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How American Hopes for a Deal in Egypt Were Undercut: David D. Kirkpatrick, Peter Baker, and Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, August 18, 2013
Why Democracy Fell Short in the Middle East: Patrick Martin, Globe and Mail, August 16, 2013
Lawless Sinai Shows Risks Rising in Fractured Egypt: Robert F. Worth, New York Times, August 10, 2013
SUPPORTING THE “PEACE PROCESS” AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN EGYPT: MISINFORMATION
Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report, August 7, 2013
There’s an Arab proverb that goes like this: When an enemy extends his hand to you cut it off. If you can’t, kiss it. Who do you think is being classified as the cutting or the kissing treatment today?
In contrast to the let’s-empower-our enemies approach, two of the best Middle East expert journalists in the world have just written from different perspectives on the real Middle East and the results are refreshing. But in other media the odds are fixed at four to one against sanity. First, at one think tank, Khaled Abu Toameh has published, “Ramallah vs. the `PeaceProcess.’” He puts peace process in quotes to show his sarcasm. He tells the story of two Israeli Arab businessmen who wanted to open a Fox clothing store in the West Bank (like the one I shop at in Dizengoff Center).
Although given Palestinian Authority (PA) permission and having already made a big investment, they found themselves the target of attacks and calls for firing bombing the store. The assaults were even organized by PA journalists. So they gave up, costing 150 jobs for West Bank Palestinians. I could easily tell the same story a half-dozen times.
As Abu Toameh concludes: “This incident is an indication of the same`anti-normalization’” movement which [PA leader] Abbas supports will be the first to turn against him if he strikes a deal with Israel.” But, of course, for both the reason that this is a powerful radical movement and the factor that he is one of the leaders of the anti-peace camp, Abbas won’t make a deal ultimately.
“Does John Kerry’s Peace Process Have a Chance?” asks Aaron David Miller. And in subtle terms he answers: No. He writes: “Neither Abbas nor Netanyahu wants to say no to America’s top diplomat and take the blame for the collapse of negotiations. This proved sufficient to get them back to negotiations, but more will be required to keep them there, let alone to reach an accord. Right now, neither has enough incentives, disincentives, and an urgent desire or need to move forward boldly.
“Unfortunately, right now, the U.S. owns this one more than the parties do. This is not an ideal situation. It would have been better had real urgency brought Abbas and Netanyahu together rather than John Kerry.”
In other words, Kerry wants and needs these talks; Netanyahu and Abbas don’t. I mean it literally when I say that there are only two sensible people given regular access to the mass media on the Middle East, one is Miller the other is Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post. (If I have left someone out please remind me. But remember I said, regularly.)
If you want to know the real attitude consider this recent exchange in Israel’s Knesset: Jamal Zahalka of the Arab nationalist Party, Balad,: “We, the Arabs, were here before you (the Jews) and we will be here after you!” The prime minister asked permission to approach the podium and said in answer, “The first part isn’t true, and the second part won’t be!” Remember that the Communist Party is the most moderate of the Arab parties. Fatah and the PA are more radical and their leaders would not hesitate to repeat |Zahalka’s statement.
Second, Zahalka wasn’t afraid to invoke genocide because he knew he was protected by democracy.That’s the real situation. The Palestinian leadership’s goal of wiping out Israel has not changed. Only if it ever does will there be any chance of a two-state solution.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation the Washington Post has no less than four op-eds or editorials in one week on why the United States should support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
In Robert Kagan, “American aid makes the U.S. Complicit in the Egyptian Army’s Acts” gives the realpolitik version. This is ludicrous. Was the U.S. thus complicit in the doings of every ally, including Egypt from 1978 to 2011? Should one dump good allies because of things they do, a debate that goes back to the onset of the Cold War.
And any way U.S. support for the army would be popular. Indeed, U.S. policy was “complicit” with the army coup against Mubarak and was complicit to the Mursi Islamist regime which it helped install, too!
