Friedman Tees Off on Saudi Arabia

Back when the revolution was percolating in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Thomas Friedman was there happy as a clam, breathlessly extolling the new age aborning in the Arab world. When the Arab Spring was subverted over the next two years, culminating in the Sisi coup in July of 2013, Friedman did an about-face, trumpeting the return to Mubarakism as the best outcome to be hoped for.

Friedman is a weather vane, going whichever way the wind blows. That's why his column this morning is so interesting. In "Our Radical Islamic BFF, Saudi Arabia," Friedman tees off on the House of Saud:

The Washington Post ran a story last week about some 200 retired generals and admirals who sent a letter to Congress “urging lawmakers to reject the Iran nuclear agreement, which they say threatens national security.” There are legitimate arguments for and against this deal, but there was one argument expressed in this story that was so dangerously wrongheaded about the real threats to America from the Middle East, it needs to be called out. 

That argument was from Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, the retired former vice commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, who said of the nuclear accord: “What I don’t like about this is, the number one leading radical Islamic group in the world is the Iranians. They are purveyors of radical Islam throughout the region and throughout the world. And we are going to enable them to get nuclear weapons.”

Sorry, General, but the title greatest “purveyors of radical Islam” does not belong to the Iranians. Not even close. That belongs to our putative ally Saudi Arabia.

This absurd line, that Iran is the greatest purveyor of radical Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, has become a talking point for GOP presidential candidates, Congressional opponents of the P5+1 accord with Iran on its nuclear program, heads of sundry Jewish groups and miscellaneous warmongers for hire. Crafted in a Tel Aviv corporate suite or a beltway think tank it has been repeated ad nauseam. The goal is to foist the big lie on the benighted U.S. voting populace, the same rubes who are flocking to The Donald.

The New York Times supports the Obama administration's deal with Iran. To that end, they are allowing columnists like Friedman and Rogen Cohen to mention that which was previously discretely avoided, that Saudi Arabia is the global exporter of radical Islam. Friedman continues:

But if you think Iran is the only source of trouble in the Middle East, you must have slept through 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and modernization of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the 1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam — the Sufi, moderate Sunni and Shiite versions — and imposing in its place the puritanical, anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.

It is not an accident that several thousand Saudis have joined the Islamic State or that Arab Gulf charities have sent ISIS donations. It is because all these Sunni jihadist groups — ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Nusra Front — are the ideological offspring of the Wahhabism injected by Saudi Arabia into mosques and madrasas from Morocco to Pakistan to Indonesia.

And we, America, have never called them on that — because we’re addicted to their oil and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.

Whether because the Europe Union is suffering through a refugee crisis brought about by Saudi-instigated regime change via Salafist jihad, or because the Iran nuclear deal needs a push to get through Congress, the Gray Lady is more open of late to going directly after Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Her editorial positions on these two ally nations are basically in line with CounterPunch.

A report this morning has Obama sewing up the Congressional support he needs to pass the nuclear deal with Iran. This won't end the crisis in the Middle East. The war crimes in Yemen, for instance, largely remain below the radar. Saudi Arabia and Israel need to be contained, as does the United States, particularly now that planning is underway to militarize Great Power conflict with China.

ElBaradei Apparently Not PM

Ben Hubbard is now reporting, "Signs of Disarray Emerge in Egyptian Generals’ Plan for Governance," that because a Salafi party, an important Islamist part of the anti-Muslim Brotherhood coalition, balked and withdrew from SCAF's transition plan, Mohamed ElBaradei is not prime minister, at least for now.

The other thing about last night's street battles between pro- and anti-Morsi fighters that I forgot to mention was the large number of guns and gunshot wounds, which is unusual because gun ownership is not a prevalent part of Egyptian culture (as it is here in the land of Yankee Doodle Dandy). This does not bode well for the possibility of nonviolent protest.

"Hayzaboon, Go Home"

All day I've been ingesting the coverage of the military coup in Egypt. Fighting has broken out in deposed President Mohamed Morsi's hometown of Zagazig. The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood is being rounded up and put under arrest. The Gulf Arab monarchies, even Qatar, have publicly expressed support for Egyptian Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi's ouster of Morsi who is being detained. A big pro-Morsi "Friday of Rejection" protest is planned for tomorrow following weekly prayers.

The United States is stepping gingerly. Obama's position so far is that he is deeply concerned about Morsi's ouster and the suspension of the Egyptian Constitution and hopes that new elections will be scheduled soon.

