"The Muslim Brotherhood broke the momentum of the protester movement by joining into talks with Suleiman. Staying away would have kept up the pressure to get rid of Mubarak and his system. They earlier had announced that they would let ElBaradei do the negotiations. But he wasn't even invited to that meeting. The MB has now broken the coalition of protesters."

History repeats itself

"By summer 1978 the level of protest had been at a steady state for four months — about ten thousand participants in each major city (with the exception of Isfahan where protests were larger and Tehran where they were smaller). This amounted to an "almost fully mobilized `mosque network,`" of pious Iranian Muslims, but a small minority of the more than 15 million adults in Iran. Worse for the momentum of the movement, on June 17, 1978 the 40-day mourning cycle of mobilization of protest — where demonstrators were killed every 40-days as they mourned the dead of earlier demonstrations — ended with a call for calm and a stay-at-home strike by moderate religious leader Shariatmadari."

Posted by: Lysander | Feb 7 2011 19:52 utc | 1

I did not know all that about The Muslim Brothers, so thanks a lot for the post.

Posted by: Joseph | Feb 7 2011 19:55 utc | 2

Outlook isn't good if they are just hiding there. From AJE:

8:44pm Ahmad Nagib, one of the organisers of the protests in Tahrir Square told Al Jazeera: "We are not scared of being martyred, but we don't want to be shot at the back by state security."

We will continue to protest in Tahrir Squrae until he [Mubarak] steps down. It is safer for us to camp out here in the open, some of our friends that left the Square were kidnapped and tortured inside the museum by state security.

We are still resilient and we will carry on, real democracy can only be achieved by involving all of us in any talks, but any talks will happen after Mubarak leaves. Our voices have not been represented, and we call for the Egyptian state TV to be prosecuted for playing an instrumental part in inciting hatred towards us and encouraging the 'baltageya' thugs to attack us.

Posted by: ThePaper | Feb 7 2011 20:49 utc | 3

About the MB moves I think there are two lines of thought to follow. One they are just a controlled opposition (CIA or whatever). An old asset from the anti-nationalist and anti-socialist fights era that they have kept alive for future use.

But I think that's an oversimplification. There is real people behind the MB and if it was an obvious stooge its following would be reduced with time. Israel also thought that they could control Hamas, a splint from the MB though now they may not be so close, as an alternative to the secular nationalist PLO and we can see how well that worked. Something similar happened with Hizbullah and the shiite movements in South Lebanon.

My other line of thought is that this people works on a different timeline and priorities that what we are used to. They are playing long term or very long term. How many decades it took the moderate islamic movements to break the secular kemalist militar dictatorship in Turkey? They also build their organization from the bottom. People as the base of a movement rather than politicians or big ideals.

Also even though they have played an important, and probably understated, place in the revolts they need to keep an apparency of moderation, even close to collaboration to survive and keep the revolt alive. If the MB had been on the front of the protests, or the regime and the western powers could have create the propaganda to back they were, the crackdown would have been immediate and bloody in the style of the Algeria civil war. Zero sympathy for those 'barbaric towel heads' from the western 'whities'.

So even though I would prefer an scenario more suiting to the secular and leftist youth movements I can understand some the MB moves.

Posted by: ThePaper | Feb 7 2011 21:03 utc | 4

Thanks for the link to the Ian Johnson piece. That led me to his recently published book:

A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West

Looks interesting and useful.

Posted by: Anonymous | Feb 7 2011 21:31 utc | 5

tomorrow and on friday will be millions again,this is just the muslim brotherhood way on dealing with things,they try to exploit them by talking and showing that they are not really going to do any real change,alot of forces are combined now,we will be free,just support us by @ least not giving mubarak and his minions weapons to kill us by bullets,choking to death and other weird things they used...ty for all who supported the cause of freedom we will never forget you,hail to martyrs of freedom,sorry for my stupid english it is not my mother tongue..

Posted by: mohamed | Feb 7 2011 23:08 utc | 6

WikiLeaks: Israel's secret hotline to the man tipped to replace Mubarak

The new vice-president of Egypt, Omar Suleiman, is a long-standing favourite of Israel's who spoke daily to the Tel Aviv government via a secret "hotline" to Cairo, leaked documents disclose.
...
Mr Suleiman, who is widely tipped to take over from Hosni Mubarak as president, was named as Israel's preferred candidate for the job after discussions with American officials in 2008.

