by Dilip Hiro
Since September 11, 2001, Washington’s policies in the Middle East have proven a grim imperial comedy of errors and increasingly a spectacle of how a superpower is sidelined. In this drama, barely noticed by the American media, Uncle Sam’s keystone ally in the Arab world, Egypt, like [...]]]>
by Dilip Hiro
Since September 11, 2001, Washington’s policies in the Middle East have proven a grim imperial comedy of errors and increasingly a spectacle of how a superpower is sidelined. In this drama, barely noticed by the American media, Uncle Sam’s keystone ally in the Arab world, Egypt, like Saudi Arabia, has largely turned its back on the Obama administration. As with so many of America’s former client states across the aptly named “arc of instability,” Egypt has undergone a tumultuous journey — from autocracy to democracy to a regurgitated form of military rule and repression, making its ally of four decades appear clueless.
Egypt remains one of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid, with the Pentagon continuing to pamper the Egyptian military with advanced jet fighters, helicopters, missiles, and tanks. Between January 2011 and May 2014, Egypt underwent a democratic revolution, powered by a popular movement, which toppled President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. It enjoyed a brief tryst with democracy before suffering an anti-democratic counter-revolution by its generals. In all of this, what has been the input of the planet’s last superpower in shaping the history of the most populous country in the strategic Middle East? Zilch. Its “generosity” toward Cairo notwithstanding, Washington has been reduced to the role of a helpless bystander.
Given how long the United States has been Egypt’s critical supporter, the State Department and Pentagon bureaucracies should have built up a storehouse of understanding as to what makes the Land of the Pharaohs tick. Their failure to do so, coupled with a striking lack of familiarity by two administrations with the country’s recent history, has led to America’s humiliating sidelining in Egypt. It’s a story that has yet to be pieced together, although it’s indicative of how from Kabul to Bonn, Baghdad to Rio de Janeiro so many ruling elites no longer feel that listening to Washington is a must.
An Army as Immovable as the Pyramids
Ever since 1952, when a group of nationalist military officers ended the pro-British monarchy, Egypt’s army has been in the driver’s seat. From Gamal Abdul Nasser to Hosni Mubarak, its rulers were military commanders. And if, in February 2011, a majority of the members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) abandoned Mubarak, it was only to stop him from passing the presidency on to his son Gamal on his 83rd birthday. The neoliberal policies pursued by the Mubarak government at the behest of that businessman son from 2004 onward made SCAF fear that the military’s stake in the public sector of the economy and its extensive public-private partnerships would be doomed.
Fattened on the patronage of successive military presidents, Egypt’s military-industrial complex had grown enormously. Its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP), though a state secret, could be as high as 40%, unparalleled in the region. The chief executives of 55 of Egypt’s largest companies, contributing a third of that GDP, are former generals.
Working with the interior ministry, which controls the national police force, paramilitary units, and the civilian intelligence agencies, SCAF (headed by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, doubling as the defense minister) would later orchestrate the protest movement against popularly elected President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. That campaign reached its crescendo on June 30, 2013. Three days later, SCAF toppled Morsi and has held him in prison ever since.
The generals carried out their coup at a moment when, according to the Washington-based Pew Research Center, 63% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the Muslim Brotherhood, 52% approved of the Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, and 53% backed Morsi, who had won the presidency a year earlier with 52% of the vote.
Washington Misses the Plot
Remarkably, Obama administration officials failed to grasp that the generals, in conjunction with Interior Minister Muhammad Ibrahim, were the prime movers behind the Tamarod (Arabic for “rebellion”) campaign launched on April 22, 2013. Egyptians were urged to sign a petition addressed to Morsi that was both simplistic and populist. “Because security has not returned, because the poor have no place, because I have no dignity in my own country…,” read the text in part, “we don’t want you anymore,” and it called for an early presidential election. In little over two months, the organizers claimed that they had amassed 22.1 million signatures, amounting to 85% of those who had participated in the presidential election of 2012. Where those millions of individually signed petitions were being stored was never made public, nor did any independent organization verify their existence or numbers.
As the Tamarod campaign gained momentum, the interior ministry’s secret police infiltrated it, as did former Mubarak supporters, while elements of the police state of the Mubarak era were revived. Reports that cronies of the toppled president were providing the funding for the campaign began to circulate. The nationwide offices of the Free Egyptians — a party founded by Naguib Sawiria, a businessman close to Mubarak and worth $2.5 billion – were openedto Tamarod organizers. Sawiria also paid for a promotional music video that was played repeatedly on OnTV, a television channel he had founded. In addition, he let his newspaper,Al Masry al Youm, be used as a vehicle for the campaign.
In the run-up to the mass demonstration in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square on June 30th, the first anniversary of Morsi’s rule, power cuts became more frequent and fuel shortages acute. As policemen mysteriously disappeared from the streets, the crime rate soared. All of this stoked anti-Morsi feelings and was apparently orchestrated with military precision by those who plotted the coup.
Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times provided evidence of meticulous planning, especially by the Interior Ministry, in a report headlined “Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi.” They quoted Ahmad Nabawi, a Cairo gas station manager, saying that he had heard several explanations for the gas crisis: technical glitches at the storage facilities, the arrival of low quality gas from abroad, and excessive stockpiling by the public. But he put what happened in context this way: “We went to sleep one night, woke up the next day, and the crisis was gone” — and so was Morsi. Unsurprisingly, of all the ministers in the Morsi government, Interior Minister Ibrahim was the only one retained in the interim cabinet appointed by the generals.
“See No Evil”
Initially, President Obama refused to call what had occurred in Egypt a military “coup.” Instead, he spoke vaguely of “military actions” in order to stay on the right side of the Foreign Assistance Act in which Congress forbade foreign aid to “any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”
Within a week of the coup, with Morsi and the first of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood followers thrown behind bars, SCAF sidelined the Tamarod campaigners. They were left complaining that the generals, violating their promise, had not consulted them on the road map to normalization. Having ridden the Tamarod horse to total power, SCAF had no more use for it.
When Morsi supporters staged peaceful sit-ins at two squares in Cairo, the military junta could not bear the sight of tens of thousands of Egyptians quietly defying its arbitrary will. Waiting until the holy fasting month of Ramadan and the three-day festival of Eid ul Fitr had passed, they made their move. On August 14th, Interior Ministry troops massacred nearly 1,000 protesters as they cleared the two sites.
“Our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” said Obama. However, in the end all he did was cancel annual joint military exercises with Egypt scheduled for September and suspend the shipment of four F-16 fighter jets to the Egyptian air force. This mattered little, if at all, to the generals.
The helplessness of Washington before a client state with an economy in freefall was little short of stunning. Pentagon officials, for instance, revealed that since the “ouster of Mr. Morsi,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had had15 telephone conversations with coup leader General Sisi, pleading with him to “change course” — all in vain.
Five weeks later, the disjuncture between Washington and Cairo became embarrassingly overt. On September 23rd, the Cairo Court for Urgent Mattersordered the 85-year-old Muslim Brotherhood disbanded. In a speech at the U.N. General Assembly the next day, President Obama stated that, in deposing Morsi, the Egyptian military had “responded to the desires of millions of Egyptians who believed the revolution had taken a wrong turn.” He then offered only token criticism, claiming that the new military government had “made decisions inconsistent with inclusive democracy” and that future American support would “depend upon Egypt’s progress in pursuing a more democratic path.”
General Sisi was having none of this. In a newspaper interview on October 9th, he warned that he would not tolerate pressure from Washington “whether through actions or hints.” Already, there had been a sign that Uncle Sam’s mild criticism was being diluted. A day earlier, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden stated that reports that all military assistance to Egypt would be halted were “false.”
In early November, unmistakably pliant words came from Secretary of State John Kerry. “The roadmap [to democracy] is being carried out to the best of our perception,” he said at a press conference, while standing alongside his Egyptian counterpart Nabil Fahmy during a surprise stopover in Cairo. “There are questions we have here and there about one thing or another, but Foreign Minister Fahmy has reemphasized to me again and again that they have every intent and they are determined to fulfill that particular decision and that [democratic] track.”
The Generals Axe the Secular, Pro-Democracy Movement
Fahmy and Kerry were looking at that democratic “track” from opposite perspectives. Three weeks later, the military-appointed president, Adly Mansour, approved a new law that virtually outlawed the right to protest. This law gave the interior minister or senior police officials a power that only the judiciary had previously possessed. The minister or his minions could now cancel, postpone, or change the location of protests for which organizers had earlier received the permission of local police. Human Rights groups and secular organizations argued that the 2013 Protest Law was reminiscent of Mubarak’s repressive policies. Washington kept quiet.
