The aid reinforced the Egyptian regime but did not help economic development. The Egyptian economy has for the most part stagnated in the face of high population growth and the "socialist hangover" of high tariffs and bloated state-owned companies. Sadat paid for the new alliance with the U.S. and Israel with his life, when the radical al-Jihad al-Islami, with which Ayman al-Zawahiri was involved, and the Gamaa Islamiyah of the blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, arranged for his assassination.

Beginning in the 1970s, Sadat had allowed carefully controlled parliamentary elections. His own National Democratic Party was founded in 1978 and has dominated Parliament ever since. The lower house, or People's Assembly, has 454 seats. (The upper house is an advisory body.) In the 2000 parliamentary elections, the NDP garnered 388 seats in the People's Assembly. The leftist Tagammu Party got six seats, the New Wafd Party of the secular-leaning middle class received seven seats, the Nasserists (Arab nationalists and socialists) received three. Some 37 seats went to independents. Another 10 were appointed by the president. No one believes that the NDP is so popular that it would naturally receive 85 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. It is not, however, impossible that it would receive a majority even in a fair election. In one recent opinion poll, 64 percent of Egyptians said that they were satisfied with their government. The NDP is a "goat barrel" (the rural equivalent of a pork barrel) party, doling out services and resources to its constituents in rural areas and among some urban groups.

The Egyptian system, like the French, has both a president and a prime minister. But Parliament is far less powerful in Egypt. In the old days it nominated the president, on whom a national referendum was held. He did not have to run against an opponent, and it was not clear how you could lose in the referendum if you were the only candidate. Hosni Mubarak won four six-year terms this way. As democracy, the system was largely a façade, though parliamentary deputies did often in some way represent their districts.

In May of this year, a national referendum approved a constitutional amendment that set up presidential elections as an actual election, with more than one candidate allowed. Only parties certified by Parliament, however, could field presidential candidates. Parliament in turn was massively dominated by the NDP of Hosni Mubarak. He warned last March, "If we open the door completely before the people, there will be chaos." So the dominant party got to decide against whom it would run its candidate. This way of proceeding is not so different from that in Iran, where the dominant clerics vet presidential candidates.

Egypt and Iran are undemocratic in ideologically opposite ways. In Iran, the clerics exclude secular candidates from running for president. In Egypt, the NDP forbids the Muslim Brotherhood to run candidates, not only for the presidency but for any political office. Egyptian law makes it illegal for a political party to be based on religion, just as Iranian law outlaws secular parties.

Mubarak agreed to run against other candidates for a number of reasons. He faces a restive Muslim fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, that continually detracts from his legitimacy. He often deals with the Brotherhood by simply rounding up the more vocal leaders and jailing them for a while. Winning a real election would counter the Brotherhood's charges that he is little more than a (secular humanist) military dictator and American puppet. The Egyptian middle classes, many of them highly educated and with entrepreneurial ambitions, chafe at the government's heavy-handed interference in the economy (mostly for protectionist purposes), which they believe limits their opportunities. They and other groups have formed the Kifayah ("Enough!") movement, which has held protests against the regime.

The new middle class is represented by the New Wafd Party and by its new competitor, the Tomorrow (al-Ghad) Party. The government recognized al-Ghad in October 2004; many observers believed it did so to weaken the Wafd and to split the urban middle-class vote. Ayman Nour, a cheeky activist lawyer who leads the al-Ghad, uses modern campaigning techniques and gives blunt speeches about Mubarak that would never have been tolerated in the 1980s. He said of the presidential election, "It will be neither free nor fair." As it is, Nour was imprisoned for a couple of months in the winter of 2005, but was let go and allowed to run for president because of the resulting outcry in Egypt and abroad. He won 8 percent of the vote. American pressure is also no doubt behind Mubarak's new openness to pluralism, but for the moment, he has finessed Washington with merely cosmetic changes.

Critics have long suspected Mubarak of planning to install his son, Gamal, in the presidency after him. Sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim once quipped that the republican dictators of the Middle East, most of whom were grooming sons to succeed them, had invented a new form of government, "monarpublicanism," which has the dynastic aspect of a monarchy and the outer trappings of a civil republic. Mubarak, thin-skinned about his family and his son's ambitions, tossed Ibrahim into prison in 2000, sentencing him to seven years, but released him early in the face of international pressure.

The president's touchy overreaction demonstrates pretty clearly that Ibrahim was perfectly correct about the plan. At the very least, it seems clear that Mubarak intends on perpetuating into the far future the dominance of the military and the National Democratic Party, which, like most other such authoritarian organizations, contains three lies in its name, being neither truly national, nor in any sense democratic, nor even really a party as opposed to a set of Mubarak cronies.

The United States has only limited leverage with Egypt. It supposedly gives the country about $2 billion a year in aid, but the military half of that sum is really just a subsidy to the U.S. weapons industry, since it has to be spent on U.S. arms. A lot of the civilian half of the sum also makes its way back to the United States. The regime likes getting the money and arms but knows that they are a bribe to keep Egypt at peace with Israel, and that they are therefore unlikely to be withdrawn, lest the large and important Arab state of Egypt become unstable or begin to play the spoiler. The United States does have the ability to pressure the Mubarak government behind the scenes, which is the only tactic that has much hope of success. After so many decades under direct or indirect British rule, Egyptians bristle at being ordered about by Western powers like so many waiters in a kebab restaurant and would stubbornly dig in their heels in the face of direct pressure. The Egyptian public would suddenly rally around the Mubarak regime if it looked as though it were being targeted by neo-imperialists.

In any case, the U.S. government appears to be ambivalent about pushing Egypt too abruptly toward true democracy. The career State Department Foreign Service officers generally fear that such a move would bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Such fears may be overdrawn, but in Washington only the more reckless neocons want to take such a risk. Given how badly their gamble in Iraq went awry, they have lost much of their influence, in any case.

Egypt watchers may as well take a nap for a while, since Mubarak is unlikely to permit much change anytime soon, Bush or no Bush. A people who figured out how to get rid of Napoleon Bonaparte within a year is hardly flummoxed by a mere Texas poseur. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal will be so kind as to wake us up when spring comes.

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