Also, below is a quote from further down in the story:

Hoping to sap the momentum from street protests demanding his overthrow, the president has instructed his deputy to launch potentially protracted negotiations with secular and Islamist opposition parties. The talks continued for a second day yesterday without yielding a significant breakthrough.

Posted by: Rick | Feb 8 2011 0:22 utc | 7

So, Israel's got a hotline, and America sends their communication via a retard on horseback. Obama's as much a puppet as is Mubarak....although it appears that Mubarak has become a Pinocchio and Geppetto has to set him straight.

Note, that was 2008. Here we are, three years later. Obviously, the global plutocrats didn't want the brat son to get the nod and the longer this dragged on, the greater chance there was of that. Suleiman, who has allegedly had five heart attacks and is 74 years old, can't last much longer, so it's now or never to extricate Egypt from Mubarak's maybe soon to be cold dead hands.

But, there's the potential of the Black Hole I mentioned in another thread. It's not a controlled laboratory, and you run the risk of the observed simulation morphing into something that heretofore was not considered a risk.

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Feb 8 2011 0:42 utc | 8

The Muslim Brotherhood broke the momentum of the protester movement by joining into talks with Suleiman.

b, you really need to take a longer view here. Both sides are hunkered down trying to wait each other out. It this context, there is no real momentum to be had or lost. At this point, it's all just skirmishing and talking about talking until one side decides it can no longer sustain itself.

Meanwhile, time is on the side of the protesters. According to AJE, the demos are costing Egypt $300 million in revenue every day, with the majority of those losses being suffered not by the people but by he kleptocratic regime that captures the bulk of the revenues for itself.

So long as the protesters hold the square, they bleed the regime dry. They know it. Mubarak knows it. The US knows it.

Patience grasshopper...

Posted by: Night Owl | Feb 8 2011 0:56 utc | 9

i'm inclined to night owl's reflection but i fear the gains of this courageous struggle will be extinguished or stolen but perhaps i have insufficient faith in the masses

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 8 2011 1:27 utc | 10

Does this remind anyone else of Honduras? Endless 'negotiations' brokered by the US, leading finally to the reactionaries retaining power, later sanctified by a faux election?

Talking of endless negotiations brokered by the US and designed to get nowhere, slowly, thus leaving the reactionaries in control...Does that remind anyone else of George Mitchell? Where is George anyway? Too discredited to be wheeled out again?

Posted by: bevin | Feb 8 2011 2:21 utc | 11

Night Owl, I suspect little of those losses are from the protesters themselves. Nearly all are from government actions. Closing the internet. Closing banks. Releasing hardened criminals from prison. Organizing attacks on protesters. Closing the Pyramids. Etc.

The protesters did little of these things. The government can reverse all of them (it already has, actually) and so There really should not be such a loss to the economy. Tourists will not avoid Egypt due to peaceful protesters. They will avoid it due to violent government crackdowns and closure of tourist sights.

That said, it is a waiting game. What is at stake for the government is its growing loss of authority and ability to intimidate the public. Holding Tahrir Square, combined with biweekly mass protests creates a culture of resistance among the public and degrades the government's authority further.

Posted by: Lysander | Feb 8 2011 2:40 utc | 12

Lysander,

The protesters did little of these things. The government can reverse all of them (it already has, actually) and so There really should not be such a loss to the economy.

Yes & No:

The financial toll of Egypt's popular uprising, already significant, is only likely to grow. In a report released Friday, the investment bank Credit Agricole estimated that the protests are costing Egypt $310 million a day. Finance Minister Samir Radwan called the economic situation "very serious."

A certain amount of stabilization during the ongoing protests can certainly help staunch the bleeding in some local sectors, but especially with regard to tourism and the hard currency it brings, the damage has already been done.

Tourism here has proved resilient over the years – Egypt's tourism sector has repeatedly recovered and gained strength after terrorist attacks. But the decision to unleash paid thugs on democracy protesters this week is likely to reverberate for some time in the minds of Europeans or Americans considering where to take a family holiday.

Lahcen Achy, an economist at the Carnegie Endowment Middle East Center, says tourism in Egypt won't recover for at least the next six months.

The resumption of Internet is also important cash generator...

