Egypt’s presidential candidates declare victory, but military generals assert vast power

 

 

By Ernesto Londoño and Leila Fadel, Updated: Monday, June 18, 4:16 PM

CAIRO — Both Egyptian presidential candidates claimed victory Monday, even though ballots were still being tallied and the extent of the victor’s power remained unclear after a bold assertion of control by Egypt’s military generals.

At an early morning news conference, Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi declared himself the winner and promised to save and serve Egypt. But former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq’s campaign also claimed victory, with 53 percent of the vote. Final results are not expected until Thursday.

On Sunday, the country’s military leaders issued a constitutional decree that gave the armed forces sweeping powers and downgraded the presidency to a subservient role. The seizure of power followed months in which Egypt’s ruling generals had promised to cede authority to a new civilian government by the end of June. Activists and political analysts charged that the generals’ move instead marked the start of a military dictatorship, a sharp reversal from the promise of Egypt’s popular revolt last year.

The generals sought to play down the scope of the decree during a news conference Monday. Maj. Gen. Mohamed el-Assar said the military chiefs would hold a grand ceremony before the end of the month to hand over the reins of power to the new president.

“The elected president will receive all the authorized powers of the president of the republic,” Assar said.

Although the generals are widely assumed to have tacitly backed the constitutional court ruling that triggered last week’s decision to dissolve parliament, Assar expressed regret over the move, saying that overseeing the national elections had been the military council’s biggest achievement.

“We were not happy with the dissolution of parliament,” Assar said. “But no one can comment on the rulings of the supreme Egyptian judiciary.”

Just after dawn on Monday, Morsi supporters trickled into Tahrir Square to celebrate the conservative Islamist’s purported victory. Brotherhood predictions of election results have proven accurate in the past, and Morsi was ahead in the polls with 51.6 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results reported on the state-run al-Ahram Web site.

At his news conference, Morsi vowed to be the man “who carries [Egyptians’] concerns and seeks to service them.”

A statement from Shafiq’s campaign criticized the Brotherhood for prematurely releasing results. Aides to Shafiq’s said they expected to take 53 percent of the vote, according to the state’s Middle East News Agency.

Meanwhile, two leading legislators were barred from entering parliament on Monday, according to al-Ahram.

Under the generals’ decree, Egypt’s president will have no control over the military’s budget or leadership and will not be authorized to declare war without the consent of the ruling generals.

The document said the military would soon name a group of Egyptians to draft a new constitution, which would be subject to a public referendum within three months. Once a new charter is in place, a parliamentary election would be held to replace the Islamist-dominated lower house that was dissolved after the country’s high court ruled that one-third of the chamber’s members had been elected unlawfully.

 

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon calledFlame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack

NYtimes

Auf Wiedersehen, Mon Ami – Foreign Policy (by Benjamin Weinthal)

If the results of the latest elections are any indication, Europeans will elect anyone from communists to fascists if they promise to fight German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the financial austerity measures she has imposed on the eurozone.

French Socialist François Hollande rode to victory on a wave of popular dissatisfaction on Sunday, May 6, defeating President Nicolas Sarkozy, a close ally of Merkel. “You did not resist Germany,” Hollande declared in a televised debate late last week, accusing Sarkozy of acquiescing to German economic measures that require France and other EU states to make deep, painful cuts to their social welfare spending.

Hollande now joins the collapsed Dutch government of Prime Minister Mark Rutte — which unraveled in late April over resistance to economic belt-tightening — to deliver a one-two austerity punch to Germany. Compounding Merkel’s political isolation on Sunday, May 6, voters knocked her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) out of a governing coalition in a regional election. Although the CDU secured the most votes in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, it was the party’s worst electoral performance since 1950.

In a shot across the Rhine, Hollande declared in his victory speech in the small southwestern French town of Tulle that “austerity is no longer inevitable.”

Yet for all his bluster, Hollande likely won’t be able to impose radical change on Europe’s core economics. The powerful German economy has kept the euro afloat as Greece, Italy, Spain, and other countries have drawn perilously close to the brink of collapse. Its manufacturing and exports businesses remain the engine of European prosperity.

