Put aid to Egypt on viagra

I spent a couple of hours last night in mild pain watching “The Square,” a documentary tracing the main turning points of the Egyptian revolution since early 2011.  The film is a good one, but the ground rules prohibited reviewing it.  Opens in January I think.  It’s the revolution I have doubts about.

Knowledgeable colleagues at the event disagreed with me.  Yes, they said, mistakes have been made, but the Egyptians are learning and things will come out all right, because there are good people prepared to make good things happen.

Of course.  Ahmed Maher, who spoke at the Middle East Institute conference last week, is clearly one of them.  The producer, director and human rights lawyer who answered questions at the showing last night certainly count among them.  So too do the nuanced and devoted revolutionaries they chose to focus on in the film.

But the revolution is not in their hands any longer.  The military has been restored to power, behind a thin civilian facade.  The popular coup (but a coup nonetheless) that displaced President Morsi has paved the way for a new constitution that will preserve military privileges, personal and institutional.  The Muslim Brotherhood, which won Egypt’s only remotely free and fair elections, will be excluded from political participation, as it was for decades under President Mubarak.

How did this restoration come about?  In my way of thinking, the mistakes started early:  the street demonstrators rooted enthusiastically for the army when it stepped in to displace Mubarak in Feburary 2011.  Then they voted, less enthusiastically, for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi to become president.  When he took on dictatorial powers, they chased him from office.  The one thing the Egyptian revolution has definitely accomplished is to give its citizens the sense that they can make thing happen.  Scholars call it “agency.”

Never did the street protesters create a political program and try to sell it to the Egyptian people.  Their goals were clear enough:  dignity, freedom, social justice, human rights.  But the army and the Brotherhood had a monopoly on organization, and still do.  Nor did the methods of the street protests lend themselves to rational political discourse.  They resembled riots more than disciplined nonviolent demonstrations.  The contrast with recent documentaries on the American civil rights movement, which faced no less determined opposition, is striking.

So what should the United States do now that the military is back in control?

Most observers see the American government as reacting hesitatingly and inconsistently to the many twists and turns in Egypt.  I don’t agree with that perspective.  The Americans have been consistent:  they will support whoever gains power and appears to have the support of the Egyptian people.  If one day that is the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), they’ll support the SCAF.  If after an election it is President Morsi, they’ll support President Morsi.  If after massive street demonstrations it is current President Mansour (with General Sissi pulling the strings), they will support him.  They will at the same time urge restraint, inclusivity, and respect for human rights, always keeping the focus on the roadmap ahead to free and fair elections, parliamentary democracy and rule of law.

The trouble is they will always prioritize security concerns and haven’t got much capacity to influence the course of events in Egypt, beyond their initial signal that Mubarak had to go.  Michael Wahid Hanna and Brian Katulis want to rethink American aid to Egypt, in an effort to remedy this impotence.  Provided Egypt stays on track towards inclusivity, they propose shifting American assistance more towards the economy and trade, lobbying other (bigger) assistance providers to steer Egypt towards economic reform, and refocusing security assistance towards reform rather than hardware.  They also propose preparing Plan Bs to reduce aid if Egypt goes in the wrong direction.

All of this makes good sense in a qualitative way.  But they don’t offer any numbers.  I’d guess America isn’t interested in enlarging its overall aid package for Egypt, which is somewhere around $1.3 billion per year.  Even if military assistance could be traded in for economic assistance–which our stove-piped Congressional appropriations process doesn’t allow–I doubt we could squeeze more than another hundred million or two out of security assistance to give to the economic side.  That wouldn’t count for much in a country getting ten times as much overall from the Gulf.  Lots of luck convincing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to condition their assistance on inclusivity.

So what do I think we should do?  I would suggest we think about getting out of the aid as usual business, which takes our $250 million or so and divvies it up among various USAID bureacracies:  “food and agriculture,” “democracy, human rights and governance,” “economic growth and trade,” “education,” “gender equality and women’s empowerment,” “global health,” “water and sanitation.”   These categories have more to do with us than with the Egyptians.  That is no way to influence the course of the revolution.

Instead, we should think hard, with Egyptians who were instrumental in the revolution, about what will really make a difference in getting to inclusivity and democracy.  My guess is that it has more to do with rule of law (including property rights) than any of the above categories, but I’m willing to see our chips put down on whatever my betters decide is the key priority.

If you want potency, take viagra, not every pill on the shelf.