The single decision to cut Internet access across the country for five days probably cost the country $90 billion, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

...but remember that the resumption of services also mean an increase in the ability of protesters to remain organized and keep up morale.

Perhaps most importantly though, the lack of stability and the uncertainty about the future retards the regime's ability to attract international investment and makes the cost of servicing Egypt's debt that much more difficult.

Egypt is running a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year that's expected to top $19 billion. Tax receipts are falling as the need for food and other subsidies has grown, and Egypt's ability to borrow abroad, as well as its potential foreign investment, have been damaged by the unrest.

Egypt's debt rating has been cut by the major rating agencies, and the country's borrowing costs have risen by about one percentage point, to about 6.8 percent. Constraints on borrowing abroad to plug the budget deficit could put pressure on the central bank to print money – something that would drive up already high inflation and prove devastating to the roughly 40 percent of Egyptians who live on $2 a day or less. The stock market dropped by 20 percent before it was closed, and the long closure of banks meant Egyptians living abroad couldn't send remittances home, says Mr. Achy.

Not to mention that in the midst of all the unrest, Mubarak has just announced another $900 million in spending to give his apparatchiks a 15% raise.

Bottom line: even if the economy becomes somewhat normalized around the protests, the standoff still costs the regime far more than it can afford.

Posted by: Night Owl | Feb 8 2011 3:29 utc | 13

about the resumption of the Internet: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/secret-tools-force-net It turns out to be a trivial matter to restore the Internet for Egyptians Without the consent of Hosni Mubarak.

Of course, the Germans could do the same thing. But we don't talk about that on this blog. The frogs could do it too. But apparently, France too busy advertising inched telos of capitalist production. and presumably, r'giap wouldn't give his check in the mail if the French government starts fucking with the Egyptian Internet blackout.

Posted by: slothrop | Feb 8 2011 3:49 utc | 14

Night Owl,

Interesting points. I'll give it some more thought.

Posted by: Lysander | Feb 8 2011 4:03 utc | 15

The regime is responsible for the dearth of tourists, too. Tourists are not put off by peaceful demonstrators, but by government goons, and their paranoid reign of terror in the streets.

Posted by: Copeland | Feb 8 2011 4:55 utc | 16

@slothrop - that Wired article is pure nonsense

- the U.S. would have to invade foreign airspace to do what the article says it could do
- people on the ground would not have the right equipment for connecting to whatever the U.S. flies around

Stupid sensationalism bare of any real knowledge.

Posted by: b | Feb 8 2011 7:26 utc | 17

Suleiman just has too much to reveal about US operations. Of course the US would like someone without a known past to fill the void, but they are stuck with Sulieman. I would have loved to hear his list of counterpoints when Hillary called...

ESNL again.

Posted by: Biklett | Feb 8 2011 7:29 utc | 18

off topic,

but I am so happy that the bar is open (just found out today!!) I was in need of a drink and good company,

Happiness

Sabine

Posted by: sabine | Feb 8 2011 9:52 utc | 19

Sabine, I know how you feel!

Posted by: Joseph | Feb 8 2011 11:02 utc | 20

They're cherry picking various voices and working them over thoroughly. One tactic is to make them feel guilty for the death and impoverishment that is occurring. They are also disappearing people, and it goes unreported by the Western media, but the people on the street know it.

They're trying to wear the protesters down, just as interrogators wear down "suspects" until they drop their defenses and eventually confess to crimes they haven't committed. American taxpayer dollars hard at work. BP's gas find must be protected from those who are not invited to the party. After all, it represents 10-20 percent of BP's global output, and that revenue and profit stream, considering what the price of natural gas will be in the very near future, is in the trillions, not billions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuYkfgL8bjs&feature=player_embedded

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Feb 8 2011 12:14 utc | 21

The momentum is still increasing. As just one example, on the first days of the Revolution protests, the chants of the people were just for Mubarak's ouster, now the chants are for prosecution!

Posted by: Rick | Feb 8 2011 13:48 utc | 22

I’m certain the Egyptian people are quite able to govern themselves without dictatorial thug and his thug cronies stealing the country blind. It may be uncomfortable for some initially, but change always is.