Two days later, critics of the law held a demonstration in Cairo that was violently dispersed by the police. Dozens of activists, including the co-founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, Ahmed Maher and Muhammad Adel, seminal actors in the Tahrir Square protests against Mubarak, were arrested. Maher and Adel were each sentenced to three years imprisonment.
Following the coup, the number of prisoners rose exponentially, reaching at least 16,000 within eight months, including nearly 3,000 top or mid-level members of the Brotherhood. (Unofficial estimates put the total figure at 22,000.) When 40 inmates herded into a typical cell in custom-built jails proved insufficient, many Brotherhood members were detained without charges for months in police station lockups or impromptu prisons set up in police training camps where beatings were routine.
The 846 Egyptians who lost their lives in the pro-democracy revolution that ended Mubarak’s authoritarian regime were dwarfed by the nearly 3,000 people killed in a brutal series of crackdowns that followed the coup, according to human rights groups.
The sentencing of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement — which through its social media campaign had played such a crucial role in sparking anti-Mubarak demonstrations — foreshadowed something far worse. On April 28, 2014, the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters outlawed that secular, pro-democracy movement based on a complaint by a lawyer that it had “tarnished the image” of Egypt and colluded with foreign parties.
With this set of acts, the post-coup regime turned the clock back to Mubarakism — without Mubarak.
Setting the World’s Mass Death-Penalty Record
On that same April day in the southern Egyptian town of Minya, Judge Saeed Elgazar broke his own month-old world death-penalty record of 529 (in a trial that lasting less than an hour) by recommending the death penalty for 683 Egyptians, including Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie. The defendants were charged in an August 2013 attack on a police station in Minya, which led to the death of a policeman. Of the accused, 60% had not been in Minya on the day of the assault. Defense lawyers were prevented from presenting their case during the two-day trial.
Elgazar was a grotesquely exaggerated example of a judiciary from the Mubarak era that remained unreconciled to the onset of democracy. It proved only too willing to back the military junta in terrorizing those even thinking of protesting the generals’ rule. A U.S. State Department spokesperson called the judge’s first trial “unconscionable.” But as before, the military-backed government in Cairo remained unmoved. The Egyptian Justice Department warned that “comments on judicial verdicts are unacceptable, be they from external or internal parties as they represent a serious transgression against the independence of the judiciary.”
When the second mass sentence came down, Kerry murmured that “there have been disturbing decisions within the judicial process, the court system, that have raised serious challenges for all of us. It’s actions, not words that will make the difference.” A defiant Nabil Fahmy responded by defending the verdicts as having been rendered by an independent judiciary “completely independent from the government.”
One predictable response to the military junta’s brutal squashing of the Brotherhood, which over the previous few decades had committed itself to participating in a multi-party democracy, was the swelling of the ranks of militant jihadist groups. Of these Ansar Bait al Muqdus (“Helpers of Jerusalem”), based in the Sinai Peninsula and linked to al-Qaeda, was the largest. After the coup, it gained new members and its terror attacks spread to the bulk of Egypt west of the Suez Canal.
In late December, a car bomb detonated by its operatives outside police headquarters in the Nile Delta town of Mansoura killed 16 police officers. Blaming the bombing on the Muslim Brotherhood instead, the interim government classified it as a “terrorist organization,” even though Ansar had claimed responsibility for the attack. By pinning the terrorist label on the Brotherhood, the generals gave themselves carte blanche to further intensify their ruthless suppression of it.
While SCAF pursued its relentless anti-Brotherhood crusade and reestablished itself as the ruling power in Egypt, it threw a sop to the Obama administration. It introduced a new constitution, having suspended the previous one drafted by a popularly elected constituent assembly. The generals appointed a handpicked committee of 50 to amend the suspended document. They included only two members of the Islamist groups that had jointly gained two-thirds of the popular vote in Egypt’s first free elections.
Predictably, the resulting document was military-friendly. It stipulated that the defense minister must be a serving military officer and that civilians would be subject to trial in military courts for certain offenses. Banned was the formation of political parties based on religion, race, gender, or geography, and none was allowed to have a paramilitary wing. The document was signed by the interim president in early December. A national referendum on it was held in mid-January under tight security, with 160,000 soldiers and more than 200,000 policemen deployed nationwide. The result: a vote of 98.1% in favor. (A referendum on the 2012 constitution during Morsi’s presidency had gained the backing of 64% of voters.)
The charade of this exercise seemed to escape policymakers in Washington. Kerry blithely spoke of the SCAF-appointed government committing itself to “a transition process that expands democratic rights and leads to a civilian-led, inclusive government through free and fair elections.”
By this time, the diplomatic and financial support of the oil rich Gulf States ruled by autocratic monarchs was proving crucial to the military regime in Cairo. Immediately after the coup, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) poured $12 billion into Cairo’s nearly empty coffers. In late January 2014, Saudi Arabia and the UAE came up with an additional $5.8 billion. This helped Sisi brush off any pressure from Washington and monopolize power his way.
The Strongman as Savior
By then, huge photographs and portraits of General Sisi had become a common fixture on the streets in Cairo and other major cities. On January 27th, interim president Mansour promoted Sisi to field marshal. Later that day, SCAF nominated him for the presidency. A slew of stories started appearing in the state-run media as well as most of its privately owned counterparts backing Sisi and touting the benefits of strong military leadership.
Sisi’s original plan to announce his candidacy on February 11th, the third anniversary of Mubarak’s forced resignation, hit an unexpected speed bump. On February 7th, Al Watan, a newspaper supportive of the military regime with longstanding ties to the security establishment, printed an embarrassing front-page story placing Sisi’s worth at 30 million Egyptian pounds ($4.2 million). Within minutes of its being printed, state officials contacted the paper’s owner, Magdy El Galad, demanding its immediate removal. He instantly complied.
Sisi continued to place his henchmen in key positions in the armed forces, including military intelligence. On March 26th, he resigned from the army, declaring himself an independent candidate. Nonetheless, as Alaa Al Aswany, a prominent writer and commentator, revealed, senior military commanders continued to perform important tasks for him. There was nothing faintly fair about such an election, Aswany pointed out. Most other potential candidates for the presidency had reached a similar conclusion — that entering the race was futile. Hamdeen Sabahi, a secular left-of-center politician, was the only exception.
Despite relentless propaganda by state and private media portraying Sisi as the future savior of Egypt, things went badly for him. That he would be crowned as a latter-day Pharaoh was a given. The only unknown was: How many Egyptians would bother to participate in the stage-managed exercise?
The turnout proved so poor on May 26th, the first day of the two-day election, that panic struck the government, which declared the following day a holiday. In addition, the Justice ministry warned that those who failed to vote would be fined. The authorities suspended train fares to encourage voters to head for polling stations. TV anchors and media celebrities scolded and lambasted their fellow citizens for their apathy, while urging them to rush to their local polling booths. Huge speakers mounted on vans patrolling city neighborhoods alternated raucous exhortations to vote with songs of praise for the military. Al Azhar, the highest Islamic authority in the land, declared that to fail to vote was “to disobey the nation.” Pope Tawadros, head of Egypt’s Coptic Christian Church whose members form 10% of the population, appeared on state television to urge voters to cast their ballots.
The former field marshal had demanded an 80% turnout from the country’s 56 million voters. Yet even with voting extended to a third day and a multifaceted campaign to shore up the numbers, polling stations were reportedly empty across the country. The announced official turnout of 47.5% was widely disbelieved. Sabahi described the figure as “an insult to the intelligence of Egyptians.” Sisi was again officially given 96.1% of the vote, Sabahi 3%. The spokesman for the National Alliance for the Defense of Legitimacy put voter participation at 10%-12%. The turnout for the first free and fair two-day presidential election, held in June 2012 without endless exhortations by TV anchors and religious leaders, had been 52%.
Among the regional and world leaders who telephoned Sisi to congratulate him on his landslide electoral triumph was Russian President Vladimir Putin. No such call has yet come in from President Obama.
For Washington, still so generous in its handouts to the Arab Republic of Egypt and its military, trailing behind the Russian Bear in embracing the latest strongman on the Nile should be considered an unqualified humiliation. With its former sphere of influence in tatters, the last superpower has been decisively sidelined by its key Arab ally in the region.
Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, has written 34 books, including After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. His latest book is A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East.
*This article was first published by Tom Dispatch and was reprinted here with permission.
