|
The Egyptian Struggle Will Continue
The Angry Arab, As'ad AbuKhalil, agrees with David Ignatius (and me) that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is cahoots with Washington DC.
Ignatius:
[L]et’s be honest: The Obama administration has been Morsi’s main enabler.
AbuKhalil:
[T]here is clear evidence that the two governments have been working closely together.
Antother enabler of the Brotherhood are the editors of the Guardian. Their editorial today is so lopsided pro-Morsi that it is laughable.
In pre-empting a decision by the constitutional court to derail his constitution, his decree was cast too wide. The final draft of the constitution has many faults, although none are set in stone. The opposition on the other hand has never accepted the results of freely held elections, parliamentary or presidential, and is doing everything to stop new ones being held.
The editrial and especially its last sentence are simply wrong. Even the Guardian's own correspondent in Cairo denounced it:
Jack Shenker @hackneylad
Let me say once again, I totally disassociate myself from this @Guardian editorial on #Egypt – it's offensive & wrong
The argument why Morsi's side is wrong is simple.
The referendum in March 2011 won 77% approval with majority of eligible voters voting.
That referendum set out the process to get to a new government and to a new constitution. It also included the modified old constitution. There were checks and balances in there and those included the judiciary being able challenge the legislative or executive when it saw them breaking the law.
By issuing his decrees and giving himself immunity Morsi did away with that.
So a 77% approval was overruled by someone who barely won 50% of the votes in a run off election with even less voters participating. This after receiving only some 25% in the first round of the election.
By issuing his decrees, likely in coordination with Washington, Morsi broke the rules a wide majority had voted for. That is what the protest are mainly about. (For other reasons the protesters have see this excellent overview of the various Egyptian interest groups.)
One argument against the protest is that the alternative to Morsi is the renewed rule of the military. But the military has never left the stage:
Accusations that, by stalling the political process, the opposition is courting a coup misread the military’s role in the current crisis. The army is equally invested in the existing draft constitution, which keeps their core prerogatives intact: a secretive budget, officers’ control over the Defense Ministry, a strong say in national security decisions and the right to try civilians in military courts. The generals are relieved to have found a civilian partner who can manage day-to-day political affairs, while ensuring that the military has the autonomy to pursue its own interests outside the purview of democratic oversight. These concessions are consistent with the Muslim Brothers’ pattern of refusing to stand up to the generals whenever their own path to power has been at stake.
The military, paid largely by Washington, is so in bed with Morsi that he can call on it to suppress further protests:
President Mohamed Morsy will soon issue a law that will give judicial and protective powers to the military, according to the state-run Al-Ahram website.
Drafted with the participation of army leaders, the law will task the armed forces with maintaining security and protecting vital installations in the state, until a new constitution takes effect and legitimate parliamentary elections are held.
This is martial law. What is Morsi now but a dictator backed by the military and under Washington's political control?
Whoever hopes that such an alliance will somehow evolve into democratically legitimated, independent foreign and domestic policies that reflect the values of the Egyptians is wrong. Very wrong.
But that is what the Egyptians had hoped for. That is why the struggle will continue.
36, I am not sure Mursi offered a dialogue. I think he said something like “I will not back down but will be glad to talk to you about it.”
I think Mursi got a deal with the military and he got a deal with “the West”. He just may not have the power base that was part of the deal.
I also think this Egyptian journalist here has got a point
Yet, even during those glorious 18 days of Jan-Feb of that year, I would constantly get Western journalists querying me about “the crucial” or “decisive” part Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, were playing in the revolution. Where they got such certitude I was at a loss to understand, seeing that there were millions on the streets, that you’d be hard pressed to find a single sign or chant in Cairo’s Tahrir or anywhere else in the country calling for the application of Sharia’a or “governance by what God has ordained,” that the revolutionary banner of: Bread, Freedom, Social Justice, had not an ounce of Islamism in it, that Christians and Muslims, women and men, fought together shoulder to shoulder, and that egalitarianism among all Egyptians had been the overriding ethic of the Egyptian revolution.
All too soon, the readiness of the Brotherhood and its Salafist allies coupled to the unpreparedness of the revolutionaries (due to 30 years of the eradication of politics under Mubarak) seemed to bear the deep-seated bias out. The extremely nuanced and complex reality of post revolutionary Egypt would be made to disappear, and the Western media’s coverage of the emergent political landscape in the country would regress into – what I’ve come to call – infantile Orientalism.
