At a crossroads!
This week, in Egypt, around four hundred demonstrators from the Egyptian Brotherhood were gunned down as they participated in supposedly peaceful protests over the ouster of their president--Mohammed Morsi. President Obama held a carefully worded press conference in which he condemned the attacks and cancelled an upcoming military exercise between Egypt and the United States. In this press statement, the president did not call what the Egyptian military did a coup. This is important because apparently under existing law, if the United States government had called the change in rule inside of Egypt a coup, then, they would have been obligated to cut off the 1.3 billion dollars in military aid that Egypt receives annually from the United States.
Egypt is in a mess and that mess is reflective of what is going on across the wider Middle East. There is the continuing conflict in Syria where Iran is participating in the bloody struggle to bring a theocracy to another ally that it has in the region.. When one looks at the attacks in Egypt, they were provoked by the Egyptian brotherhoods use of arms to supplement their supposed peaceful protests which have not really been all that peaceful at all. As a retaliation to the attacks, the brotherhood is now calling for a “day of anger” across Egypt. It is anyone’s guess what that may entail and how many may die because it will occur.
The United States has little leverage in Egypt and what leverage it does have is through the close ties that our military has with the Egyptian military officer corps. That relationship was crucial back in the Arab spring period when the strongman Mubarak was toppled from power over just an eighteen day period of time. The Egyptian military observed remarkable restraint during that period of time when a complete revolution took place. There is little doubt that the Egyptian military is the nation’s strongest institution and must play a crucial role in what the future of the nation will look like just down the road. So many remember the mistakes made by the George W. Bush administration after the fall of Iraq when they chose to disband the Iraqi army and did two things as a result of it. They took away an element of stability inside of Iraq and they created the seeds of the insurrection that took place in Iraq for several years after the country fell that was led by elements of the military who felt alienated. It is crucial that this does not occur in Egypt. So many of these Middle Eastern nation do not have strong institutions due to the choices made by their strongmen and when democracy does break out it has a problem succeeding simply because there is nothing to build from. Libya is a fine example of that. In Egypt, at the start of the democratic process, the strongest institution outside of the Egyptian military was the well organized Muslim brotherhood.
The entire world and the entire Middle East is looking at what is occurring in Egypt at this time as a model for how to move forward in the seemingly never ending struggle, mainly religious in nature, between conflicted elements of Middle East society. We have seen what can happen when the wrong course is followed, both in Iraq and, earlier on, in Iran. Iran is a theocracy and is the seed of much of the discourse that goes on in the Middle East today. There is a definite radical bent to the Muslim Brotherhood inside of Egypt as is reflected in their decision to provoke the military into using live ammunition after they first used it themselves. There is no respect for life among the brotherhood radicals as they simply see the deaths of some of their own as a means to an end. And that end is the establishment of a radical theocracy inside of Egypt, nothing more and nothing less.
As the world looks on, there are no really good choices ahead in the context of a thriving democracy that the United States would like to see anywhere in the world. But it is very apparent that the lesser of two evils must be the continuation of stability inside of Egypt and the opposition to this rise of radicalism that the Muslim Brotherhood so ably espoused and furthers with their actions and their deeds. It was one of the great accomplishments of the latter half of the twentieth century when Jimmy Carter was able to broker a peace between Israel and Egypt with the Camp David accords and to lose that advance by losing Egypt to Iranian style radicalism is simply not acceptable. We have no idea if there is really a road to democracy inside of Egypt but there are some of the elements necessary for it there, including an educated populace of young people committed to a brighter future for both themselves and the nation as a whole. Where the deaths that occurred during the Arab spring in Egypt were significant in the course of freedom, these deaths among the brotherhood this week mean really nothing to either the brotherhood nor anyone else among a radical coalition in which death is merely another means of achieving an ultimate end.
Egypt is the current flashpoint in the region and it is also the most important prize in this never ending struggle that is and has been occurring there for centuries now. Both the world and the region are at another cross roads among many that have occurred across the space of time. The Brotherhood, willing to sacrifice as many lives as need be, will not back down and what will probably insure is the establishment of a modified military dictatorship simply because there is no other way to oppose people who are this radical and this committed to their cause. It is apparent to many that Iraq is moving into the Iranian orbit and the actions of Bush/Cheney over a decade ago are now bearing bitter fruit indeed. The world simply cannot afford to allow either Syria or a place like Egypt to follow down this road which leads to really nowhere good. To think that there is a democracy inside of Iran is to think foolishly. It is a cleric led theocracy and that is what will happen anywhere else where they hold sway. And, we best remember that Iran exports terrorism each and every day.
And that is the current and continuing cross roads that we face!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
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