Tag Archives: Turkey

America and the Arab Spring

A year ago this week, on January 25, 2011, the ground began to crumble under then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s feet. One year later, Mubarak and his sons are in prison, and standing trial. 

This week, the final vote tally from Egypt’s parliamentary elections was published. The Islamist parties have won 72 percent of the seats in the lower house.

The photogenic, Western-looking youth from Tahrir Square the Western media were thrilled to dub the Facebook revolutionaries were disgraced at the polls and exposed as an insignificant social and political force.

As for the military junta, it has made its peace with the Muslim Brotherhood. The generals and the jihadists are negotiating a power-sharing agreement. According to details of the agreement that have made their way to the media, the generals will remain the West’s go-to guys for foreign affairs. The Muslim Brotherhood (and its fellow jihadists in the Salafist al-Nour party) will control Egypt’s internal affairs.

This is bad news for women and for non-Muslims. Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been under continuous attack by Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist supporters since Mubarak was deposed. Their churches, homes and businesses have been burned, looted and destroyed. Their wives and daughters have been raped. The military massacred them when they dared to protest their persecution.

As for women, their main claim to fame since Mubarak’s overthrow has been their sexual victimization at the hands of soldiers who stripped female protesters and performed "virginity tests" on them. Out of nearly five hundred seats in parliament, only 10 will be filled by women.

The Western media are centering their attention on what the next Egyptian constitution will look like and whether it will guarantee rights for women and minorities. What they fail to recognize is that the Islamic fundamentalists now in charge of Egypt don’t need a constitution to implement their tyranny. All they require is what they already have – a public awareness of their political power and their partnership with the military.

The same literalist approach that has prevented Western observers from reading the writing on the walls in terms of the Islamists’ domestic empowerment has blinded them to the impact of Egypt’s political transformation on the country’s foreign policy posture. US officials forcefully proclaim that they will not abide by an Egyptian move to formally abrogate its peace treaty with Israel. What they fail to recognize is that whether or not the treaty is formally abrogated is irrelevant. The situation on the ground in which the new regime allows Sinai to be used as a launching ground for attacks against Israel, and as a highway for weapons and terror personnel to flow freely into Gaza, are clear signs that the peace with Israel is already dead – treaty or no treaty.

EGYPT’S TRANSFORMATION is not an isolated event. The disgraced former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh arrived in the US this week. Yemen is supposed to elect his successor next month. The deteriorating security situation in that strategically vital land which borders the Arabian and Red Seas has decreased the likelihood that the election will take place as planned.

Yemen is falling apart at the seams. Al-Qaida forces have been advancing in the south. Last spring they took over Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province. In recent weeks they captured Radda, a city 160 km. south of the capital of Sana.

Radda’s capture underscored American fears that the political upheaval in Yemen will provide al- Qaida with a foothold near shipping routes through the Red Sea and so enable the group to spread its influence to neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Al-Qaida forces were also prominent in the NATO-backed Libyan opposition forces that with NATO’s help overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in October. Although the situation on the ground is far from clear, it appears that radical Islamic political forces are intimidating their way into power in post-Gaddafi Libya.

Take for instance last weekend’s riots in Benghazi. On Saturday protesters laid siege to the National Transitional Council offices in the city while Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the head of the NTC, hid inside. In an attempt to quell the protesters’ anger, Jalil fired six secular members of the NTC. He then appointed a council of religious leaders to investigate corruption charges and identify people with links to the Gaddafi regime.

In Bahrain, the Iranian-supported Shi’ite majority continues to mount political protests against the Sunni monarchy. Security forces killed two young Shi’ite protesters over the past week and a half, and opened fired at Shi’ites who sought to hold a protest march after attending the funeral of one of them.

As supporters of Bahrain’s Shi’ites have maintained since the unrest spread to the kingdom last year, Bahrain’s Shi’ites are not Iranian proxies. But then, until the US pulled its troops out of Iraq last month, neither were Iraq’s Shi’ites. What happened immediately after the US pullout is another story completely.

Extolling Iraq’s swift deterioration into an Iranian satrapy, last Wednesday, Brig.-Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps Jerusalem Brigade, bragged, "In reality, in south Lebanon and Iraq, the people are under the effect of the Islamic Republic’s way of practice and thinking."

While Suleimani probably exaggerated the situation, there is no doubt that Iran’s increased influence in Iraq is being felt around the region. Iraq has come to the aid of Iran’s Syrian client Bashar Assad who is now embroiled in a civil war. The rise of Iran in Iraq holds dire implications for the Hashemite regime in Jordan which is currently hanging on by a thread, challenged from within and without by the rising force of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Much has been written since the fall of Mubarak about the impact on Israel of the misnamed Arab Spring. Events like September’s mob assault on Israel’s embassy in Cairo and the murderous cross-border attack on motorists traveling on the road to Eilat by terrorists operating out of Sinai give force to the assessment that Israel is more imperiled than ever by the revolutionary events engulfing the region.

But the truth is that while on balance Israel’s regional posture has taken a hit, particularly from the overthrow of Mubarak and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists in Egypt, Israel is not the primary loser in the so-called Arab Spring.

Israel never had many assets in the Arab world to begin with. The Western-aligned autocracies were not Israel’s allies. To the extent the likes of Mubarak and others have cooperated with Israel on various issues over the years, their cooperation was due not to any sense of comity with Jewish state. They worked with Israel because they believed it served their interests to do so. And at the same time Mubarak reined in the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas because they threatened him, he waged political war against Israel on every international stage and allowed anti-Semitic poison to be broadcast daily on his regime-controlled television stations.

Since Israel’s stake in the Arab power game has always been limited, its losses as a consequence of the fall of anti-Israel secular dictatorships and their replacement by anti-Israel Islamist regimes have been marginal. The US, on the other hand, has seen its interests massively harmed. Indeed, the US is the greatest loser of the pan-Arab revolutions.

TO UNDERSTAND the depth and breadth of America’s losses, consider that on January 25, 2011, most Arab states were US allies to a greater or lesser degree. Mubarak was a strategic ally. Saleh was willing to collaborate with the US in combating al- Qaida and other jihadist forces in his country.

Gaddafi was a neutered former enemy who had posed no threat to the US since 2004. Iraq was a protectorate. Jordan and Morocco were stable US clients.

One year later, the elements of the US’s alliance structure have either been destroyed or seriously weakened. US allies like Saudi Arabia, which have yet to be seriously threatened by the revolutionary violence, no longer trust the US. As the recently revealed nuclear cooperation between the Saudis and the Chinese makes clear, the Saudis are looking to other global powers to replace the US as their superpower protector.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect to the US’s spectacular loss of influence and power in the Arab world is that most of its strategic collapse has been due to its own actions. In Egypt and Libya the US intervened prominently to bring down a US ally and a dictator who constituted no threat to its interests. Indeed, it went to war to bring Gaddafi down.

Moreover, the US acted to bring about their fall at the same time it knew that they would be replaced by forces inimical to American national security interests. In Egypt, it was clear that the Muslim Brotherhood would emerge as the strongest political force in the country. In Libya, it was clear at the outset of the NATO campaign against Gaddafi that al-Qaida was prominently represented in the anti-regime coalition. And just as the Islamists won the Egyptian election, shortly after Gaddafi was overthrown, al-Qaida forces raised their flag over Benghazi’s courthouse.

US actions from Yemen to Bahrain and beyond have followed a similar pattern.

In sharp contrast to his active interventionism against US-allied regimes, President Barack Obama has prominently refused to intervene in Syria, where the fate of a US foe hangs in the balance.

Obama has sat back as Turkey has fashioned a Syrian opposition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Arab League has intervened in a manner that increases the prospect that Syria will descend into chaos in the event that the Assad regime is overthrown.

Obama continues to speak grandly about his vision for the Middle East and his dedication to America’s regional allies. And his supporters in the media continue to applaud his great success in foreign policy. But outside of their echo chamber, he and the country he leads are looked upon with increasing contempt and disgust throughout the Arab world.

Obama’s behavior since last January 25 has made clear to US friend and foe alike that under Obama, the US is more likely to attack you if you display weakness towards it than if you adopt a confrontational posture against it. As Assad survives to kill another day; as Iran expands its spheres of influence and gallops towards the nuclear bomb; as al- Qaida and its allies rise from the Gulf of Aden to the Suez Canal; and as Mubarak continues to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher, the US’s rapid fall from regional power is everywhere in evidence.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

 

No-kidding red lines

“Don’t do it.”  That is the message American officials, from President Obama on down, are delivering to their Israeli counterparts in the hope of dissuading the Jewish State from taking a fateful step: attacking Iran to prevent the mullahs’ imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons.

This week, the nation’s top military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, will visit Israel to convey the same message in person.  If recent reports of other U.S. demarches are any guide, the General will deliver an insistent warning that Israel must give sanctions more time to work and refrain from acting unilaterally.

Such warnings have become more shrill as evidence accumulates that Israel is getting ready to move beyond what is widely believed to be a series of successful – but insufficient – covert actions against the Iranian nuclear program, missile forces and associated personnel.

Some U.S. officials reportedly think the Israelis are just posturing.  As one put it, they are playing out a “hold me back” gambit – perhaps hoping the Americans will do the job themselves, or at least to be rewarded for their restraint.

Others point, however, to evidence that the Israelis are concealing key military movements from our intelligence assets as an indicator that they are going for it – and want to keep us from interfering.  At a minimum, Jerusalem would have to worry that an American administration that is holding secret negotiations with Tehran in Turkey at the level of Deputy Secretary of State William Burns would seek to curry favor with the mullahs by compromising any information it obtains about Israel’sintentions.

At the end of the day, the fundamental difference between the U.S. and Israel is that the Israelis have laid down “red lines” with respect to the Iranian nuclear enterprise.  One of them was crossed two weeks ago when the Iranians announced that they had started enriching uranium in a hardened, and heavily defended, underground facility near the city of Qom.  Even the International Atomic Energy Agency – an organization that, under its previous management, incessantly obscured the true weapons purpose and steady progress of the Iranian nuclear program – views this step as ominous.