But what caught my eye was Mark Landler's piece on Ambassador Anne W. Patterson in this morning's national edition :

Ms. Patterson’s problems started on June 18 when she was invited, at a time of mushrooming demonstrations against Mr. Morsi’s government, to speak to an audience in Cairo about the United States’ relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was, she said, a welcome chance to “set the record straight.” 

While the United States supported Egypt’s democratic development, it still had to deal with those in power, Ms. Patterson said, adding, “I don’t think the elected nature of this government is seriously in doubt.” Moreover, she said she was “deeply skeptical” that “street action will produce better results than elections.” 

Even as Ms. Patterson sought to distance the United States from the Muslim Brotherhood, those words marked her as an enemy of the crowds in Tahrir Square, reviving memories of Mr. Obama’s early reluctance to cut loose Mr. Mubarak, a longtime ally of the United States. 

“She manipulates people and secretly governs the country,” Mona Mohammed, 52, a bank employee said of Ms. Patterson at an antigovernment rally. “The ambassador is part of a conspiracy against Egypt and its people,” Ms. Mohammed added, clutching a poster with a caricature of Ms. Patterson and the slogan “Hayzaboon, Go Home.” (Hayzaboon is Arabic for ogre.)

The United States government is despised by the Egyptian masses, the European masses (for spying on them), the Latin American masses (for, among a host of reasons, getting Spain, Italy, France and Portugal to deny overflight of Bolivian President Evo Morales' plane because of suspicions that NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden was a stowaway) -- even the American masses (for being dysfunctional).

Egypt Headed Toward Civil War

The Egyptian Armed Forces have given president Mohamed Morsi an ultimatum, resign or be removed. This from today's frontpage story written by David Kirkpatrick and Ben Hubbard:

The standoff threatened to roll back the clock to the day two years ago when the generals first seized power from Hosni Mubarak and to thrust Egypt into an extended period of instability and perhaps escalating violence. The military’s vow to intervene raised questions about whether Egypt’s revolution would fulfill its promise to build a new democracy at the heart of the Arab world. And the defiance of Mr. Morsi and his Brotherhood allies raised the specter of the bloody years of the 1990s when fringe Islamist groups used violence in an effort to overthrow the military government. 

Under the banner headline “removal or resignation,” Al Ahram reported that the generals would “abolish the controversial Constitution” and form a committee of experts to write a new charter, form an interim presidential council with three members led by the chief of the constitutional court, and put a military leader in charge of the executive branch as an interim prime minister. 

Citing an unidentified military official, the newspaper said that “to ensure the country’s security” the military and security services had already put some of Mr. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood allies under house arrest, and had issued orders for the arrest of “anybody who resists these decisions” for trial in special courts. 

Mr. Morsi refused to back down. In an impassioned, if at times rambling, midnight address broadcast on state television, he hinted that his removal would lead only to more violence. 

“The people empowered me, the people chose me, through a free and fair election,” he said. 

“Legitimacy is the only way to protect our country and prevent bloodshed, to move to a new phase,” Mr. Morsi said. “Legitimacy is the only thing that guarantees for all of us that there will not be any fighting and conflict, that there will not be bloodshed.” 

“If the price of protecting legitimacy is my blood, I’m willing to pay it,” he said. “And it would be a cheap price for the sake of protecting this country.”

It's hard to imagine a situation where this doesn't end up in civil war. The Muslim Brotherhood feels clean in the pursuit of martyrdom; they won the election fair and square. They see the military's demand as a coup. They feel as if they've been abandoned.

I wonder to what extent the Gulf Arab monarchies will support the Brotherhood once the shooting war really takes off. It seems as if the Saudis and Qataris are obsessed with toppling al-Assad and bringing sharia to Syria. A civil war in Egypt queers that pitch. The fact the Muslim Brotherhood is quoted repeatedly in today's paper saying that they've been abandoned leads one to believe that the advice they're getting from their benefactors in the Gulf is to stand down.

Certainly the United States, supplying the Egyptian military with $1.3 billion in aid annually, signed off on the plan to oust Morsi and rewrite the Constitution; it's a way to bring back a version of the Mubarak era.

The Brotherhood's pledge to go down fighting will definitely complicate things for the U.S. and its allies -- the old colonial powers, Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies -- and it will be a boon for Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Russia and China. The European markets, sensing this, are already down.