Deep-seated bias is only one part of the explanation, however. The second secret to the love affair is much more down to earth, essentially a function of realpolitik. For the US-led Western alliance, the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt proved to be the answer to a prayer.
Notwithstanding all the rhetoric about the liberation of “Islamic Palestine”, Egypt’s new rulers would swear themselves blue in the face that they would uphold the commitment to the peace treaty with Israel, collaborate with the “hated enemy” in fighting terrorists in Sinai, bring in American troops and sophisticated spying equipment into the troubled peninsula’s demilitarized Area C, all the while maintaining “strategic ties” with Washington.
It would take the US/Egypt brokered truce in Gaza, however, to have Western media and pundits drooling over Mr Morsi and his up-and-coming Muslim Brotherhood run and controlled regime. All of a sudden, they discovered that not only was the MB president as compliant as his predecessor on “Israeli security”, but that he was proving a much more effective partner in this respect.
Suddenly, the realization hit home: Here was a democratically elected president (albeit narrowly), backed by “authentic” Islamist Muslims, not only in Egypt but throughout the Greater Middle East, able not only to intimidate and pressure Hamas into “reasonableness”, as Mubarak’s Omar Suleiman was known to do, but to do so in his capacity as Big Brother to the errant Palestinian branch of his movement. A unique and previously unexpected prize of this order was simply too precious to squander, even for the sake of such niceties as basic liberties and human rights.
So precious indeed, that one Israeli political writer suggested only last week that Netanyahu’s Israel might be in the process of making a strategic shift in its attitude to Hamas. Translated from the Hebrew by Media-Clips-Isr, Alex Fishman, writing in Yedioth Aharonot, suggests that under Netanyahu’s leadership Israel was in the process of changing its policy on the Gaza Strip, and that “Instead of toppling Hamas, it wants to give the Hamas regime power so that it will ensure quiet and to push it toward the Sunni, anti-Iranian coalition of Egypt, Qatar and Turkey.” Far-fetched, you might say. Possibly, I admit I haven’t been following Israeli politics as I should, what with domestic Egyptian developments overwhelming time and thought. Yet, very indicative, to say the least.
Rehabilitating Hamas with a view to “safeguarding Israeli security”, as defined by Netanyhau, no less than setting up a regional Sunni coalition against Iran are, it goes without saying, top agenda items in US/European policy in the Middle East.
But there is a more compelling reason for the Western alliance and its media’s love affair with Egypt’s Brotherhood – one of even greater strategic import. For some time now, the US and its allies had come to realize that the rickety, aged and corruption-ridden police states in the region, however servile, were very poor guardians of their vital interests in the region. The Arab Spring seemed to have given rise to a new and ostensibly much more solid foundation on which to anchor these interests. And as predicted by nearly everyone for years, some form of political Islam seemed the only viable alternative at hand.
In Egypt, by far the biggest Arab state and home to Al-Azhar, the very fount-head of Sunni Islam, the Mother of all Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood, had come to power and was ready and able to be the sort of loyal friend and guardian of “vital” Western interests as its predecessors had been, and to do so in a considerably more “legitimate” and effective manner.
Embroiled for the past decade in a seemingly endless and harrowing battle against “terrorism”, specifically against Islamist radicalism, and with Europe increasingly phobic about the “demographic nightmare” of the Muslim “enemy within”, the US and its allies now had a model of the kind of Islamism they could have only dreamed of. By its very existence, such an Egyptian model was bound to undercut the dread radicals and ameliorate the “Islamist threat”, all the way from the heart of Paris to the Qaeda infested hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This veritable treasure was as valuable to hold onto as its opposite, the collapse of such a model, was to be dreaded. Indubitably, such failure would provide a powerful boost to Islamist radicals everywhere, a further argument that Jihad rather than a “Western, Secularist-imported democracy” is the only way forward.
The love affair is thus explained, and as the popular saying goes “Love is blind.”
And yet, here at home, the souls of millions of Egyptians continue to cry out for freedom, come what may.
Posted by: somebody | Dec 10 2012 22:44 utc | 37
|