To be sure, the United States says it has red lines, too.  It was only last week that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta pronounced two:  Iran would not be allowed either to acquire nuclear arms or to close the world’s energy pipeline that flows through the entrance to the Persian Gulf: the Strait of Hormuz.

The difference between American and Israeli red line, of course, is that the latter may actually take seriously the breaching of theirs.  Presumably, that would be because the government of Israel has drawn them so as to define existential threats to the state, not simply as a matter of rhetorical posturing intended mostly for domestic political consumption.

By contrast, we know that at least some Obama administration officials are persuaded the United States can live with a nuclear Iran.  They are said to be working up plans to contain, or at least, accommodate themselves to such a prospect.

It is less clear whether Team Obama actually thinks it can tolerate the mullahs’ closure of the Strait.  After all, the oil and natural gas that flows through it from much of the Gulf’s littoral states would be severely affected.  The effect would be dire for energy prices, U.S. allies and the world economy.

So far, though, in what may be seen from Tehran – whether rightly or wrongly – as submission to the new, Iranian-dictated order of things, we have chosen to remove all carrier battle groups from the Gulf.  We have also yet to challenge Iranian assertions that our capital ships will be attacked if they try to return without Tehran’s permission.

Worse yet, even if President Obama actually wanted to enforce his administration’s red lines, he has further compromised America’s ability to do so with his  wholesale abandonment of Iraq, draconian defense budget cuts and the emasculated national security strategy he claims is all we can afford.

Thus, the Israelis could reasonably view the United States as less-than-serious about the threats posed by Iran and as wholly unreliable when it comes to keepingthem from metastasizing further.  Under such circumstances, if the Jewish State feels it has no choice but to be deadly serious with respect to its red-lines, its leaders must be expected to act as Iran violates them.

The likelihood for such action can only have grown as a result of the contempt with which President Obama has treated Israel, our most important regional ally.  Dissing its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is one thing.  Allowing our own red-lines to be flouted with impunity, signals that Israel is on its own and must proceed accordingly.

If we are going to stop the nightmare of a messianic regime armed with nuclearmissiles, somebody better do it soon – and with something more effective than sanctions.  America should take the lead.  But, if the Obama administration won’t, it should get out of the Israelis’ way.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Speak Not of Evil

One of the most popular attractions in Washington, D.C. is a building that graces Pennsylvania Avenue with an exterior engraved with the First Amendment to the Constitution and its guarantee of, among other liberties, freedom of speech.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have been well advised to hold her three-day meeting last week with the some of the most determined enemies of free expression – increasingly doing business as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – at the Newseum, rather a few blocks away in Foggy Bottom.

After all, at that shrine to our most fundamental civil rights, the delegates would have found an exhibit about freedom of speech which declares: “For better or worse, the First Amendment helps shelter the varied results of free expression even when they are considered by some to be offensive or distasteful.”  

Unfortunately, such shelter is precisely what the Organization of Islamic Cooperation wishes to eliminate when it comes to expression about its faith that the OIC’s 57 member nations and other Islamists find “offensive or distasteful.”  

Advancing that agenda is the OIC’s purpose in the so-called “Istanbul Process” that it launched with Mrs. Clinton last July in Turkey.  As the Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea pointed out in a withering indictment of this diplomatic exercise published last week in the New York Post, “the gathering was folly.”  

Ms. Shea provides several reasons for that conclusion.  Reduced to their essence, it is folly for America to be legitimating – let alone engaging in – a search for ways to “bridge” the gap between our First Amendment rights, on the one hand, and the Islamists’ belief that anyexpression that “offends” their religion is a capital offense, on the other.  To do so is to affront the Constitution and threaten the free and tolerant society it has made possible in this country.

The Obama administration started down this ill-advised road by cosponsoring in 2009 an OIC-drafted resolution in the UN Human Rights Council that condemned “defamation of religion” – read, Islam.  That initiative helped advance the Islamists’ twelve-year campaign to “prohibit and criminalize” such defamation in accordance with the “blasphemy laws” that are part of the totalitarian doctrine they call shariah.

Then, as more and more of the Free World began awakening to the danger posed by such efforts to compel them to submit to shariah, Team Obama helped engineer a new document at the Human Rights Council.  Adopted in March, Resolution 16/18 focused, instead of banning defamation, on getting the world’s nations to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization, and  discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against persons based on religion or belief.”  

In Istanbul in July, Mrs. Clinton kicked off her “process” with a passing nod to free speech: “We…understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy.”  She went on, however, to declare:  “So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’tfeel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”  

In other words, the Obama administration believes it can silence those whose expressions are, in the words of the Newseum, “considered by some to be offensive or distasteful.”  Or, in the words of the OIC, “Islamophobia.”  It’s just that, instead of criminalizing such behavior, Team Obama will use “peer pressure and shaming.”

It gets worse. In the course of last week’s three-day, mostly closed-door confab at the State Department called to “implement” Resolution 16/18, the OIC focus seemed to be on how the United States and other non-Muslim, freedom-loving states would prevent “incitement.”  Sec. Clinton asserted that we would only be obliged to counter incitement  to “imminent violence.”  But this is a classic slippery-slope, opening America to prohibitions on “hate speech” at the insistence of people who, irony of ironies, are more routinely engaged in incitement to imminent violence and religious intolerance than anyone else on the planet: the Islamists.

The appearance of U.S. submission to shariah was only exacerbated by the opening comments of the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Thomas Perez.  As Ms. Shea put it:

“[[Perez’s] opening keynote address gave a one-sided historical depiction of American bigotry against religiousminorities, including Muslims, without explaining our relatively exemplary achievement of upholding individual freedoms of religion and speech in an overwhelmingly tolerant and pluralistic society.] He told the participants,some representing the world’s most repressive states, that America can learn to protect religious tolerance from them.”

It is particularly troubling that Nina Shea has just been removed as a commissioner of the U.S. Commission onReligious Freedom.  That was the upshot of a compromise that saw Senator Dick Durban abandoning his stealthy bid todeny the reauthorization of the Commission, but only if Ms. Shea and nearly all of her colleagues lost their posts.  Practically the only exception is Dr. Azizah al-Hibr, a woman who has espoused the creation of shariah courts in the United States.

If you haven’t been to – or, for that matter, been by – the Newseum lately, you might want to make a point of paying it a visit.  See it before the diplomats decide that our pesky First Amendment condones “offensive or distasteful” expression that constitutes unacceptable “incitement,” and is no longer applicable.

Silencing the Watchdogs of Religious Freedom: Durbin’s War on the USCIRF

We have been hearing a lot about the Muslim Brotherhood lately – and none of it is good news.  Get used to it.  With the Brotherhood’s ascendancy in the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and beyond, the world is going to be subjected to a crash course in Islamist supremacism – and what it means for the rest of us.

We were on notice even before the Egyptian elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and their allies secured upwards of sixty percent of the votes in that country’s new, post-Mubarak parliament – and the murderous violence towards Coptic Christians that preceded them.  A reminder came on December 7th when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed convictions ofleaders of the MB-associated Holy Land Foundation.  The earlier trial in 2008 did much to expose the totalitarian, supremacist nature and seditious objectives of that group, elsewhere and here in the United States.

Notably, evidence introduced (uncontested by the defense) in that case by federal prosecutors established that the Brotherhood has established myriad front organizations, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the North American IslamicTrust (NAIT), to pursue what it calls “civilization jihad.”  This is a stealthy form of holy war, designed to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within…by their hands [i.e., those of the infidels].”

The Obama administration has greatly facilitated the efforts of such organizations to penetrate and influence the government of the United States.  To cite but one example, on December 12-14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is convening a meeting with representatives of theBrotherhood’s multinational official counterpart, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).  As Phyllis Chesler points out in a brilliant essay published by PJMedia () entitled “The End of Religious Freedom,” the OIC’s stated purpose for this meeting is to counter: “media campaigns and fabrications made by some quarters in non-member states regarding the mistreatment of non-Muslim minorities and communities in the OIC member states under the slogans of religious freedoms and so on.”

Put simply, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and other adherents to the Islamist politico-military-legal doctrine of shariah seek to impose their practice of “blasphemy” laws worldwide.  Accordingly, they seek to suppress information that “offends Muslims” or otherwise puts them, their agenda or their behavior in a negative light – no matter how accurately.

In recent years, the U.S. government has increasingly conformed to what amount to  shariah blasphemy laws.  A singular exception has been the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).  Since its inception by act of Congress in 1998, the unpaid commissioners have rendered incalculably important servicemonitoring and reporting on threats to freedom of religion emanating from Islamist and other sources.

USCIRF has, for example, documented the plight of Copts in Egypt and Christians and Jews inother parts of the Middle East.  They have exposed how non-shariah-adherent Muslims and “apostates” from Islam have been raped, tortured and killed for deviating from what is deemed to be the true faith by Brotherhood, OIC and like-minded forces.

The Commission has also helped expose how Saudi government-supplied textbooks used, among other places, in American madrassas, extol violent jihadism and intolerance for people of other faiths.  Interestingly, such texts explain three different ways homosexuals can be executed in conformity with shariah’s treatment of their behavior as a capital offense.

Now that Team Obama has made promoting the radical lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender agenda whatMrs. Clinton calls a U.S. foreign policy priority,” one would think the administration would be grateful for the work the Religious Freedom Commission has done, among other things, to expose and demand changes in such Saudi textbooks.

To the contrary, the Obama administration has been working behind the scenes to do as its Islamist friends have demanded by shutting down the USCIRF.  It has enlisted for this purpose Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate’s Number 2 Democrat.  Sen. Durbin is not only perfectly placed to do the deed stealthily.  He has his own close associations with a number of the Brotherhood’s top fronts and operatives in his home state of Illinois, in Washington and elsewhere across the country.

