Bob Dreyfuss | The Nation

A protester, opposing Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, holds a book titled President Morsi Building a New Egypt in front of the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo’s Moqattam district July 1, 2013. (Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh)

UPDATE 2:40 pm: According to the Guardian, President Morsi plans to defy the military ultimatum. His office has declared that he will face down what they call a “military coup.” Morsi, leader of the secretive Muslim Brotherhood, reportedly believes that President Obama will not allow the Egyptian military to seize power if the Brotherhood defies the generals. Reports the Guardian:

"Obviously we feel this is a military coup," a presidential aide said. "But the conviction within the presidency is that [the coup] won't be able to move forward without American approval."

That’s a huge problem for Obama. Already, the protesters believe that the United States is backing the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Cairo. The truth is, the United States has leverage over the military, since it supplies aid to the armed forces, but Washington hardly controls either the military or the Muslim Brotherhood. During the fall of the Mubarak government in 2011, the United States was virtually on the sidelines, unable either to prop up Mubarak, control the generals, or connect with the Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition.

So, if Morsi believe that Obama can rescue him (or wants to), he may have a big surprise coming.

UPDATE 2:25 pm: Egypt’s military has started a coup d’etat of sorts, delivering an ultimatum to President Morsi to make a deal with protesters – or else. [See below for my earlier post, which discusses how the police and the military are backing the street rebellion.] As Reuters reports:

Egypt's armed forces handed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi a virtual ultimatum to share power on Monday, giving feuding politicians 48 hours to compromise or have the army impose its own roadmap for the country.

A dramatic military statement broadcast on state television declared the nation was in danger after millions of Egyptians took to the streets on Sunday to demand that Morsi quit and the headquarters of the ruling Muslim Brotherhood were ransacked.

 

ORIGINAL POST: Readers of this blog know what I think about the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk: the Brotherhood is a secretive, reactionary cult. It is a conspiracy-minded, cell-based clique of right-wing Islamists, many of whose members are violence-prone.

So my readers won’t be surprised that I’m lining up with the protesters in Egypt. President Mohamed Morsi has to go.

He won’t go easy. As they did at several moments of its past—the 1930s and the 1950s, for instance—the Brothers are mobilizing a paramilitary force to defend its grasp on power. But they’re losing their grip, not least because the Egyptian national police has essentially thrown its lot in with the millions of people who’ve taken to the streets of Cairo and other cities, and the military is slyly suggesting that it’s neutral in the political battle unfolding in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

So far, the United States is staying neutral, although it’s hard to believe that the Department of Defense and the generals in Washington aren’t busily consorting with their Egyptian colleagues. The threat of a military coup d’état hangs over Cairo, but in this case the majority of the protesters—who’ve already declared an alliance with the police—seem to favor at least a temporary seizure of power by the armed forces. The problem with that scenario, however, is that it could inflame Egypt and lead directly to a civil war, pitting the army and police against the Islamists. Which is pretty much what’s happening in Syria.

In fact, the only real public comment by the Obama administration thus far—aside from boilerplate comments about supporting the rule of law—is about steps taken to secure the American embassy. That’s a legacy of the trumped-up, Fox News–driven phony controversy over the violence at America’s outpost in Benghazi last September, and it’s a sad commentary that the United States is so preoccupied with the safety of its diplomats when the entire nation of Egypt is teetering on the brink of chaos. But there’s little that the United States can do, other than to suggest that the military stay in its barracks. Still, the United States ought to reiterate over and over again that it doesn’t support the Muslim Brotherhood. By all accounts, the protesters in Egypt believe that Washington backs the Brothers’ rule—perhaps because the United States supplies billions of dollars in military aid to Egypt.

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But the real backers of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are the reactionary states of the Persian Gulf, especially Qatar and Saudi Arabia. These are the same countries who support Syria’s Islamist rebels, who are dominated by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and allies further to the right. And the Saudi-Qatar billionaires and sheikhs are also among the chief backers of Turkey’s reactionary and authoritarian-minded Prime Minister Erdogan and his AK party. They’ve also poured billions into support for Islamists in Libya, Tunisia and Iraq, as well.

