Not Kept The Square

Putting down an Islamist insurgency was a crime when Mubarak did it. It is a crime when Assad does it. Yet it is anything but a crime when we do it, or when we try and fail to do it, in Afghanistan or in Iraq. Which latter, at least, only has one in the first place as a consequence of our intervention. We intervened directly and specifically in order to aid one in Libya.

Not that the Egyptian generals mean a word of this conviction, of this sentence, or of anything that those ostensibly represent. They are banking, and doubtless more than banking, that their man, Mubarak's man, will win the run-off for President and "pardon" his own old patron.

Well, whom would we prefer instead? The only other candidate on the ballot paper is from the Muslim Brotherhood, and we have probably burned our bridges with that Anglophile old creature of British intelligence. We have only ourselves to blame for that. We could have had two camels in this two-camel race. In the days when we still had our own foreign policy, we would have had.

Let us hope that the Coptic vote once again comes out behind Ahmed Shafiq. Even if, shall we say, he would have won anyway, published figures bespeaking dependence on that section of the electorate in order to put him across the finishing line would compel both an Arab nationalism and an Egyptian patriotism exemplified by the late Pope Shenouda III.

Arab nationalism is very largely a product of the Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist academic nurturing of the political aspirations of popular indigenous Christianity, while Egyptian patriotism includes a very heavy dose of that affection for Britain so often characteristic of the Arabs generally (it marked the large and thriving Iraqi middle class before we clod-hoppingly destroyed that class, for example), in the Egyptian case from a country where the old ties even extend to a currency which is still called the pound.