As it happens, in addition to serving as the Majority Whip, Sen. Durbin is a member of both the Senate Foreign Relations and Appropriations Committees – the panels responsible for reauthorizing and funding the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.  He has used his leadership and committee positions to place what amount to secret “holds” on legislation that would extend the life of the commission.

Consequently, unless something changes before the current government funding bill expires, our nation’s sole official, independent and still-effective watchdog for religious liberty – and the most trusted and important American voice for those being denied it – will go out of business on December 16th.

The Majority Whip’s role in this stealthy jihad against an agency that still dares to speak thetruth to the Islamists’ power is all the more reprehensible since Senator Durbin frequently excoriates his colleagues’ use of secret holds.  In fact, he has cosponsored legislation to bar the practice.  Such rank hypocrisy simply adds to the venality of Sen. Durbin’s conduct in this matter.

So does the reported reason for the hold Senator Durbin has yet to acknowledge he is exercising against the USCIRF.  Evidently, he is trying to euchre members of the House of Representatives into earmarking funds for the federal government to purchase a state prison in Thompson, Illinois that his home state can no longer afford to operate.

When the idea of a federal takeover of this facility was first floated last year, it ran into strenuous opposition on both sides of Capitol Hill.  Not only was the deal deemed to be unaffordable at a time of yawning federal deficits.  It turned out that the Obama administration and its allies in Illinois’ Democratic machine in Washington and Springfield state had in mind another, even more outrageous motivation: the Thompson prison could serve as the place to relocate terrorists currently held offshore at Guantanamo Bay, allowing Gitmo’s closure.

In other words, Sen. Durbin is seeking to secure by stealth an earmark that would overturn existing legislation barring the relocation of such detainees inside the United States – and the real risk that they would, thereby, be granted constitutional rights, access to civilian U.S. courts and perhaps be set loose in our country by irresponsible federal judges.  How many more reasons do the American people need to oppose and condemn Dick Durbin’s shenanigans?

Voters in Illinois and elsewhere need to call out Senator Durbin’s contribution to the stealth jihad – both with his office and, in the case of other Senators’ constituents, those of their own representatives.  America needs to safeguard religious freedoms against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  To that end, we must strengthen, not garrote, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom – the one official entity still doing that vital mission.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Adel Guindy: Islamism & the Facade of Egyptian Democracy

Adel Guindy testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives. Reps. Frank Wolf and James McDermott presented “Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians.”

Mr. Guindy is President of the Board of Coptic Solidarity. He is also President of Solidarité Copte (France), is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Freedom Forum (USA, Egypt), Le Monde Copte (France) and Egyptian Democratic Solidarity (Egypt).

He has been an activist for several years, and frequently writes on political transformation in Egypt, the Coptic issue and Islamism. He has authored several articles in English (MERIA and other publications), three books in Arabic, and co-authored one book in French. He was a senior editor of Egypt’s Coptic community weekly Watani.

Other witnesses included Kathy Fitzpatrick (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State); Nina Shea (Director, Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute); Dina Guirguis (Member, Egyptian American Rule of Law Association); Raymond Ibrahim (Middle East specialist and Associate fellow, Middle East Forum); and Cynthia Farahat (Egyptian political activist).

The following is Mr. Guindy’s testimony for the record and, below, is a transcript of his comments at the hearing.

Adel Guindy: Testimony before the Tom Lantos Commission, December 7 2011. Click here for a PDF of his testimony for the record.

 

 

 

 

TESTIMONY OF ADEL F. GUINDY

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for conducting this important hearing entitled “Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians.” I am honored to be here today, and I would like to request that my entire written statement be made part of the Record, however I will highlight some of the key points and would be happy to answer questions.

In keeping with the “seasonal” depictions of the situation in Egypt, such as “spring of this” or “winter of that,” I would venture to say that Egypt, indeed the region, is entering – at least for the short- and medium-term – a harsh summer with little to be seen in its arid deserts beyond thirst, agony and mirage.

In my testimony, I will touch more on the general political situation in Egypt and its projected evolution, because it is only by understanding the overall picture, that we can fully understand the implications and consequences for the Copts.

 

TAHRIR-II

In order to better understand the admittedly confusing situation, let me begin with what happened during Tahrir-II.

On Friday Nov 18, 2011, hundreds of thousands of Islamists-mainly Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists-set out to protest the inclusion of the term “civilian” to describe  the future state. This term was mentioned in a document on constitutional principles that have been in the works for months. The term “civilian” is generally understood to mean “non-religious and non-military,” but Islamists loathed the possibility that it might be understood to mean “secular.” This, despite the fact that the text of Article II of the old Constitution in which Islam is the religion of State and the principles of  Sharia the main source of legislation, was  still upheld by the document. This same new document gave the Army a special, almost supra-state, status. Just hours after the November 18 march, the government caved to pressure and removed the contested term.

The next day, the docile government turned into a lion, when a sit-in by some 150 protesters from the families of the injured revolutionaries demanding treatment by the government, was brutally disbanded by the anti-riot forces. Furious at the attack and more so at the apparent complicity between the Military and Islamists, crowds poured into Tahrir Square. As the oppression increased, the crowds became even more determined and aggressive, trying to attack and burn the Ministry of Interior building. The majority of the anti-government slogans were directed at the SCAF and its Chief, al-Moushir (Field Marshal) Tantawi, calling for his ouster and trial. At least 38 people were killed and thousands wounded.

THE ORIGINAL SIN: THE MILITARY’S OBSESSION WITH POWER

To try and understand the full picture, we need to go back to what the Military did when they took over governing Egypt last February. It was a manifestation of what I like to call the even-older “Original Sin” that bred what we are in today and will continue to do unless redeemed – that “original sin” is the Military’s attachment to power since 1952. Ever since that date, they have enjoyed unparalleled power; apart from a unique position of behind-the-scenes authority, all the presidents, many prime ministers, ministers, governors and heads of public organizations have come from their ranks. Coupled with that are the huge financial and economic interests (estimated by some to reach 30-40% of Egypt’s economy) with which the military is involved The Army’s budget is beyond any scrutiny and the Army’s ranks can be only judged before military tribunals.

The stakes for the Military are high and however they may deny it, numerous acts show their intention to hold on to that unique position.

For the Military, it is almost unavoidable that the they enter into alliance with the Islamists while at the same time – in a twisted form of machination – use them to scare Egypt’s citizens, and the World, to justify the need for the Military’s very strong role in maintaining peace and stability.  Whether or not SCAF or other military lean towards the Brotherhood is not important, but the issue of the alliance is what is important.

It is fair to claim that both the Military and the Islamists have a strategic interest in working together. Why is that?

The generals know that there are strategic imperatives for the U.S., whatever the U.S. Administration’s political party:

  • Maintain U.S. interests in Egypt; after all huge sums have been invested there. By one account, what Egypt has received since the Camp David agreements is about the same as the entire Marshall Plan (both in current dollars) devoted to rebuild several western European countries after WW-II (it appears to roughly be about 85 billion);
  • Maintain the security of Israel and the peace treaty;
  • Not allow a military regime to rule in Egypt – at least in appearance.

The generals are also aware and are proponents of a fourth strategic element, specific to the current Administration, which is to operate with a policy of open arms towards Islamist parties, as long as those parties come to power through the “ballot box.” I will touch on this point a bit later in my testimony.

The generals are certainly not interested in directly “governing” Egypt. A country with so many chronic problems, not to mention the chaos created after January and the new rebelliousness of the people, makes it more of a liability for them to be involved in the country’s  day-to-day governing. They are, however, intent on maintaining the power and authority the Army has enjoyed over the past six decades.

On the other hand, while the Brotherhood is known to have reassured the U.S. in contacts over the past few years of its intentions regarding the above-mentioned American policy imperatives, it knows well that an alliance with the military is useful, at least in the short term.

In order to further improve their hand, the Military has reverted to the usual scare tactics, in which Mubarak had excelled for decades. They raised the possibility of some truly disturbing situations in which only the Military can be trusted to maintain peace and stability, such as:

1. Islamists cannot be trusted – (and we must ask, when was the last time they upheld their commitments and promises anywhere they took over?  Note – they DO uphold promises to enforce Sharia so perhaps better to ask “when did they uphold their promises for transparency, freedom, and democracy”);

2. An Islamist rule in Egypt will only represent strategic depth to Hamas. Any planned, or even unplanned, action by a Hamas zealot could drag Egypt into war with Israel, unless the Army is there to calm things;

3. An uncontrolled Islamist regime could lead to hazardous and adventurous regional activities (remember Iran);

4. Radicalization as a means to survive by diverting the people’s attention, especially if it fails internally to resolve daily-life problems. As a hint for future repetitions, please note the recent case from  Friday November  25, 2011, when the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar mosque lead thousands from Hamas, the Brotherhood, Jamaa Islameya and Azhar scholars in a big rally “in support of Al-Aqsa Mosque” and denouncing Israeli “attempts at Judaization of Jerusalem.” (Note that there was nothing particular in the news that warranted such a rally).

And if these were not enough reasons to appreciate the need for the Army to reign in the   unbridled Islamists, the Military threw in some extra factors to emphasize the above-mentioned “potential” risks with real, actual ones. The Military:

1. Released from prison thousands of Islamists, including the killers of Sadat, and turned them into instant heroes on state-owned TV stations;

2. Allowed thousands of Jihadists, who had lived in exile for years, to enter Egypt;

3. Encouraged the most radical factions of Salafists (literally “ancestral;” an offshoot of Wahabis) to surface and even dominate the scene;

4. Even though the existing laws prohibit the creation of political parties based on religion or race, no less than 15 out of 31 newly created parties after January 25, 2011, are Islamist  in ideology;

5. Adopted a roadmap for political transition that was devised by, and in the interest of, the Muslim Brotherhood. For example, it was the request of the revolutionaries and many intellectuals to start with working on a Constitution, as a consensual charter taking into account the interests of all the nation’s segments. Instead, the Military started with the parliamentary elections, whose partisan winners – widely expected to be the Islamists – would monopolize writing the Constitution to their own advantage;

6. Implicitly encouraged terror campaigns against the Copts and even took part in them directly, such as in the October Maspero massacre;

7. Raised anti-Americanism and the xenophobic tone, blaming foreigners of all kinds of wrongdoings.

Meanwhile, the Military also sought by all means to strangle the few active NGOs by accusing them of receiving “illegal” funds from abroad, particularly from the U.S. and the E.U., at a time where Islamists are reported to have received over a billion pounds from some Gulf countries over a few months.