Under the fiscal treaty Merkel advanced this year, EU member states are required to ensure that their “deficits do not exceed 3 percent of their gross domestic product at market prices” and must maintain strict limits on government debt. The treaty goes to great lengths — with corrective measures and potential legal action against member states — to prevent a repeat of a Greek-style economic meltdown.

On Sunday, however, Hollande promised a “new start for Europe,” spelling a possible wholesale revision of the fiscal treaty. All this has investors (and speculators) worried: His victory on Sunday, along with the weekend’s anti-austerity Greek election results, prompted the euro to sink to an eye-popping almost-five-month low of $1.2988.

All this helps explain Gideon Rachman’s recent Financial Timescommentary, “No Alternative to Austerity,” in which he notes that France is “a country where the state already consumes 56 per cent of gross domestic product, which has not balanced a budget since the mid-1970s, and which has some of the highest taxes in the world.”

Of course, this is all anathema to the rule-abiding Germans. In 2003, Merkel’s predecessor, Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, introduced his Agenda 2010, a sort of watered-down version of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s “welfare-to-work” program, which cut taxes, unemployment benefits, and other social welfare programs. The reforms brought German unemployment down from over 5 million in 2005 to 2.8 million today. Merkel has since led the way in imposing similar discipline across the eurozone, and Sarkozy has helped her.

“Europe must be pulled out of paralysis,” declared Sarkozy on his first presidential visit to Berlin after his May election victory nearly five years ago, urging the German leader to join him and “take the initiative.” Merkel reciprocated, culminating in a political alliance to retain EU unity and eventually impose robust fiscal discipline on the 17 eurozone countries. The unlikely and oft-quoted fusion of these two leaders — Merkozy — advanced an ambitious plan to prevent the European Union from fragmenting.

Hollande Beats Sarkozy in French Election – NY Times

PARIS — François Hollande swept to victory on Sunday, becoming the first Socialist to become president of France since François Mitterrand left office in 1995.

Mr. Hollande campaigned on a kinder, gentler, more inclusive France, but his victory over President Nicolas Sarkozywill also be seen as a challenge to the German-dominated policy of economic austerity in the euro zone, which is suffering from recession and record unemployment.

French voters may not like belt-tightening, but both Mr. Hollande and Mr. Sarkozy had promised to balance the budget in the next five years. The vote was viewed domestically as a rejection of the unpopular Mr. Sarkozy himself and his relentless effort to appeal to the voters of the far right National Front. Mr. Sarkozy is the first incumbent president to lose since 1981.

With about half the vote counted, preliminary results released by the Interior Ministry shortly after the last polling stations closed showed Mr. Hollande had secured about 51 percent of the vote while Mr. Sarkozy, of the center-right Union for a Popular Movement, won about 49 percent. Opinion pollsters suggested that the final result would be closer to 52 percent versus 48 percent.

“The French did not want to elect a president who is powerless: it must be given a majority, otherwise it would be absurd,” said Pierre Moscovici, Mr. Hollande’s campaign director. He called on voters to “amplify this victory” in legislative elections next month.

Mr. Sarkozy conceded defeat minutes after the polls closed, and said that he accepted “total responsibility” for Sunday’s result.

He told voters that he had called Mr. Hollande to wish him “good luck,” and thanked “the millions of French who voted for me.”

“My involvement in the life of my country will be different now,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “But time will never weaken the ties between us.”

Speaking to party members, Mr. Sarkozy, who campaigned energetically to the end, told them to “remain united” and not give in to division. He said he would not lead the party into June’s legislative elections, he said but “they are winnable.”

Mr. Sarkozy said: “I become a citizen among you.”

With anxieties rising again over the fate of the single currency, the election in France — as well as a snap parliamentary election in Greece on Sunday — was closely watched in European capitals and particularly in Berlin, where Chancellor Angela Merkel has led the drive to cure the euro zone debt and banking crisis with deep budget cuts and caps on future spending.

Such policies have come at a heavy political price for many of Europe’s leaders, whose opponents, emboldened by waves of voter resentment, have vowed to challenge the German push for deficit and debt reduction in favor of measures to stimulate economic growth.

With his defeat, Mr. Sarkozy becomes the latest leader of a country to fall victim to theEuropean debt crisis. Voters in Greece on appeared to radically redraw the political map in the country, bolstering the far left and neo-Nazi right in a wave of protest against the dominant political parties they blame for the country’s economic collapse.

