Reports: Former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak 'clinically dead'

[Dino Velvet]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/19/us-egypt-mubarak-death-idUSBRE85I1ME20120619 (http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/former-egyptian-president-hosni-mubarak-dies-212544424.html)
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/former-egyptian-president-hosni-mubarak-dies-212544424.html

Reports: Former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak 'clinically dead'

By Yahoo! | The Lookout (http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/) – 10 mins ago


Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is clinically dead according to media reports. He was 84.
Mubarak ruled Egypt for nearly 30 years, steering the nation through the turmoil (http://news.yahoo.com/egypts-mubarak-war-hero-convict-184309116.html) that swept a Middle East buffeted by wars, terrorism and religious extremism. But the war hero and savior of his country died as a criminal convicted for his role in the deaths of those fighting to oust him.
He suffered a stroke on Tuesday, and a defibrillator was used in prison before he was taken to Toura Prison Hospital hospital in Cairo, Agence France-Presse (http://news.yahoo.com/egypts-mubarak-defibrillated-hospital-transfer-likely-190205781.html;_ylt=Aqb8LMAho049ZB6MZCxPaPyZCMZ_;_ ylu=X3oDMTFkZWgzYnZwBG1pdANCbG9nIEJvZHkEcG9zAzIEc2 VjA01lZGlhQmxvZ0JvZHlBc3NlbWJseQ--;_ylg=X3oDMTMzamhnNXNxBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRw c3RhaWQDY2MyYjUxYjQtZDE2Yi0zMWE4LWIyZGYtMmMzMTQ4MD YyZjg4BHBzdGNhdANibG9nc3x0aGVsb29rb3V0BHB0A3N0b3J5 cGFnZQ--;_ylv=3) reported.
Mubarak's health had been failing since he was sentenced to life in prison on June 2, after he was convicted of failing to prevent the killing of protesters in a February 2011 uprising against his rule.
Doctors at the prison hospital used a defibrillator twice on June 11 after they could not find a pulse on the deposed leader. An AP story at the time (http://news.yahoo.com/health-egypts-mubarak-deteriorates-prison-210111627.html) said Mubarak "was slipping in and out of consciousness, was suffering from high blood pressure and breathing difficulties, and was in a deep depression, according to security officials at the prison."
More details on his death or funeral arrangements are not yet available.
[Slideshow: Hosni Mubarak in pictures (http://news.yahoo.com/photos/deposed-egyptian-president-hosni-mubarak-slideshow/)]
The son of a low-level bureaucrat in the Nile Delta, Mubarak completed Egypt's three-year military academy in two years and rose quickly through the ranks of the Egyptian air force, according to a 2011 profile in the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/11/AR2011021106699.html).
He was tapped as Egyptian vice president in 1975 and thrust into the presidency at 53 on Oct. 6, 1981, when Islamist radicals gunned down (http://news.yahoo.com/timeline-egypts-mubarak-presidency-prison-194511876.html) then President Anwar Sadat at a military parade.
Mubarak himself survived six assassination attempts (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/02/01/all-about-hosni-mubarak/). He won four terms in single-candidate referendums and easily carried off the first contested election in 2005.
During his presidency, Mubarak was a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, a stalwart against the West's Islamist enemies, even joining the 1999 invasion of Iraq. He was also able to rebuild relationships with neighboring countries that were strained after Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel.
Mubarak kept the peace with Israel while keeping Egypt free from Islamic militarism. On Nov. 17, 1997, an Islamic militant group killed 58 tourists and four Egyptians at an ancient temple near Luxor. Reuters called it (http://news.yahoo.com/timeline-egypts-mubarak-presidency-prison-194511876.html)the "most dramatic act in a 1990s rebellion by Islamists seeking to establish an Islamic state." The revolt was eventually crushed by state security.
The Washington Post profile noted:
Mubarak valued stability above all else—and assumed the vast majority of Egyptians shared that perspective. Egypt was a nation, he would argue, that depended millenniums ago on central authority to organize the harvest and mobilize the resources to build the pyramids—and that still needed the same sort of unyielding management to avoid sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians or infiltration by terrorists.
His relationship with the West also earned Egypt tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military and foreign aid over Mubarak's term. The money helped rebuild the country's crumbling infrastructure and invigorate its armed forces.
However, his legacy was mixed.
Efforts to groom his son Gamal as a successor ultimately stoked popular anger and suspicion that the spoils of government and economic growth would be steered to a favored clique for another generation, the Post reported.
While the country's economy is much improved and the financial markets and infrastructure have been modernized, "the country still struggles with high unemployment, rampant corruption, residual state controls and growing demands for basic services from an ever-burgeoning population," the paper reported.
Mubarak's political downfall began in January 2011 when anti-government protests began across Egypt, driven by discontent over poverty, repression and corruption. He ordered troops to quell the demonstrations.
On Feb. 10, 2011, he transferred his power to Vice President Omar Suleiman. Mubarak refused to step down, however, igniting protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Mubarak stepped down the following day and a military council took control of the country.
"This will be the land of my living and my death," Mubarak said in that final address as president. "It will remain a dear land to me. I will not leave it nor depart it until I am buried in the ground."


