Frank Wisner and Hosni Mubarak | Michael Tomasky

Bookfan wondered: Any reaction from you on the US decision to engage former Ambassador Frank Wisner, who is a mover & shaker in the M.E. and who is a lead attorney at the law firm Patton Boggs, which has links with the Mubarak regime and is involved in major Egyptian contracts (multi million) / privatisation? Wasn’t it a touch hasty to appoint Wisner as the US Envoy to Egypt of Hillary Clinton and President Obama? The man is tainted and cannot have been properly vetted. Big big mistake. Obviously, Wisner’s comment Saturday, in which he said he thought Mubarak should stay, was a whopper. A terrible misjudgment and a surprising one on the part of a man with his reputation and 40 years of diplomatic experience. The obvious question then becomes, did he say it because of the Patton Boggs situation? People will want to jump to that conclusion. We can’t really know. Having now read Robert Fiske’s piece that started this, if you read it closely we don’t know definitively, which is not a knock on Fiske necessarily because such a thing is hard to prove, if true. Patton Boggs is a massive firm with 600 attorneys spread across nine locations. It represents 200 international clients from more than 70 countries. Did Wisner work directly on the Egypt account? If so, problem. At the other far end of the spectrum, he might not even have known the firm represented Egyptians interests. Don’t laugh. He’s not a managing partner. He’s just an “adviser,” whatever that is, exactly. Now one would think that he knew, but one would think a lot of things that don’t turn out to be true. In my reporting years in New York, I pursued my share of conflict-of-interest stories. I often found that they usually didn’t pan out exactly the way I’d hoped. I remember very clearly wanting to tie one big-shot conservative money guy to the Colombian army, which seemed a sexy angle. But it turned out that the guy honestly had nothing to do with that portfolio. The other thing is, there’s nothing per se shady about representing Egypt’s interests before Congress. Yes, it’s a nasty regime, but representation of its interests could just involve development projects that most people would think were a fine idea for a developing country, or a change in visa policy of some sort. I doubt very much that Patton was lobbying Congress in behalf of Mubarak’s right to throw political enemies in jail. And yes, I would take the same posture with regard to a Republican administration. You didn’t see banging on about Dick Cheney and Halliburton. Whether a Halliburton subsidiary might have done business in Saddam’s Iraq was an interesting question, but not to me dispositive of anything in particular. The corporate-financial-political world is so sophisticated today and has everything so wired that they know exactly how to keep it all legal. Remember, trading derivatives, which nearly ruined the world, was perfectly legal. These cases come down to a person’s integrity. I don’t know Wisner’s, so I can’t really say. It made sense to send him because he’s known Mubarak for ages. But maybe it wasn’t properly vetted. In any case, he messed up Saturday, and I would imagine he’s done with this assignment. Egypt-related, apropos nothing: It is my naive dream that next week, say, Mubarak will say something like: You know, I get it now. I do want to stay until September, but I want to use the time between now and then to open this society up and lead the change in the Arab world. I will pass a bill of rights guaranteeing basic freedoms, open up the press, raise the status of women, and show the world that it should invest in an open Arab society so that we can find suitable work for all these engineers and PhD’s driving taxis. He’d go down in history as one of the great heroes of our time. Hey, I said it was naive. Egypt Hosni Mubarak US foreign policy Michael Tomasky guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 7, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry