El-Sisi Begins His Presidential Reign By a Bicycle Ride in Egypt - How Appropriately Symbolic!!

By leading a bicycle marathon in Cairo, President El-Sisi was sending multiple appropriate signals: the importance of the safety of the Egyptian street; the need to conserve energy in order to reduce subsidies; and the willingness to make governmental pragmatism a national cause.

There is another added symbolism in that bicycle marathon.  Nowhere have we ever seen in the Arab world a head of state on a bicycle.  For generations, we have been accustomed to watch from a distance a long caravan of black limos with tinted glass windows, surrounded by sirens and a host of motorcycles signaling the ultra-speedy movement of the Head of State on his country's streets.  So you had to take a double look at that youthful Egyptian President on his bicycle, surrounded by sportsmen as if you were watching a scene from a Scandinavian country, not an Arab State.

Am I here romanticising the significance of that El-Sisi presidential parade?  You bet I am.  And why not if I were to link that symbol of pragmatism to this new era of Egypt's struggle to regain its composure and sanity after 3 very long troublesome years.

So here is more welcome symbolisms:

• Egypt is in sore need for housing.  So who is now its Prime Minister?  Dr. Ibrahim Mehlib, a former Minister of Housing.
• Egypt's Ministry of Information has existed in the midst of multiple codes of professional conduct for the media, and numerous official spokesman for nearly all the other ministries.  Redundancy, and no appreciable impact on the flow, style or analysis of public information in or about Egypt.  Result: Disbanding that ministry from the line-up of 31 Cabinet portfolios.
• Prior to El-Sisi presidency, there was a ministry for "Transitional Justice," charged with dealing with integrating personnel of prior regimes.  It has to do with inclusiveness within a framework of the Rule of Law.  Result: Because it straddles the portfolios of justice, human rights, and civil liberties, that ministry has also been disbanded.  Its replacement is a Board, or a Council on which various shades of opinion shall be represented.
• An uptick has occurred in the ugly phenomenon of sexual assault by hordes of young men against females in public places.  Prior to the transfer of power to El-Sisi, Judge Adly Mansour, the interim president, had toughened the laws applicable to this heinous crime.  

Yet on the day of that transfer of power, a massive attack against a young woman took place in Tahrir Square generating public revulsion all over Egypt .  Consequently, one of the first public acts by President El-Sisi was to visit the victim and her family at the hospital.  The new president did not only offer the victim roses.  He publicly expressed apologies and in a blunt language promised that the newly promulgated laws shall be enforced in full measure.

• In regard to Africa, several commentators noted the absence of several Heads of State from the festivities of El-Sisi installation as President earlier this month.  They saw in this a sign of a low ebb in Cairo relations with Africa.  Even those five African Heads of State who took part, including Chad, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea were impunged by those commentators.  Their take on this was that those presidents came to power in coups similar to what they perceived to have been the path of El-Sisi to power.

Nonsense.  It is the same old story of whether the Second Egyptian Revolution of June 30, 2013 represented "a coup" or a legitimate popular recall of Morsi.  What these commentators gloss over is that in the new Egypt, the old Nasserite way of thrusting the nose of Egypt into the internal affairs of its neighbors -Africa and Arab- is over.  Those days are gone, thanks to the pragmatic priorities in foreign policy for the new Egypt.  The summit level of representation of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Kuwait (present sources of funding of the transition in Egypt) and Jordan, meant, more in practical terms, to the Egypt of El-Sisi.

In addition, the suspension of Egypt's membership in the African Union, a symbolic bow to the faulty "coup" argument, played a part in the absence of several African Heads of State and Government.  Now this suspension is over, and Egypt, as a Charter member since 1963 of African unity, whatever that means, is back to that African conclave.  Its primary goal is mending relations with Ethiopia in regard to her share, together with the Sudan, of Nile water.

The disparaging comments on El-Sisi's installation as president fall in what I call "the Law of Anticipated Reactions."  That is the law of "leap to faulty conclusions, then ponder!!"

• Behind all these symbols of the pragmism of the new Egypt are hard realities.  Some of these realities are domestic, and some are external as discussed above.  A tectonic shift in foreign policy in the Egypt of El-Sisi has taken place.  It denotes staying clear from armed conflicts either in the backyards or the frontyards of your neighbors.  Leaders with military experience like El-Sisi are usually the best assessors of the high price of war in both blood and treasure.  Egypt's developmental decline began with Nasser's wars.
• With the containment of Islamism in Egypt, and with the daily assertion of national sovereignty and security in Sinai, through, among other measures, keeping Hamas at bay, Egypt is now pivoting in one essential and logical direction: Egypt.  
• Let us here look at how the present Obama doctrine and the emerging El-Sisi doctrine are largely similar.  The two leaders seem to be seeing the world through the same prism: "Unless the homeland is directly threatened, no boots on the ground or bombs from the air shall be employed beyond national borders." 

Endless wars have caused both Cairo and Washington, D.C. retardation at home.  For Obama, building America's infrastructure has greater priority than building Afghanistan super-structure.  For El-Sisi, Hamas and the Brotherhood are terrorist organizations which should be repulsed in order to develop Egypt and keep the peace with Israel.

Both the U.S. and Egypt are now pivoting toward Asia, with America toward the pacific and Egypt towards Sinai.  As Cairo has downgraded the cause of pan-Arabism in favor of Egyptianism, D.C. has abandoned the cause of fighting other peoples' wars, whether in Libya, Syria or Iraq which is now on the verge of sectarian civil war and dismemberment.

It should not escape our attention that for the foreign affairs portfolio of the new Egypt, an able Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nabil Fahmy, has been replaced by an equally able new Cabinet member: Sameh Shukri.  Shukri has been plucked from his post as Ambassador to the U.S. for managing a different Egyptian foreign policy: warmth towards America with equal openness to other world and regional powers.  That is in spite of the recent misguided U.S. benign outlook on the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate and peaceful opposition.

In conclusion, this blogger says to President El-Sisi: 

We applaud your riding a bicycle in the streets of Cairo as an impetus for the security of the Egyptian street and for the development of Egypt through energy conversation.  Better riding a bicycle at home than riding a tank crossing over other national boundaries.

In the presently tumultously and fractured Middle East, peace is a strategic path to prosperity at home.