In sum:

  • With the “Original Sin” of the Military’s attachment to power over six decades fully in action, it is unimaginable that the Army in Egypt will relinquish willingly the powers it wields and turn into simply another army which receives orders from civilians. It is worth noting that on February 8, 2011, just before toppling Mubarak, General Omar Soliman, for years in charge of the Intelligence Services, and his newly appointed Vice President, told the various political forces: “either dialogue, or face a coup d’État.” That intriguing expression may hold a key to better understanding the “Original Sin.” The Military would stop short of nothing in order to maintain their special status.
  • It is unimaginable that the Brotherhood, and other Islamists, will miss this golden opportunity to take over Egypt at such a time when they are finally nearing triumph in their global campaign, spearheaded from Qatar (the de facto regional headquarters of the Brotherhood, where its propaganda arm-al-Jazeera TV-is based) across the Sunni Near East and North Africa.
  • The other forces, be it the original revolutionaries, the Copts, liberal and secular Muslims, or simply average people who are wary of an Islamist or a military rule, are quite fragmented.

POSSIBLE FUTURE SCENARIOS

This Tahrir-II episode of the revolution shows that the Egyptian people are starting to realize the formidable challenge ahead with the Military-Islamist alliance. If a large portion of the population  is willing to accept an Islamist regime (for reasons outside the scope of this testimony) the majority are increasingly loath to swallow the alliance.

That’s the crux of the matter, and the outcome of this bras-de-fer will influence the future of Egypt, and the region, for years.

Egypt’s dilemma now is that the options appear rather bleak:

  • A Military-Islamist ruling alliance, is the most probable outcome with a “civilian” façade after “democratic” elections, thus presenting a more appealing face to the U.S. and the West;
  • A power struggle, in the short term, in which the Islamists (who dominate the “street”) benefit from the latest gaffes by the Military, leading to a purely “civilian” Islamist regime with the West indifferent, as long as the ruler remains allegedly “civilian.” In this scenario, the army might eventually take a subdued role – but after ideological (and physical) “cleansing” (à la Iran);
  • An extended power struggle, with the possible entry into a cycle of coup d’etats.

ISLAMIST AND CHRISTIAN POLITICAL PARTIES

Mr. Chairman, at this point, I would like to focus on the West’s seeming obsession with the idea that democracy equals a “ballot box,” irrespective of whether the foundations and the environment of democracy are in place.

I would like simply to comment on one statement made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her Keynote Address at the National Democratic Institute’s 2011 Democracy Awards Dinner on November 7 of this year.  After explaining how the U.S. works with many different governments, she asked the question, “How will America respond if and when democracy brings to power people and parties we disagree with?” and then she answered,

“We hear these questions most often when it comes to Islamist religious parties. Now, of course, I hasten to add that not all Islamists are alike. Turkey and Iran are both governed by parties with religious roots, but their models and behavior are radically different. There are plenty of political parties with religious affiliations-Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim-that respect the rules of democratic politics…”

I respectfully disagree with the Secretary. Any objective study on the history and evolution of the Christian parties (such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Party, headed by Angela Merkel) in Europe and some other parts of the world, shows clearly that their founding principles revolve around a commitment to particular values such as human dignity, justice, equality, social responsibility and effective citizenship, thus putting these parties on the conservative part of political spectrum.

However, none of these Christian political parties advocate the establishment of a local or international “Christian State or Caliphate.” In looking at several mainstream “Christian” parties in Europe and South America, none of them demanded that a Christian version of Sharia be the source of the country’s Constitution.  None of them sanction violence to advance their goals, speak in the name of God, adorn their programs with biblical verses, or a chain of referrals or edicts. None of them set women lower than men, discriminate between citizens based on belief, or demand to impose a Jizyah on non-Christian citizens. None of them use logos of a bible embraced by two crossing swords. None would interfere in what people eat or drink or how they dress.  None would enforce a penal code where the condemned may be whipped, lapidated or have their limbs amputated.

Here is but one, out of many, recent illustrations which give a more accurate reflection of who Islamists really are. On the Friday after the fall of Mubarak, Youssef El Qaradawi, the Qatar-based prominent Egyptian Islamic preacher and spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, descended on Tahrir Square in a Khomeini-like show of force, to preach to the victorious believers. To his credit, he appeared conciliatory towards the Copts, trying to calm their anxieties. But that was in February. On his November 18, 2011, Friday address, he, according to CNN Arabic, urged Egyptian electors not to “vouch for a secularist, an agnostic, or those who don’t accept Allah as their God, Islam as their religion and Mohamed as their prophet.” So much for democracy, liberty, and basic freedoms.

This is not a call for mobilizing armies to fight Islamist parties whenever they take over. But it is a reminder that we need to be vigilant when these parties take over.

At the very least, the international community must hold them fully accountable to fundamental principles of human rights which are universal, and to take them to task when they fail to respect those rights. This is not out of a utopian, altruistic view, but from down-to-earth sense of preservation of the basics of civilization.

THE COPTS: SIMPLY COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

This brings me to the question: Where are the Copts in all this? The following may be telling.

On October 24, 2011, the Coptic Pope Shenouda III  “met with” (according to the local media) or was “summoned by” (according to sources close to him) Egypt’s ruling military council for an urgent meeting at the Ministry of Defense. The ailing Patriarch, age 88, whose fortieth anniversary in office was celebrated November 14, 2011, was told to come alone.

At the meeting, the Pope was berated by the top three generals. After the meeting, the Pope would not say much but the official declaration emphasized “putting Egypt’s interest above all.” I, like many Copts, thought it was likely the generals had bullied him.

If the Generals truly want to quiet the situation, why don’t they address and try to resolve Coptic grievances?

Copts, as we all know, have been subjected to systemic discrimination for years, often accompanied by sectarian attacks. The general reaction pattern was to swallow their pain and humiliation, groan in private,  take refuge in prayer, and depend on the church’s clergy to beg the authorities on their behalf.

The October 9, 2011, Maspero massacre, which will be covered in more detail by another colleague, claimed 27 deaths and 300 injured. Despite overwhelming evidence, the Military continues to deny any responsibility for the violence and in a press conference on October 12, 2011 – just three days after the massacre – even praised the performance of its soldiers as well as the state media’s performance.  Of course they never regretted, let alone apologized for, the heinous act. In fact, 28 Copts are still imprisoned and are “under investigation,” for these attacks, which amounts to nothing less than keeping them as hostages as a means of future blackmail.

Since it’s February takeover, the Army vowed never to shoot at citizens. It largely has kept to its promise, (up until the events of November 19-22, 2011, referred to above), despite numerous cases when huge demonstrations went out of control, or even when mobs cut roads, attacked public buildings, churches, or other Christian-owned properties.

So the Maspero massacre can only be interpreted as an escalation to intimidate further Coptic protest. This brings us back to the Generals’ hurried meeting with the Coptic Pope. They were clearly trying to achieve three objectives.

First, by dealing directly-and only-with him, the Military gives the Copts a taste of their status in an Islamic state where they will be treated as a minority religious community (“dhimmis“) rather than as a large portion of Egyptian citizens with a grievance.

Second, that the Copts’ religious “chief” will be held responsible for the acts of his people and hence is expected to control them, or else. By the same token, this is intended to intimidate the Copts (inside Egypt and in the Diaspora) since they do not want to place their elderly spiritual leader in danger.

Third, the Copts should put “Egypt’s interest above all” by shutting up and not doing anything – however legitimate – that can be used as a rationale by Islamists to attack them.

However, and despite such singling out, Copts are aware that they are not only defending their own rights but also participating in a battle, alongside secularist and liberal Muslims, to stop Egypt from “democratically” turning into an Iran-like or Taliban-like state. In fact, given the above-mentioned background, one could warn the Copts, “Behind you is the Military; before you, the Islamists.”

Thousands of Christians have fled the country since the revolution. Others are determined to remain in their ancestors’ homeland and to resist the advance of Islamists.

As for the international community’s attention to the issue, it is important  to realize  that the Copts may not be seen to represent much strategic importance. They have no oil, and don’t represent a security threat that would warrant appeasing them! Hence, apart from occasional sympathetic statements, the world is likely to turn a blind eye and consider the oppressed Copts as mere collateral damage.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Instead of supporting the military and/or embracing the Islamists, there must be a “Alternative Way.”

Constitution:  We urge the U.S. Government and the international community to press Egypt to ensure that its commitments to international human rights norms are upheld in the foundational sections of the new Constitution and are not undermined by any subsequent articles or passages. It would be extremely dangerous if “democracy” were used as a pretext to impose stipulations that defy those international norms, such as imposing Taliban-like laws on all Egyptians.

NGOs:  The international community must support the liberal and secular forces in Egypt. The NGOs and emerging political parties should be assisted through adequate training programs as well as through appropriate funding. In this regard, the Egyptian authorities must stop their tactic of choking NGOs operating with transparency, while turning a blind eye to massive amounts of money channeled from certain Gulf countries to Islamist and Salafist groups in Egypt.