But the shift in France could prove to be the most crucial. While crowds in the streets of Paris cheered Mr. Hollande’s victory, investors were a bit more cautious. Investors are concerned that Mr. Hollande might choose to spend more money to jumpstart the economy, rather than move ahead with labor market and business reforms that economists say France sorely needs to lift competitiveness and prevent it from getting caught in the euro’s financial criss.

“Markets will not attack France right away,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But there is a risk that if Mr. Hollande does not act early on, France will become the next sick man of Europe.”

Earlier on Sunday, dressed in a dark suit and accompanied by his partner, the journalist Valérie Trierweiler, Mr. Hollande, 57, cast his vote in Tulle, the capital of his Corrèze constituency. Conceding that he had slept “only briefly” overnight, Mr. Hollande, told reporters he was bracing for a long day.

“It’s up to the French people to decide if it’s going to be a good day,” he said.

Under gray skies and amid intermittent rain showers, Nicole Hirsch, a 60-year-old retiree in the working-class 20th Arrondissement of Paris, said she was voting for Mr. Hollande in the hope that he would “bring the change that France needs.”

Opinion polls published on Friday, the last day of campaigning, showed the gap between Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Hollande had narrowed to between four and five percentage points. And Mr. Sarkozy had remained confident, predicting that the election would be decided by “a razor’s edge,” and spoke of a possible “surprise.”

But his campaign suffered double setbacks last week.

On Tuesday, Marine Le Pen — the candidate of the populist National Front who garnered 18 percent of the first-round vote — refused to endorse either the president or Mr. Hollande, saying she would cast a blank ballot. Then, on Friday, François Bayrou, a centrist who finished in fifth with 9 percent of the vote, endorsed Mr. Hollande.

Analysts have said Mr. Sarkozy will need the votes of an overwhelming majority of Ms. Le Pen’s supporters to win. But the latest surveys show the president getting little more than 50 percent of the National Front vote.

Mr. Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, cast their votes shortly before midday at a high school in the staid 16th Arrondissement of Paris. The couple left without speaking to the media.

Juan Carlos Velaure, a 57-year-old lawyer, said he voted for Mr. Hollande because he was fed up with Mr. Sarkozy’s governing style and his conception of the presidency. “He ruled over everyone,” Mr. Velaure said.

He remained unsure, however, whether Mr. Hollande would be up to the task of guiding France and Europe through the economic crisis.

“I don’t know if Hollande will help, but he is changing minds in Europe” about the need to stimulate growth along with achieving fiscal discipline, he said. “The future of France is uncertain. I couldn’t say if feel optimistic or pessimistic at this moment. We will have to see what the future holds.”

Dutch government austerity talks collapse

After weeks of discussions on austerity measures, the Dutch prime minister has said government talks have fallen through and new elections are the “next logical step.”

The Dutch government appeared close to collapse on Saturday after budget talks between the minority government parties and its opposition support collapsed.

The talks were aimed at cutting up to 16 billion euros ($21 billion) from the annual budget. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told reporters he would hold a crisis meeting on Monday to assess the situation.

“Elections are the logical next step,” Rutte said. He added that he wants to work with parliament to finalize austerity measures before the poll takes place.

The talks among Rutte’s Liberal Party, his coalition partners the Christian Democrats and the anti-Islam Freedom Party headed by Geert Wilders started in March as the Dutch economy sank into recession. Forecasts showed the 2012 budget deficit would reach 4.6 percent of gross domestic product when the EU deficit ceiling is 3 percent.

Rutte blamed Wilders for the collapse. He said that on Friday a “balanced package” of cuts had been agreed only for Wilders to come back on Saturday after talking to his party colleagues and rejecting the plan.

Wilders said he “would not accept that the elderly in the Netherlands have to pay for nonsensical demands from Brussels.”

AAA-rating in jeopardy

Last week, ratings agency Fitch warned that the Netherlands might loose its AAA credit score if action to cut the deficit and stop debt from rising was not taken.

The Dutch also have huge levels of personal debt, mostly mortgage-related. One of the highest in the EU, the debt has become a major concern as house prices started to fall in 2008.

Only Germany, Finland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands still hold AAA rating in the eurozone. The Dutch government has been one of Germany’s strongest supporters for a new pact on fiscal responsibility in the eurozone.