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial, says:

Mr. Morsi insists he’ll serve out his four-year term, and the military is reluctant to take over again. But another coup is possible if the unrest turns more violent and the economy keeps sinking. The best solution now is a compromise in which Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood drop their attempts at political domination, share power with opponents and write a more liberal constitution, and focus on reviving the economy. The alternatives are all ugly.

That’s fairly accurate, but there are few signs that Morsi is ready to compromise. Since taking power, he’s rammed through a constitution that favors the Muslim Brotherhood, cracked down on free expression, and issued an anti-democratic diktat that allows him to rule virtually by decree. There is no elected parliament to reign him in, and in any case the Muslim Brotherhood controlled the parliament that was elected and then disbanded by court order.

According to The New York Times, the Cairo protests are even larger than the ones that led to the fall of President Mubarak in 2011—and those crowds, you’ll recall, were bolstered by the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood’s well-organized supporters. Many of the protesters are calling on Defense Minister Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi to intervene, that is, for a coup. According to Al Jazeera, the protest movement issued a statement calling on “state institutions including the army, the police and the judiciary to clearly side with the popular will as represented by the crowds.”

Sisi, in a sphinxlike statement, said that the army would “intervene to keep Egypt from sliding into a dark tunnel of conflict, internal fighting, criminality, accusations of treason, sectarian discord and the collapse of state institutions.” That sounds very much like he’s getting ready to order a coup if the situation spins out of control, and it might. Indeed, Sisi’s comment sounds like an incitement to the anti-Morsi forces.

The police, which have stood by as protesters sought to set fire to the Cairo headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, have clearly taken sides. Reports the Times:

At a recent meeting of the main police officers’ association to discuss the planned protests, one policeman recalled their “betrayal” by the collapse of the Mubarak government and called their current diminished status “a catastrophe.” Alluding to Mr. Morsi’s time in jail for his Islamist politics, the officer denounced “people who were in prison and are now presidents,” and he said that if even a single officer went to protect a Brotherhood office on Sunday, “I swear to God almighty, he will be shot.”

Gen. Salah Zeyada, a senior Interior Ministry official on the association’s board, reassured him. “We all agree, brothers, that there will be no security provided for headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.

The police association made no secret of its disaffection: it posted a video clip of the exchange on its Facebook page, and activists opposed to the Brotherhood have cited it as encouragement.

The anti-Morsi forces—under the name Tamarod (“rebellion”)—are broadly based, including secular and middle-class Egyptians, the left, Nasserists and socialists, current and former security forces and former Mubarak officials, and Egypt’s minorities, including Shiites and Coptic Christians who’ve been attacked and persecuted under the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule. In its statement, Tamarod said:

“There is no alternative other than the peaceful end of power of the Muslim Brotherhood and its representative, Mohamed Morsi.”

But Morsi isn’t showing signs of compromise, as evidenced by an interview with The Guardian:

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Morsi rejected opposition calls for early presidential elections and said he would not tolerate any deviation from constitutional order. He said his early resignation would undermine the legitimacy of his successors, creating a recipe for unending chaos.

“If we changed someone in office who [was elected] according to constitutional legitimacy—well, there will be people opposing the new president too, and a week or a month later they will ask him to step down,” Morsi said.

“There is no room for any talk against this constitutional legitimacy. There can be demonstrations and people expressing their opinions. But what’s critical in all this is the adoption and application of the constitution. This is the critical point.”

How did Egypt get here? Sharif Abdel Kouddous explains why, one year after Morsi took office, Egyptians are marching again to demand his removal.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. (AP Photo)

The US war in Syria is underway.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the CIA has already begun shipping weapons to “vetted Syrian rebels.” Says the Journal:

The Central Intelligence Agency has begun moving weapons to Jordan from a network of secret warehouses and plans to start arming small groups of vetted Syrian rebels within a month, expanding U.S. support of moderate forces battling President Bashar al-Assad, according to diplomats and U.S. officials briefed on the plans.

