Egypt rules out IMF emergency finance

By Heba Saleh in Cairo

In an apparent attempt to exert pressure on the International Monetary Fund, Egypt has ruled out seeking emergency finance from the fund and said it still wants to secure a $4.8bn loan agreement.

Egypt is in free fall, has rather little hard currency oxygen left.

Balance of payment support has become urgent in recent weeks as the country, which imports a large proportion of its food and fuel, has depleted two-thirds of its foreign reserves. Those now stand at $13.5bn, slightly less than the critical level of three months’ import cover.

Well, if the Ikhouan want free money, they should ask Qatar.

Egypt rules out IMF emergency finance

By Heba Saleh in Cairo

In an apparent attempt to exert pressure on the International Monetary Fund, Egypt has ruled out seeking emergency finance from the fund and said it still wants to secure a $4.8bn loan agreement.

Egypt is in free fall, has rather little hard currency oxygen left.

Balance of payment support has become urgent in recent weeks as the country, which imports a large proportion of its food and fuel, has depleted two-thirds of its foreign reserves. Those now stand at $13.5bn, slightly less than the critical level of three months’ import cover.

Well, if the Ikhouan want free money, they should ask Qatar.

Egypt rules out IMF emergency finance

By Heba Saleh in Cairo

In an apparent attempt to exert pressure on the International Monetary Fund, Egypt has ruled out seeking emergency finance from the fund and said it still wants to secure a $4.8bn loan agreement.

Egypt is in free fall, has rather little hard currency oxygen left.

Balance of payment support has become urgent in recent weeks as the country, which imports a large proportion of its food and fuel, has depleted two-thirds of its foreign reserves. Those now stand at $13.5bn, slightly less than the critical level of three months’ import cover.

Well, if the Ikhouan want free money, they should ask Qatar.

Now that things are getting hot out in the Maghreb, it is worth tracking given the spill into the Maghreb via Algeria (or re-back-spill.

A quick reflexion: given the arms spillover from Libya, this is genuinely dangerous for the Algerians, and has some potential for upending the stasis that has characterised the W. Sahara dispute. The French intervention in Mali was without doubt required, but..

But Israel has even less control over its own destiny than Portugal or Britain do. The main reason is that, unlike those countries, Israel refuses to give up its empire. Israel is unable to sustain its imperial ambitions in the West Bank, or even to articulate them coherently. Having allowed its founding ideology to carry it relentlessly and unthinkingly into what Gershom Gorenburg calls an "Accidental Empire" of radical religious-nationalist settlements that openly defy its own courts, Israel is politically incapable of extricating itself. The partisan battles engendered by its occupation of Palestinian territory render it less and less able to pull itself free. It is immobilised, pinned down, in a conflict that is gradually killing it. Countries facing imperial twilight, like Britain in the late 1940s, are often seized by a sense of desperate paralysis. For over a decade, the tone of Israeli politics has been a mix of panic, despair, hysteria and resignation.

No one bears greater responsibility for the trap Israel finds itself in today than Mr Netanyahu. As prime minister in the late 1990s, he did more than any other Israeli leader to destroy the peace process. Illegal land grabs by settlers were tolerated and quietly encouraged in the confused expectation that they would aid territorial negotiations. Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward; the most charitable spin would be that the Israelis failed to exercise the restraint they might have shown in retaliating against Palestinian terrorism, had they been truly interested in progress towards a two-state solution. Mr Netanyahu believed that the Oslo peace agreements were a mirage, and his government's actions in the late 1990s helped make it true.

Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would not be a happy development for Israel. Neither was Pakistan's, nor indeed North Korea's. The notion that it represents a new Holocaust is overstated, and the belief that the source of Israel's existential woes can be eliminated with an airstrike is mistaken. But Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite.

Yesterday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave President Obama a copy of the book of Esther, which will be read in synagogues this week in observance of Purim. Esther tells the story of a Persian government that tries and fails to wipe out all the Jews in the Persian Empire. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Netanyahu saw this as an occasion to generalize about Persians (or, as we call them today, Iranians). He told Obama, "Then, too, they wanted to wipe us out."

