How the White House Approached Egyptian Turmoil

Good insight on how the white house has been operating.

regards,
-Lance

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/02/how-the-white-house-approached-egyptian-turmoil/70646/

How the White House Approached Egyptian Turmoil
FEB 2 2011, 9:56 AM ET2

A few months after Barack Obama took office, CIA analysts monitoring  
the Middle East received an unusual request from the National Security  
Council. The president had appreciated the in-depth country profiles  
the intelligence community had prepared for him to read. But there was  
something missing. The white papers all assessed what various groups  
within each country didn't like about the United States - but there  
was very little about what they admired. So that's what Obama wanted  
to know: What do Yemenis, Qataris and Egyptians like about the U.S.?

The answer, in the case of Egypt, was the American education system.  
The competition for visas to study inside the U.S., particularly among  
those with a bent toward the hard sciences, was fierce. And it was  
considered a point of pride for a family member to brag about his  
brother studying overseas. The National Security Council and the State  
Department turned this nugget of insight into policy: Obama would  
expand the number of educational visas available to qualified Egyptian  
students. The State Department would increase its direct outreach to  
Egyptians; it would hold entrepreneurship and science summits, and  
would convene gatherings of Egyptians to meet with visiting American  
scientists.

As the White House's focus turned to Egypt late last week, the  
aspirations of young Egyptians were very much on the president's mind.

After Tunisia, the intelligence community, the diplomatic community  
and the White House all anticipated that protests would spread. The  
sheer number of calls the State Department was fielding from other  
governments was a clue: lots of mid-level diplomats in the Mideast  
wanted to know what their counterparts at State were hearing and seeing.

What they were seeing was "a sort of contagious element," a senior  
administration official said. (Like others, the official offered a  
candid assessment on the condition of anonymity because events were  
still unfolding.) "By Thursday night we were warning journalists and  
our allies that we anticipated that Friday would be a tough day ...  
and that there would be some stark images."

Egypt was simply the most logical candidate for unrest. Protests of  
some sort erupted in the country fairly regularly. Anger at President  
Hosni Mubarak for breaking his promise to lift the country's decades- 
old emergency law was acute. A food shortage was in the offing. The  
government wasn't able to distribute coupons for bread that many  
smaller vendors relied upon. Mubarak had long ago lost the formal  
support of the Egyptian Army, who, the U.S. was fairly certain, would  
never take up arms against the people.

On Monday, January 24 and Tuesday January 25, the White House watched  
the first wave of mass protests in Cairo. Ironically, there was little  
about the internal political debate inside the country that the U.S.  
was not privy to, a consequence of its close military relationship  
with the Egyptian Army and Air Force, which had kept informal tabs on  
the government for Americans. Most Egyptian military officials of  
consequence were in the U.S for an annual training exercise assessment  
last week, as were several of the country's intelligence officials.  
The early briefings were basic. Outside of the National Security staff  
and State Department desk officials, the knowledge about Egypt's  
political structure was thin. A number of White House officials were  
given an Encyclopedia Britannica-like briefing about the basics: how  
many U.S. citizens were inside the country and contingency plans to  
get them out; reminders that Egypt wasn't a Muslim country; Hosni  
Mubarak was a Coptic Christian of a certain sect; the Muslim  
Brotherhood was at once an opposition political party and a co-opted  
part of the social system. The government encouraged its charities and  
even accepted its recommendations for cultural censorship while  
treating its political platform as anathema.

The Brotherhood had done a poor job of recruiting young Egyptians; its  
membership ranks were fewer than polls showed. The strong secular  
undercurrent in most major Egyptian cities kept the Brotherhood in  
check as much as the heavy-handed security forces did.

On Friday morning, Obama turned his intelligence briefing into a  
seminar about Egypt, peppering his foreign policy team with questions  
about the relationship between Egyptian police and the military.  
During his mid-day press briefing Friday, press secretary Robert Gibbs  
seemed to imply that further U.S. aid to Egypt would be contingent  
upon the country's reactions to the protests, which had reached gale- 
force size. Obama's advisers believed that the informal checks and  
balances that had kept Egypt firmly in America's corner would continue  
with or without Mubarak.

The military was the key: most of the more then $1 billion in annual  
aid, a legacy of the Sadat-Begin peace accord, flows directly to them.  
Publicly insinuating that future money would be conditioned on how  
Egyptian leaders handled the protesters' demands was less of a direct  
threat than simply the application of direct leverage: Mubarak would  
have to tread lightly when ordering his military to backstop his  
police; for the military, siding with the police would be tantamount  
to abandoning the U.S.

What does the U.S. want?

Principally, an ally in the region that will not further destabilize  
the Arab-Israeli peace process, that will not complicate dealings with  
Iran, that will not (significantly) threaten Saudi Arabia's intra-Arab  
political aspirations while simultaneously containing them. The  
reality by late last week, as Obama and his advisers came to conclude,  
was that Egypt 2.0 would be a reforming Egypt as well. The sooner  
Mubarak understood this, the better. And of course, given that the  
protesters focused so cleanly on Mubarak as the source of their  
discontent, he would have to go. But Obama insisted that his team not  
call for regime change. For one thing, though protesters might  
suddenly experience a flood of positive feeling toward the United  
States, given the general level of anti-U.S. hostility inside the  
country, at least as assessed by intelligence reports, any government  
seen as being endorsed by the U.S. would risk legitimacy in the long- 
run.

"We recognize that the bar on the street is set at a place we could  
never possibly reach," the administration official said. "They want  
the U.S. to declare Mubarak needs to leave now. We're not in the  
business of regime change."

"As the president said in Cairo, Bush's freedom agenda has turned into  
a proxy for regime change, like getting rid of some leaders and  
replacing them with leaders more friendly to the U.S.," the official  
said. "The president believes that for these reforms to be real and  
lasting, these reforms need to be indigenous and lasting and pushed by  
the people."

It became U.S. policy to nudge Mubarak to a place where he considered  
it his best option to step aside and allow for free elections - truly  
free elections - as he had promised to do. By not pressing him to  
resign immediately, the U.S. was giving Mubarak a graceful way to  
exit. At around 4:15 p.m. on Friday, National Security Adviser Tom  
Donilon was holding a deputies committee meeting on another subject  
when Obama suddenly walked in - "crashed the thing" was how  
participants put it - and "told everyone he wanted to call Mubarak and  
speak to the nation about Egypt."

The president walked back up to the Oval Office and stopped just  
outside the door. His assistant, Katie Johnson, was watching Mubarak's  
first televised address to Egypt on her television set, and Obama  
lingered to see what Mubarak had to say. It was insufficient. A short,  
midnight Cairo time statement dissolving his government (and  
reconstituting it with former officials) would not satisfy the demands  
of the protesters. Mubarak had calculated that his vice presidential  
appointment of Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence minister who  
had helped the U.S. render terrorism suspects, and who probably has  
the best relationship with Israel of all of Mubarak's senior advisers,  
would pacify the West. (The U.S. has been urging Mubarak to appoint a  
vice president for decades).

A few minutes later, Mubarak was on the phone. "The president told him  
that he was going to speak to the American people and would be clear  
about what he expected out of Egypt, but he was also clear that the  
U.S. government was not in the business of regime change and that  
Egypt was our ally," was how another administration official who was  
privy to the details of the call put it.

As he had in private discussions, Obama said the U.S. would publicly  
call for four discrete changes: One, an end to the emergency law. Two,  
free and fair elections. Three, constitutional changes to allow for  
more freedom of expression. Four, a real dialog with the opposition.  
Without giving Mubarak an ultimatum, Obama made it clear that the  
status quo was no longer operative. Obama made sure that Mubarak  
understood how much the U.S. valued its relationship with Egypt, and  
pointedly "noted that the U.S. was resisting political pressure to  
call for Mubarak to resign," an aide said. He implied that U.S.  
patience was not infinite but it was tactical: the U.S. calculated  
that the protests would dim if Egyptians really believed that change  
was on the way. But that was as far as the U.S. policy of non- 
interference would go. Every action taken by Egypt from then on would  
be watched.

To say that the National Security staff was in panic mode would be  
inaccurate. Tired and wary, they spent the first few hours of daylight  
Saturday preparing for a principals committee meeting later that day  
to assess Egypt and burgeoning protests elsewhere in the region. A few  
American allies, like Jordan, were sufficiently worried about  
simmering tensions inside their own countries that they asked the U.S.  
to avoid mentioning any government to government contacts. That day,  
the National Security staff and the State Department asked Frank  
Wisner, the former U.S. ambassador to Egypt who was known to be close  
to Mubarak, to travel to the region at his earliest convenience. He  
would not be given the task of urging Mubarak to step down but his  
presence there would remind Egypt's political leaders that the United  
States expected constant progress.

Donilon had his staff send invitations to a dozen Egypt experts. Later  
in the day, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked to his  
counterpart in Egypt, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, then to  
Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barack. The read-out was positive:  
Tantawi was urging restraint, and Israel and Egypt were already  
discussing contingency plans in the event of - the biblical allusion  
was noted - a mass exodus out of cities.

On Saturday night, several members of Obama's team allowed themselves  
a rare break, joining the president and senior adviser David Axelrod  
at a party celebrating his return to a normal life. But the White  
House Situation Room's duty officers kept sending over bulletins.  
There were plenty of heads bobbing up and down, checking Blackberries.

  The watchword by Sunday was "orderly transition." Admiral Mike  
Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated it to  
his counterpart, the Egyptian military's chief of staff, Gen. Lt. Gen.  
Sami Hafez Enan, that morning. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used  
the phrase on all five Sunday shows. When Obama's press team sent  
reporters a "read out" about his calls to the region's leaders, it  
also included the phrase. "The military is very much aware of what we  
expect and everything they've said to us privately tracks with what  
they've done in public," the first administration official said. 

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