Column One: When dictatorships end with a whisper
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Sep. 11, 2008
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With its nuclear weapons program, its control of Lebanon, Gaza and Syria,
its massive influence in Iraq and Afghanistan and its messianic, global
ambitions, Iran is rightly viewed as the greatest threat to global security
today.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Iranian challenge is that on the
issues of greatest concern to the West, there is no way to divide and
conquer the regime. Anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and the quest for
Islamic dominance worldwide are sentiments shared by all levels of the
regime. The desire for nuclear weapons that can be used together with terror
armies to destroy Israel and the West is shared by all members of Teheran's
decision-making bodies.

Those who preach appeasement towards Iran claim that President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad is not reflective of the regime. They argue that Supreme Leader
Ali Khamenei is far more moderate than Ahmadinejad, and it is Khamenei, not
Ahmadinejad who calls the shots.

While it is true that Khamenei calls the shots, it is not true that he is
moderate. Khamenei is just as radical as Ahmadinejad. It was Khamenei's
decision to elect Ahmadinejad president. And Khamenei has approved every
move Ahmadinejad has made in office. Moreover, last week Khamenei announced
that he wants Ahmadinejad to serve a second term.

Then, too, Khamenei's rhetoric is just as vitriolic as Ahmadinejad's. On
Tuesday, he exhorted Iranian judges and members of parliament to patiently
await Islam's defeat of the West and not accept calls to embrace
"rationality and moderation" or agree to peacefully coexist with "the global
arrogance," which is how he refers to the US and Europe.

The Iranian regime came to power in a violent revolution 29 years ago. Led
by the charismatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hate-spewing,
Koran-thumping ayatollahs overthrew the pro-Western autocracy of the shah.
The Islamic revolution was a popular revolution. The shah's repressive
policies and the resonance of Khomeini's Islamic dogmas gave the ayatollahs
broad support among the Iranian people.

In the years and months that preceded the fall of the shah, the West failed
to understand either the sources or the dangers of the revolution. The US,
Europe and Israel had such close relations with the shah that they hadn't
realized that while broad, Iran's alliance with the West was skin deep.
Indeed, the fact that the Iranian people identified the West with the shah
made it easy for Khomeini and his followers to convince them that the West
was no less their enemy than the shah was.

THE IRANIAN revolution is frequently recalled as a cautionary tale for the
West as Americans, Israelis and Europeans continue to view unpopular, yet
ostensibly pro-Western Arab autocracies as stable. Such warnings have been
uttered with increasing frequency in recent years in regards to Egypt, whose
pro-Western dictator Hosni Mubarak now enters the twilight of his reign.

Mubarak has been ruling Egypt with an iron fist since 1981. He is 80 years
old and the state of his health is uncertain.

The Egypt Mubarak presides over is an economic basket case. Egypt's
population of 80 million - the highest in the Arab world - has doubled since
he took power after Anwar Sadat's assassination. Forty percent of Egyptians
are under 15 years old.

Mubarak has done little to advance his country's economic prospects. A fifth
of Egyptians subsist on less than a dollar a day. The average per capita
income, which has been declining since 2000, was $1,485 in 2006.

With few job prospects, Egypt's youth increasingly turn to the mosques for
consolation. There they embrace the jihadist doctrines of the Muslim
Brotherhood. Like its spinoffs - al-Qaida and Hamas - the Muslim Brotherhood
upholds jihad in the quest for Islamic world domination as its highest goal.
And due in large part to Mubarak's failure to develop his country, the
Muslim Brotherhood is the strongest social force in Egypt.

Owing to Mubarak's careful cultivation of Egypt's military and intelligence
services and his control of the media, the US and Israel uphold him as a
strong leader of a strong state. Yet Egypt's inherent weakness and Mubarak's
own incompetence is exposed every time something goes wrong in the country.
Whether al-Qaida strikes in Sinai or ferries sink to the bottom of the Red
Sea, Egyptian authorities are incapable of handling disasters.

On Saturday, at least 50 families were buried in rubble as part of a rocky
cliff crashed onto a shantytown in Cairo. According to The New York Times,
in the months leading up to the rock slide, residents had complained to
authorities repeatedly that the cliff was disintegrating. But the
authorities ignored them.

On Saturday it took rescue workers several hours to respond to calls for
help. And when they arrived, they occupied themselves not with saving those
trapped beneath the rocks, but with preventing the crowds from demonstrating
against the regime. By Thursday, 64 bodies had been pulled from the rubble
and the excavation was far from complete.

For the past several years, Mubarak has been grooming his son Gamal to
replace him. But it is far from clear, even if he replaces Mubarak, that
Gamal will be able to maintain a grip on power similar to that of his
father. Unlike Mubarak, who commanded the Egyptian Air Force before he
became Sadat's vice president, Gamal has never served in the military. He
does not enjoy the strong backing of the military command, which prefers to
see Mubarak's heir emerge from its ranks.

