Posted on 09/16/2013 7:02:53 AM PDT by SJackson
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
The Egyptian Pyramid Scheme
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On September 16, 2013 @ 12:56 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments
Deserts are funny things. A big wide open space in which nothing moves can play tricks on the mind. Spend enough time looking at a desert and you will see things moving in it because your mind needs to believe that there is life in it. Look hard enough and you will see democracy, progress and change.
But when you close your eyes and open them again, you will see that there is only a desert. And that there only ever was a desert.
Everything else was a mirage.
Egypt has gone back to what it was before the Arab Spring. It is now once again a country ruled by the military and bureaucratic institutions that are the legacy of British colonialism. Mubarak will not return to power again, but there are plenty of other military men to squat on top of a bankrupt oligarchy that lives on foreign aid and pride.
The mirage of Tahrir Square, the fireworks, fires and social media protesters brandishing smartphones and throwing down with riot police, is fading away. There will be more riots and fires and rapes. But that false sense of history being made will never return.
The truth about the Arab Spring is that it never existed. The term was coined by Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor, who had spent years urging engagement with Hamas and championing the role of the Muslim Brotherhood as a “firewall” against Al-Qaeda “radicalism.”
This Arab Spring had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. It was a scheme to split the Islamist ranks by turning over the Middle East to political Islamists. It was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Green Belt strategy practiced on a grander scale than Iran. Instead of Jimmy Carter hoping that the Ayatollah Khomeini would checkmate the USSR, there was Barack Obama counting on Muslim Brotherhood election victories to make the practice of international terrorism passé.
The Arab Spring was a cheerful brand, a shiny media package, covering up an ugly truth. The optimistic implications of its name kept many from looking at the list of ingredients and finding out that the only things inside were Islamists and more Islamists.
The pyramid scheme would keep investing in new Islamist governments and they would pay us back by discrediting Al Qaeda’s campaign of terror and that, the liberal foreign policy mavens insisted, would allow us to bring an end to the War on Terror.
Egypt was where it was all supposed to come together. It was the most powerful Arab country standing and its political system was a legacy of European colonialism. The Muslim Brotherhood had been born there and Al Qaeda, in its own way as well, with ambitious Egyptian Brotherhood members like Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s current leader and former grey eminence, using Bin Laden as a hand puppet.
That was why Obama went to Cairo. His new beginning had its biggest implications for Egypt. This was where the Muslim Brotherhood was supposed to turn his Post-American foreign policy into a success.
Not only didn’t the Arab Spring do what it falsely promised; open up closed societies, expand freedom and reform the region; but it didn’t even do what its backers wanted.
The Arab Spring was supposed to bring stability, but it made Egypt more unstable. It was supposed to work economic miracles by fusing devout Islam with free market capitalism. Western useful idiots told Morsi to use Turkey as a model. He did. The real Turkey is a paranoid oligarchy in debt up to its eyeballs.
Finally, it was supposed to neuter Al Qaeda. Instead it only encouraged it. Islamists taking power by winning elections was supposed to convince Al Qaeda members that it was time to trade in the bomb for the ballot box. Instead the Muslim Brotherhood used Al Qaeda to play a game of “Good Terrorist” and “Bad Terrorist” with the United States the way most Muslim countries do.
The traditional Egyptian authorities, the old oligarchy, disliked the Muslim Brotherhood businessmen financed by Qatari cash and propagandized by its Al Jazeera megaphone, even more than Mubarak’s son. They knew that given time, Morsi would take their posts and business monopolies and hand them over to his supporters. The issue for them wasn’t Islam; it was power and money.
They knew that there was no Arab Spring. This was a regime change operation. Washington had decided that its old allies were no longer getting the job done and decided to trade them in for the Brotherhood. And they waited, giving the Brotherhood and Obama enough rope to hang themselves with. The same type of manipulated popular revolt that had brought them down would bring Morsi down too. And did.
The Muslim Brotherhood went down, denounced as thieves, murderers, terrorists, Zionists and American puppets. Only 3 out of 5 of those charges are actually true, but the other two are the only ones that matter.
Assassinating Sadat was a minor matter. That sort of thing happens in the Middle East. But becoming a tool of American regime change is treason.
Mubarak had kept the Muslim Brotherhood around to demonstrate to the United States that pushing him to democratize was too dangerous; stepping on it just enough to keep it down, but not wipe it out. It took him too long to realize that Obama not only would not stop pushing for elections out of fear of a Muslim Brotherhood victory, but would actually welcome a Muslim Brotherhood victory.
Egypt, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and many Muslim countries, had used Islamic terrorism as a counter. Either the United States would support the “moderate” and “responsible” authorities committed to occasionally fighting terrorism or the terrorists would take over. It didn’t expect an America insane enough to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood was the moderate and responsible alternative.
The fury and hate directed at the Muslim Brotherhood comes out that deep sense of betrayal. The Muslim Brotherhood’s political judo trick of flipping its dreaded image as a threat of violence into a gatekeeper of violence should have been anticipated, especially since that is the whole purpose of terrorism, but change comes slowly to the region. And it usually comes from outside.
Egypt’s ruling authorities were shaped by a British colonial patronage whose roots were in a former century. The Muslim Brotherhood was politically influenced by modern transnational movements like Nazism and is far more flexible and light on its feet. And unlike its leftist opposition, which is mainly clever when it comes to making memes, it understands how to seize power.