Implementation of Justice:

  • We strongly urge the U.S. Government to press the Egyptian authorities to prosecute perpetrators of violence before, during and after the uprisings and the historic events in Egypt this year, including the Maspero massacre and the excessive violence at Tahrir square during November. Further, the extensive contacts between the U.S. and Egyptian militaries should emphasize the importance of prosecution of military personnel involved in Maspero.
  • We also urge the U.S. Government to ban visas and travel to the U.S. for any government official involved in torture. While this may be difficult to implement immediately, the U.S. could assist in setting up a mechanism that would allow for victims of violence to report the names of their torturers. With the proper instruments and processes in place to allow for confirmation that a government official is indeed involved in torture, the U.S. could easily implement a visa ban against these officials similar to that in the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.
  • We strongly urge the Egyptian authorities to stop arresting both Christians and Muslims when Christians and their property are attacked and instead bring the real perpetrators to justice.

Foreign Aid: While we welcome efforts to help Egypt in its current economic situation, we believe that unconditional aid would be a strategic error. Financial and military aid should be linked to Egypt’s human rights record in terms of constitutional stipulations, laws and practices over the short and medium terms.  We urge the U.S Government, European governments and others in the international community providing financial aid to Egypt to tie that aid to Egypt’s upholding and protecting fundamental human rights norms now and in any new Constitution.

Please note, that we believe all international aid should support democracy, freedom and fundamental human rights.. For instance, the G-8 summit held in May 2011 in Deauville in France was marked by the “Deauville Partnership” with the people of North Africa. As a start, $20 billion was pledged in support for Tunisian and Egyptian reforms after the Arab Spring.

Furthermore, France’s ex-Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, was charged by the G8 Presidency to follow-up on the issue. In an article dated November 14, 2011, he reports that $30 billion would be earmarked for Egypt alone over the period 2011-2013. However, he adds an astonishing remark, which sounds like a guideline by the G8 leaders, “Obviously, there shouldn’t be through the (Deauville) Partnership any attempt of political tutelage over the aid- receiving countries, which would be doomed to fail.”

The simple question is why should the U.S. and the international community pours in such colossal sums without even seeking the least guarantee to respect the principles of human rights – especially towards minorities?

Special Envoy:  We support and strongly urge the passage of S. 1245, after the adoption of H.R. 440, which provides for the appointment of a Special Envoy for minorities in the Middle East.  We also strongly urge the Administration to appoint someone to that position who is highly qualified and has the stature needed to ensure the issues related to minorities are included in the highest level of the U.S. Government’s policy and diplomacy, particularly during this historic transition in Egypt and other countries in the region.

The U.S. and international community must stop appeasing Islamists and instead hold them accountable when they abuse human rights. This means to publicly and strongly condemn abuses, and not hesitate to impose sanctions when issues are not addressed or corrected.

Mr. Chairman, Egypt is at crucial crossroads. The U.S. needs to lead the international community in helping Egypt go in the right direction. It is in Egypt’s own, and everybody else’s strategic interest.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to provide this testimony to this distinguished commission. Again, I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

TRANSCRIPT OF ADEL GUINDY’S TESTIMONY

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

DECEMBER 7, 2011

 

Thank you very much. Thank you also for your leadership and that of Chairman Wolf and Franks and other distinguished congressman who have been giving us unwavering support over the years. I’m honored to be here today and I would like to request that my entire written statement be made part of the record. It’s too long to read. Of course, it’s nine pages long. So I’m going to pick on a few important things which are, I think, are indicative of what’s going on in Egypt. I would start by describing the situation in Egypt, the depiction – in keeping with the depiction of summer of – spring of this and winter of that, I think Egypt is entering into a harsh summer with little to be seen in its Arab deserts beyond thirst, agony, and mirage. The first mirage is what has been – is being hailed as historic transition to democracy. It’s a charade of a democracy. What’s going on in Egypt today. Right from the beginning, by design, in this land here, you start with a Bill of Rights, Constitution to set the rules of the game, and then you build the institutions. In Egypt, by design, the military and the Islamist Brotherhood have reversed the sequence and were intent against the desires and the requests of the revolutionaries and many secularists, politicians, right from the beginning, right from February, to start with a decent constitution and they reversed the sequence to start with elections. That way, the elections, everybody, every kid in Egypt knew that was going to be won by the Islamists. That way they will make the constitution that’s to their liking. So what’s going on today? It’s a charade of a process. Right from the beginning.

Apart from the irregularities in the process itself of the elections, the past, the first – phase one. And in fact, even all along the process, you know, in Egypt, even by law you do not make a party which is based on religious or race a foundation. Fifteen out of the thirty-one newly authorized parties in Egypt over the past ten months have been all religious based, religious based and openly asking for the application of shariah. So that’s the first charade. The second mirage – the second mirage is going into civilian government. Egyptian is going – is entering a phase of an alliance of rule by the military and civilians. The facade will be similar to the liking of the United States and the international community. But the force and the power behind the scenes will be held by the military. There is marriage of convenience, or maybe by conviction. I don’t know. I doesn’t matter at that stage. Between the two groups. And this is going to be the phase of the ruling in Egypt for the next years, so these expectations – and we see op-eds here and there asking for passage from military, civilian – it’s going to happen. There’s no problem at all.

The military are not interested in governing Egypt on a day to day basis. That’s a fact. A non-starter there. Not interested at all. They are interested in the authority and the power which they have held for the past six decades. All the presidents so far came from between them, many prime ministers, ministers, heads of organizations, the economy, the army controls an economy which is about thirty or forty percent of the economic vision. It’s a black economy, it’s a black box without any scrutiny or control of anybody. The budget, it’s out of the scrutiny of the people’s assembly. And they have said clearly, they will maintain that in the future. So the couple – or the alliance of military and Islamists are going to take over Egypt. The road may be rocky over the time. Maybe the balance of power is not clear. Today they both have interest in working together in joint – in rule – in governing Egypt for the next few years, but you don’t know, we don’t know. In fact, one prediction is that the Islamists will control the street, may feel strong enough at one point to subdue the army, which is the same situation that happened in Iran, in fact, that you subdue the army by doing some kind of, you know, cleansing, ideological or physical. Pledging to have an army under the arms of the Islamists. So we are entering a very rocky period. It’s not a rocky transition towards democracy like some people would like to imagine or think. It’s a rocky downhill process which is not at all encouraging. I think we need to be prepared for what’s going on and do not applaud all of the appearances of democracy in Egypt. Which takes me, I mean, there’s so many theories about why is this alliance between the two – and what the army is, the staff has been doing over the past few months, but for the sake of time, I’ll skip that. I may come back to it if you have any questions. The second mirage is, in fact, the idea that the Islamist parties are just like any other religious parties. You know, why not the Christian parties.

And I quote here your Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, which – when she spoke at the National Democratic Institute’s 2011 Democracy Alliance Dinner, just November 7. She said, it’s a long quote, I’m just going to say – there are plenty of political parties with religious affiliations. Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, that respect the rules of democracy. The suggestion – I mean, I would very respectfully, but strongly, disagree with that statement. If you take the Christian parties in the world, you know, take the Germany’s Christian Democratic Party and try to think for a second that it has anything to do with a party like the Brotherhood, it’s outrageous, in fact. The history, you know, the movement of Christian parties started early 19th Century. If you look at the history, the evolution, the what they stand for, the current agenda and you compare that with, you know, any Islamist party, it’s like, you know, pretending that sulfuric acid and water are equal because they’re both of them fluids. They are – it’s a day and night. Islamist parties are followers of totalitarian ideology. In fact, it’s even worse than the other totalitarian ideologies the world knew and that during the 20th Century, because they pretend to speak in the name of God. So we – the world needs to be aware that what’s happening there, it’s not democracy. They pretension that these parties will become democratic, I mean, we hear some amazing things like, you know, mainstream Islamists or, you know, moderate Islamists. It’s like talking about, you know, mainstream Nazi party or moderate fascist party. These are equivalent – contradiction of terms there are amazing. I will – then the Copts. Where do the Copts fit in? The whole situation is going into, if it is not a theocratic military, theocratic state, it is a semi-theocratic state. Everybody – you know, what is being called sometimes Tahrir Two, which is the demonstrations that happened in Tahrir over the week from the 19 to the 24, 25 of November, was preceded by enormous demonstration of Islamists on Friday the 18. For what? For one word – you know, people have been working on a kind of a constitution of principles, a document for the past six or seven months, you know, has many things. Sometimes mostly contradictory fact.

But anyway, at one point, at one phrase, sentence, to describe a future state was saying that it’s a civilian state. Civilian – it’s to avoid talking about secular, not only that, but it means non-theological, non-theocratic, rather, non-theocratic and non-military. Okay, with these two meanings in mind, in fact, in the same document, there is also the stipulation which is – which has been in the past, the old defunct constitution about Islam being the religion – the religion of state and the principles of shariah being the main source of legislation. So that’s really in there. Yet the Islamists said, started to worry about the word, or the expression civilian might be construed, as the lawyers would like to say, into the possibility of becoming a secular state and they were, you know, violently, you know, demonstrating in the streets at Tahrir, hundreds of thousands there. Of course, by the evening of that date, the commission, which is a governmental commission deleted that single word or description from the committee and caved in completely. And, of course, the next few days, you know, the [UNCLEAR] government turned to align against the revolutionaries [UNCLEAR] has described before. Where do the Copts fall into that? The Copts, apart from the systematic persecution, in fact, it’s systemic also. And it’s going to be more so when they are treated as dhimmis in an Islamist state. And the gist of that has been given to them again and again over the past six months, not only by the street, by the parties, by the Islamists. By the military council itself when – the way they treated them. And in fact, what happened to [UNCLEAR] Maspero on October the 9, was made to give them a harsh lesson. In fact, the – when the military took over from Mubarak in February the 10 or 11, they committed not to shoot at citizens, never ever. They have largely kept that until the 9 of October. The first time that army shoots and crushes people. And these were the Christians, the Coptic Christians. That happened again on November 25, a story there.