SAA is steadily grinding away at a disorganized mercenary Wahhabi opponent. A civil war in Egypt will potentially draw jihadi support away from the Syrian war zone as foreign fighters come to the aid of the Muslim Brotherhood. At the very least it will distract the war pigs who have been coordinating the assault on Syria as they have to focus their attention on salvaging their political formation in Egypt

Syrian Peace Conference Likely Won't Take Place Until September, If Then

Today is the second day in a row that the New York Times national edition has no coverage of Syria. Events in Egypt, with a showdown now between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military looming large, have crowded out coverage of the civil war.

Reuters has a story which is built around a rebel video threatening two Shiite villages, Nubl and Zahra, near Aleppo. SANA reports a terror bombing in Damascus as the SAA grinds away in Homs.

Online Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times has a story about the status of the peace conference. Now September is being spoken of as a possible date. The story is a useful recapitulation of the bargaining positions of the United States and Russia. Reading it I am once again struck by the destructiveness of U.S. strategy, which is to foment chaos in hopes that it will bring al-Assad to the table. Imagine a situation where al-Assad immediately accedes to Western wishes and steps down. The sectarian warfare will not stop. The opposition is splintered. They most likely will continue fighting each other for spoils. There is already some of this going on among jihadi groups.

If civil war erupts in Egypt everything changes. The Wahhabis will be in a pickle. The Muslim Brotherhood is their baby. Will they allow a return of military control? Possibly. If they are allowed to achieve their aims of Talibanizing Syria.

Meet the New Boss Same as the Old Boss

Last Wednesday there was a great story from David Kirkpatrick -- "Cairo Activist Fighting Tear Gas With Tear Gas." It's a description of the ongoing real war of the Egyptian Revolution as seen through the eyes of a street fighting man.The Mubarak police state remains alive and well in the Interior Ministry; the street fighters -- the real force of the uprising in Tahrir Square two years ago -- feel, and rightly so, that the Revolution is unfinished as long as the police of the Interior Ministry are unbowed:

Now, while elite politicians tussle over matters of ideology or provisions of the Constitution, street protesters like Mr. Mokbel say they are carrying on the fight that kindled the original revolt, a battle against Mr. Mubarak’s abusive and unaccountable security services. Two years later, they note, the security forces are still largely intact, and reports of torture, extortion and excessive force continue.

The street war between protesters and the police presents a double-edged challenge to President Mohamed Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who had been jailed without trial under Mr. Mubarak. Brotherhood leaders close to Mr. Morsi say he does not yet fully control the Interior Ministry. Its officers make no secret of their hostility to the Islamists, and Brotherhood leaders say that the new president is struggling to win the ministry’s trust in order to tame it.

But many in the street have turned against Mr. Morsi in part because they believe that he has sided with the security forces. Activists like Mr. Mokbel say they fear that like the region’s secular dictators, Mr. Morsi may use the security police against his opponents as a tool of political power.

“They are trying to build a new regime exactly like the old one, with all its disadvantages,” said Mr. Mokbel, an artist with a small and slender frame who, between battles, studies painting in a graduate program in one of Egypt’s top art schools.

The protesters, Mr. Mokbel argued, are the ones defending the rule of law, standing up for their right to peaceful expression. With no personal gain, he said, they risk their lives for their cause, for one another, and for their many friends who have fallen. “We owe them something,” he said. “Not just a better economic situation, a government that deals with the people, that is not authoritarian or repressive.”

Rather than extirpate the cancer the Morsi government has been gentle with the Interior Ministry hoping to co-opt it:

But now the Islamists’ apparent monopoly on power has turned activists cynical about Egypt’s young democratic process. Since Mr. Morsi’s decree temporarily suspending the power of the courts to challenge his decisions, violence around the country has escalated sharply. “When the regime smashes the judiciary against the wall, and uses the police as a tool of repression, who will conduct elections?” Mr. Mokbel asked. “If we wait for elections, what guarantees do we have?”

Senior Brotherhood officials close to Mr. Morsi say moving too fast to reform the Interior Ministry might provoke an open revolt by the police at a time when public security is already fraying. Instead, after recent clashes with police officers killed dozens of civilians, Mr. Morsi publicly thanked the security forces for their work, and in certain cities expanded police powers.

More proof of the fundamentally conservative nature of the Morsi Muslim Brotherhood government is provided by Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh in a story published the same Wednesday as Kirkpatrick's; it has to do with Iranian president Ahmadinejad's visit to Egypt. Mubarak and before him Sadat were opponents of Iran under the clerics. I didn't know that a street in Tehran was named after Sadat's assassin:

The relationship had atrophied over decades, damaged in particular by the Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat’s granting of asylum to the deposed Iranian shah, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, who was given a state funeral in Cairo in 1980. When Mr. Sadat was assassinated the next year, Iran named a street after his killer, Khaled Islambouli.

