It would be hard to overstate what a catastrophe the Egyptian elections are shaping into. Reports about stage one of the long process show not only that the Muslim Brotherhood may be getting over 50 percent of the vote; an even more extreme Islamist party — called “Nour” — is apparently getting between 10 and 15 percent.
In a bit of sleight-of-hand I’ve noted before, the media describes as “Salafists” the elements that are even more extreme Islamists than the MB. This is a device to help the Obama administration’s assiduous campaign to airbrush the Brotherhood into a “moderate” organization — one that National Intelligence Director James Clapper so memorably (and ludicrously) described as “largely secular.”
Do not be deceived. The MB is itself a Salafist organization. Salafism is a retro-refom movement that seeks to return Muslims to what is seen as the pure Islam of the founding generations (the Salafiyyah — the “righteous companions” of Mohammed). MB founder Hassan al-Banna was a Salafist. So was Sayyid Qutb — the most important MB theorist of the second half of the 20th Century. So is the MB’s leading sharia jurist in modern times, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi (despite efforts by his delusional Western fans to portray him as a modernizing reformer). The difference between MB Salafists and more extreme Salafists (like the difference between the MB and al-Qaeda) is much more about methodology than ideology). It is akin to the difference between Saul Alinksy organizers and the New Left radicals of the ’60s and ’70s. The MB has always believed in working with (and penetrating) government, and boring into society’s institutions, in order to Islamize society gradually. More extreme Salafists reject secular society and refuse to interact with its government — on the theory that such interaction corrupts them while legitimizing the secular government. But the goal of both sides is precisely the same: to install sharia law as the foundation for Islamizing the society.
The fact that Islamists even more extreme than the MB are not only participating but winning substantial seats in the election is a disaster on at least three counts. First, it demonstrates yet again the weakness of the secular democrats who have been portrayed, fraudulently, as the dynamic force of the “Arab Spring.” Second, it will push the dominant MB into an even more aggressively Islamist posture. Third, it will have the perverse effect of helping the Obama administration and Western Islamophiles continue to portray the MB as comparatively moderate. Of course, the Brothers are only ostensibly moderate in comparison to Nour (with whom they’ll be delighted to collaborate) — objectively speaking, they are virulently anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli (indeed, anti-Semitic).
The Islamist ascendancy in Egypt, enabled by the West’s democracy fetishists and its Leftist allies of the MB, will have immediate disastrous consequences — in the imminent drafting of the new Egyptian constitution; in the eventual Egyptian presidential election next year; in overcoming the Egyptian military’s half-hearted attempts to stem the Islamist tide; in the deteriorating security of 8 million Coptic Christians (about 10 percent of the population); in a radically new and more threatening Islamist threat to Israel on a long border it has not had to worry about for the last 30 years; and in ensuring (in cahoots with Islamist Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, a longtime MB intimate) that the Brotherhood will take over Syria when Assad falls — probably sooner rather than later.
Who could have predicted such a grand jihad?
The war in Iraq/Afghanistan will be remembered as the modern day WWI. i.e. "To be continued..."
I beginning to think "Arab Spring" has actually been championed by some on the Right because they genuinely want a full scale war in the Middle East so as to vanquish Isreal's foes. They increasingly appear to be getting their wish.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe enduring mystery is how on Earth did we allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons while we had huge forces in theater on Iran's eastern and western flanks?
The appalling stupidity of American politicians and the fecklessness of our "see no evil" intelligence apparatus is something to behold.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBush did not have the political capital to widen the war. Obama campaigned on "surrender".
One often meets his destiny on the path he seeks to avoid it. - Jean de la Fontaine (French poet)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBush had all the capital he needed and then some---Iran not only manufactured the IEDs which crippled so many of our troops, but sent their own troops into fight us.
Bush never made the cassus belli, either because he was weak.or because his own intelligence agencies lied about Iran seeking nukes. Or both.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt took me a long time to realize that the Bush operations and maneuvers in Iraq and Afghanistan were not the opening of a brilliant pincer movement aimed at subduing the Islamic Republic, destroying its nuclear weapons program and forming a deep territoprial bulkhead against the greater danger in Southwest Asia, which is of course Pakistan.
In a sane world, that's what would have been.
Our failure to follow through on our quick tactical successes in Mesopotamia and Southwest Asia, and our nearly-complete retreat therefrom, are apparently to become tragic and historic blunders of the first magnitude.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOur elected leaders dramatically miscalculated the intensity of al Qaeda's response to our invasion of Iraq and the number of troops required to build a lasting peace. I remember a post in The Weekly Standard back in early 2003 by Jonathan Last. I wrote the author basically saying "unless we plan to stay there for 40 years, I'm not sure this is worth it, and I'm not sure this staying-power has been taken into account." He wrote back essentially agreeing, but at that point the die had been cast.
Had we dealt with reality in 2003 about the number of troops and the long-term costs, it is likely Sadaam would still be in power today. But once the political calculation to "sell" the war was made, and the reduced number of troops and mission focus required to get the votes, any idea of a 'pincer' with Iran was lost. This is what happens when you fight like a Liberal. When Bush finally got some conservative stones in 2007 with the surge, things dramatically improved. Had we had that strategy in 2003, there might be a different set of circumstanced on the ground in the region today.