I’ll jump straight to the recommendations and I have six of them. One is the constitution. There must be an assistance by the international community about the inclusion of the adherence – full adherence and acceptance of human rights, norms upheld in the foundation part of the new constitution. The word needs a distance to it. There must be a third alternative. Because, you know, you ask pragmatic governments. We have the army on one hand – on the one hand – and Islamists. Which one. We should – should not be stuck with one or the other. The world must be able to choose to encourage – for the sake of Egypt, for the sake of the world, for the sake of the security of the area, to encourage the liberal, secularist forces in Egypt, which do include the Copts, the Copts are part of that. Part of that movement. There hasn’t been enough. In fact, with so much open doors and channels and discussion and talks between Western countries, especially the US administration and the Islamists has been very, very modest effort to engage with the liberal secularist movements there. Third recommendation is implementation of justice. There’s been very seldom implementation of justice in Egypt. We encourage the authorities there to take it more seriously. The massacre of the Maspero – for example, they basically, not the only, I mean, the majority of those arrested are Copts. The perpetrators are the army. The other thugs on the street were mobilized by the secret police and so on, but yet the only people in jail are twenty-eight Copts, plus a few Muslim activists who have been bravely supporting the cause of the Copts.

We would like to request a – encourage the US government to create a kind of blacklist to ban certain officials who might be identified by victims from entering the United States. This is not difficult. There are usually enough evidence against these people. They can be given the right to defend themselves if that’s required to be fair. But at least that is the least of things to be done so that, you know, you don’t kill somebody and then the next day you get a visa to the States and Europe. The fourth point is about foreign aid. I’m delighted to hear again and again the idea of the linkage of aid to performance of human rights. In fact, it’s not only the United States. This applies to the rest of the world. I was amazed to discover a couple of weeks ago that the G-8 in its meeting in France in May has started working on a package of aid for our spring countries and they gave an ex-prime minister of France the duty of investigating the subject and he presented his report in the G-20, at the G-20 meeting in France two, just three weeks ago, during which he’s talking about allocating about twenty billion dollars, or thirty billion dollars to Egypt over the next three years. And not only that, I mean, he’s – he makes an astounding statement. You know, not only that people don’t want or hesitate to link aid to any constraints, he makes a commitment to the opposite. He says, obviously, there shouldn’t be through that partnership any attempt of political tutelage over the aid-receiving countries which would be doomed to fail. I found that flabbergasting.

Okay, the next point is the special envoy, the HR-40 has been adopted and we strongly recommend that as well for the five to be adopted to. And the last one is the US enter – I mean, the international community must stop appeasing Islamists and instead hold them accountable when they abuse human rights. Once again, Mr. Chairman, thank you very much and I repeat it’s in the interest in Egypt and the world that Egypt be guided properly in the right direction in the next few years. Thank you very much.

 

 

 

Adel F. Guindy is President of the Board of Coptic Solidarity. He is also President of Solidarité Copte (France), is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Freedom Forum (USA, Egypt), Le Monde Copte (France) and Egyptian Democratic Solidarity (Egypt).

He has been an activist for several years, and frequently writes on political transformation in Egypt, the Coptic issue and Islamism. He has authored several articles in English (MERIA and other publications), three books in Arabic, and co-authored one book in French. He was a senior editor of Egypt’s Coptic community weekly Watani.

Previously, he had a long international management career with a large technology company in the energy sector.

 

 

 

 

An ally no more

With vote tallies in for Egypt’s first round of parliamentary elections in it is abundantly clear that Egypt is on the fast track to becoming a totalitarian Islamic state. The first round of voting took place in Egypt’s most liberal, cosmopolitan cities. And still the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists received more than 60 percent of the vote. Run-off elections for 52 seats will by all estimates increase their representation.

And then in the months to come, Egyptian voters in the far more Islamist Nile Delta and Sinai will undoubtedly provide the forces of jihadist Islam with an even greater margin of victory.

Until the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world. The Egyptian military is US-armed, US-trained and US-financed. The Suez Canal is among the most vital waterways in the world for the US Navy and the global economy. Due to Mubarak’s commitment to stemming the tide of jihadist forces that threatened his regime, under his rule Egypt served as a major counter-terror hub in the US-led war against international jihad.

GIVEN EGYPT’S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration’s response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for "democracy."

Rather than warn Egypt that it will face severe consequences if it completes its Islamist transformation, the Obama administration has turned its guns on the first country that will pay a price for Egypt’s Islamic revolution: Israel.

Speaking at the annual policy conclave in Washington sponsored by the leftist Brookings Institute’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hammered Israel, the only real ally the US has left in the Middle East after Mubarak’s fall. Clinton felt it necessary – in the name of democracy – to embrace the positions of Israel’s radical Left against the majority of Israelis.

The same Secretary of State that has heralded negotiations with the violent, fanatical misogynists of the Taliban; who has extolled Saudi Arabia where women are given ten lashes for driving, and whose State Department trained female-hating Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the lead-up to the current elections in Egypt accused Israel of repressing women’s rights. The only state in the region where women are given full rights and legal protections became the focus of Clinton’s righteous feminist wrath.

In the IDF, as in the rest of the country, religious coercion is forbidden. Jewish law prohibits men from listening to women’s voices in song. And recently, when a group of religious soldiers were presented with an IDF band that featured female vocalists, keeping faith with their Orthodox observance, they walked out of the auditorium. The vocalists were not barred from singing. They were not mistreated. They were simply not listened to.

And as far as Clinton is concerned, this is proof that women in Israel are under attack. Barred by law from forcing their soldiers to spurn their religious obligations, IDF commanders were guilty of crimes against democracy for allowing the troops to exit the hall.

Clinton didn’t end her diatribe with the IDF’s supposed war against women. She continued her onslaught by proclaiming that Israel is taking a knife to democracy by permitting its legislators to legislate laws that she doesn’t like. The legislative initiatives that provoked the ire of the US Secretary of State are the bills now under discussion which seek to curtail the ability of foreign governments to subvert Israel’s elected government by funding non-representative, anti-Israel political NGOs like B’Tselem and Peace Now.

In attacking Israel in the way she did, Clinton showed that she holds Israel to a unique standard of behavior. Whereas fellow Western democracies are within their rights when they undertake initiatives like banning Islamic headdresses from the public square, Israel is a criminal state for affording Jewish soldiers freedom of religion. Whereas the Taliban, who enslave women and girls in the most unspeakable fashion are worthy interlocutors, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which supports universal female genital mutilation is moderate, Israel is an enemy of democracy for seeking to preserve the government’s ability to adopt policies that advance the country’s interests.

The unique standard to which Clinton holds the Jewish state is the standard of human perfection.
And as far as she is concerned, if Israel is not perfect, then it is unworthy of support. And since Israel, as a nation of mere mortals can never be perfect, it is necessarily always guilty.

CLINTON’S ASSAULT on Israeli democracy and society came a day after Panetta attacked Israel’s handling of its strategic challenges. Whereas Clinton attacked Israel’s moral fiber, Panetta judged Israel responsible for every negative development in the regional landscape.

Panetta excoriated Israel for not being involved in negotiations with the Palestinians. Israel, he said must make new concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them of its good faith. If Israel makes such gestures, and the Palestinians and the larger Islamic world spurn them, then Panetta and his friends will side with Israel, he said.

Panetta failed to notice that Israel has already made repeated, unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians and that the Palestinians have pocketed those concessions and refused to negotiate. And he failed to notice that in response to the repeated spurning of its concessions by the Palestinians and the Arab world writ large, rather than stand with Israel, the US and Europe expanded their demands for further Israeli concessions.

Panetta demanded that Israel make renewed gestures as well to appease the Egyptians, Turks and Jordanians. He failed to notice that it was Turkey’s Islamist government, not Israel, that took a knife to the Turkish-Israeli strategic alliance.

As for Egypt, rather than recognize the strategic implications for the US and Israel alike of Egypt’s transformation into an Islamic state, the US Defense Secretary demanded that Israel ingratiate itself with Egypt’s military junta. Thanks in large part to the Obama administration, that junta is now completely beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood.

As for Jordan, again thanks to the US’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its aligned groups in Libya and Tunisia, the Hashemite regime is seeking to cut a deal with the Jordanian branch of the movement in a bid to save itself from Mubarak’s fate. Under these circumstances, there is no gesture that Israel can make to its neighbor to the east that would empower King Abdullah to extol the virtues of peace with the Jewish state.

Then there is Iran, and its nuclear weapons program.

Panetta argued that an Israeli military strike against Iran would lead to regional war. But he failed to mention that a nuclear armed Iran will lead to nuclear proliferation in the Arab world and exponentially increase the prospect of a global nuclear war.

Rather than face the dangers head on, Panetta’s message was that the Obama administration would rather accept a nuclear-armed Iran than support an Israeli military strike on Iran to prevent the mullocracy from becoming a nuclear-armed state.

Clinton’s and Panetta’s virulently anti-Israeli messages resonated in an address about European anti-Semitism given last week by the US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman. Speaking to a Jewish audience, Gutman effectively denied the existence of anti-Semitism in Europe. While attacks against European Jews and Jewish institutions have become a daily occurrence continent-wide, Gutman claimed that non-Muslim anti- Semites are essentially just all-purpose bigots who hate everyone, not just Jews.

As for the Muslims who carry out the vast majority of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe, Gutman claimed they don’t have a problem with good Jews like him. They are simply angry because Israel isn’t handing over land to the Palestinians quickly enough. If the Jewish state would simply get with Obama’s program, according to the US ambassador, Muslim attacks on Jews in Europe would simply disappear.

Gutman of course is not a policymaker. His job is simply to implement Obama’s policies and voice the president’s beliefs.

But when taken together with Clinton’s and Panetta’s speeches, Gutman’s remarks expose a distressing intellectual and moral trend that clearly dominates the Obama administration’s foreign policy discourse.

All three speeches share a common rejection of objective reality in favor of a fantasy.

In the administration’s fantasy universe, Israel is the only actor on the world stage. Its detractors, whether in the Islamic world or Europe, are mere objects. They are bereft of judgment or responsibility for their actions.