Mr. Morsi, an Islamist and Egypt’s first elected leader, promised a new direction for foreign policy that he said would be more independent than his predecessors’ and would reassert Egypt’s historical leadership role. Extending a hand to Iran was seen as part of an effort to improve ties with regional powers and, more important, to broker a solution to the war in Syria. 

Iranian officials were even more eager to mend the relationship, speaking of Egypt and Iran as the core of an axis of regional military powers. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been promoting the idea that the recent Arab uprisings were inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

The first major step toward repairing the relationship came in August, when Mr. Morsi visited Tehran during the meeting of the Nonaligned Movement, in what was seen as an effort toward easing Iran’s international isolation.

 But in Tehran Morsi toed the Saudi line, criticizing the Assad government:

But that trip also veered off script. Mr. Morsi embarrassed his hosts somewhat by delivering a stinging condemnation of President Assad, delighting Saudi Arabia and Qatar, strong financial supporters of both Egypt and the Syrian insurgency.

And in speaking about the Arab uprisings, Mr. Morsi notably avoided, as he often does, any mention of the Shiite-led revolt against Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy, further endearing him to allies in the gulf region who have portrayed the uprising as an Iranian plot rather than a popular movement. 

Many analysts think it unlikely that the Egypt-Iran thaw will develop into fully restored relations, given the pressure exerted by the United States and the gulf monarchies on Mr. Morsi to keep his distance. Despite his talk of charting a new path for Egypt, “the Morsi administration is trying to avoid any direct confrontation with the international system,” said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University of Cairo. 

A separate attempt by the Egyptian leader to develop closer ties with Iran, by including it in a regional effort with Turkey and Saudi Arabia to solve the Syrian crisis, also faltered, after the Saudis stopped participating, diplomats said. 

“Morsi is learning the constraints and the realities of the cold wars in the region — the old rivalries and local calculations,” Mr. Shahin said.

"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss," as the Who remind us in "Won't Get Fooled Again." Robert Dreyfuss' book Devil's Game lays out the long, rich relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the United States. The Egyptian street is coming to the conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood is going to provide a version of the state very similar to Mubarak's, with the notable exception that the Brotherhood can legitimately win -- at least so far -- popular elections.

The Battle Against Mubarak Continues

Two years ago when protests in Tahrir Square led to the ouster of Egyptian despot Hosni Mubarak I was ecstatic. American-Saudi-Israeli domination of the Middle East seemed about to undergo a necessary alteration in order to accommodate democracy over autocracy. I was working at a carpenters local at the the time and there was plenty of hopeful, giddy discussion among the few informed progressive members. 

This morning after catching up on stories from David Kirkpatrick for today, yesterday and Monday I'd argue that Egypt is still showing us the way. There is a lot of tut-tutting about the state being in collapse, about the attack on the Semiramis InterContinental Hotel. But what's happening is the Egyptian people are trying to dislodge the entrenched, repressive Mubarak-holdover police that control the Interior Ministry. Describing the citizenry's battle against the cops in the Suez Canal city of Port Said, Kirkpatrick illuminates us as to the politics involved:

Defending their stations, the police fought back, and in Cairo they battled their own commander, the interior minister.

Brotherhood leaders say Mr. Morsi has been afraid to name an outsider as minister for fear of a police revolt, putting off any meaningful reform of the Mubarak security services. But when Mr. Morsi recently tapped a veteran ministry official, Mohamed Ibrahim, for the job, many in the security services complained that even the appointment of one insider to replace another was undue interference.

In a measure of the low level of the new government’s top-down control over the security forces, officers even cursed and chased away their new interior minister when he tried to attend a funeral on Friday for two members of the security forces killed in the recent clashes.

“What do you mean we won’t be armed? We would be disarmed to die,” one shouted, on a video recording of the event.

In an attempt to placate the rank and file, Mr. Ibrahim issued a statement to police personnel sympathizing with the pressure the protests put on them. Later, he promised them sophisticated weapons.

“That can only be a recipe for future bloodshed,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which monitors police abuses.

Minus an intervention by the military the war between citizens and the police will continue. So far the military is biding its time. Its calculation is when to risk becoming the target of the Revolution.