Obama’s Cairo pivot gave the Muslim Brotherhood its best shot at power in Egypt, but it may have also destroyed it. The Muslim Brotherhood’s continued existence is no longer an asset that keeps American calls for democracy at bay. It has become a Damocles sword of regime change hanging over their necks. And that means it may have to be destroyed. In the peculiar politics of the region, success may be the only thing that can destroy terrorists.
But destroying the Brotherhood is a big job. The authorities would prefer that the Muslim Brotherhood accept its place and return to the way things were. And that is what everyone really wants. Not hope, change or revolution. Only the past. Even the Islamists only long for a return to an ancient status quo.
The desert is a barren place. It’s not a place of life, growth or change. Western travelers, bored with the lifelessness, squint and think that they can see a revolution coming that will transform the region.
And then they open their eyes and see that there is nothing there.
Spring reminds one of renewing after a long, dark, cold winter. The Muslims are still in that long, dark, cold winter and prefer it to enlightenment.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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In what sense is the left opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood?
They put them in power, they give them Libyan weapons and in the case of Hillary they literally sleep with them.
This article reads OK on first glance, but dig deeper and it's built on slithering sand.
Like a desert. Like an empty desert.
Very well crafted and to the point.
I think that gives our President too much credit for foresight (even if erroneous) and good intentions. Otherwise, an interesting article.
Basically this is what we suspected from the beginning.
Duh!
Barry Soetoro is all about the CHAOS - he probably is a card-carrying member of the MB. He is an unmitigated liar who should NEVER be trusted under any circumstances. Give this man no quarter to be doing anything in the best interests of America as a sovereign nation. Out of his own mouth, he has told us as much.
I think his point is that brother barry thought that once he got Morsi in place, it was over, the bros. win...like the day after his first election. The muzzie bros. are like the monkeys who grab the banana in the trap...they can't help themselves and the ME is no place where a rulebook is relevant; fear, greed and brute force rule the day!
I do believe it is true that the idiots in Washington are helping to destroy the bros. by enabling them. Similar situation in Syria...the gooners going up against Assad (and Iran, Lebanese Hizballah, and Russia) are likely to overplay their hand and get themselves wiped out, whereas if they were forced to assess their strength in a realistic manner they would likely survive and possibly overcome Assad over time.
Obama was just gigging gullible reporters again.
“In what sense is the left opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood?”
I think they mean the Egyptian left - the more secular and progressive elements in Egypt who opposed the dictatorship, but also oppose turning the country into another Islamic theocracy.
I think the article reads like an Obammunist apologia for, and dissembling of, his demolition of U.S.-sponsored security arrangements in the region going back to Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter (Nixon got Sadat to toss the Russians by exposing their plot to create a puppet regime, and Carter got Sadat to sign the peace treaty with Israel, which is the cornerstone of the pre-Obama architecture).
I think the author is trying to forefend delivery of blame to Obama's doorstep for what Obama has, with an abundance of foresight and practical advice, done to demolish U.S., Egyptian, and Israeli security.
Who first coined the phrase “Arab Spring?” It was cynical black humor really by those who perpetrated the ouster of Mubarek. The Muslim Brotherhood Saudi Arabian leader’s daughter Huma Abedin at Hillary’s side giving Hillary advice beneficial to one group and that group is the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood crowd with top jobs in Obama’s White House. Obama’s trying to do the same thing in Syria, which is to oust the leader and put power into the hands of Jihadists, who want to turn the whole world Muslim or else. Everywhere one looks when it comes to Obama, one reads, hears, sees Muslim Brotherhood friends and associates and staff. This is an administration that acts in ways that benefit not America, but America’s enemies.
“The term was coined by Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor, who had spent years urging engagement with Hamas and championing the role of the Muslim Brotherhood as a “firewall” against Al-Qaeda “radicalism.”
The philosophical foundations of both Al Queda and the Muslim Brotherhood have their origins in the same men, in Egypt, and those around them - Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_al-Banna) and Sayyid Qutb a Muslim Brotherhood philosopher, activist and writer and “the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23GURU.html).
Someone cannot TRULY understand either Al Queda or the Muslim Brotherhood without coming to know the philosphies of those two men. What do Al Queda and the Muslim Brotherhood represent to the world? Two sides of the same coin; one playing the “good cop” (MB) to the more violent “bad cop” (Al Queda) as if to say “I’m better”; when their long term aims are similar where they are not identical.
The always naive Zbigniew Brzezinski’s creating another “Jimmy Carter” foreign policy - if the author’s pronouncements on the U.S. policy import to the Arab Spring are correct.
“Egypt’s ruling authorities were shaped by a British colonial patronage whose roots were in a former century.”
Nonsense. The British had their own policies and priorities and their own system of administration from an administrators perspective, but beyond that they merely tied into the local home-grown patronage and “old boy” networks that Egypt had from Ottoman times (100s of years). The main local Egyptian aspects of that was not a British creation.
Culture, culture, culture.
The British had colonial power in Egypt; they did not create its culture, not even its domestic political culture. For the most part, the same top persons, families & groups in every sector, military, economic or intellectual, served the British as they had the Ottomans, and continued to serve their own interests as well.
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