Free Republic

The military junta ruling Egypt has announced that parliamentary elections will be held in September. Rather than spending the next five months complaining, those who aren’t supporting the Muslim Brotherhood better get started actually working and organizing. I’ll analyze this a lot more in the coming months but briefly the blocs are as follows: Islamists: The Muslim Brotherhood says it is aiming at getting 30 percent of the seats. I think they’ll succeed. A smaller, moderate Islamist party — whose members split from the Brotherhood because they say it is too extremist — would be lucky to get any seats....

Egypt's Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq resigned on Thursday and a former transport minister was picked to appoint a new government after pro-democracy activists demanded a purge of Hosni Mubarak's old guard from the cabinet. Military rulers said they had accepted the resignation of Shafiq and appointed Essam Sharaf in this place.

Libya retains the focus of the moment, for the media need a headline, but the background story is so much larger. The entire region is on fire, or very close to ignition, from Morocco to Pakistan, and we need to start thinking on this larger scale. It does not follow, from the fact everyone is hooting, that Moammar Gadhafi will fall. He might, tomorrow, for all I know, or all anyone knows who is not clairvoyant. But as I recall, Saddam Hussein did not fall after the Gulf War of 1991. And the comparison is instructive. [....] Saddam's consistent policy...

/begin my excerpts Kim Jong-il Orders Dozens of Tanks to be Deployed around his Residence at Yongsung, Pyongyang Sources in Pyongyang reported on Feb. 28, "When the Egyptian protests were at their peak in early February, Kim Jong-il deployed tens of tanks around his residence at Yongsung, Pyongyang." They believe that he made such decision when it was apparent that Egyptian President Mubarak, whom he had close relationship with, was being forced to step down, and it made him extremely wary. The sourced added, "Starting at the second half of 2009, when the succession process is in (full) progress, he...

Egypt imposed a travel ban Monday on former president Hosni Mubarak and his family while complaints about their wealth are being investigated. The public prosecutor issued an order freezing the money and assets of Mubarak and his family, following claims that they had acquired wealth through illegal means, a spokesman for the prosecutor said. A Cairo criminal court is set to look into the case on March 5, the state news agency MENA said. The travel ban follows the prosecutor’s February 21 decision to ask foreign governments to freeze the overseas assets of Mubarak, who handed power to the army...

Events in Egypt with Mubarak resigning and thousands of jubilant Egyptians in the streets have brought joy and hopefulness to people in Egypt and around the world. We hear the siren words of freedom, liberty and justice from the Egyptians in the streets, while the media portray these events as joyous blessings and the end of a tyranny. Perhaps. We seem to be, again, without any history context. With more of this important context, the need for caution would be obvious. For these words of freedom, liberty, justice (a supremely vague term) have all been heard before, and they did...

~ EXCERPT ~ Thousands in the streets protesting. Chanting workers, young and old, taking over a government building and grinding activity to a halt. Lawmakers fleeing. An executive standing firm in face of the revolt. **snip** President Obama weighed in on the issue on Wednesday, calling Walker's legislation "an assault on unions." **snip** "The President was quicker and more forceful of his denouncement of Gov. Scott Walker than he was of denouncing Hosni Mubarak," (ABC News Correspondent Jon) Karl said. "Madison, Wisconsin – the state of Wisconsin -- this is arguably ground zero for the 2012 presidential campaign. Look, this...

Egyptian authorities arrested on Thursday former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly and two other ex-ministers who are under investigation for corruption, security officials said. Authorities also arrested steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz, once a prominent member of the ouster leader Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party. El-Adly, whose job gave him control over the 500,000-strong security forces, has been widely blamed for the deadly brutality used by riot police against demonstrators in massive protests that began Jan. 25 and forced Mubarak to step down Feb. 11. El-Adly served in his former post for 12 years. News of el-Adly's arrest followed the detention...

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak refused to respond to telephone calls from US President Barack Obama because he still felt offended by Obama's statement in which he called on Mubarak "to step down immediately," London-based Arabic language daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported on Thursday. Mubarak, still living in "presidential style" in Sharm el-Sheikh, according to the report, refused an invitation from Saudi King Abdullah to come to the kingdom, telling him he preferred to die on Egyptian soil. The report said that it was not clear if Mubarak had been in contact with Egypt's new military rulers through his former deputy...

WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday. Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.

