WASHINGTON: A bulwark of America's Middle East policy for a quarter-century, ties between the United States and Egypt are showing new strains in the wake of the war in Iraq , the 3-year- old Palestinian uprising and President Bush's push for reform in the Arab world.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq and the Bush administration's widely perceived pro-Israel tilt against the Palestinians have made the United States the object of intense anger among many Egyptians, putting the government of Hosni Mubarak on the defensive over its alliance with Washington.
Meanwhile, administration officials have grown impatient with Egypt's slow pace in opening up its political system and economy, a pattern of human rights abuses, including torture, streams of anti-American invective from its government-controlled media and failure to exert strong pressure to halt Palestinian violence.
"Last year was a difficult year for the relationship," acknowledged Nabil Fahmy, Egypt's ambassador to Washington. But he added, "I think the relationship has faced challenges, including problems, but it's a sound and solid relationship that has proven its mettle over the years and is useful to both sides."
The two allies are now working to strengthen contacts between the two governments through a "strategic dialogue," which was discussed on Wednesday in Cairo between Mubarak and Assistant Secretary of State William J. Burns, and is expected to be approved formally when Mubarak visits Washington later this year.
"We would like to have a much more organic understanding of each other," Fahmy said. But within the administration and on Capitol Hill, officials are taking a skeptical look at Egypt, the second-biggest recipient of US aid after Israel, and its capacity to help advance American goals of suppressing terrorism and advancing democracy and prosperity throughout the Middle East.
"In Washington in general, people are kind of down on Egypt," said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East programme at the conservative-leaning Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and a former member of the US State Department's policy-planning staff.
Egypt assumed a pre-eminent place among US allies in the Arab world as a result of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord brokered by President Carter in 1978, which broke the circle of hostility surrounding Israel and removed a major strategic threat to the Jewish state.
Shunned by other Arab nations, Egypt was rewarded with large sums of US military and economic aid that over the years became inextricably linked with the even larger amounts supplied to Israel.
As Egypt gradually repaired ties with fellow Arabs, it reasserted its centuries-old cultural and political leadership in the region, enhancing its value to Washington as a leader of moderate, pro-Western forces in the Arab world.
The bond deepened when Mubarak became a close military and political ally to the first President Bush in driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and in helping to spearhead Bush's postwar drive to renew the Arab-Israeli peace process.
Fissures developed late in the Clinton administration, in the rancorous atmosphere that followed the collapse of US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David.
Egypt faulted Washington for a failure to keep its leaders informed about the talks, while some Americans blamed Mubarak - perhaps the only Arab leader able to influence Yasser Arafat - for failing to persuade the Palestinians to compromise.-Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Baltimore Sun.