The prospect that a post-Mubarak Egypt will be seized by jihadist fervor
capable of fomenting a jihadist takeover of the country is real. And both
Israeli and US policy-makers should be planning contingencies for such a
turn of events. But recent developments in Pakistan show that while it is
possible that the Muslim Brotherhood could take over Egypt after Mubarak
dies, it is also possible that a less conclusive reality will ensue.

MUBARAK'S RULE of Egypt bears many similarities to recently ousted president
Pervez Musharraf's rule of Pakistan. Like Musharraf before him, Mubarak
understands that his hold on power is based not on his own people's consent
but on the US's continued political and financial support for his regime.
Consequently, like Musharraf, Mubarak views secular democrats - who enjoy
Western support - as greater threats to his regime than the jihadists, whom
the West opposes.

So, too, like Musharraf, Mubarak's owes his ability to remain in power to
his control of Egypt's military and intelligence services. And like
Musharraf, Mubarak has maintained their support both because he himself
emerged from their ranks and because he showers the army and intelligence
services with economic power and social prestige.

It was the US's support for Musharraf's secular opponents and their call for
elections that forced Musharraf from power this summer. The Pakistan the US
now confronts is led by the weak government of newly elected President Asif
Ali Zardari, who was sworn into office on Tuesday. Unlike Musharraf, who
commanded the military as president, Zardawi has little sway over Pakistan's
General Staff and the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence force.

After the September 11 attacks on the US, Washington was so concerned with
the prospect of what would happen if Musharraf were to leave office that it
subordinated its own interest in defeating the Taliban and al-Qaida to its
interest in maintaining him in power. For six years the US refrained from
attacking al-Qaida and Taliban redoubts inside Pakistan for fear that doing
so would weaken Musharraf's credibility within the military and among the
Pakistani population in general. Like their Egyptian counterparts,
Pakistanis are better disposed toward jihadists than they are toward the US.
And in the interest of maintaining Musharraf's support for its operations in
Afghanistan, the US allowed him to host al-Qaida and the Taliban in
Pakistan.

In Musharraf's last two years in office, the US's policy of self-restraint
became increasingly untenable. The Taliban and al-Qaida took control over
more and more of Pakistan's border provinces with Afghanistan and used the
areas as launching pads for their stepped-up insurgency in Afghanistan. In
recent months, it became apparent to Washington that if the US wishes to
achieve victory in Afghanistan, it will need to extend its fight to
Pakistan's border provinces.

Counterintuitively, it was Musharraf's very exit from power that has enabled
the US in recent weeks to steeply intensify its operations in Pakistan.
While Pakistan's military commander Gen. Ashfaq Kayani is far less
supportive of the US than Musharraf was, he is also far weaker. What's more,
the US has little investment in his longevity in power. The same is the case
with Zardawi's government.

Last month, Kayani met with Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm.
Mike Mullen and Gen. David Petraeus, who has now taken command of the US
Central Command, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier. There he
apparently rebuffed their request for Pakistani military support for
American operations in Pakistan.

But given the US's lack of investment in Kayani, his refusal did not have
the same effect as Musharraf's opposition to such raids had. Whereas the US
respected Musharraf's refusal to allow American forces to operate in
Pakistan, Washington feels free to ignore Kayani's objections.

The fact that in Pakistan today no one person or faction has the power to
control the country is what rendered the US's stepped up operations inside
of its border provinces with Afghanistan politically feasible. The US's
stony silence in the face of Kayani's condemnation Wednesday of its ground
forces' raid on a Taliban camp in Pakistan this week showed that America is
no longer deterred by Pakistani objections.

There is no doubt that the current state of affairs in Pakistan is
inherently unstable. If the US raises its military profile in Pakistan too
much, it is liable to foment a backlash that could propel its enemies to
power in that nuclear-armed state. But if the US is able to press its
advantage with a weak regime, it may be able to defeat the Taliban and
al-Qaida before they muster the strength necessary to take over the country
and so secure Pakistani neutrality for the foreseeable future.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS in Pakistan show that the situation in Iran need not
repeat itself in Egypt after Mubarak exits the scene. Weak interim regimes
provide opportunities that do not exist in strongly authoritarian and deeply
unpopular regimes.

Based on the current situation in post-Musharraf Pakistan, perhaps the US
and Israel should not be fearing that if Gamal Mubarak fails to secure full
control of Egypt after his father dies they will have to contend with an
Iranian-style Muslim Brotherhood regime. Maybe what will emerge is a more
amorphous situation where no one group will have the power to assert
absolute power. Such a situation could free the US and Israel to concentrate
on simply defeating their enemies, without concerning themselves with the
fortunes of those who have yet to join in the fight against the forces of
global jihad.