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Photo Credit: Mohammad Omer/IPS
Copyright 2014 Dilip Hiro
]]>by Henry Precht
In the turbulent weeks after the Iranian revolution we officers in the State Department or in Embassy Tehran struggled to construct a “normal” relationship with the decidedly abnormal, strife-ridden new regime. In frustration I used to tell my wife that we should hang a thick curtain around Iran’s borders [...]]]>
by Henry Precht
In the turbulent weeks after the Iranian revolution we officers in the State Department or in Embassy Tehran struggled to construct a “normal” relationship with the decidedly abnormal, strife-ridden new regime. In frustration I used to tell my wife that we should hang a thick curtain around Iran’s borders and return home. Every so often we would lift a corner and peak in. If conditions seemed to be settling down, we might again venture back. If strife continued, we would pull the curtain closed and patiently wait for more placid times to come.
It seems that the Obama administration has installed an Iranian curtain around Egypt.
Egypt didn’t rate a mention in the President’s State of the Union. The Capitol Hill-White House debate about whether the army’s move to take over last summer was a coup or not seems to have been called a draw. When the regime jails journalists or democracy advocates, Washington is silent or late with a reaction. There’s a simple explanation for this silence or apparent neglect of a country that used to be considered a key ally: No one who is not marching in Tahrir Square has the foggiest idea how to address the strife-ridden land of the pharaohs.
In the old days when neocons were making policy in the Reagan White House and tried to manipulate Egypt for their Cold War purposes (e.g., a base on the Red Sea), I was working in Embassy Cairo. We used to warn, “Don’t take Egypt for granted!” As if the ghost of Nasser might return and resume his dirty work of stirring up regional anti-Americanism and tensions with Israel. But President Mubarak, despite all-out, but clumsy PR efforts, never resembled a mock-up of Nasser. A risk averse leader of a deeply conservative country, he was not about to upset Washington or Jerusalem. Instead, he set his set his heart and nervous fingers to dig into Saudi Arabia’s deep pockets.
Mubarak failed to find enough cash to satisfy his fecund people — except for those who promised that their newly gained wealth would trickle down to the youth gathered on street corners. His great plan for a new, prosperous Egypt failed. And so revolution came — and came again and yet again.
Egypt’s new pharaoh figure is almost certainly to be General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The senior military chief, he offers his countrymen another Nasser look-alike, with the same seeming rectitude, same toughness in pursuit of patriotism and order plus the Mubarak additional quality of grasping for the Saudis’ sustaining riches.
Al-Sisi’s problem is that the Egypt he will inherit is not the one Nasser and the early Mubarak could depend on. It is, rather, a bit closer to Sadat’s country — expectant, easily disappointed and unfaithful. Probably half the population now stands against whoever wears a general’s uniform with a pharaoh’s double crown promising ample bread and nationalistic rhetoric. These disaffected, first-time voters were the revolution’s ostensible winners; they became after last summer’s coup its losers. This half of the population, feeling betrayed, is infected with the Muslim Brotherhood’s message of guided democracy, legitimacy and religiosity. Unhappily for this year’s new Nasser, his opponents also seem skilled in and determined to use terrorism to fight him.
It is easy in these circumstances to see how an Iranian curtain might appeal to those charged with formulating policy towards Egypt in Washington. On the one hand, there are the old timers for whom the peace treaty with Israel is the only thing that matters. Other Democrats march under the banner of human rights. Fighting terrorism is what matters for a third bunch. The market for arms sales counts most importantly for another group. And, of course, no one wants to offend Saudi Arabia, Cairo’s generous patron.
When offered so many policy choices, some in direct conflict with other options, a president will be tempted to check, “All of the above,” or “None of the above.” That’s where the Iranian curtain comes in handy. Keep quiet whenever possible. Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes send anti-terrorist intelligence and training, utter a whisper now and then about human rights and maintain the continuing, quiet flow of weapons sales.
All the while expecting — hoping — that, as it has for over 6,000 years, the Nile will flow freely, eventually abundant in its gifts and life along its banks will go on with tolerable tranquility.
]]>by Wayne White
The arrest of many senior Muslim Brotherhood (MB) leaders and the banning of the organization are the latest blows in what appears to be a relentless campaign by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government to deny the Brotherhood any future role in Egyptian politics. The MB’s continued defiance has driven [...]]]>
by Wayne White
The arrest of many senior Muslim Brotherhood (MB) leaders and the banning of the organization are the latest blows in what appears to be a relentless campaign by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government to deny the Brotherhood any future role in Egyptian politics. The MB’s continued defiance has driven the military to bear down even harder, but the new regime can do little to divest the Brotherhood of its popular base. Also of concern are various moves that smack of a calculated effort to return to Mubarak-style military rule, this time centered upon el-Sisi. Meanwhile, despite generous Arab Gulf financial support, a deeply troubled economy, poor governance, and repression will most likely cause many Egyptians to become weary of the new regime as events play out.
President Obama stated in his September 24 UN General Assembly address that future US support for Egypt “will depend upon Egypt’s progress in pursuing a democratic path.” Yet, despite several sharply negative developments along those lines over the past two weeks, Obama so far has resisted cutting off US military assistance. Key administration officials believe all such aid should be suspended except for a portion related to bolstering security in Sinai, and such a recommendation reportedly has been with the President since August. Reluctance to crack down on the new Egyptian regime on the part of not only Washington, but the West more broadly, probably has emboldened el-Sisi.
For now, Egypt’s foreign aid situation is relatively rosy thanks to lavish financial assistance from Arab Gulf states like the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia since Morsi’s fall. In fact, el-Sisi felt comfortable enough financially to return $2 billion to Qatar in a pointed gesture of dismay over Doha’s generous assistance to the Morsi government (the exact amount transferred to Egypt yesterday by Kuwait). In contrast, however, violence and uncertainty continue to discourage investors. With so many multi-national corporations (including Chevron, BP, General Motors, and BASF) closing operations in Egypt or taking investments elsewhere, roughly 25 percent of Cairo’s best office space is now vacant.
The Brotherhood and its popular following have done little to encourage el-Sisi & Co. to ease up. The MB’s core leadership is unlikely to abandon its disciplined focus on the establishment of Islamist rule. This ideological agenda almost certainly led to MB excesses under Morsi. Despite occasional pragmatism during Morsi’s tenure in office, for the most part the Brotherhood revealed its intent to ram home its doctrinal goals, shoving opposition aside.
Since Morsi’s ouster, the outbreak of Muslim extremist violence against army and police cadres in Sinai (and some in Egypt proper) has probably infuriated senior military commanders. Attacks on Coptic Christians, their businesses, and churches, plus reports of localized threats of more should security forces drop their guard, could sustain sufficient public outrage against the Brotherhood for el-Sisi’s government to retain substantial support for quite a while despite its own increasingly authoritarian behavior. Pro-Brotherhood students have revived anti-regime protests since the opening of the school year on the 21st, warning of a return to the days of Mubarak. Still, the Brotherhood’s own credibility has been reduced because Morsi too allied himself with the military. And, quite simply, many Egyptians at this point just yearn for the return of some semblance of stability and “normalcy” after over two years of turmoil.
Permitting Morsi to chat with his family for the first time earlier this month has been of little consolation to the Brotherhood amidst other harsh measures. Morsi apparently is still to be tried for inciting the killing of protestors as well as potential charges relating to alleged slander against judges and supposed involvement in Hamas prison attacks during the anti-Mubarak uprising back in 2011. Additionally, 18 members of the MB’s most senior “Guidance Bureau” (along with its high profile spokesman), hundreds of mid-level cadres, most of its legislators and provincial governors under Morsi, plus over half of Morsi’s planned legal defense team have been taken into custody.
And then on the 25th, two days after an Egyptian court banned “all activities” of the Brotherhood on the 23rd, security forces closed the offices of the MB’s flagship newspaper “Freedom and Justice,” confiscating equipment and furniture. State owned al-Ahram printers claimed it would continue to publish the Brotherhood’s daily (which apparently has not been produced in the building seized), but only if its length is reduced by half and its circulation cut ten-fold.
Despite el-Sisi’s July statement that he has no political ambitions, a group of professionals and former army officers initiated a petition on the 23rd urging him to run for president. A major effort to create an al-Sisi personality cult has been underway for quite some time with huge al-Sisi posters plastered everywhere, fawning TV coverage, pro-military pop songs and videos, as well as talk shows featuring discussions on whether el-Sisi should run for president (with positive conclusions). And a military spokesman did say back in early July that doing so would be possible if el-Sisi retired. Amidst all this, there have been arrests of Egyptians for spraying anti-Sisi graffiti and even a farmer for naming his donkey el-Sisi and riding it through his village.
Plans also are in motion to draft either a new constitution (or substantial amendments to the one passed hastily by Brotherhood parliamentary representatives) that seem to include doing away with the ban against Mubarak-era officials serving in public office. And the new or revised constitution will be prepared by a 50-member committee chaired by former Mubarak Foreign Minister Amr Moussa. The committee contains only two Islamists–neither from the Brotherhood.