There are two possible explanations for this state of affairs – and they are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that the Obama administration is an ideological echo chamber in which only certain positions are permitted. This prospect is likely given the White House’s repeated directives prohibiting government officials from using terms like "jihad," "Islamic terrorism," "Islamist," and "jihadist," to describe jihad, Islamic terrorism, Islamists and jihadists.

Restrained by ideological thought police that outlaw critical thought about the dominant forces in the Islamic world today, US officials have little choice but to place all the blame for everything that goes wrong on the one society they are free to criticize – Israel.

The second possible explanation for the administration’s treatment of Israel is that it is permeated by anti-Semitism. The outsized responsibility and culpability placed on Israel by the likes of Obama, Clinton, Panetta and Gutman is certainly of a piece with classical anti-Semitic behavior.

There is little qualitative difference between accusing Israeli society of destroying democracy for seeking to defend itself against foreign political subversion, and accusing Jews of destroying morality for failing to embrace foreign religious faiths.

So too, there is little qualitative difference between blaming Israel for its isolation in the face of the Islamist takeover of the Arab world, and blaming the Jews for the rise of anti-Semites to power in places like Russia, Germany and Norway.

In truth, from Israel’s perspective, it really doesn’t make a difference whether these statements and the intellectual climate they represent stem from ideological myopia or from hatred of Jews.

The end result is the same in either case: Under President Obama, the US government has become hostile to Israel’s national rights and strategic imperatives. Under Obama, the US is no longer Israel’s ally.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

A predictable fiasco

The Egyptian elections have resulted in a rout for the throngs whose springtime hopes for freedom are now facing the prospect of a nuclear winter at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow Salafists.  These Islamists appear to have garnered 60% of the seats in the next parliament and the opportunity to shape the country’s new constitution in line with their ambitions to impose the totalitarian doctrine of shariah nationwide.  That will be bad news for the people of Egypt, for Israel and for us.

This fiasco was made predictable in early February when President Obama announced that President Hosni Mubarak had to leave office at once.  It was clear even then that the most organized, most disciplined and most ruthless group would prevail in the ensuing, chaotic electoral environment.  Apart from the military, in Egypt that group has been the Muslim Brotherhood basically since its founding in 1928.

Press reports indicate that the Obama Administration spent $200 million to help non-Islamist parties organize and compete in last week’s elections.  If true, it adds insult to injury.  The money was wasted, not only because the liberal and secular elements to whommuch of it reportedly was given, were hopelessly outgunned by the Brotherhood.  More importantly, it was squandered because Team Obama, in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, made a point in the run-up to the vote of welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in the “political dialogue” in Egypt.

In so doing, the Obama administration not only signaled that it could do business with the Brotherhood.  It gave lie to any pretense of concern about the Islamists’ role in the massacre of Coptic Christians (which will be the subject of an important hearing in the House of Representatives’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Wednesday).

Similarly, the President and his subordinates appear determined to ignore the Brotherhood’s virulently supremacist and jihadist creed.  They are also evidently indifferent to the strategic plan issued in 1991 by the MB’s American arm and the phased approach for realizing its goal of “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”  (Documents enshrining these ambitions were introduced uncontested into evidence by federal prosecutors in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial.)

At the same time, the Obama administration is reaching out to and empowering Muslim Brotherhood front groups as their exclusive interlocutors with Muslims inside the United States.  Incredibly, the Department of Homeland Security has recently promulgated guidelines that effectively require all trainers and their training material to be approved by “community leaders” – read, officials of organizations like the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American Islamic Relations that the federal government has identified as tied to the Brotherhood.

One wonders about the extent to which such fatally flawed policies reflect the influence exercised on senior administration officials by people with deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.  For example, Secretary of State Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, has a mother (Saleha Abedin) and a brother (Hassan Abedin) who have been linked, respectively, to the Muslim Sisterhood and Brotherhood.  Could such associations be coloring Mrs. Clinton’s judgment about, notably, the advisability of having the MB come to power in Egypt and the reliability of the Islamist government of our NATO “ally,” Turkey?

Perhaps such influences are also shaping Secretary Clinton’s willingness to engage next week in Washington with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in aneffort to bridge differences between the United States and Islamists bent on its submission to shariah.  The issue involves one of our most fundamental liberties – freedom of expression.  Unfortunately, it is hard to see how this conclave will do anything but impinge upon that constitutionally protected right.

After all, the OIC has been seeking for years to secure worldwide acceptance of its shariah-adherent prohibition on expression that offends Muslims.  The Obama administration has already associated itself with a watered-down version of this initiative.  Now, it seems intent on finding a way to deny free speech to those who the Islamists depict as “Islamphobes.”

Given this agenda, it is ironic that Vice President Joe Biden has been lately touting the importance of free speech – most recently during a visit to, of all places,  Turkey.  He seems to epitomize the old saw that “somebody always doesn’t get the word.”  Neither the Veep nor Mrs. Clinton (who started her dialogue with the OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in Istanbul in July) seem to have noticed that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan is in the process of completing the Islamization of his country andsnuffing what is left of independent media that dares to challenge him.

In fact, what is happening in Turkey right now is a roadmap for what is to come in Egypt – and wherever else the Muslim Brotherhood or its ilk come to power.  The willful blindness of the Obama administration to the reality that such Islamists are determined to impose shariah at the expense of freedom has – as was predictable and predicted – facilitated that outcome in Cairo.  If it persists, such malfeasance will simply substitute the despotic misrule of clerics for the despotic misrule of secular autocrats, to the detriment of the people most immediately affected and, in due course, of America’s as well.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

The Isolationist delusion

I had an unsettling flashback last week listening to two of the Republican presidential candidates talk about foreign policy.  Representative Ron Paul of Texas and former Utah Governor Jon Hunstman espoused isolationist stances that called to mind one of the most preposterous public policy debates in decades.

As I recall, the occasion was a Washington, D.C. event sponsored in the early 1990s by a group of libertarians.  A colleague and I were invited to rebut the following proposition:  “Resolved, the Constitution of the United States should be amended to prohibit the use of military force for any purpose other than defending the nation’s borders.”

Our side of the debate pointed out that, however superficially appealing such an idea might appear, it was ahistorical, irrational and reckless.

After all, if history teaches us anything, it is that wars happen – as Ronald Reagan put it – not when America is too strong, but when we are too weak.  In the run-up to World Wars I and II, we followed more or less the libertarians’ prescription, and disaster ensued.

By contrast, for over six decades, the world has been spared another global conflagration because the United States military has been both formidable and forward-deployed.  Do we really want to try our luck and once again indulge in a “come home America” posture?

Now, in fairness, an argument could have been made (and was) in the aftermath of President Reagan’s successful use of all instruments of national power to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War, that we were without serious peers or adversaries.  Even then, however, the unlikely durability of such an assessment made it a poor basis for U.S. disengagement from the world.

But no one in their right mind would mistake today’s strategic environment as one in which we are unchallenged – or even as one that is stable, let alone tranquil.

Indeed, virtually everywhere one turns, there are rising threats to our interests and security.  The Chinese, Muslim Brothers and other Islamists, Russians, Latin American Chavistas, Iranians and North Koreans are among those who increasingly sense weakness on our part.  They are responding as thugs everywhere do to such vacuums of power – by becoming more assertive, aggressive and dangerous.  Ditto erstwhile “allies” like Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt.

Unfortunately, such behavior is only likely to become more of a problem as the perception takes hold that Barack Obama’s abandonment of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to strategic defeats for America.  Add to the mix a U.S. military that is being eviscerated by arbitrary and deep cuts in defense spending and it is a safe bet that the so-called “international community” will only become more inhospitable to freedom.

If this is so obvious, though, why do Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman and their libertarian and other supporters not get it?  Some of these partisans may simply know nothing of the world.  That explanation certainly does not apply to a former U.S. ambassador to China like Gov. Huntsman, however.

Then, there’s the “we can’t afford to be ‘the world’s policeman’” argument.  Its corollary is that we face grave economic difficulties and must remedy them before we can bear the costs associated with having a military second to none.

Again, hard historical experience teaches otherwise.  The costs associated with maintaining armed forces that deter aggression are vastly less than those involved in waging wars, particularly on a global scale.  And our economy depends critically on our ability to maintain access to markets and resources, open sea lanes, etc.

For his part, Ron Paul maintains that the defense budget is not being cut, just its rate of growth.  In fact, the roughly half-a-trillion dollars in reductions to which President Obama agreed will result in actual cuts. Add on another $600 billion and you have what the Pentagon calls “negative real growth.”

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the isolationist delusion is the idea that we have angered others by our policies and our presence in distant lands, which they regard as provocative interference.  It follows that, if only we stop engaging in such behavior, they will leave us alone.

The truth of the matter is that adherents to the Islamic doctrine of shariah and Chinese and Russia nationalists have aspired to rule the world – or at least large stretches of it – for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.  In other words, they have been hostile long before the United States was founded, let alone the last century when it started exercising power on the global stage.

That being the case, the isolationists’ siren song must be rejected: Were it to become national policy (either in the form of the extreme position of a long-ago debate or the less obviously absurd one advanced by Messrs. Paul and Huntsman in the recent candidates’ forums), we would confront the prospect of fighting in due course these (or other) adversaries on our own soil, rather than elsewhere.

A recent Rasmussen poll indicates that by a 50-36% margin, the American people have more confidence in Republicans than Democrats when it comes to national security matters.  That is a potentially decisive advantage.  It must not be compromised – either by picking candidates who will not enjoy and do not deserve such trust, or by the GOP running to the left of President Obama’s Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who is correctly warning of catastrophe if our armed forces are denied the funds they need to do their abidingly important job around the world.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of Secure Freedom Radio, which airs in Washington on WRC 1260 AM at 9:00 p.m. weeknights.

Calling things by their proper names

Next month, America’s long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country.

Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw on the US’s hard won gains in that country.

After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.

The general stupor was broken last week with The Weekly Standard’s publication of an article titled, "Defeat in Iraq: President Obama’s decision to withdraw US troops is the mother of all disasters." The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan. The Kagans contributed to conceptualizing the US’s successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as "the surge," that president George W. Bush implemented in 2007.

