Free Republic

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.

Throughout the Middle East, reformers have been driven away by autocratic rulers. We Westerners are desperate to see the political systems in the Middle East evolve from authoritarian theocratic or oligarchical models to some variation of representative government. That desire suffered another setback on Saturday when former Egyptian presidential candidate Ayman Nour, 41, was sentenced to five years in prison for (what outside observers insist are trumped-up charges of) forgery. Up and down the region - Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority - the Western pluralist model of representative democracy has failed because broadminded, Western-oriented reformers have been...

The glamorous young wife of Gamal Mubarak, son of the Egyptian president, is set to become the first lady of the Middle East if, as expected, her husband becomes Egypt’s next leader. ***Gamal’s 27-year-old wife Khadija, a wealthy society beauty with a business degree from the American University in Cairo, has kept a low profile and refused all interviews since their wedding two years ago. She rarely appears in the glossy magazines that chronicle Cairo’s elite and is seldom photographed at social events. That may be about to change if her husband stands for president. In a rare public appearance...

While his father hosted U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Sharm el-Sheikh resort on the tip of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula earlier this week, Gamal Mubarak quietly slipped into Washington for a "private visit," multiple sources have told Foreign Policy. The younger Mubarak, who is widely thought by Egypt hands to be positioning himself to succeed his father, prefers to keep a low profile on his trips to the United States. In comments paraphrased by Al-Masry al-Youm, an independent daily newspaper in Cairo, Gamal said he would "participate in seminars on the global financial crisis and its impact on...

CAIRO -- In Washington this month, George Bush met with Gamal Mubarak, heir apparent to the Egyptian throne, and sent regards to Mr. Mubarak's father, President Hosni Mubarak. The House Appropriations Committee turned back an effort by Wisconsin Democrat David Obey to withhold a fraction of Egypt's $1.7 billion annual aid allocation. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that any cuts would damage a "strategic partnership" that is "a cornerstone of U.S. policy in the Middle East." Also this month, in Cairo, pro-democracy activists such as 39-year-old Ahmed Salah of the Egyptian Movement for Change and dozens of his colleagues...

MEMRI:The Grooming of Gamal Husni Mubarak Inquiry and Analysis - Egypt July 8, 2003 No. 141 By Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli* The Grooming of Gamal Husni Mubarak The Arab world is going through a crisis of succession, the process by which an outgoing head of state is replaced. In the absence of a democratic process that guarantees an orderly transition of power, and with a few aging leaders who have been in power in excess of 20 years, the issue of succession in the Arab world has become very acute. In three countries - Syria, Jordan, and Morocco - the sons...