Professor Juan Cole is reporting at his blog, Informed Comment, that Vice President’s Cheney’s trip to meet with leaders in Egypt and Saudi Arabia may involve his request for the deployment of Egyptian troops to Iraq:
Cheney will Ask Mubarak for Egyptian Troops for Iraq: al-Zaman
Will Cairo counter Tehran?Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney will meet Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on Wednesday. Al-Zaman (“The Times of Baghdad”) says that its sources in Cairo tell it that Cheney will ask that Egypt be ready to send troops to Iraq if the situation there calls for it.
Why would the Administration want Egyptian troops in Iraq? And why would Egypt accept such a charge? And what does Saudi Arabia have to do with all this?
Answers on the flip side . . .
First, the Egyptian motivation for doing this “favor” for President Bush (per Professor Cole):
Mubarak may say “no.” If he did show a willingness to get involved, what would impel it?
1. The Egyptian regime has been afraid of Iranian-inspired Muslim radicalism ever since the 1979 revolution. The opportunity to attempt to counter Iranian influence in Arab Iraq could seem attractive to the Egyptian military, and also could strike them as a form of self-defense. . . .
2. Egypt receives $2 billion a year in US aid. Although that aid helps US corporations more than Egyptians, since it must be spent in the US, it is a prop for the regime. . . . Significantly, al-Hayat reports that Cheney is in charge of negotiating a free trade deal between Egypt and the United States, which would open the US market unrestrictedly to Egyptian exports and vice versa. . . .
3. If the US dumps the Iraq mess on the United Nations, and the Egyptian troops could serve under a UN command, the enterprise might be made palatable and legitimate to the Egyptian movers and shakers. That is, establishing order in the Arab nation in the wake of an imperial withdrawal (coded as a defeat) is a task that might appeal to the Egyptian political elite.
OK. Their motivation seems clear enough. More billions in aid from the US. Also, a “free trade agreement” with the US, which one can assume would be on favorable terms for Egypt. Then, there would be the opportunity to put their own “Sunni” boots on the ground in a country that has taken a decidedly Shi’ite turn politically. Finally, the chance to look like an Arab savior earning points with both the Bush regime and other Arab states, in particular, the biggest economic player in the region, Saudi Arabia.
So what role do the Saudis play in this, and why?
Since Saudi Arabia is a neighbor, and anyway doesn’t have much of an army, presumably Cheney would be asking Riyadh to fund the Egyptian/ Arab peacekeeping force in Iraq. Saudi Arabia had played a similar role in funding the Syrian peacekeepers in Lebanon in the 1970s and after.
. . .The Arab League member states don’t want Iran going nuclear, and the Saudis have spoken publicly on this. An Egyptian military and intelligence presence in Iraq might strengthen Cairo’s ability to monitor the Iranian program and would be a way for the Arabs to pressure Iran over it.
Reading between the lines here, one gets the sense the Saudis may well want a counterweight to Iran’s influence in Iraq, and may be willing to pay some of the cost of deploying Egyptian troops (and possibly those from other “Sunni” Arab nations), so long as the whole operation is given cover by the UN as part of a “peace-keeping” arrangement. Again, this would earn the Saudis major brownie points with Bush, so I’m assuming that if this deal gets done there will have to be some sort of “sweetener” for the Saudis, now or down the road at some point. What that may be I don’t know, but rest assured it would have something to do with the economics of oil.
So what does this possible “transaction” (best to look at this as a business deal, since we have a “CEO President”) say about the Bush administration? I’ll let Professor Cole describe how he views the matter:
The wording of the Al-Zaman article suggests that Cheney is angling with Mubarak for a contingency plan, in case things go very badly indeed when the US withdraws its troops. In other words, the Bush administration is going on hands and knees to Cairo because it is very, very desperate and very, very worried.
A few additional thoughts, purely speculative on my part. An Egyptian deployment would free up US forces for a possible attack on Iran in 2007 after an appropriately frightening media campaign this year in the run up to the 2006 mid-term elections. In other words, a repeat of how Bush manipulated the public prior to our attack of Iraq in March, 2003. Whether any of this plays out, of course, depends greatly on what the Egyptians and Saudis demand as a quid pro quo.
If, as Professor Cole suggests, they want both Iran and Israel to disarm their nuclear programs and (in Israel’s case) any nuclear weapons, I think it highly unlikely that any deal will get done. That would be too difficult for Bush politically back home to sell to his fundamentalist and “rapturous” supporters, not to mention many Jewish Americans. However, if that little road bump can be finessed in some way, this scenario doesn’t strike me as all that unlikely.
Only time will tell.