http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/oKpWEAirIRN6PR55YvC74g--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTYzMA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en/blogs/thelookout/mubarakobit.jpg
Egypt's former President Hosni Mubarak delivers a speech in Cairo, Egypt, in this file photo dated Saturday, Nov. …

[Dino Velvet]

Hosni doing much better today. God is Great.

[Ben]

Hosni doing much better today. God is Great.

Thank God... ;)
But do we really care. Noam Chomsky explicates:

New Noam Chomsky - Western Governments do not care what Arabs think! - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK0Ixg9SD7Y)

[robertlouis]

Hosni doing much better today. God is Great.

As Dorothy Parker said after hearing that Pres Coolidge had died, "How could they tell?" :dancing:

At least it won't be like the farce in Spain in 1975 when Franco was either braindead or completely dead for days before the fascists finally conceded that El Caudillo had finally reached hell.

[Gouki]

of course he is, he would not play ball with the money powers anymore so he had to be dealt with and I used to care about what Noam had to say until he started calling for a world government and the end of national sovereignty

[Dino Velvet]

As Dorothy Parker said after hearing that Pres Coolidge had died, "How could they tell?" :dancing:

At least it won't be like the farce in Spain in 1975 when Franco was either braindead or completely dead for days before the fascists finally conceded that El Caudillo had finally reached hell.

I did think of Franco right away. Still safe to say Hosni won't be playing Twister with Ariel Sharon anytime soon. Maybe they both play with Francisco some day.

[Stavros]

In Syria as in Egypt, removing the figurehead does not change the structure of power. Egypt has been ruled by the military since 1952, Syria since roughly 1970 although some would place the date earlier. Even in the case of Saddam Hussein and his sons, the Anglo-American alliance had to purge Iraq of its Ba'ath party institutions, but changing attitudes is much harder -people who for more than a generation have been used to patronage as a route to jobs, corruption, and violence find that life in Iraq is difficult and unpleasant, even if they are not subject to the institutionalised terror of Saddam. Unlike Egypt or Syria, the country is badly split between Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, and as yet there has been no resolution to the problem of oil contracts which could create a crisis whose outcome is unknown.

In Egypt the military does not want to a 'return to barracks' policy whoever is in power; they are opposed to a liberalisation of the economy if it divests certain people in the military of their riches, and are using the issue of law and order to persuade people to vote for something they know, rather than the Muslim Brotherhood. By contrast, the Brotherhood, on economic policy, is presenting itself as a progressive, liberating force that will create more competition in the market where under the military all major contracts were mediated to guarantee that a few selected elites benefited. For example, a former member of the Brotherhood has stated:
“The core of the economic vision of Brotherhood, if we are going to classify it in a classical way, is extreme capitalist,” says Sameh Elbarqy, a former member of the Brotherhood who parted ways with the group after he disagreed with its refusal to register as an official nongovernmental organization, which would have forced transparency.

