppose radical elements within Egypt coming to power. And it is not as if we have not been warned. For example, one leading Muslim Brotherhood cleric from England told Sean Hannity this month that his favorite form of sharia law had been secured in Somalia and Iran, and that “it is coming to America too!” I am sure Egyptians cannot wait.

Seventh, she reminded me this chaos and turmoil has been festering for many decades. “Remember thirty five years ago, we were warned about this in a surprisingly prescient speech by a liberal Congressman from New York City which you had brought to my attention?” Yes, I replied. In June 1977, a little known member of the Agriculture Committee gave a House floor speech in which he warned about the twin time bombs of population growth and labor force growth and a moribund centralized socialist economy. The combination was curtailing food production and increasing social instability in Egypt. Such a system he said “was not sustainable.” At the time, he warned family planning would not work–“it was a hoax” he said, and “socialism was an anachronism.” Both “pretended to solve problems.”

He explained, by subsidizing the price of staples such as grain and cooking oil, as well as petroleum, the government was masking the extent of poverty and unemployment, which shielded the society from its true weakness. Egyptian President Sadat had just that month tried to reduce price subsidies, which had engendered food riots. So the reform measures were withdrawn. This was what prompted the Congressman’s remarks. [Ironically, much of the impetus for the current unrest in Cairo was the recent removal of price subsidies by the Government of Egypt, action that was apparently never explained to the people most affected].

I remembered being asked to visit the Congressman’s office shortly after his remarks. State Department officials wanted “to talk.” Their message was that “you can’t say such things.” They were very troubled by his speech. Was he going to call for reform? Would he not support foreign assistance? He was reminded “US interests” were very important and this required a “stable Egypt.” He was asked not to say too much about food, population and social stability, or at least say that things were getting better.

The Congressman asked how stability was helped with a population policy that was nothing more than “voodoo demographics.” He asked how an economic policy that was inimical to the very investment and economic growth needed to put millions of young Egyptians to work would help stability. There were no answers forthcoming.

Eighth, Jeane reminded me that in too many countries of the Middle East, especially the Moslem Arab nations, government policy is fueled by twin errors: one a false hope and the other a false fear. “Concentrating on creating empires gets them only trouble. And seeing in Israel the primary obstacle to their prosperity is nonsensical. As a result, they concentrate on all the wrong things.”

Syria wants to annex Lebanon, Saddam tried with Kuwait and Tehran wants all of the Middle East. The US has tried to dispel these impulses to empire–going so far as to expel Saddam from Kuwait in Desert Storm. But, she noted, on the other hand, America has come to embrace the whole notion of the “peace process.” Apparently, nothing in US Middle East policy is of higher importance than creating a Palestinian state. Nowhere was this more evident she noted than in the 1990s and now today.

Following the Oslo agreement, both Israel and the US governments embraced the notion. However, she said you could not make peace with people–the Palestinian authority– who refer to you in their children’s textbooks as “monkeys and pigs,” let alone organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and their terror masters in Syria and Iran who seek your destruction. And the tragic side effect was that this “peace process” turned our attention away from the emerging threat from state sponsored terrorism, some we mistakenly saw as “peace partners.”

For example, she was incredulous about the recent remarks of journalist Seymour Hersh. “Did you see what he said”? He thinks Syrian strongman Assad is truly interested in helping the peace process! “He thinks the US ignored Assad’s entreaties. I suppose when Damascus is not murdering Lebanese high officials there might be time to explore normal relations with the US” she cracked. She shook her head sadly when reminded of the visit to Damascus by former Speaker Pelosi and Chairman Kerry who apparently sought similar assurances.

It is the same with Selig Harrison, the former Times reporter than is always finding moderates with whom “to do business” in North Korea. I said, “Selig is always interviewing ‘moderates’ supplied by the regime for his stories. They are always interested in pursuing “compromise,” but complain “we cannot do so because of a hostile US policy.”

Compromise, of course, is never apparent in Pyongyang’s “official” positions. Nevertheless, we are assured by Harrison, just the right kind of concession by the US or the Republic of Korea is all that is needed to move things forward–and it just so happens the proposed concessions are exactly what North Korea repeatedly demands of the US! I asked whether this pattern was being repeated now.

Yes, she said. So little has changed on the left, she noted. Our enemies seek to use real or imagined grievances such as the lack of jobs and employment to overthrow allied governments. Our professional left–Hollywood, the drive-by media, academia–ally themselves with these enemies of the US, seeking “solidarity” with those who pretend to be reformers but our actually terrorist wolves in reformist sheep clothing. It is exactly what she had warned about in her famous November 1979 Commentary article “Dictatorships & Double Standards”: “[These] assumptions are those of people who want badly to be on the progressive side in conflicts between rightist autocracies and leftists challenges, and to prefer the latter, almost regardless of the probable consequences.”