As I wrote in another post, I'm not sure we would have been successful with Iran anyway. The country is huge, and although there are dissidents, the fanatics are basically a bunch of Kamikaze's. After the "highway of death" in 1991, I don't know how much of a slaughter anyone would have been ready to inflict on the people of Iran. But a whole sale slaughter may be what it will take to dislodge the Iranian regime.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBefore Bush invaded Iraq, the RAND Corporation had done a study of past military occupations to learn how many troops were needed for a successful occupation.
Their analysis suggested that to be sure that you can suppress any insurgency and keep the country peaceful, you need a minimum force ratio of one soldier for every 50 civilians.
For Iraq, a country of 26 million people, that would work out to 520,000 troops--comparable to the number we had in the Gulf War of 1991.
All our difficulties were caused by one thing: Too few troops. Rumsfeld's "small footprint" theories were proven dead wrong in Iraq.
The number we finally did send--140,000--actually represented a compromise between what Rumsfeld wanted and what the military brass thought we needed. Originally, Rumsfeld wanted to invade Iraq with fewer than 100,000 troops!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYep, like I said, they had to sell the war, and they could not do that with the force posture that existed in 2003. The Army was just too small by the time the "peace dividend" was paid.
"You go to war with the Army you have," Rumsfeld once famously said.
The surge was brilliant in this regards. Pair that strategy with the original invasion plan, and maybe you get something like success. But there were far too many assumptions about Iraqi stability post-invasion that proved wrong.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Bush never made the cassus belli, either because he was weak..."
This is what I meant by political capital. There were plenty of contemporaneous reports of Iran-made IEDs. But had he tried to pursue and expansion of the war into Iran, he would have been stopped by a mix of weary Americans preyed upon by the political Left. Iran is a much, much larger country, and a great deal more fanatical than Sadaam's Iraq. We would have been widening a war with millions of Iranian Kamike's. The number of troops required to do this would have been well north of 500,000. Smaller-scale operations probably would not have been successfu. We will never know. But if we're going to take out Iran, it will have to be root and branch. The half-a**'d strategy we had in Iraq from 2003-2006 would have been a nightmare in Iran.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusepardon the typo...I meant Iranian Kamikaze's...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow, exactly, did Obama campaign on "surrrender"?
Are you saying the US should have "widened the war" to include Iran at the same time we were committed in Iraq and Afghanistan? How would that have worked?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseObama campained on "ending" the war. Not winning it or securing the peace, not victory, just "ending" the war. If you don't win it, you have decided to walk away, to surrender. I've been calling it our "long surrender" for years, and it is quite true. We are doing the same in Afghanistan. Obama is tired of it, so we are bringing the troops back home.
You may wish to call it something other than surrender, but abandoning the war effort is what Obama ran on. To me, that is simply a surrender. Call it what it is.
The only thing Obama has done is ensure that we'll be back.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The enduring mystery is how on Earth did we allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons while we had huge forces in theater on Iran's eastern and western flanks?"
You're kidding, right?
How big do you think the US Marine Corps and US Army are? We didn't have enough troops in theater to keep Iraq from spiraling out of control (I know, I was there), let alone enough troops to invade an adjacent country.
Moreover, unlike Iraq that had its air defenses and tactical missile capabilities all but dismantled in the first Gulf War, Iran had (and maintains) a robust missile defense system. Allied forces deployed in huge, static bases, would have been sitting ducks for the immediate missile retaliation that SURELY would have come if we tried to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities.
Whatever the Iraq war really cost, we would have seen that number triple (in both treasure and blood), had we tried to eliminate the Iran nuclear threat.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat's right, hokkoda. You've figured it all out. 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq... hell, we did it all to serve our Jewish masters. All that blood and treasure? All in a days work serving the Jews. Boy, we can't fool you.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow wonderfully obnoxious of you to say a bunch of nasty things that I never said.
Only a fool would believe that the removal of these regional dictators would produce a string of secular democratic republics along the lines of Turkey. Were you asleep during the Iraq war circa 2005? So, assuming that people are not fools, you have to ask yourself, "Well, why were so many people in favor of 'Arab Spring'?"
If you know (or suspect) that Arab Spring will yield a bunch of crazy Islamist governments bent on the destruction of the West and Israel, why would you champion it? Maybe the supporters of Arab Spring, a great many of whom are not Jewish, just want to have a straight up fight and be done with it.
That doesn't make me anti-Semitic. But good job pulling that libel out of your pocket and throwing it up on the table. Why not throw in "racist" too...sort of the double-word-score of identity politics.
If you want somebody who thinks 9/11 and the subsequent wars were an inside job, you really need to chat up the Ron Paul voters and spend more time on Michael Moore's blog.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe only thing Islamic terrorists seem to understand and respect is power. I hate to say, but it's hard to see how a full scale war between the west and radical Islamists can be avoided. There is no collaboration or compromise in the tenets of radical Islam.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe pieces are being moved into position for Iran to dominate the Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood, like Hezbollah, is one of Tehran's terrorist proxies.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGet ready for the Arab Dark Ages.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseArab dark ages? Hasn't that BEEN the case since before 1300 AD or so? That's when the age of their poets and philosophers and great thinkers (the "Islamic Golden Age")ended after all. And actually most of their great minds were not Arabs, but rather other peoples living in Arab countries or conquered states. Averroes was an ethnic Persian born in Spain. Avicenna was also Persian. Al-Farabi was a Turkic man from Central Asia.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe result is a major catastrophe keeping in mind that Egypt is one of the largest muslim nations.
But I have to say that conservatives are seriously to blame. This is because the conservatives were one of those pulling and clamouring for Mubarak to step down. See what the result is now.
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