Egypt's ousted president has given up and wants to die in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh where he has been living since a popular uprising ended his rule, a Saudi official said on Wednesday. Hosni Mubarak, 82, has suffered from health problems in recent years and travelled to Germany for gall bladder surgery in March last year. Reports of a further decline have increased since he stepped down on Friday after three decades in power. An official in Saudi Arabia said the kingdom had offered to host Mubarak but he was determined to see out his days in...

Tarek al-Bishry, the chairman of the constitutional panel, is a respected judge who criticised former president Hosni Mubarak and is regarded as moderate in his views. But he has been associated with Al-Wasat, an offshoot of the Brotherhood. He has selected a committee made up mainly of judges and politicians, including a judge who is a Coptic Christian, but also a former Muslim Brotherhood MP. There are no women. Wael Abbas, the best-known human rights blogger in Egypt, who was sentenced to prison by the Mubarak regime last year, said it was a "worrying" choice. "There is no such thing...

Saudi Official: Mubarak has given up and 'wants to die' There is talk of his depression, refusing to take medicine for ongoing health issues, and even of his falling into a coma this weekend. Yet despite reports that he'd flown to Germany, Hosni Mubarak is refusing Saudi offers to host him, instead saying he prefers to remain on Egyptian soil to the end of his days... which may be drawing near from the sound of things: On Tuesday morning, the London-based pan Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat reported that Mubarak is in very grave medical condition. A senior Egyptian official close to...

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, or al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, is more than a radical network, comparable to al Qaeda; more than an ideological phenomenon, like the followers of Khomeini in the 1979 Iranian Revolution; and more than a political insurgency, similar to Pakistani jihadism. It is an Egyptian Islamist subculture of great depth and influence. It is therefore also much more than a product of political decisions made by Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood was powerful before Mubarak, before his predecessor Anwar Sadat, and before their elder comrade, Gamal Abdel Nasser. But the Brotherhood today is not identical with the paramilitary Arabist-Islamist Ikhwan...

On October 6, 1973, in a move calculated to attract US attention, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal, capturing a narrow strip of land. After three weeks of fighting and with a fragile UN ceasefire in place, Sadat's grand plan came to fruition. In November, Henry Kissinger, the US national security adviser, arrived in Cairo for talks. Agreements between Israel and Egypt were brokered and the following year Richard Nixon, the US president, visited Egypt for the first time. A series of diplomatic efforts ensued which ultimately led to an historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and Sadat's highly...

The overthrow of the Egyptian government is being led by the hard-corps Islamics, and there is video to prove it. We are repeating history. In 1962, a group of senior enlisted USAF photo interpreters was secretly slipped into the back door at the White House. They were there to brief President Kennedy. There had been unconfirmed rumors of a significant Russian military presence in Cuba, but the CIA agents on the ground were supplying conflicting information, and no proof of anything. In addition, no one had reported the missile crates being unloaded from Russian ships in Cuban harbors. The crates...

The Jerusalem Post's Ben Hartman and Melanie Lidman describe the Egyptian uprising, painting a harrowing picture of lynchings, beatings and fear for their lives.

Middle Eastern Democracies by Ari Bussel The recent wave sweeping the Middle East has been overwhelmingly non-violent. As if an invisible force, visible only to corrupt or autocratic heads of state, has been advancing and bringing down decades-long regimes within a matter of days. It seems that almost no one is immune to this force, except those that outwardly and actively fight democracy like Syria and Iran. The public has cried “Democracy,” and the youth has repeated and reiterated the call, over and over again: “Democracy,” they chant, “Democracy,” something we know nothing about, have never experienced (other than what...

Hosni Mubarak's departure from power does little to address the fundamental issues that brought protesters to Cairo's Tahrir Square for the past 18 days. In fact, their protests were never about Mubarak but about a sclerotic political system and an economic system that was full of cronyism and corruption. Mubarak sustained that system, but its backbone was always the Egyptian military. Mubarak nurtured the military, from which he came, and the military preserved him. Although the officers behind Egypt's 1952 revolution abandoned their uniforms long ago, Egypt's rulers have been generals in suits for decades.

For nearly three weeks, the Biden/Clinton/Obama policy concerning the tottering Mubarak regime was contradictory, incoherent, and predicated entirely on the perceived pulse of the demonstrations. Finally, the confused administration seemed to have realized that U.S. foreign policy must center on long-term support for the non-violent transition to secular consensual government, rather than hour-by-hour, very public assessments of Egyptian individuals. To the degree that individuals thwart constitutionality (quite a different thing from plebiscites), we should be opposed; to the degree they aid it, we should be supportive. That way, we at last dispense with the embarrassments of “Mubarak, a dictator/not a...