Over the short-term, el-Sisi and the military obviously will be in the political driver’s seat. Western condemnations have been relatively restrained (probably hoping—so far in vain–for el-Sisi’s behavior to improve). And, with extremists on the rampage in Sinai, the Brotherhood also having ruled abusively, and the extremist problem growing in places like Syria, East Africa, and Iraq, many governments could view watching & waiting as the least risky option at the moment.
Farther out, however, the situation in Egypt could worsen once again. The military’s current path seems to lead back to neo-Mubarak authoritarian rule. If so, Egyptians will gradually sour on el-Sisi, as military-dominated governance entails a return to restrictions on freedoms, rampant official corruption, institutional dysfunction, and lack of transparency. Right now, the Brotherhood is reeling from the multiple blows it has suffered since July 3, and its leadership has been seriously disrupted. However, hundreds of thousands of its most fervent adherents might not remain on the sidelines under such a regime (especially after having tasted national power). So, if al-Sisi cannot be persuaded to change course, economic stagnation, various other ills, rising popular dissatisfaction, and eventually yet another major Egyptian political crisis could lie ahead.
Photo Credit: Mohamed Azazy
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
Almost 1,000 Egyptians have died, according to the official count, since Aug. 14 when Egypt’s armed forces began clamping down on Muslim Brotherhood-led protests against the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. That number well exceeds the 846 people who officials say died during the 18 days of protest [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
Almost 1,000 Egyptians have died, according to the official count, since Aug. 14 when Egypt’s armed forces began clamping down on Muslim Brotherhood-led protests against the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. That number well exceeds the 846 people who officials say died during the 18 days of protest that ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule in Jan. 2011.
The democratically elected Morsi, a leading member of the MB, has not been seen in public since Jul. 3. But Mubarak has been released from prison into house arrest while he faces retrial. Egyptian media has for the most part adopted the language of the army in framing the unrest — Muslim brotherhood members are alleged “terrorists” who are trying to destroy the country.
While the US, who the Egyptian media claims conspired with the Brotherhood, has cancelled military exercises with Egypt and urged both sides to halt violence, it has so far resisted calls for halting military aid to its strategically positioned ally.
The rapid turn of events in Egypt, from a revolution to perhaps a “counterrevolution”, has left US President Barack Obama in quandary. Having eventually supported the fall of Mubarak, the US looks hypocritical in continuing its relationship with the military as authoritarian rule is restored.
In an interview with IPS, Emile Nakhleh, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Islamic Strategic Analysis Program, explained why repression will not prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from continuing its existence as a rooted, cultural and political force. Continued repression could also push the Brotherhood’s younger members to embrace violence as a political tool.
The US should pursue its own interests in Egypt, which “do not necessarily equate with dictatorial repressive regimes,” the Middle East expert told IPS. “In the long run, democratically elected governments will be more stable than these autocratic regimes.”
Q: There are different accounts circulating, especially in the Egyptian media, about what the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) actually is. Can you provide some background?
A: The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 as a social, religious, educational, political and partly military movement. It was founded against British colonialism and with it came the fight for Palestine, starting in the early 30s. Its main ideology is as follows: Islam is the solution. And the 3 D’s in Arabic, which translate to Islam is faith, state and society. There is to be no separation between the mosque and state in any of these.
The Muslim Brotherhood spread more than any other party in the Middle East in the last 85 years. It focused heavily on Islam, but took all those other things into consideration. And then of course they got involved in politics. That put them in conflict with the monarchy at the time. In 1948 this conflict became violent. Muslim Brotherhood members assassinated the Egyptian Prime Minister and in turn, the regime assassinated the founder of the MB in 1949.
By the mid-90′s, the Brotherhood decided to forgo violence and move toward their original mission, Da’wa, to proselytize their doctrine by Islamizing society from below. They wouldn’t allow themselves to be removed by force; they saw what happened in Algeria in 1991 and redirected their ideology to society itself, modeled after that American baseball-feed ideology, you know, you build it and they will come. So you Islamicize society from below and once society becomes Islamicized, you can establish a position in government and become a Shari’a-friendly government.
This process started in the late 80s, when the MB entered 4 or 5 parliamentary elections as independents or in alliance with other parties, such as the Wafd Party and the Labor Socialist party. Why? Because the government passed Law 100, which prohibited religious parties from participating in politics.
In the 2005 election, the MB won 88 seats in parliament, the largest ever for the MB. But they ran as independents. They emerged as the largest opposition party in parliament after Mubarak’s ruling party. In their 85-year history, the MB has been banned and repressed by regimes — from King Faruk to Mubarak; that’s why they’re not going away. They’re part and parcel of the religious foundation of Egyptian society.
With every regime Egypt has had since 1948, the relationship with the MB has always initially been good and then soured toward the end. Gamal Abdel Nasser was the same. He reached out to the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954 and by 1955-6, when a plot to assassinate him was uncovered, the Muslim Brotherhood was repressed and exiled. Then in 1966 Nasser’s government hanged one of the MB’s conservative thinkers, Sayyid Qutb.
Q: Is that what’s happening now, with the army’s arrest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohamed Badie?
A: Qutb was actually more of a radical thinker than the mainstream MB. It’s also very interesting to note that a number of MB activists were exiled to Saudi Arabia where they established a more radical view of Islam. That view led Saudi Arabia to oppose Nasser’s actions in Yemen and other Arab nationalist projects.
Q: The Saudis welcomed the MB because they were Salafis?
A: The Saudis welcomed the MB with open arms because they were Salafis and because they were opposed to the secular Arab nation ideology that was preached by Nasser. The MB’s relationship with Nasser soured until 1970 when Nasser died and Anwar Sadat came to power. Sadat also began to court the MB as a countervailing force against leftist and Nasserist nationalist ideology.
The MB’s influence really began in the 1970s when they reconstituted themselves as a religious party that underpinned society. The constitution reflected Islam and allowed them freedom to preach and participate in associations, so much so that by the 1980s, the MB, through elections, controlled almost every professional association and university student council.
That scared the hell out of Hosni Mubarak, who also tried to court the MB in the beginning. It was, by the way, Mubarak who approved a change in the constitution to say Sharia is the source of legislation.
General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s game is thus very dangerous. It will fail because the MB is the most organized and the most disciplined in Egypt and because they have been used to repression from Farouk to Nasser to Sadat and to Mubarak. Sadat allowed the MB to reconstitute itself and invited MB exiles to return home, but by the late 1970s, the MB broke with Sadat because of his trip to Jerusalem and the peace treaty with Israel. At that time, the entire Arab world broke with Sadat.
Although Sadat warmed up to the MB, he never recognized them as a political party, only as a social religious element, which was great for the MB. This gave them freedom to penetrate the soft ministries, education and welfare, and establish all kinds of religious schools, alongside al-Azhar University. Because of that, religious education under their guidance began to expand tremendously.
Q: Should military aid to Egypt be stopped?
Aid should be cut off. We supported the removal of Mubarak so we can’t support the resurrection of a military dictatorship. The cut-off by itself is not enough. It should be accompanied by a high-level conversation about Egypt’s future in accordance with the ideas of Egypt’s January 2011 revolution. In Bahrain, we should make it very clear to the al-Khalifas that repression and exclusion of the Shia majority cannot continue.
Q: How much does Egypt need the US and how much does Egypt — especially the Egyptian army — need the US?
A: Don’t forget that most of Egypt’s military aid is spent in this country for weapons systems. But that’s not the main reason for the aid. U.S. military aid to Egypt has been a tool of American national interests, which are to maintain the peace treaty with Israel, give us priority over the Suez Canal and flights over Egypt, etc, and to help us with the war on terror, especially since 9/11.
There’s a side interest, too: Egypt’s role with the Palestinians and Hamas and the push for negotiations. The main interlocutor with Hamas over the years has been Egyptian intelligence folks like Omar Suleiman.
Q: Does the Egyptian military truly fear the US stopping aid?
A: The military would be devastated if the US stopped aid because of the training the US provides and also because of the prestige. All the statements by Egyptian officials contradicting this notion is just talk.
Q: What if Saudi Arabia steps in to support the military more than it is already supporting them, as it has offered to do?
A: The Egyptian military doesn’t want to be beholden to Saudi Arabia. One of Sadat’s primary goals in reaching out to the US was to reestablish relations with the US after the October 1973 War, specifically so Egypt could acquire that training and prestige. Threatening to halt aid will be met with tremendous consternation by the Egyptian army.
Q: So the US stops the aid. Then what?
A: It’s a 2-way street. Consider our national interests, but it’s also in Egypt’s interest to maintain the peace treaty, by the way. Even Morsi wasn’t going to touch it. And when there was terrorism in the Sinai, he worked with the Israelis in fighting it.
