US Aid to Egypt: A One-Sided Relationship
Every year, Egypt receives of $1.5 billion from the United States in return for—well, honestly, I never have quite figured out what it’s for, not these days anyway. Basically, it started as an open-ended bribe, a kind of cash-stuffed drugstore greeting card from the West to onetime President Hosni Mubarak who continued to maintain relations, however fraught, with Israel, long after the murder of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat.
For this massive tribute, Egypt has been, since the start of US aid, only minimally grateful. Back in the ’80s, when I lived in Cairo, there was much griping, both on the street and among intellectuals, about the disparity between what Israel received from the US ($3 billion in 1987, in all-grant economic and military assistance) versus what Egypt got (almost $2 billion, mostly in the form of Abrams battle tanks and F-16s).
If you talked privately to US officials, they would offer a very convincing argument for that disparity: corruption within Egypt was so rampant that the relative pittance donated to the country for economic assistance (roughly $250 million, then as now) never actually went to those whom the money could have benefited. It ended up, also then as now, in the pockets of the rich and the empowered. “Vitamin B,” those millions were called by US Embassy people—the “B” standing for baksheesh, which is the Arabic word for bribe.
What exactly has changed since that time? Well, Mubarak is out of power, a fallen, repudiated idol, and his clones, the generals, have replaced him. Corruption (bribery, blackmail, bullying—all the B vitamins) is still essentially the most effective way of getting things done.
Oh, and the US is threatening to cut its aid to Egypt.
The move comes in response to the criminal trial of 16 Americans and 27 others, which began this past weekend amid much chaos, with 14 defendants appearing inside a metal cage. None of the caged were Americans, but everyone watching the courtroom drama understood the symbolism: the caged defendants were stand-ins for America, stand-ins for, among others, an American official’s son who had been forced to flee to the US Embassy in Cairo in order to avoid trial on charges no one has really spelled out or understands. Thus, the cage: that way the world could fully absorb and reflect on the complete humiliation of a wealthy donor nation.