Such an example as the “Gaza flotilla” comes to mind, the ambassador noted. “Remember, it had state protection and sponsorship” as well as sponsorship from former Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn. (Dohrn was interviewed in November 2010 during which she said, “The American government are the real terrorists” in the world.)

Unfortunately, the very lack of transparency of terror sponsoring states and their terrorist allies makes attribution difficult. Traditional deterrence is not always available. Thus, because of the shadowy nature of much terrorism, its leftist allies can repeatedly claim that Iran, or Syria, or Hamas or Hezbollah really do not engage in terrorist attacks against the US.

Alternatively, if it can be proved that such groups do engage in terrorism against Israel or America, it is always “our fault.” We are often then told they are only doing so because the terrorists do not have weapons commensurate with the military power of Israel or America. “Of course, they also obscure their objectives in a very clever way,” she noted, much as the Iranian cleric Khomeini did in 1979. Remember he claimed to be in favor of “democratic” principles and goals. And remember the multitude of academics and media types, who rushed to embrace the Iranian revolution. Our ambassador to the UN, AndrewYoung, famously said: “Khomeini is a saint.”

I reminded Jeane of the comments of the Swedish ambassador to the United States a few years ago here in Washington. “What did he say?” asked Kirkpatrick. Well, he opposed all sanctions against both North Korea and Iran. He said he was proud of Sweden’s record of accomplishment of providing economic assistance to Pyongyang. He said Sweden kept open the “lines of communications.” At the time, I asked him whether he was similarly proud of his country’s assistance and trade with Castro’s Cuba. He said, “Of course.”

I asked Ambassador Kirkpatrick what she thought of the New York Times piece “America’s Journey With Strongmen,” (February 5, 2011). Well, she said, they did note that in the Philippines democracy replaced the strongman Marcos, so “I guess they think we got that one right. But they were quick to assume our support of the Shah in Iran led inevitably to Khomeini and our support of Batista in Cuba led directly to Castro.”

The irony is that while they blame this on the US, they supported and embraced both Khomeini and Castro then and much later. They “still blame all this on America which means they have learned nothing.” She continued: “And I am unclear what they were trying to say. Seems to me, communist strongmen yield to democracy or freedom when empires such as the Soviet Union are defeated or destroyed. They rarely do so voluntarily.”

Moreover, she reminded me, “In the twelve years when Ronald Reagan and then George H.W. Bush were President, some many dozens of countries previously run by strongmen emerged or starting emerging as democracies. How many countries can say they were the mid-wife to so much freedom and liberty in so short a period of time?”

Indeed. The New York Times got it wrong, as usual. What gave it away this time? The media today too often appear to be cheering for Mubarak’s end, much as they did in Iran, Nicaragua and Cuba years ago. In fact, in all these countries, the media decided early on they favored the replacement of the strongmen allied with the US. The new rulers, we were assured were “democrats.”

We now know, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua joined Castro’s Cuba in making war on Central America while Iran created “terrorism central” as it made war on everyone.

As Rush Limbaugh wisely noted recently, the media too often play at policy makers. Their enthusiasm for the overthrow of Mubarak is only the more stark due to the absence of similar cheerleading to see the Mullahs overthrown during the 2009 Green Revolution, or to see the Kim family or Chavez cabal swept away in Pyongyang or Caracas.

The real story today should be: “The Lefts Love Affair With America’s Enemies.” That is the story in Washington this winter of 2011. A more democratic Egypt may emerge, and its 30-year cooperative alliance with the US may survive. But serious dangers remain.

We would be wise to heed the Ambassador’s concluding remarks:**

For these reasons and more, a posture of continuous self-abasement and apology vis-a-vis the Third World is neither morally necessary nor politically appropriate. No more is it necessary or appropriate to support vocal enemies of the United States because they invoke the rhetoric of popular liberation. It is not even necessary or appropriate for our leaders to forswear unilaterally the use of military force to counter military force. Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest.

In short, in the face of the left’s constant pursuit of alliance with our enemies, it is indeed becoming more and more urgent that we seek to ensure that we “provide for the common defense” and not fall once again for the siren song of revolution.

[Notes: *For nearly half a century, the World Bank, the Agency for International Development and the UNFPA, (the United Nation Fund for Population Activities) have done little more than buy and distribute millions of contraceptives to Egyptians. A neat bureaucratic trick has been repeatedly played on Congress. Whenever population data would show the population of a country exceeding the “rosy projections” of the population mafia, the family planners would cook the books. They would go back and adjust past populations upward in order to justify their previously projected declining growth rates. Thus, it is in countries such as Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan, to name just a few, total populations have swelled well beyond previous projections, although we are assured, all at the same time that “family planning” works. The US Federal government now spends annually some $725 million in international family planning foreign assistance, and nearly $20 billion since the program’s inception. House Republican budget cutters: that is $7 billion over a decade. **Many of the other quotes, as well as this one, attributed to Ambassador Kirkpatrick in this article are in fact directly taken from her November 1979 Commentary essay “Dictatorships & Double Standards.” ]