The Brotherhood for decades connected with ordinary people through social welfare programmes, and as the article shows, has its own millionaires -but what this suggests is that there is a large enough market in Egypt for entrepreneurs to be successful, while also developing the economy -Turkey being the model the Brotherhood seeks to emulate. But as this article also suggests, by getting close to the existing circle of elites who effectively own Egypt, the Brotherhood may be unwilling to see the back of them, but co-opt them into a 'new' deal, in which case they wouldn't lose at all -presumably the thinking is that if the economy grows beyond what it is now, new capitalists -and 'the people' will benefit without existing elites being replaced. Not sure if that can work if what Egypt needs is a more aggressive capitalist economy -but divesting elites of their riches will not be easy, so compromise could be the outcome -depending on who wins the election.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/the-economic-vision-of-egypts-muslim-brotherhood-millionaires#p1

[Dino Velvet]

In Syria as in Egypt, removing the figurehead does not change the structure of power. Egypt has been ruled by the military since 1952, Syria since roughly 1970 although some would place the date earlier. Even in the case of Saddam Hussein and his sons, the Anglo-American alliance had to purge Iraq of its Ba'ath party institutions, but changing attitudes is much harder -people who for more than a generation have been used to patronage as a route to jobs, corruption, and violence find that life in Iraq is difficult and unpleasant, even if they are not subject to the institutionalised terror of Saddam. Unlike Egypt or Syria, the country is badly split between Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, and as yet there has been no resolution to the problem of oil contracts which could create a crisis whose outcome is unknown.

In Egypt the military does not want to a 'return to barracks' policy whoever is in power; they are opposed to a liberalisation of the economy if it divests certain people in the military of their riches, and are using the issue of law and order to persuade people to vote for something they know, rather than the Muslim Brotherhood. By contrast, the Brotherhood, on economic policy, is presenting itself as a progressive, liberating force that will create more competition in the market where under the military all major contracts were mediated to guarantee that a few selected elites benefited. For example, a former member of the Brotherhood has stated:
“The core of the economic vision of Brotherhood, if we are going to classify it in a classical way, is extreme capitalist,” says Sameh Elbarqy, a former member of the Brotherhood who parted ways with the group after he disagreed with its refusal to register as an official nongovernmental organization, which would have forced transparency.

The Brotherhood for decades connected with ordinary people through social welfare programmes, and as the article shows, has its own millionaires -but what this suggests is that there is a large enough market in Egypt for entrepreneurs to be successful, while also developing the economy -Turkey being the model the Brotherhood seeks to emulate. But as this article also suggests, by getting close to the existing circle of elites who effectively own Egypt, the Brotherhood may be unwilling to see the back of them, but co-opt them into a 'new' deal, in which case they wouldn't lose at all -presumably the thinking is that if the economy grows beyond what it is now, new capitalists -and 'the people' will benefit without existing elites being replaced. Not sure if that can work if what Egypt needs is a more aggressive capitalist economy -but divesting elites of their riches will not be easy, so compromise could be the outcome -depending on who wins the election.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/the-economic-vision-of-egypts-muslim-brotherhood-millionaires#p1

Nice post. Thanks Stavros. Any prediction how this election will fall out and who seizes power? I wish the Egyptians nothing but the best and I hope they have a government that we can have a good and businesslike relationship with as well, regardless of who wins. I'd still like to see The Pyramids some day.

[Stavros]

Can't really give you a definitive answer to that Dino. The Muslim Brotherhood carved out a niche in Egyptian society over many decades, and some feel they were co-opted by the Sadat and Mubarak regimes in order to de-radicalise them, although even by the 1960s more extreme groups were merging, albeit with a smaller network of supporters. The Mubarak regime in particular co-opted the Brotherhood in education and the judiciary, which exposed some of their extreme policies on issue such as women's rights, divorce and schooling -the problem being that while the Brotherhood might want a liberalisation of the economy, they are socially conservative. The regime is currently hoping that the more grating issue of law and order will persuade people to back the Mubarak candidate, and they might fix the election results anyway. Either way, the outcome of the Presidential election, and any new legislative elections will not mark anything other than a step towards, or back from real change. It will take at least 10 to 15 years for Egypt to change. If, as some commentators argue, Turkey is the model, bear in mind that the last military coup took place in 1980, and it was only last year that the top Generals 'resigned' from the government in protest at a wave of arrests of corrupt officers. This was believed to a signal change given that the military have been at the top of Turkish politics since the Republic was declared in 1923. It doesn't mean the military have gone away, they continue to suppress Kurdish dissidents in the south-east. But it does suggest that if it took 30 years to tame the uniforms in Turkey, Egypt's transition could take as long.

It could go the way of stalemate, it could get worse; it could even get better, but it is as rare to find optimists on the Middle East today as it was yesterday.