Then we have the liberal human rights/democracy project view in Michele Dunne: “With Morsi’s ouster, time for a new U.S. policy toward Egypt,” because a U.S. policy supporting human rights must ensure that the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood is part of the government (and no doubt would encourage stability)
And we have, third, Reuel Marc Gerecht: “In Egypt, the popularity of Islamism shall endure,” which gives the conservative version for why we need the Brotherhood in power. Yet after all, just because the enemy can endure is not a reason to refuse to fight them. On the contrary, it is necessary at minimum to ensure it doesn’t become stronger.
Finally we have an editorial, The Post’s View: Egypt’s military should hear from Obama administration, which demands that the Obama Administration also pressures the military. Let’s be frank: the Egyptian army did a great service not just to Egypt’s people but also to the U.S. government because it saved its strategic balance in the Middle East.
Only one op-ed piece, Jackson Diehl: “Egypt’s ‘democrats’ abandon democracy,” pointed out a rather salient issue. The moderates themselves stopped supporting the status quo and begged for a coup! They support the government now! They want the Obama Administration to back the
military regime! Good grief.
THE TRUE NATURE OF A COUP REVEALED
Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, Aug. 14, 2013
It is an uncomfortable truth: Dictatorship often rests on a measure of consent. A people acquiesce in their own servitude, forge their own chains.
An ordinary man obliges, and the crowd projects on him its need for a redeemer. Forgive Egypt’s Gen. Abdul Fattah Sissi his flagrant political transgressions—the sacking in July of a legitimately elected president. The secular crowd, all those good and decent liberals, were clamoring for military intervention.
Young rebels who had come together to topple the old Mubarak dictatorship now conspired with the military and police to overthrow the first elected civilian ruler in Egyptian history. It was odd. Men and women who had given military dictatorship decades of obedience and indulgence were now driven by a spirit of impatience with the soldiers.
Some of the leading men of the realm were on hand when Gen. Sissi—hitherto unknown, promoted by Mohammed Morsi himself over more senior colleagues in the army—announced the end of the Morsi presidency. On Wednesday, Mohamed ElBaradei, one of the luminaries who had been tasked with giving the coup a liberal cover abroad, at least had the decency to call it quits and distance himself from the violence unleashed by the security forces on the supporters of Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. ElBaradei’s resignation from the vice presidency came quickly on the heels of that brutal action. “It has become difficult for me to hold responsibility for decisions I do not agree with, whose consequences I fear,” he said. “I cannot be responsible for one drop of blood in front of God, and then in front of my conscience, especially with my belief that we could have avoided it.”
In truth, there was no avoiding the bloodshed. It was willful to assume that the Brotherhood would go gently into the night—that a political party that had pined for power for eight long decades, that had won outright parliamentary and presidential elections and secured the passage of a constitution of its own making, would bow to a military writ. No one who followed the official media, who observed erstwhile decent thinkers give themselves over to a new belligerence and venom, would have been surprised by the bloodshed.
Egyptians have always prided themselves on their peaceful temperament. Their country was not Iraq or Syria or Algeria. They had seemed confident that blood would not be spilled in their midst. But vengeance stalked their country in the year of the Morsi presidency.
National chauvinism was unleashed, and the dream of an Egypt without beards and veils took hold. There was in the land a clash of two fundamentalisms, it seemed—the utopia of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the modernist conceit that the reign of the Brotherhood was foisted on a sophisticated, progressive country.
The crowd that gave the coup its blessing ran away from the reality of their homeland—the crippling poverty, the illiteracy, the dispossessed who saw in Mohammed Morsi, a peasant’s son, one of their own. And in their willful escape and evasion, those who cheered the military seizure of power were willing to entertain the darkest of conspiracies.
The rise of the Brotherhood was an American plot, they maintained, part of an American scheme to subjugate Egypt and deny it its place among the nations. Political Islam itself was disowned, turned into an American creation. Mohammed Morsi had kept the peace with Israel, brokered an accommodation between Hamas and Israel: This, too, became proof of this malignant American design.
The rule of reason had quit Egypt. Under the old regime, Egyptians came to believe everything and nothing as their military rulers took them out of political life, denied them the chance to participate in the making of their own history. The stridency, the violence with which they pronounced on political matters in the year behind us, issued out of this damage to the culture sustained in the years of authoritarianism.
In truth, patience could have served the Egyptians. There was no urgency for a coup d’état. Mr. Morsi had the presidency, but the army was beyond his control, the police was a law unto itself, and the judiciary a truculent citadel of the old regime. The feloul, the remnants of the old regime, still had the commanding heights of the economy.
The Brotherhood had sown its own poor seeds, and the bloom was off that Islamist plant. The Islamist project was in retreat, but the pace of history had to be forced, and the Brotherhood had to be put to flight. A frenzy came to surround Abdul Fattah Sissi: He was the reincarnation of the beloved strongman Gamal Abdul Nasser. He would sack the Brotherhood and then return to the barracks.
Thus would the great schism in Egypt, the fight over the place of Islam in public life, be papered over. The army would give the secularists the victory that eluded them at the ballot box.
The two pro-Morsi encampments that the Brotherhood and its supporters put up in Cairo had to be stormed. The crowds that overturned Messrs. Mubarak and Morsi had once owned Tahrir Square, had brought the life of the country to a standstill. Their agitation and flamboyance had become the stuff of legend, and the army itself had paid tribute to the protesters. No such regard was to be shown the Islamists.
In this Egyptian drama, the United States did not give the best of itself. When the Obama administration could not call the coup d’état by its name, we put on display our unwillingness to honor our own democratic creed. Egypt has long been in the American strategic orbit. When our secretary of state opined that the army was “restoring democracy,” we gave away the moral and strategic incoherence of an administration that has long lost its way.
THE CHOICE BETWEEN AN AUTHORITARIAN AND A THEOCRAT IS A NO-BRAINER
Lawrence Solomon
National Post, Aug 13, 2013
Egypt’s winners in the restored military rule are the poor, the young,women, and those who fear Islamic rule would end prospects for democracy.
Egypt’s losers in the restored military rule are Islamic fundamentalists and their supporters. Egypt’s winners are the poor, the young, women, Christians and other minorities, and those who fear that Islamic rule would permanently end prospects for democracy and a modern society. If Western leaders and the Western press stop their obtuse condemnations of Egypt’s military for rescuing Egyptians from Muslim Brotherhood rule, some semblance of peace could also be a winner.
There is no such thing as a good coup, only bad coups and worse coups. All military regimes, in time, become tawdry and self-serving. Whatever intentions the army officers begin with, they end up as petty tyrants. An elected ruler is kept in check by the knowledge that he can be fired. Take that knowledge away and, however pure his motives, he will end up arranging the affairs of state around his personal convenience.
No doubt Velasco – who inspired Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez – genuinely thought he was standing up for the downtrodden masses against the oligarchs. No doubt, from the opposite end of the spectrum in neighbouring Chile, Augusto Pinochet genuinely thought he was saving his country from Communist meltdown. In both cases, there was a smidgen of truth in their self-justification. But, over time, both men became autocrats, repressing dissent and enriching themselves at state expense.
“This is an Egyptian revolution … It is not a military coup as named by the Brotherhood liars … 33 million Egyptian protesters are in the streets against the Muslim Brotherhood.” These are the words of Egyptian reformers – human rights and pro-democracy activists, feminists, liberals, leftists and intellectuals – who resent the implication that the military, and not the people, took the initiative to oust the Muslim Brotherhood, and who have taken to the airwaves and social media to get their side of the story out. Many of them, perhaps the great majority, are among the very same people who demonstrated in January 2011 to oust their authoritarian dictator, President Hosni Mubarak. Seeing the consequences as the Muslim Brotherhood increasingly moved toward totalitarian rule, protesters starting in December 2012 again took to the streets, and in even greater numbers, to reinstate the military rulers who were all that stood between them and fundamentalist Islamic rule.
“When terrorism is trying to take hold of Egypt and foreign interference is trying to dig into our domestic affairs, then it’s inevitable for the great Egyptian people to support its armed forces against the foreign danger,” wrote leading liberal Esraa Abdel Fattah in a newspaper column, referring to the Muslim Brotherhood as both terrorists and foreigners. Said Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, this is a “historical revolution and not a coup d’état.” “The revolutionaries turned to the army and the army responded … Democracy is about more than elections.”
Those in the West who deplore the military’s overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government – they include leaders like President Obama as well as many in the press and in various think tanks – seem not to understand that democracy amounts to mob rule if untempered by protections for human rights. In this view, Egypt’s “democracy” under the Muslim Brotherhood was anything but laudable – after the Muslim Brotherhood took office it imprisoned critics, prosecuted journalists for “insulting the president” and looked away as Christian Copts and other minorities were attacked. The Muslim Brotherhood ruled less as a Western-style democracy than as a totalitarian theocracy.
It’s inevitable for the great Egyptian people to support its armed forces against the foreign danger.
The West also criticizes Egypt’s reformers for switching sides, as seen in articles in The New York Times (“Egyptian Liberals Embrace the Military, Brooking No Dissent3“) and Washington Post (“Egypt’s ‘democrats’ abandon democracy4“). Yet the only credible path to democracy in the Middle East is through the military – there is not one example of theocratic rule morphing into democracy in the Middle East’s 1400-year experience with Islam.
A military dictatorship, in contrast, often morphs into democracy – this is what happened throughout Latin America in recent decades and it’s what happened in the Middle East in Turkey, after a military coup overthrew the Caliphate following World War I. The new Republic of Turkey abolished Shariah law and other Islamic institutions and introduced Western reforms, including a Western legal code and the emancipation of women, all under authoritarian strong-man rule. Over time – it took many decades, not years – Turkey morphed into a secular democracy with a private-sector economy. Egypt under Mubarak was in fact steadily modernizing, albeit in fits and starts. His ban on female genital mutilation was one of the reforms that inflamed Muslim opposition, as was his protection of Christian minorities.
To an aspiring liberal or democrat in the Middle East today, the choice between an authoritarian and a theocrat is a no-brainer. This explains the about-face by Egypt’s reformers when they saw how wrong their 2011 revolution went. To many average folk in Egypt, the revolution that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood was also a no-brainer, if only because of the collapsing Egyptian economy – in the two weeks preceding the army takeover, 92% of Egyptians reported that they were either “struggling” or “suffering,” according to a Gallup Poll, with 80% believing the country’s economic conditions were getting worse. Just 19% of the populace still supported the governing party. 53% reported that elections were more honest under Mubarak, 80% that life was better under Mubarak.
Put yourself among the majority of Egyptians today and you could understand their incredulousness and dismay at Westerners who label their revolution a military coup – in the minds of most Egyptians, both revolutions were popular uprisings that led the military to replace the tyrants in power. They see the West’s condemnation of their revolution as continued support for the Muslim Brotherhood and as de facto encouragement of more Muslim Brotherhood attempts to violently return to power.
You can also understand why fewer than 20% of Egyptians support the U.S., and why many are welcoming overtures from Russia, which has offered to replace U.S. military aid and which is supporting the Egyptian military government at the United Nations. Russia, once a major player in the Middle East and an ally of Egypt’s until it was jilted for the U.S. in the 1970s, seems determined to make a comeback.
If the West loses Egypt, it will have lost the Arab world’s most important country, portending a loss of influence in other West-friendly Arab nations. Egyptian reformers will have lost out, too: An Egypt with close ties to authoritarian Russia would be less open to democracy.
The Obama Administration needs to hit its reset button on Egypt, as does the rest of the West, and wholeheartedly stand with Egyptians in their Second Egyptian Revolution.
The death of so many innocent civilians in the last few days is truly appalling. But the best way to minimize the horrendous loss of life is to end the perception, certainly within Egypt, that the West supports the Muslim Brotherhood’s return to power. The interim government in Cairo has already accused Obama of encouraging violent groups by not denouncing the “terrorist acts” on vital installations, churches, and government buildings.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not our friend, or a friend of democracy. Give the forces for modernity in Egypt a break, and peace a chance.
How American Hopes for a Deal in Egypt Were Undercut: David D. Kirkpatrick, Peter Baker, and Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, August 18, 2013
Why Democracy Fell Short in the Middle East: Patrick Martin, Globe and Mail, August 16, 2013
Lawless Sinai Shows Risks Rising in Fractured Egypt: Robert F. Worth, New York Times, August 10, 2013
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