I am not in his pay. He does not know me. I have never met him. But I carefully followed his trajectory from Chief of the Egyptian Air Force; to a successor to that good man, General Tantawi, as Field Marshal; to his submission of his name as of April 16 as a presidential candidate. I also know his Cairo neighborhood of Al Gammaliyah which includes the tourist Mecca of the historic bazaar called "Khan El-Khalili." That is where ancient Egyptian art embraces Coptic and Islamic Egyptian art. And that is where my wife of 44 years, an American by the name of Grace to whom I was married at Al-Shahr Al-Aqari (Egypt's Notary Public Office) spent most of our vacation money. More importantly, I followed his public meetings and utterances from July 3, 2013 when he endorsed the public outcry against Morsi and the Brotherhood till this date.
The objectives of reaching the unreachable star of an El-Sisi presidency (or to copy the Egyptian graffiti: an CC presidency) parallel those of the UN objectives. These are: peace and prosperity. Let us transpose these on the Egyptian scene.
In Egypt, "peace" starts with the safety of the Egyptian street. The resurrected security apparatus, in terms of a re-trained police force, is now at work. Their nearly daily attacks on its personnel, especially in Sinai and rural areas perpetrated by the Brotherhood and affiliates within its franchise, since the legitimate ouster of Morsi's islamist regime in July 2013, are acts of desperadoes dead-enders. The role of the armed forces in these terrorist confrontations by the outlawed Brotherhood has made it necessary to have these forces act as "police auxiliaries."
Feeling the pain of the knock-out punches of the police and the army, the Brotherhood International has reached for its lowest ranks -university students. Their demonstrations throughout the nearly 20 universities in Egypt (where tuition is free) are akin to other terrorist organizations using unthinking human shields. To think that those infantile demonstrations are going to bring down the transitional government of Judge Adly Mansour is truly laughable. More comic in their ineffectiveness is the Brotherhood's aim of giving to the outside world the false impression that they are a mass movement. In reality, these outbursts on Egyptian university campuses prove daily that the Brotherhood is a "mess movement." The Egyptian judiciary is now in an overdrive to bring the law-breakers to justice.
The peace objective which an El-Sisi presidency is expected to pursue shall be sought relentlessly also beyond Egypt. A ring of steel around Hamas and Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis and Islamic jihad shall be perfected. Their 1500 tunnels from Gaza into Sinai are mostly gone; Hamas coffers are losing now from $250 million to $400 million of annual revenue from tunnel smuggling; the banning of the Brotherhood branches in the Gulf, with the exception of Qatar, is in effect together with their criminalization as terrorist outfits, a la Egyptian model; and the British investigations in Brotherhood International activities are being assisted.
In his meeting of April 15 with the representation of Arab/Egyptian tribes, numbering 240, whose leaders hailed from Sinai, the Delta, southern Egypt, the western desert, and the eastern desert, El-Sisi uttered as follows: "Your role in bolstering Egypt's stability, and the aid you provide the State in restoring the country's peace and security, are crucial."
Branching out beyond the country's primordial need for security, an El-Sisi presidency shall undoubtedly pursue in foreign policy a new mode: non-interference in Egypt's internal affairs. This is one area where the Brotherhood contributed to its own demise: the anti-Egyptian search for internationalizing the call for the return of Morsi to power. Egypt, especially after the imposition of American limited sanctions on it, has pivoted eastward. Russia for armament, China for trade, India for technology, the Gulf for investment in desert reclamation.
And in pursuit of the resurrected policy principle of "focus on Egypt," the new Egypt has distanced itself from husbanding "the Palestine Question." With that in mind, the following questions have assumed a new urgency: "the Coptic question," "The Nuban question," "the African question in the context of the water issue." No more Egyptian military footprint outside of Egypt, and all international agreements, including the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, shall be observed.
With that focus on "Egypt First and Always," the daily manifestations of the search for Egypt's development and prosperity have been publicized by El-Sisi campaign whose "General Coordinator" is the highly qualified Ambassador Mahmous Karem, a valued friend of nearly 40 years. Reporting on a visit to El-Sisi on April 17 by the Middle East envoy of the Government of Japan, the campaign highlighted El-Sisi's statement of welcome. In it he said: "The Middle East is a region which faces great dangers and is in need of substantial and speedy aid in order not to fall prey to extremist influences... The Egyptian public has, throughout the past period, waited patiently. The coming phase calls for hard work to fulfill its expectations, and to solve its long-neglected developmental problems."
In that context, I recall an interview in the early 1980s with Frank Wisner, the then-U.S. Ambassador to Cairo. Reporting on that interview for Forbes Magazine, I quoted Wisner's response to one of my questions regarding U.S. aid to Egypt. The Ambassador responded succinctly: "Egypt does not need aid. It needs trade." An aspect of the new Egypt's search for dignity is its grudging acceptance of U.S. aid. In fact, the Egyptian lower house of Parliament, before its dissolution by a court decree in 2012 had passed a non-binding resolution calling for refusal of U.S. aid. It is axiomatic to say that foreign aid is generally the other side of the coin of outside intervention -an anathema to the now rising Egypt.
It is common knowledge that Egypt's considerable natural resources have so far remained untapped. However, the real and durable resource is the huge untrained human resources whose skills are not up to the challenges of the 21st century, especially as regards to science and technology.
The unreachable star may yet be reached under this new presidency of El-Sisi which puts security first, and democracy and development as assured consequences of that security next. From these premises, begins the remaking of an Egypt worthy of the 21st century.
An Arab poet has once said: "The strong will to succeed exacts a price; that price is the exhaustion of the body to achieve its quest." Lost in this translation is the beauty of the cadence of Arabic poetry!!
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