The president’s speech in Cairo in 2009 was important because, at least rhetorically, it reflected the belief that the Islamic world is diverse and there is a distinction between the majority and the minority who are the radicals. We need to engage mainstream Muslims. He believed in that and has been interested in engaging mainstream parties that have been elected through peaceful and fair processes. That’s why he accepted to work with the MB and the Freedom and Justice Party.
Q: There was an article article in the New York Times on July 10 suggesting that the ouster of Morsi was actually planned from early on. What’s your take?
A: Morsi appointed el-Sisi himself and el-Sisi turned against him. Elements of the old regime and the so-called Egyptian liberals, who never accepted the election results, plotted from day one to undo Morsi. That’s not to say that Morsi did not make mistakes. He reneged on most of his promises. He promised to include women and Egyptian minorities in the country’s decision-making processes and he did not. But the old guard and the military never forgave Morsi for finally removing Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. So even after Morsi’s hard work, he brought in el-Sisi. Well, el-Sisi pretended that he supported Morsi but in fact he didn’t. There’s an unholy alliance between the military, the old regime and Egypt’s so-called liberals against Morsi. It’s also a fact that the revolution removed Mubarak but it did not remove the regime. So after Morsi came to power, the ministries and their bureaucrats began to torpedo his program. There were lines in Cairo after the flow of oil was restricted and somehow they disappeared shortly after Morsi was toppled.
And then el-Sisi called on people to go to the streets and give him a “mandate” to act in the national interest and remove Morsi. In January 2011, people went into the streets to remove Mubarak, and in 2013, by el-Sisi’s request, they removed Morsi. Very soon they are going to discover that this is a military dictatorship and they’re going to go into the streets again.
Q: Why is the military so revered in Egypt?
A: In addition to everything else, they have a first-rate propaganda machine. They have a tremendous public relations operation. They are masters at what we call strategic communication with the public. They probably control more than 30% of the Egyptian economy, much like China, Pakistan and Iran
The military claimed during the Nasser regime and then under Sadat that it did a great job in its wars with Israel and it was the politicians who actually undermined their missions. They are always blaming someone else. So it has emerged as symbol of national sovereignty. Nasser gave that impression when he took over the Suez Canal in 1956.
Every president since the end of the monarchy in Egypt has come from the ranks of the military. So they remove their military uniform, don a suit and become president. Morsi was the first president since 1954 who didn’t come from the military and the military didn’t trust him. I’m not a defender of Morsi, he made many mistakes, but this was the first freely, fairly, democratically elected leader since Egyptian independence. All the others were selected through sham elections with a lack of viable political opposition.
Q: What do Saudi Arabia’s explicit calls to back up the Egyptian military financially in battling the Muslim Brotherhood say about US-Saudi relations?
A: The Saudis are terrified of the MB as a reform movement. Now Saudi Arabia is also playing a dangerous game. A coalition of Arab autocrats is trying to stifle democracy because they do not like these revolutionary movements and are terrified of seeing them in their own countries. That’s why the Saudis sent troops to Bahrain to control the Shia, they said. When no one bought this argument, they said they were battling terrorism. And they say they are trying to kill it in Egypt, which is the main Arab country. If it’s killed there, they will feel more comfortable in their rule.
But this is not about the MB in Egypt or the Shia in Bahrain. Its about reform movements and opposition to repressive regimes in those countries.
Q: What options does President Obama have at this point?
A: The president had to face a new reality with the Arab Spring. He decided on going with the pro-democracy movements and that’s why he supported the removal of dictators in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Now, he has been a bit silent on Bahrain, even though the American ambassador has spoken out. I think the United States has got to create a clear balance between national security and our democratic values and it has to communicate such a balance to the American people and to peoples in the region clearly.
We should still pursue our own interests, but they do not necessarily equate with dictatorial repressive regimes. In the long run, democratically elected governments will be more stable than these autocratic regimes.
Q: Which means the US should be willing to make some sacrifices in the short-term?
A: I think so, yes. You can’t have a cookie-cutter approach to the whole region. For Bahrain, you should emphasize that if the ruling family wants to maintain its rule, they should seriously engage in dialogue with the opposition, should stop human rights abuses, release political prisoners from jail and provide the Shia majority equal access to employment in government sectors, including the military and security services.
Q: Won’t these autocratic regimes worry that implementing reforms will present more challenges to their rule?
A: They believe that they can maintain power through repression, but they should know by now that staying in power can’t be guaranteed without popular support. Look at what we’re seeing in Egypt, in Syria, in Libya…
What concerns me is that in Bahrain and Egypt, our personnel are being threatened; our ambassadors are being vilified in the media, which in Egypt and in Bahrain are the mouthpieces of the regime. The autocratic regimes in both countries run sophisticated PR campaigns. The al-Khalifa in Bahrain believe the US supports Bahrain’s Shia! The Egyptian military and some liberals believe the US supports the MB and Morsi.
So this lack of clarity in our positions is generating personal threats to our diplomatic personnel, journalists and private citizens in those countries.
Q: Is Egypt becoming a military state?
The military regime is making it clearly so. Arresting the General Guide of the MB, at el-Sisi’s instructions, which no previous regime has done, signals that the military regime is here to stay.
I worry about Egypt. I really think by moving to reinstate military rule, the el-Sisi regime is inviting more violence.
Something worries me more. In the last 20 years, the MB and other mainstream Islamic political parties have supported man-made democracy and rejected al-Qaeda’s calls, including its calls against participating in this election. And now, with democracy being torpedoed by the military, this is something that the younger generation is going to tell the older leadership within the MB — that we tried democracy and it failed and the only alternative is violence.
We might see the rise of a youthful generation in the MB that no longer believes in democracy as a viable political system.
Q: Where is the Egyptian revolution heading?
A: El-Sisi has presented himself as a guardian of national sovereignty, not a new Mubarak. It’s going to be a while before the so-called liberal and mainstream Egyptians begin to see the reality of the new military regime in Egypt. And in the meantime, the youthful members of the Muslim Brotherhood are going to turn to violence if their peaceful protests continue to be violently repressed.
Q: So far the only country where the so-called Arab Spring has had seemingly stable results is Tunisia, where a moderate Islamic government remains in place. What do you see in Egypt’s future?
The toppling of Morsi in Egypt doesn’t mean the failure of Islam or Islamic politics. It represents the failure of a particular leader in a particular country at a particular time. In Tunisia, Moncef Marzouki and Rachid Ghannouchi avoided the mistakes that Morsi made. The ruling party, Ennahda, has tried to be more inclusive and consult with other groups and parties and be more open. That’s why by comparison, Tunisia has succeeded despite the killing of two senior opposition members.
To be fair, the MB and Morsi inherited a very dysfunctional economy. The economy in Tunisia was much better by comparison. And frankly, there’s no way in hell that any party in Egypt would have been able to address Egypt’s economic issues in 1 year. If the military stays in government in the next year and they also don’t address Egypt’s severe economic problems, including unemployment and tourism, people are going to ask again, what have you done for us? That’s why I argued earlier this year that if they had just waited for Morsi to finish his term, he would have never been re-elected. We should never worry about the first election; we always should look at the 2nd and 3rd elections.
Photo Credit: Charles Roffey
]]>via IPS News
As the administration of President Barack Obama continues wrestling with how to react to the military coup in Egypt and its bloody aftermath, officials and independent analysts are increasingly worried about the crisis’s effect on U.S. ties with Saudi Arabia.
The oil-rich kingdom’s strong support [...]]]>
via IPS News
As the administration of President Barack Obama continues wrestling with how to react to the military coup in Egypt and its bloody aftermath, officials and independent analysts are increasingly worried about the crisis’s effect on U.S. ties with Saudi Arabia.
The oil-rich kingdom’s strong support for the coup is seen here as having encouraged Cairo’s defence minister Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and resist western pressure to take a conciliatory approach that would be less likely to radicalise the Brotherhood’s followers and push them into taking up arms.
Along with the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, Saudi Arabia did not just pledge immediately after the Jul. 3 coup that ousted President Mohamed Morsi to provide a combined 12 billion dollars in financial assistance, but it has also promised to make up for any western aid – including the 1.5 billion dollars with which Washington supplies Cairo annually in mostly military assistance – that may be withheld as a result of the coup and the ongoing crackdown in which about 1,000 protestors are believed to have been killed to date.
Perhaps even more worrisome to some experts here has been the exceptionally tough language directed against Washington’s own condemnation of the coup by top Saudi officials, including King Abdullah, who declared Friday that “[t]he kingdom stands …against all those who try to interfere with its domestic affairs” and charged that criticism of the army crackdown amounted to helping the “terrorists”.
