Month: February 2011

Pimp My Palace

by Zoe Pollock

Hunter Walker has the 411 on all of Mubarak's palaces. Money quote:

Abdeen Palace includes museums dedicated to silverware, gifts received by President Mubarak, and weaponry including a pistol once owned by Italian fascist Benito Mussolini. … One room in the Presidential gifts museum contains a portrait of Mubarak surrounded by weapons given to the President. Saddam Hussein contributed a gold-plated AK-47 to the collection.

What happens to the loot now? EA updates on Mubarak's coffers:

1727 GMT: A Foreign Ministry spokesman says the Swiss government has frozen potential Mubarak assets in the country.

The Guardian relays what the blanket injunction to freeze his assets really means:

This is the usual procedure in such cases, and has also been the procedure for Tunisia earlier this year: Besides decreeing that all accounts etc belonging to Hosni Mubarak and his family plus certain ex-ministers are immediately blocked, it also mandates banks to report to the federal administration whether they hold any accounts in the name of Hosni Mubarak etc.

Thus, it's a preventive "blanket injunction" aimed at any and all accounts of Mubarak et al, if there are any. It does not really serve to confirm whether Mubarak actually has any money in Switzerland or not, it could well be that actually no accounts will found to fall within the remit of the injunction.

Pricing Tweets

by Patrick Appel

Felix Salmon defends Twitter's valuation - estimated between 8 to 10 billion:

Twitter has a couple of hundred million dollars of cash in the bank: it’s not like it’s running out of money. And the chances are that as Twitter succeeds in cementing itself into the way that people live their lives each day, it will be bombarded with opportunities to monetize its position. In the history of humanity, everybody who owns the means by which people communicate and socialize with each other has been very rich and powerful. That might be less true going forwards than it was in the past, but it’s unlikely to disappear entirely.

Eli Lake's reaction to Mubarak's departure touches upon Twitter's social value:

Is there anything twitter can't do? Let's use twitter to kill bin Laden next. And then twitter can help us perfect space lasers.

The Narrative

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Last week you published my letter arguing that media coverage of Egypt had – remarkably – not fallen into overly simplistic narrative cliches, as another of your readers feared. Well, I'd like to revise that view, especially in light of Daniel Larison’s concerns. Watching the first hour of coverage following Mubarak's resignation, I'm hearing news anchors resort not just to the obvious "history in the making," but also to phrasings like "the rebirth of Egypt" and "the people rise up in unity, with one voice," as if these were neutral descriptions. Larison is right: They're not. They're little encapsulated narratives, which like any good story can move us emotionally while possibly being quite misleading.

"The people" in particular is a deeply loaded term. But I guess you don't get to be a TV news anchor by saying things like, "There's a lot of noise and excitement, but to be honest, no one knows yet what 'the people' think or what it all really means."

A Prediction Predicament, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader processes this post and this post:

It sounds like Mubarak's speech last night came as a surprise to even the Egyptian military. Maybe the CIA really did have reliable information from inside the Egyptian military that Mubarak was supposed to leave last night. If that's the case, it's not as massive an intelligence failure on the part of the U.S. as we thought.  It seems to me the events on the ground have been moving quite rapidly and the Obama administration has been doing its best to keep up with them.

The Bankruptcy Of “Islamofascism”

by Patrick Appel

Larison skewers a nutty Invester's Business Daily editorial:

Like some of the other more hysterical reactions against the protests, the IBD editorial serves as a useful reminder that the judgment of a lot of anti-jihadists in the West is hopelessly impaired by their complete failure to make any distinctions among Muslims or between different groups of Islamists. The catch-all term “Islamofascism” is the perfect symbol of this tendency to conflate everything together. Even if they happen to make some valid observations along the way, their overall interpretation and understanding of politics and religion in the Near East and elsewhere are so flawed that their analysis can’t be taken very seriously. It is the anti-jihadist hysterics’ crying wolf at every opportunity that makes people completely indifferent and hostile to any warnings that come from them.

The Road Ahead, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

Fred Kaplan wonders what happens now:

It may seem strange to Westerners that the military might play—and would be popularly celebrated for playing—a progressive role in national politics. But in fact it's not so unusual, especially in the developing world. The Turkish military has long been that country's most forceful advocate of secular modernism. Even in our own country, in colonial times, the Continental Army led the Revolution, and its commander George Washington could easily have emerged as a new king (in today's parlance, a military dictator) had it not been for his reticence and dedication to democratic principles.

Who are the new uniformed leaders in Egypt? What are their ambitions and principles? Nobody really knows, perhaps not even Cairo insiders. Mubarak had ruled for 30 years, after all. He was a general officer himself, he treated the officer corps well, and the military's Supreme Council never had the chance to develop as an independent entity.

Now that they're untethered from their master, who can say what courses the officers will follow, what historic figures they might emulate. Will they be Washingtons, Trotskys, Pinochets—or something altogether different?