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose that an Arab or Iranian leader of Muslim faith met with President Obama and told him about some part of the Koran that alludes to conflict between Muhammad and Jewish tribes. For example, according to Muslim tradition, the Jewish tribe known as the Qurayzah, though living in Muhammad's town of Medina, secretly sided with Muhammad's enemies in Mecca. Suppose this Muslim said to Obama, "Then, too, the Jews were bent on destroying Muslims." What would our reaction be?

I think reactions would vary. Some people would say, "See, the Koran teaches Muslims to hate Jews!" Some would say, "Wow, this Muslim is looking really, really hard for reasons to keep hating Jews, isn't he?"

That second point, at least, would have some merit. After all, the Muslim could just as easily have pointed to parts of the Koran that say nice things about Jews--such as the part that says that God, in his "prescience," chose "the children of Israel ... above all peoples." Or the part that says that God "sent down the Torah" as "guidance to the people" and now had sent down the Koran "confirming what was before it."

By the same token, Netanyahu could choose to emphasize a part of the Hebrew Bible that depicts Persians in a more flattering light. For example, the part that calls Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, the "messiah" because he delivered the exiled Israelites back to their home. (Yes, the only non-Hebrew called messiah in the entire Hebrew Bible is a Persian!)

But another contingent of lawyers had turned up to argue on behalf of Egyptians who they said had been harmed by the activities of the nonprofit groups, which officials of the military-led government have charged with stirring unrest in the Egyptians. They shouted back accusations the defendants and their supporters were agents of the United States.

As though to complete the sense of a climactic unleashing of pent-up bad feeling between the two longtime allies, another group of protesters outside the courthouse chanted for the United States to release from prison Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian jailed for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Some here have argued he should be released in a prisoner swap for the Americans on trial in the case.

American diplomats, Egyptian lawyers and others involved said the efforts to resolve the case had foundered amid a breakdown in the lines of authority within the military-led transitional government in the final months before the generals have pledged to leave power. American officials say they have tried to find Egyptian counterparts who might intercede, but Egyptian leaders say they cannot intervene in the judicial process.

If the case is not resolved, Congress and the Obama administration have vowed to cut off the $1.55 billion in annual aid to Egypt, potentially rupturing the three-way alliance among Washington, Cairo and Jerusalem that has been a linchpin of regional stability.

...
There is no dispute that the two groups and their staffs have broken the letter of Egyptian law. Both groups sought, but never received, licenses from the Egyptian government, and both are openly financed from abroad. They therefore violate two restrictions on civil groups left over from government of Hosni Mubarak, the strongman president who was deposed a year ago. But both groups have been tolerated here for years, along with scores of Egyptian nonprofit groups that also break both rules.

..

But the case has continued to move forward, and the American threats to cut off aid have set off a new wave of Egyptian nationalism.

We’re just over a year past the beginning of the uprisings in Libya that ultimately produced (along with, of course, NATO’s intervention) Muammar Qaddafi’s ouster. And there are now increasing calls for some form of military intervention in Syria. As such, this seems like an important time to evaluate the aftermath of NATO’s intervention in Libya, and how it intersects with American interests.

Essentially, there is a dearth of information publicly available about the state of affairs in Libya, but we nonetheless know a number of facts unambiguously:

The TNC has yet to establish its authority within Tripoli. However well-meaning its endeavors may be, they are not being executed or enforced outside a very small geographic area.
The overwhelming majority of the country is ruled by local militias under commanders with no accountability or common code of conduct.

Several towns (including Zintan, Misrata, and Benghazi) are dominated by local warlords who have power equal to, or greater than, the capital. Indeed, the emergence of a western council in the Nafusa Mountains that directly opposes the TNC is a testament to its weakness.

Qaddafi loyalists (more tribal than ideological in nature) have successfully retaken Bani Walid, and have not been displaced.

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group is well established in parts of Tripoli and Derna. Its rise is directly correlated to attacks against Sufi shrines, and the movement of foreign volunteers going to fight in Syria.

There has been a rash of ongoing retaliatory ethnic and tribal fighting against communities perceived to be pro-Qaddafi, most notably Tuaregs, Berbers, and black Africans.

The influx of weaponry and returning Tuareg mercenaries after Qaddafi’s fall has helped to destabilize a not-inconsiderable part of Mali. Violent incidents occurring in Algeria, Niger, and Tunisia have also been traced back to Libya.