Bruce Riedel, a former top CIA Middle East analyst who has advised the Obama administration, called the comments “unprecedented” even if the king did not identify the United States by name.
Chas Freeman, a highly decorated retired foreign service officer who served as U.S. ambassador to Riyadh during the Gulf War, agreed with that assessment.
“I cannot recall any statement as bluntly critical as that,” he told IPS, adding that it marked the culmination of two decades of growing Saudi exasperation with U.S. policy – from Washington’s failure to restrain Israeli military adventures and the occupation of Palestinian territory to its empowering the Shia majority in Iraq after its 2003 invasion and its abandonment of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and its backing of democratic movements during the “Arab awakening”.
“For most of the past seven decades, the Saudis have looked to Americans as their patrons to handle the strategic challenges of their region,” Freeman said. “But now the Al-Saud partnership with the United States has not only lost most of its charm and utility; it has from Riyadh’s perspective become in almost all respects counterproductive.”
The result, according to Freeman, has been a “lurch into active unilateral defence of its regional interests”, a move that could portend major geo-strategic shifts in the region. “Saudi Arabia does not consider the U.S. a reliable protector, thinks it’s on its own, and is acting accordingly.”
A number of analysts, including Freeman, have pointed to a Jul. 31 meeting in Moscow between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the head of the Riyadh’s national security council and intelligence service, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, as one potentially significant “straw in the wind” regarding the Saudi’s changing calculations.
According to a Reuters report, Bandar, who served as Riyadh’s ambassador to Washington for more than two decades, offered to buy up to 15 billion dollars in Russian arms and coordinate energy policy – specifically to prevent Qatar from exporting its natural gas to Europe at Moscow’s expense – in exchange for dropping or substantially reducing Moscow’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
While Putin, under whom Moscow’s relations with Washington appear to have a hit a post-Cold War low recently, was non-committal, Bandar left Moscow encouraged by the possibilities for greater strategic co-operation, according to press reports that drew worried comments from some here.
“[T]he United States is apparently standing on the sidelines – despite being Riyadh’s close diplomatic partner for decades, principally in the hitherto successful policy of blocking Russia’s influence in the Middle East,” wrote Simon Henderson, an analyst at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).
“It would be optimistic to believe that the Moscow meeting will significantly reduce Russian support for the Assad regime,” he noted. “But meanwhile Putin will have pried open a gap between Riyadh and Washington.”
As suggested by Abdullah’s remarks, that gap has only widened in the wake of the Egyptian military’s bloody crackdown on the Brotherhood this month and steps by Washington to date, including the delay in the scheduled shipment of F-16 fighter jets and the cancellation of joint U.S.-Egyptian military exercises next month, to show disapproval.
U.S. officials have told reporters that Washington is also likely to suspend a shipment of Apache attack helicopters to Cairo unless the regime quickly reverses course.
Meanwhile Moscow, even as it joined the West in appealing for restraint and non-violent solutions to the Egyptian crisis, has also refrained from criticising the military, while the chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee of the Duma’s upper house blamed the United States and the European Union for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
“It is clear that Russia and Saudi Arabia prefer stability in Egypt, and both are betting on the Egyptian military prevailing in the current standoff, and are already acting on that assumption,” according to an op-ed that laid out the two countries’ common interests throughout the Middle East and was published Sunday by Alarabiya.net, the news channel majority-owned by the Saudi Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC).
Some observers argue that Russia and Saudi Arabia have a shared interest in containing Iran; reducing Turkish influence; co-operating on energy issues; and bolstering autocratic regimes, including Egypt’s, at the expense of popular Islamist parties, notably the Brotherhood and its affiliates, across the region.
“There’s a certain logic to all that, but it’s too early to say whether such an understanding can be reached,” said Freeman, who noted that Bandar “wrote the book on outreach to former ideological and geo-strategic enemies”, including China, and that his visit to Moscow “looks like classic Saudi breakout diplomacy”.
But reaching a deal on Syria would be particularly challenging. While Riyadh assigns higher priority to reducing Iran’s regional influence than to removing Assad, some analysts believe there are ways an agreement that would retain him as president could be struck, as Moscow insists, while reducing his power over the opposition-controlled part of the country and weakening his ties to Tehran and Hezbollah.
But Mark N. Katz, an expert on Russian Middle East policy at George Mason University, is sceptical about the prospects for a Russian-Saudi entente, noting that Bandar has pursued such a relationship in the past without success.
“I’m not saying it can’t work, but this has been his hobby horse,” he told IPS. “Whatever happens in Saudi-American relations, however, the Saudis don’t trust the Russians and don’t want them meddling in the region. Everything about the Russians ticks them off.”
He added that Abdullah’s harsh criticism was intended more as a “wake-up call” and the fact that “the Saudis are on the same side [in supporting the Egyptian military] as the Israelis has emboldened them”.
Photo Credit: Analysts worry about the effect of Egypt’s ongoing crisis on U.S.-Saudi relations. Above, CNO Adm. Jonathan Greenert and Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz in February. Credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery/CC by 2.0
]]>by Daniel Luban
For the last few weeks, Lobelog has been noting the continued disagreements among US neoconservatives over how to respond to the military coup in Egypt, with a few prominent neocons such as Robert Kagan denouncing it while many others are supporting it and calling on [...]]]>
by Daniel Luban
For the last few weeks, Lobelog has been noting the continued disagreements among US neoconservatives over how to respond to the military coup in Egypt, with a few prominent neocons such as Robert Kagan denouncing it while many others are supporting it and calling on the Egyptian military to finish off the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). These disagreements are continuing apace; yesterday, the Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens offered the latest salvo with a call for the US to “Support Al Sisi“. The column is vintage Stephens: after offering his typical platitudes about the need to throw off comforting pieties and make the best of a set of bad options, he concludes: “Gen. Sisi may not need shiny new F-16s, but riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets and Taser guns could help, especially to prevent the kind of bloodbaths the world witnessed last week.” Evidently this clear-eyed apostle of Seeing The World As It Is has determined that the Egyptian military has been massacring protesters with live ammo only because it’s been running low on rubber bullets.
But the neocons are only one segment of the US right-wing coalition, and their disagreements may not be symptomatic of what’s happening in the rest of it. Indeed, a wider focus could suggest that US right-wing support for the Egyptian military is even stronger than it might otherwise appear.
One particular aspect of the story that we might miss by focusing only on the neocons is the religious angle. Read National Review, still the flagship of the right and a place where various elements of the coalition mingle, and you will find very little on the killing of MB supporters, the rumored release of former President Hosni Mubarak, or other stories that have dominated mainstream coverage of Egypt. Instead, there’s a whole lot of coverage — and I do mean a whole, whole lot of coverage — of the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. The Copts are facing a “jihad,” a “pogrom,” a “Kristallnacht“; unsurprisingly, the magazine’s editors have urged the US to “back Egypt’s military,” in large part to protect the Copts, whose status is “a good bellwether for whether progress is being made in Egyptian society.”
Meanwhile, other NR commentators are going farther. Witness David French (former head of Evangelicals for Mitt [Romney] and prominent Christian Zionist) demanding that the US leverage its aid to force the Egyptian military to step up its anti-MB campaign in defense of Christianity: “The Muslim Brotherhood is our enemy, the Egyptian Christians are victims of jihad, and the American-supplied Egyptian military can and should exercise decisive force.” While French does not spell out exactly what he means by “decisive force,” given the current political context it can only be taken as a show of support for the military’s indiscriminate massacres of MB supporters.
None of this, of course, is to diminish the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians — those of us living in security elsewhere should not scoff at the justified fear and foreboding that they must feel. It’s merely to say that reports on their predicament, like Andrew Doran’s, which make claims like “bizarrely, Western media have largely portrayed the Muslim Brotherhood [rather than Christians] as the victims of violence” — while making no mention whatsoever of the hundreds of MB supporters who have been killed in recent weeks — give readers a rather skewed perspective on the current situation.
Yet this is a perspective that we discount at our own peril. The foreign policy commentariat may tend to view the situation in Egypt through the lens of realism versus neoconservatism, or democracy promotion versus authoritarianism. But for large segments of the US public, the situation in Egypt is first, foremost and last a struggle between Muslims and Christians, and when viewed through this lens their unstinting support for the coup leaders is all but guaranteed.
Photo Credit: Mohamed Azazy
]]>by Henry Precht
I wonder if it might help to puzzle out where the army might be taking Egypt in the period ahead if we think back to the Iranian revolution and the military’s role therein.
Old timers will recall that as Iran’s revolution gathered force, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah [...]]]>
by Henry Precht
I wonder if it might help to puzzle out where the army might be taking Egypt in the period ahead if we think back to the Iranian revolution and the military’s role therein.
