CAIRO: People are rushing to conclusions about the repercussions of the Tunisian revolution and whether Egypt could follow suit, former US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told Daily News Egypt.
“I see people rushing to a lot of conclusions and events have barely happened, drawing various implications and I think that that’s premature,” Negroponte said.
“One has to wait and see what happens. Every country has its own unique circumstances so it’s hard to generalize from one set of events.”
Negroponte was in Egypt ostensibly to sound out viewpoints here regarding recent events in the Middle East, and particularly the revolt in Tunisia that saw the end of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s 23-year reign as president.
Negroponte is a career diplomat who has served as US Ambassador to the United Nations and Iraq after the American invasion in 2003. He was also the Director of National Intelligence in the US. Currently, he is a researcher and lecturer in international affairs at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and is also vice-chairman of McLarty Associates, a consulting firm that advises in issues concerning the Middle East.
He advocated a wait-and-see approach to Tunisia as it currently attempts to demarcate a new political path in the wake of the revolt that was kick started in Sidi Abouzid when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on Dec. 17. He also drew a parallel from Iraq to comment on the current situation.
“When people comment on such events, it’s interesting how they’ll sometimes say there hasn’t been enough change; there are still people from the old regime. And then when you talk about some of the past transitions we’ve known about in history like in Iraq, they say the big mistake you made was when you changed too many people,” he said.
“That’s the conventional wisdom: that one of the biggest mistakes that were made in Iraq was that the changes were too sweeping,” Negroponte added. “In human nature, people have a tendency to want it both ways. So I would just say ‘patience, let’s wait and see what happens, and I don’t think anyone wants to see political chaos in any of these countries, whatever their political aspirations are for this [particular] country.’”
He pointed out that what remains to be seen was “what the nature of the change is, how extensive it will be, and what its political implications are.”
Daily News Egypt asked Negroponte about the US role in the region and how some view US assistance to Middle Eastern countries — specifically Egypt — as indirectly propping up regimes that are not democratically elected by its people.
He responded: “My view is, the reason why we provide assistance to the government of Egypt [is that] we play a role in helping the development of countries all around the world. Egypt has been a critical partner in the whole Middle East peace process [and] the Camp David Accords. Look at what it is that has caused Egypt and the United States to [become] closer in the last 30 years — it’s clearly been the Camp David Accords.
“Because of the nature of relations between states, we provide that assistance on a government-to-government and a state-to-state basis. It’s not aid for one individual or another or one regime or another; it’s actually designed to help support the institutions of the Egyptian government,” he added.