In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic implications of next month’s withdrawal. First they note that with the US withdrawal, the sectarian violence that the surge effectively ended will in all likelihood return in force.

Iranian-allied Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is purging the Iraqi military and security services and the Iraqi civil service of pro-Western, anti- Iranian commanders and senior officials. With American acquiescence, Maliki and his Shi’ite allies already managed to effectively overturn the March 2010 election results. Those elections gave the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi the right to form the next government.

Due to Maliki’s actions, Iraq’s Sunnis are becoming convinced they have little to gain from peacefully accepting the government.

The strategic implications of Maliki’s purges are clear. As the US departs the country next month it will be handing its hard-won victory in Iraq to its greatest regional foe – Iran. Repeating their behavior in the aftermath of Israel’s precipitous withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies are presenting the US withdrawal from Iraq as a massive strategic victory.

They are also inventing the rationale for continued war against the retreating Americans. Iran’s Hezbollah-trained proxy, Muqtada al-Sadr, has declared that US Embassy personnel are an "occupation force" that the Iraqis should rightly attack with the aim of defeating.

The US public’s ignorance of the implications of a post-withdrawal, Iranian-dominated Iraq is not surprising. The Obama administration has ignored them and the media have largely followed the administration’s lead in underplaying them.

For its part, the Bush administration spent little time explaining to the US public who the forces fighting in Iraq were and why the US was fighting them.

US military officials frequently admitted that the insurgents were trained, armed and funded by Iran and Syria. But policy-makers never took any action against either country for waging war against the US. Above the tactical level, the US was unwilling to take any effective action to diminish either regime’s support for the insurgency or to make them pay a diplomatic or military price for their actions.
As for Obama, as the Kagans and Sullivan show, the administration abjectly refused to intervene when Maliki stole the elections or to defend US allies in the Iraqi military from Maliki’s pro-Iranian purge of the general officer corps. And by refusing to side with US allies, the Obama administration has effectively sided with America’s foes, enabling Iranian-allied forces to take over the US-built, trained and armed security apparatuses in Iraq.

ALL OF these actions are in line with the US’s current policy towards Egypt. There, without considering the consequences of its actions, in January and February the Obama administration played a key role in ousting the US’s most dependable ally in the Arab world, president Hosni Mubarak.

Since Mubarak was thrown from office, Egypt has been ruled by a military junta dubbed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Because SCAF is comprised of the men who served as Mubarak’s underlings throughout his 30-year rule, it shares many of the institutional interests that guided Mubarak and rendered him a dependable US ally. Specifically, SCAF is ill-disposed toward chaos and Islamic radicalism.

However, unlike Mubarak, SCAF is only in power because the mobs of protesters in Tahrir Square demanded that Mubarak stand down to enable civilian, majority rule in Egypt. Consequently, the military junta is much less able to keep Egypt’s populist forces at bay.

Throughout Mubarak’s long reign, the most popular force in Egypt was the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. The populism unleashed by Mubarak’s ouster necessarily rendered the Brotherhood the most powerful political force in Egypt. If free elections are held in Egypt next week as planned and if their results are honored, within a year Egypt will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the outcome Obama all but guaranteed when he cut the cord on Mubarak.

Recognizing the danger a Brotherhood government would pose to the army’s institutional interests, in recent weeks the generals began taking steps to delay elections, limit the power of the parliament and postpone presidential elections.

Their moves provoked massive opposition from Egypt’s now fully legitimated and empowered populist forces. And so they launched what they are dubbing "the second Egyptian revolution."
And the US doesn’t know what to do.

In late 2010, foreign policy professionals on both sides of the aisle in Washington got together and formed a group called the Working Group for Egypt. This group, with members as seemingly diverse as Elliott Abrams from the Bush administration and the Council on Foreign Relations, and Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, chose to completely ignore the fact that the populist forces in Egypt are overwhelmingly jihadist. They lobbied for Mubarak’s overthrow in the name of "democracy" in January and February. Today they demand that Obama side with the rioters in Tahrir Square against the military. And just as he did in January and February, Obama is likely to follow their "bipartisan" advice.

FROM IRAQ to Egypt to Libya to Syria, as previous mistakes by both the Bush and Obama administrations constrain and diminish US options for advancing its national interests, America is compelled to make more and more difficult choices. In Libya, after facilitating Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow, the US is faced with the prospect of dealing with an even more radical regime that is jihadist, empowered and already transferring arms to terror groups and proliferating nonconventional weapons. If the Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment acknowledge the hostile nature of the new regime and refrain from supporting it, they will be forced to admit they sided with America’s enemies in taking down Gaddafi.

While Gaddafi was certainly no Mubarak, at worst he was an impotent adversary.

In Syria, not only did the US refuse to take any action against President Bashar Assad despite his active sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, it failed to cultivate any ties with Syrian regime opponents. The US has continued to ignore Syrian regime opponents to the present day. And now, with Assad’s fall a matter of time, the US is presented with a fairly set opposition leadership, backed by Islamist Turkey and dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The liberal, pro-American forces in Syria, including the Kurds, have been shut out of the post-Assad power structure.

And in Egypt, after embracing "democracy" over its ally Mubarak, the US is faced with another unenviable choice. It can either side with the weak, but not necessarily hostile military junta which is dependent on US financial aid, or it can side with Islamic extremists who seek its destruction and that of Israel and have the support of the Egyptian people.

HOW HAS this situation arisen? How is it possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled "The Lost Decade."

Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after September 11, 2001, to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those interests.

The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn’t want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world’s hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.

For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US’s enemy because it feared the Left.

And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic – terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn’t an enemy. It’s just a tactic. 

And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular. Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.

The lion’s share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn’t want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.

Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left’s ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America’s worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey’s Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.

And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington’s irresponsibility.

There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Who lost the world? The unraveling of the globe under Obama’s watch

Conventional wisdom has it that the 2012 election will be all about the dismal economy, unemployment and the soaring deficit.  That appears a safe bet since such matters touch the electorate, are much in the news at the moment and have indisputably gotten worse on Barack Obama’s watch.

It seems increasingly likely, however, that the American people are going to have a whole lot more to worry about by next fall.  Indeed, the way things are going, by November 2012, we may see the Mideast – and perhaps other parts of the planet – plunged into a cataclysmic war.

Consider just a few of the straws in the wind of a gathering storm:

Muammar Gadhafi’s death last week prompted the Obama administration to trumpet the President’s competence as Commander-in-Chief and the superiority of his "small footprint," "lead-from-behind" approach to waging war over the more traditional – and costly and messy – one pursued by George W. Bush.  The bloom came off that false rose on Sunday when Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council, repeatedly declared his government’s fealty to shariah, Islam’s brutally repressive, totalitarian political-military-legal doctrine. 

Among other things, Abdul-Jalil said shariah would be the "basic source" of all legislation. Translation: Forget about representative democracy.  Under shariah, Allah makes the laws, not man. 

In short, the result of Mr. Obama’s $2 billion dollar expenditure to oust Gadhafi is a regime that will be led by jihadists, controls vast oil reserves and has inherited a very substantial arsenal (although some of it – including reportedly as many as 20,000 surface-to-air missiles – has "gone missing.")  This scarcely can be considered a victory for the United States and will probably prove a grave liability.

An Islamist party called Nahda seems likely to have captured the lion’s share of the votes cast in the first free election in Tunisia.  While we are assured it is a "moderate" religious party, the same has long been said of Turkey’s governing AKP party.  Unfortunately, we have lately seen the latter’s true colors as it has become ever-more-insistent at home on jettisoning the secular form of government handed down by Attaturk and acted ever-more-aggressively abroad.  A similar transformation can be expected, later if not sooner, of any shariah-adherent political movement.

Meanwhile in Egypt, the agenda of the Islamists’ mother ship – the Muslim Brotherhood – is being adopted even before elections formally bring it to power.  The interim military government has abetted efforts to punish and even kill the Coptic Christian minority.  It has facilitated the arming of the Brotherhood’s franchise in Gaza, Hamas, and allowed the Sinai to become the launching pad for al Qaeda and others’ attacks on Israel. 

Egypt’s transitional regime also helped broker the odious exchange of over 1,000 convicted terrorists held by Israel for a single soldier kidnapped and held hostage for five years by Hamas.  Upon their release, even the convicts with Jewish blood on their hands received heroes’ welcomes even as they affirmed their desire to destroy Israel and called for the seizure of still more Israelis to spring their comrades still behind bars.  This does not augur well for either the Jewish State or for our interests.

The increasingly mercurial Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has announced that – despite the long-running, immensely costly and ongoing U.S. effort to protect his kleptocratic government – in a war between Pakistan and the United States, Afghanistan would side with Pakistan.  The magnitude of this insulting repudiation of America is all the greater since Pakistan is widely seen as doing everything it can to reestablish the Taliban in Kabul.

And in Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has touted his success in thwarting Washington’s belated (and half-hearted) efforts to keep a significant number of U.S. forces in his country after the end of this year.  Already, his coalition partner and fellow Iranian cats-paw, Muqtada al-Sadr, is boasting that he will also drive out the American contractor personnel who are, for the moment, expected to provide a measure of security after the military withdraws.  In that case, we may well see the mullahs’ agents take over a U.S. embassy for the second time since 1979 – this one the newest, largest and most expensive in the world. 

Add to this litany an emboldened and ascendant China, a revanchist Russia once again under the absolute control of Vladimir Putin, a Mexico free-falling into civil war with narco-traffickers and their Hezbollah allies on our southern border and you get a world that is fraught with peril for the United States.  Matters are made infinitely worse by the prospect of the U.S. military being hollowed out by reckless budget cuts.

The Republican candidates to succeed Barack Obama are beginning to find their voices on the national security portfolio.  They will be formally debating the president’s sorry record in coming weeks.  The question the American people will want answered is not only "Who lost the world?" but what will they do to get it back?

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.