Old timers will recall that as Iran’s revolution gathered force, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, was urged by supporters, foreign and domestic, to apply the “iron fist.” That was taken to mean the army would shoot down large numbers of troublemakers — as many as it takes to restore order. The Shah resisted that remedy, hoping that friends might help him find a less bloody way out of his predicament. He was loathe to leave a legacy of violent repression when his son succeeded him on the throne.
I argued in the State Department against relying on the iron fist. First, the military’s senior leadership, in general, lacked the talent or fiber to manage a brutal crackdown. They had risen through the ranks because of the one quality the Shah most valued: loyalty. In the absence of an active enemy, they had grown soft behind desks and in parade reviewing stands. There were, to be sure, a few exceptions — a few younger men mainly in the second rank, who might wield an iron fist. But the Shah didn’t entirely trust them. The air force chief, General Mohammad Khatami, for example, might have been one, but he had died in a hang glider accident — which some voices suspected was not, in fact, an accident, despite his marriage to the Shah’s sister.
Now let’s turn to the Egyptian army, a truly professional force, well trained, carefully selected and generally enjoying good morale. Egypt has fought more than five wars since 1948 and the army was plainly essential to the nation’s security. (Very different from the peaceable pre-revolution Iranian army — just as the present Revolutionary Guards are different from the Shah’s troops.) Widely respected and dear to the hearts of Egyptians, the army has been generously pampered, becoming a separate economic and social state within the state. From Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser onwards, senior Egyptian officers filled most of the top civilian government jobs in Cairo and the provinces.
That tradition has faded a bit in recent years as business and academic appointees replaced generals in the cabinet. Times change. The army leadership began to look inward after its own interests. Few generals now on duty have experienced, or expect to face, combat.
Still, national honour adheres to the officer corps; Egypt’s Free Officers Movement, after all, created the republic. The Egyptian on the street affords them respect, particularly in comparison with the run of old and new civilian politicians, who are often deemed corrupt or incompetent. I doubt, however, whether the current crop of military brass has the imagination, other political skills or relevant background to manage with subtlety the tricky weeks and months ahead. Shooting and jailing, no problem, they come naturally; wheeling and dealing in back rooms are an unfamiliar foe on a strange battlefield.
Will the senior corps remain unified as stress builds? The Iranians didn’t. Will they take guidance from the Americans? The Iranians were reluctant to do so without guidance from the Shah. Some Egyptian generals might; others will resent foreign meddling.
Neither Iranian nor Egyptian officer corps have seen themselves as Turk generals do, the ultimate protector of the inheritance from Ataturk and the constitution. There is no national ideology that conferred on Iranian and Egyptians a similar authority. Yet the Egyptian top brass earned praise for the way it engineered the removal of Hosni Mubarak and, by liberals and ancient regime remnants for the removal of Mohamed Morsi. It is a reputation that could fade quickly depending on events.
So much for a comparison of the two senior officer corps. In combatting iron fist-adherents in the Washington bureaucracy during my Iran days, I also argued that the draftee ranks were either (1) from the lower classes, twin brothers of those devout demonstrators whom they were supposed to shoot across the barricades or (2) technically trained, modern men who had been enlisted to cope with the sophisticated gear the Shah was acquiring. Below the officer ranks, the Iranian and Egyptian services are similar in origins and how they are treated. The modern men, it seemed to me, would, sooner or later, begin to think for themselves and some would conclude the Shah had no future. The Iranian draftees and noncoms, I thought, would in due course lay down their arms, follow the dictates of their religion and switch from the Shah to Ayatollah Khomeini. Right on both counts in Iran. Right also in Egypt? We shall see.
Before too many weeks pass we shall see how cohesively the new masters of Cairo in uniform hold together and how skillfully they can manage the nation during bitter strife. I am not sanguine.
]]>via IPS News
The military’s removal of democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi poses a serious challenge to Washington’s pro-democracy agenda and its ability to influence events in Egypt and the rest of the region.
The Barack Obama administration should make it clear to Egyptian Secretary of Defence [...]]]>
via IPS News
The military’s removal of democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi poses a serious challenge to Washington’s pro-democracy agenda and its ability to influence events in Egypt and the rest of the region.
The Barack Obama administration should make it clear to Egyptian Secretary of Defence Abdel Fattah al-Sisi the coup cannot stand, and Egypt’s unsteady march toward democracy should continue.
Although senior religious and opposition leaders were present on the stage, General al-Sisi’s military action to depose Morsi, suspend the constitution, and appoint an acting president was a major blow to the January 2011 revolution.
Toppling Morsi by the military in the name of national security makes a mockery of the principles of freedom, justice, and the rule of law for which millions demonstrated 30 months ago.
It is deeply disturbing that many within the Egyptian opposition who fought against the Mubarak regime are now welcoming the military’s intervention.
Long gas lines, high unemployment, exorbitant food prices, and pervasive corruption might explain people’s anger, but do the millions of protesters who called for Morsi’s head expect the post-Morsi government to solve these problems within a year or two? What will the new civilian government do about the military’s massive control of the economy and their opaque “black box” budget?
Al-Sisi’s brazen “in your face” action speaks volumes of perceived, and some say actual, U.S. impotence in the region. His temerity was largely driven by Washington’s timidity to prevent a coup or to denounce it after it happened.
Because of U.S. strategic interests in the region, its ongoing concerns about Syria, Iran, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement, and Egypt’s pivotal role in the region, Washington cannot abandon Cairo. The Egyptian military, however, must be made to understand this is a two-way street.
It’s time for U.S. policymakers to act boldly and decisively in support of democratic transitions and in opposition to reprehensible human rights violations across the region. They should stand firm against Arab militaries’ ever-present temptation to usurp the political process in Egypt and elsewhere.
Morsi inherited a dictatorial, military top-heavy, corrupt regime and a stalled economy. Several groups and centres of power in Egyptian society – including the military, the police, remnants of the old regime, secularists, and radical Salafis – opposed his election and refused to be governed by a Muslim Brotherhood man. They were bent on defeating him and brought out millions in the streets to do just that.
Ironically, this is not dissimilar to how some U.S. politicians have felt about President Obama’s election. Those who were bent on defeating President Obama have used the courts, state legislatures, the Republican controlled Congress, and the ballot box to advance their agenda.
Egyptian oppositionists, by contrast, have gone to the streets despite their seeming initial acceptance of the results of the election.
Yet, incompetence, insensitivity toward minorities and other groups that do not share the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, reticence to consult with his cabinet, and an inability to revive the economy marred Morsi’s one-year tenure.
When he came to office, Morsi promised to be president of all of Egypt. He failed to deliver. As a majority in the parliament, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood showed no inclination to form alliances with other parties and groups.
While he halted the downward spiral of the economy and successfully sought international loans, the daily life of the average Egyptian has gotten much worse. In the past year, Egyptians have suffered from a lack of personal security and high unemployment.
Egyptian women under the new regime have been subjected to widespread personal attacks, sexual abuse, and humiliation. Morsi and his government failed to combat the pervasive terror against women meaningfully and convincingly.
Lawlessness and joblessness are rampant. Thuggery and fear have replaced civility and hope.
Let’s be clear. These conditions and Morsi’s demise resulted from the failure of a particular Islamic party in power and a particular leader. They do not signal the defeat of Arab democracy or a failure of political Islam.
Rachid Ghannouchi and al-Nahda, by contrast, have successfully created an inclusive, tolerant, and workable political governing model in Tunisia.
Washington should actively encourage the Egyptian military to take several immediate steps. First, urge the newly appointed Acting President Adly Mansour to form a national unity government and set a date certain for parliamentary and presidential elections within six months.
Second, in light of President Obama’s recent statements, urge the military to free Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood and other top leaders, who have been detained in the past few days. These leaders should not be tried on trumped-up charges or for political vendettas.
Third, urge the Egyptian military to allow the acting president a free hand to establish civilian rule and for the military to return to the barracks.
Fourth, urge the acting president to proceed with national reconciliation by including representatives from all political parties and civil society organisations. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice party, of course, should be included.
These steps do not necessarily guarantee saving Egypt from total collapse or preventing a possible civil war. They do offer, however, a civilian-managed “roadmap,” that could be embraced by all Egyptians.
Washington should be clear: Al-Sisi should know the era of military dictatorship in the Arab world has run its course. Such excuses as “foreign armed groups,” “Shia terrorism,” and now “Muslim Brotherhood plots” to justify a military takeover are stale and no longer believable.
If al-Sisi and his generals doubt that, let them take another look at Tahrir Square.
Photo U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in New York, New York on September 24, 2012.
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It’s no wonder that Egypt has floundered in its efforts to create a more democratic system from the ruins of the Mubarak regime.