Posted by: Virginia Internet Marketing | Feb 8 2011 14:41 utc | 23

Protests today are massive in Tahrir. They haven't lost any momentum at all. The US/EU/Israel along with the empty shell of the government can plot and scheme to their hearts' delight. But They will not have their way.

Perhaps Mubarak will refuse to leave. That might be a blessing as his presence motivates the protesters like nothing else. They are putting enormous pressure on the government, which initially yielded nothing, then started making minor and fake concessions and soon they will have to give real concessions. Or more accurately, the concessions will be pried from their greedy hands.

Posted by: Lysander | Feb 8 2011 14:48 utc | 24

Juan Cole today (juancole.com) shows an interview with Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who played a role in organizing the January 25 demonstrations (click on cc for a translation). He was held very respectfully for days incommunicado, and testifies very convincingly that the demonstration comes from the people who want peace and who organized through Facebook. He also said that his interrogators seemed entirely sympathetic to this view! Perhaps we are at the fringe of a new avenue for sane effective worldwide communication that is not in thrall to the moneymaking interests!

Posted by: lambent1 | Feb 8 2011 15:30 utc | 25

The Muslim Brotherhood broke the momentum of the protester movement by joining into talks with Suleiman.

All religiously founded political or semi influential bodies face contradictions and difficulties.

Organization of society (law, constitution, economy, etc.) cannot any longer be purely religious, in the sense of fundamentally (or at least somewhat literally) based on texts that are all at least more than a thousand years old.

Well there’s the Bahai and Scientology, for ex. but these are not traditional religions, they are deliberate mixes pointed to modernity.

The power of the priest’s caste can no longer function in an open space, a world where religious authority competes with, and trumps, other powers, such as the rule of the State or other domineering factions, such as finance or the military.

The framing of 9/11 as carried out by islamist terrorists was a calculated attempt to attribute attacking force, underground, hidden, quasi-military power, to a religion, to void, prevent, other analyses. Lame.

Islam is very much a ppl’s religion, without a fierce top-down power structure, though it has been instituted here and there, as part of the Higher Authority see Iran for ex. and the totally hypocritical Saudi ‘religious’ grip.

The MB’s calling card rests in the ‘caring’ part, the on the ground actions, etc. The Catholic church does exactly the same. American evangelists go abroad to care for little darkies, the dispossessed, etc.

The MB descendants knows all this.

Tariq Ramadan is a perfect example of equivocation, surfing between traditionalists and modernists/reformists, meanwhile gaining status and a fat bank account.

For all these reasons, the MB is very subservient - they are the low man on the pole - and vulnerable to whomever supports it, and they aren’t, afaik, very discriminatory.

In the same spirit, they are always ready to ‘negotiate’, to ‘deal’, to beat the multi-culti drum, find any platform that will afford them a voice. That is the agreed upon strategy, their only card, it works somewhat, with a lot of help from the scare-mongers, the Anglo world first of all, the developed world, EU, etc. second.

Having sweet veiled ladies on the TV swearing to peaceful solutions is cream to both sides of the game.

Posted by: Noirette | Feb 8 2011 16:38 utc | 26

Years ago the US missed a similar chance when it it supported the Shah up to his very end instead of his then secular opposition.

To say that we did not support to secular opposition is a significant understatement.

"The Soviet KGB defector, Vasili Mitrokhin stated in his book that the CIA continued to provide lists of Iranian Communists that the Islamic revolutionary government utilized to arrest, torture and execute Iranian communists."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Iran

It's hard to disbelieve this account given that this was well-documented standard operating procedure for the CIA in the Cold War.

Posted by: Tom | Feb 8 2011 18:51 utc | 27

it's unsurprising that whenever evidence is offered that is difficult for you to weave into the woof and warp of your narrow narrative, is dismissed. Actually, technologies exist -- wireless, satellite! -- to mitigate the government Internet blackouts. I have a colleague who works at nist who is an expert on forensics of communication technologies, and he says are a number of ways to reduce the scope of blackouts and censorship. The US military does it all the time in the Middle East.

What's more interesting to me is the way that the vassal states of the United States (northern Euros) pretend to be innocent bystanders to the world-historic transformation of the Middle East. you play your part, b, and a vast dissimulation of responsibility on this blog -- that Europe, once again, remains a happy spectator American entanglement in Egypt and all the rest.