A sweeping new history of Middle Eastern political activists shows that the search for justice has deep roots in the region but has often been thwarted [...]]]>
via IPS News
It’s no wonder that Egypt has floundered in its efforts to create a more democratic system from the ruins of the Mubarak regime.
A sweeping new history of Middle Eastern political activists shows that the search for justice has deep roots in the region but has often been thwarted by the intervention of foreign powers.
The Arab Spring revolts of 2011 were “both improbable and long in the making,” writes Elizabeth Thompson in her book, “Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East.”
The young people who massed in Tahrir Square and overturned the U.S.-backed Mubarak dictatorship were the heirs of Col. Ahmad Urabi, whose peasant army was crushed in 1882 by British troops. The beneficiaries of 2011 so far, however, are the heirs of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose concept of “justice” appears to restrict the rights of women, religious minorities and secular groups.
On Tuesday, President Mohamed Morsi’s own legal adviser resigned to protest a law that would force the retirement of more than 3,000 judges – Mubarak appointees that have sought to blunt the rising influence of Islamist politicians such as Morsi. The United States, while criticising human rights abuses under the new regime, appears to be placing a higher priority on Egypt maintaining its peace treaty with Israel.
If, as President Barack Obama likes to say – quoting Martin Luther King – “the arc of history bends toward justice” – in the Middle East, that arc has been exceedingly long.
The breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I interrupted movements for constitutional government and tainted liberalism by association with Western colonialism. Military autocrats, nationalists and Islamic groups took their place.
Thompson, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Virginia, structures her book by compiling mini-biographies of strivers for justice beginning with an early Ottoman bureaucrat, Mustafa Ali, who wrote a critique of corruption in Egypt, and ending with Wael Ghonim.
Ghonim, a Google executive, created a Facebook page devoted to a young Egyptian beaten to death in 2010 by police that attracted 300,000 followers – many of whom later gathered in Tahrir Square.
Others profiled in the book include Halide Edib, known as Turkey’s “Joan of Arc,” who first supported, then opposed Kemal Ataturk’s dictatorship; Yusuf Salman Yusuf or “Comrade Fahd,” whose Iraqi Communist Party was the largest and most inclusive political movement in modern Iraqi history; and Ali Shariati, the Iranian Islamic Socialist whose ideals were hijacked by the clerical regime after the 1979 revolution.
At a book launch Tuesday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Thompson was asked by IPS if her book was largely a “history of losers” and whether there was any way to break the dismal cycle of one step forward, two steps back toward effective, representative government in the Middle East.
She compared recent revolts in the region to the 1848 revolutions in Europe that failed at the time but were key precursors of democratic movements to follow.
“You have to think long term,” she said. The optimistic interpretation of the Arab Spring is that it has led to “a fundamental shift in the political culture that will bear fruit decades later.”
She conceded that the current picture in Egypt is not a happy one.
Women, who in 2011 figured prominently in the overthrow of Mubarak, are now afraid to go to Tahrir Square for fear of being molested by thugs. Morsi, the president who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, “is in a defensive posture,” Thompson said, “playing to the Salafist right.” Meanwhile, “the poor and the Copts are losing out.”
However, the Egyptian press has never been so free and Middle Easterners in general are more exposed to information than at any time in their history, she said. “People are not sealed off like they were in Syria in 1989” when state-run media omitted news that the Berlin Wall had fallen, she said.
Still, time and again in the last 150 years, the desire for security and independence from foreign powers has trumped liberal conceptions of human rights.
Thompson’s book contains many tantalising “What ifs” often linked to foreign machinations.
What if France had permitted Syria to retain an independent constitutional monarchy under King Feisal after World War I? French troops instead occupied the country under an internationally blessed mandate that lasted until after World War II.
What if Akram al-Hourani, leader of the Arab Socialist Party in Syria after independence, had not agreed to union with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt in 1958? Nasser proceeded to outlaw Syrian political parties and in 1963, the Baath party staged a coup and installed a regime that is fighting for its existence today.
The book also sheds light on important figures such as the Palestinian Salah Khalaf, Yasser Arafat’s number two who was known as Abu Iyad. Assassinated in 1991 by the rejectionist Abu Nidal faction, Iyad had made the transition from terrorist mastermind to supporter of the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Arafat, who used to rely on Khalaf’s advice, might have steered his movement more wisely in his later years if he had not lost Abu Iyad as well as PLO military commander, Abu Jihad, who was killed by Israelis in 1988.
If, as Thompson concludes, the Arab Spring “has reprised the struggle interrupted by the World Wars and the Cold War,” it is a struggle that is still far from being won.
Photo: Protests across Egypt have not brought a right to information. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani.
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The governing programme of Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood has been disappointing. His commitment to genuine democracy has been faltering, and his efforts at inclusion and political tolerance have been wanting.
Morsi’s actions against the Egyptian comedian Basim Yousif belie his initial statements supporting [...]]]>
Morsi’s actions against the Egyptian comedian Basim Yousif belie his initial statements supporting tolerance, inclusion, and freedom of expression. Humor is the backbone of a mature democracy; muzzling the voices of dissent is an omen of a budding dictatorship.
These actions unfortunately confirm the suspicions of many Arab secularists, liberals, and non-Muslim Brotherhood citizens that once the MB reaches power through elections, they would scuttle democracy and replace it with their version of theocratic rule or divine hukm.
Morsi’s intolerance of secularists, women, Christians, and even liberal judges is generating fears in Egypt and elsewhere that the country has replaced the secular Mubarak dictatorship with a theocratic autocracy. Morsi’s rule does not allow a diversity of views, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of the role of religion in the state has emerged as the guiding principle for governing Egypt.
This disturbing phenomenon does not bode well for political Islam, especially as Islamic political parties become majorities in Arab and Muslim governments.
My former government colleagues and I have argued for years that as part of government, Islamic political parties would focus on “bread and butter” issues and relegate their religious ideology to the backburner. We believed their policy concerns would trump their ideology.
As minority government partners in Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Yemen, Malaysia, and Indonesia, Islamic parties focused on legislation that responded to the needs of their constituents, bargained with other parties to pass needed legislation regulating commerce, transportation, power, energy, food prices, and other issues of concern to their citizens.
They generally were not elected or re-elected because of their Islamic credentials and did not use their Islamic ideology to govern. They promoted moderate platforms during their election campaign and generally have governed as responsible factions in their respective parliaments.
As we briefed senior policymakers, we highlighted the difference between mainstream political parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots in Jordan, Palestine, Morocco, and elsewhere, and extremist Islamic groups, which did not believe in man-made democracy and inclusive government.
At the time, all of those parties were in the minority. We also judged that when some of those parties become a majority, they would uphold the same democratic, inclusive tendencies.
The Turkish Justice and Development Party or AKP, which became the first Sunni majority governing party in the region, emerged as the poster child of our briefings. It governed democratically, defended Turkish secularism, and encouraged inclusion in the economic and political life of Turkey. Despite its Islamic roots, AKP supported the democratic notion of separating religion from politics.
Many had hoped the Muslim Brotherhood would bring a similar governing model to Egypt. In fact, that was the promise that President Morsi made upon his election as president. He consolidated his power the first one hundred days, but since then he’s begun to consolidate his control in undemocratic ways based on a constitution that he helped push through hastily and without much public discussion.
How can Morsi recapture democracy and move Egypt in the right direction?
First, rescind the sham constitution and replace it with a constitution that reflects the diverse political ideologies in Egyptian society.
Second, include secularists, women, Christians, and non-MB leaders in high positions in government and promote a national programme of tolerance toward these groups and punish those who engage in sectarian and gender hate crimes.
Third, hold open, free elections for the next parliament, with much simpler and straightforward voting procedures and without stacking the decks in favour of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Fourth, create a major fund to support young men and women in start-up initiatives in technology and entrepreneurship to develop businesses and create jobs. The young generation must have tangible incentives to have a stake in society in order to help build a prosperous future.
Fifth, convene a series of high-level meetings of leaders – men and women – from across Egyptian society from the business, banking, and tourism community, the professions, civil society, academia, and the high tech industry, with different political, social, and religious ideologies to discuss the immediate future of Egypt and develop specific strategies of how to get there.
The Muslim Brotherhood has no monopoly on the future vision of Egypt. If Morsi is to be the president of all of Egypt, he must take concrete steps to alleviate his citizens’ concerns about his leadership, create jobs for the youth, and partner with leaders of different ideological stripes to build a more democratic Egypt.
Egypt is endowed with a rich culture and a diverse social fabric and could not possibly prosper under a theocracy. Putting the country on the right path will be Morsi’s greatest legacy.
Photo: Protesters battle police in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the second anniversary of Egypt’s January 25 revolution. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani/IPS.
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