You should really write a condemning American diplomacy for the happy secession of southern Sudan. No, wait. By required submission to your weird ideology, the religious nuts of Sudan should have retained southern Sudan and of course darfur. Their skeletons will go under the tidal sands. Who really cares how many millions starve?

Posted by: slothrop | Feb 9 2011 4:04 utc | 28

"Actually, technologies exist -- wireless, satellite! -- to mitigate the government Internet blackouts." where does this site find so many blithering buffoons?
The ISP's in Egypt who are the only entities which could provide access to wireless or satellite data transmission in sufficient volume to be useful for the protestors, cannot do so because their permission to carry data in any form is granted by a governmment issued license which contains numerous pre-conditions, sanctions for non-compliance which range from suspension of the license to cancellation for the entity and the imprisonment for life of the recalcitrant entity's employees.
When the net was turned off last Friday week, the interior ministry didn't do it by pulling fuses or cutting cables, they sent faxes out to the ISP's and mobile phone providers telling them to turn off the net and mobile phones.
The ranges of services to be curtailed and the methods of cessation were all decided upon and planned for well in advance of these protests.

Apparantly Vodafone included it's strategy in the initial tender documents it put up to the Mubarak govt many years ago when it applied for a bandwidth allocation and a telephone service license. Ask your friends the telecoomunications engineers in the US, which of them drew up the Egyptian governments's tender plans and dreamt up the inclusion of that requirement. As we have found time and time again many of the tactics which US politicians criticise Egypt for were actually invented by US advisors to the Mubarak regime.

Worst of all of these sanctions can be enacted without even having to bother a court, since they are contained within regulations which have devolved both the determination of liability and the subsequent punishment to the minister of telecommunications and information technology, Tarek Kamel, who was one of the few ministers re-appointed back into to his old position following the dissolution of the cabinet last week.

The US is never particularly zealous in spreading the freedom its citizens enjoy, to the citizens of it's colonies.

Posted by: UreKismet | Feb 9 2011 9:45 utc | 29

it's unsurprising that whenever evidence is offered that is difficult for you to weave into the woof and warp of your narrow narrative, is dismissed. Actually, technologies exist -- wireless, satellite! -- to mitigate the government Internet blackouts.

I have been working on Internet/Telecommunication stuff for over 25 years now. From writing Internet device drivers to large network management. I do know what I am talking about here.

Absent a full invasion, there is no way the U.S. could get any decent amount of Internet up in a country when that countries government wants to have it cut off. A few Iridium phones are not a replacement for gigabit fibers.

As for the rest of your comment - crap.

Posted by: b | Feb 9 2011 13:57 utc | 30

UreKismet wrote this in some other thread we are all a bit at a loss, rgiap

Any attempt to gain an understanding of the events in Egypt from outside the country is fraught and essentially guesswork filtered through the observer’s particular beliefs and prejudices.

To elaborate on what I surmised about the 15% raise (useless) it shows again that the Regime, while holding the superior position, i.e. being in an entrenched position of resistance and reaction, having pretty well abandoned the idea of a Tien-an-men scenario, whereas the protestors are on the attack, is operating with a world view that is outdated and errroneous.

The Regime sees their enemy as politically or culturally motivated groups, such as the Left or Islamists (MB), groups that can be repressed, as in the past, as enemies of the State. Mub and his General cronies trained in the USSR, right?... As for despairing revolt from some section of the pop. that can only come, they deem, from the POOR, which can be fixed or held at bay by minimal redistribution (food subsidies, etc.)

Then, they see individuals either as random elements belonging to politically motivated groups, or as foreign agents, spies, ppl with some ‘foreign’ agenda, traitors to the nation, ppl in disguise. (See the interview posted by b). As if anyone needed to spy on Egypt with the internet, ha ha. Pathetic.

So the old methods are implemented: random repression aimed to scare to death (arresting journalists, bloggers, etc.) and what they see as making concessions to temporarily off-the-rails groups, giving away a little bit to satisfy puerile demands, and patronizing negotiation with ‘opposition’ groups, the only important one in their minds being MB, which goes a long way to explaining, I think, the face-to-face meet, given that MB would also gleefully exploit their special status.

The Regime has missed the boat entirely. They don’t have a clue what it going on, and it is quite possible that will do them in.

Posted by: Noirette | Feb 9 2011 16:27 utc | 31