Most worrisome is that, with American support, Saudi Arabia is shipping Manpads, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, to the rebels, despite the risk that those deadly arms could fall into the hands of Al Qaeda and its allies:

Talks are under way with other countries, including France, about pre-positioning European-procured weapons in Jordan. Saudi Arabia is expected to provide shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, known as Manpads, to a small number of handpicked fighters, as few as 20 at first, officials and diplomats said. The U.S. would monitor this effort, too, to try to reduce the risk that the Manpads could fall into the hands of Islamists.

Saudi officials have told their American counterparts that they believe Riyadh can identify a small group of trusted rebel fighters and provide them with as few as 20 Manpads initially, reducing the risk that the weapons will fall into the hands of radical Islamists, a major U.S. and Israeli concern.

Ever naïve, the United States is asking the Syrian rebels to please, please don’t give any weapons to the Al Qaeda types in the coalition arrayed against President Bashar al-Assad’s secular government. Notes The Hill:

The Defense Department is seeking assurances from Syrian opposition leaders that U.S.-provided weapons to rebels in the country will not end up in the hands of Islamic militants.

Now that we know that Secretary of State Kerry is leading the hawkish faction inside the Obama administration, it appears that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are the “doves.” In a news briefing yesterday, Hagel and Dempsey made it clear that while they’ll carry out President Obama’s orders to arm the rebels, they’re not exactly happy about it. In reading the transcript, you have read between the lines, as both Hagel and Dempsey said that they’d support “the decision” by Obama. Said Hagel:

On Syria, I think the central point of your question is always going to be a factor. The opposition represents many different groups. And we will always be and have to be assured that assistance we give to the Syrian military council gets to the right people, and that isn’t a decision that can be answered quickly. It’s a constant process of assessment.

So that still remains as part of the overall objective and what we’re—we’re trying to do. We support what the decision is and what the president decided to do. As to your question, direct military and U.S. military involvement there, no.

And Dempsey added:

Well, the only thing I’d add is, you know, we—we support the decision that was made to provide direct support to the Syrian military council, the details of which I won’t discuss, but we support the decision.

Militarily, what we’re doing is assisting our partners in the region, the neighbors of Syria, to ensure that they’re prepared to account for the potential spillover effects. As you know, we’ve just taken a decision to leave some Patriot missile batteries and some F-16s in Jordan as part of the defense of Jordan. We’re working with our Iraqi counterparts, the Lebanese armed forces, and Turkey through NATO, and that’s—that’s what we’re doing at this point.

And Dempsey flatly shot down the idea of a no-fly zone, calling it “an act of war”:

A no-fly zone, by the way, is just one option of many that we have analyzed and—and prepared. It will be difficult, because the Syrian air defense system is sophisticated and it’s dense. As I’ve said many times, if that is a decision that the nation takes that we want to impose a no-fly zone, we’ll make it happen, and we can do that with a combination of standoff munitions, electronic jamming, long-range attack, and close air attack. We—we can, if asked to do so, establish a no-fly zone.

My concern has been that—that ensuring that Syria’s airplanes don’t fly addresses about 10 percent of the problem, in terms of the casualties that are taken in Syria. And if we choose to—to conduct a no-fly zone, it’s essentially an act of war, and I’d like to understand the plan to make peace before we start a war.

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It’s apparent that the idea of a harmonious Obama administration on Syria is poppycock, and that there are deep splits in the administration over how to approach this civil war. As I’ve written repeatedly, Obama resisted going to war in Syria for a long time, though he created a dangerous slippery slope for himself by calling for Assad’s ouster, helping Saudi Arabia and Qatar supply arms to the rebels, ordering the CIA to train select rebel fighters in Jordan and, of course, drawing a foolish “red line” over the use by Syria of chemical weapons. By agreeing to arm the rebels, however, Obama has finally caved in to the hawks’ (including Bill Clinton’s) pressure. There’s still time for him to right himself, by accelerating plans for the Geneva peace conference and by inviting Iran to attend, but it’s not looking good.

Secretary of State John Kerry is America’s top diplomat, but he is leading the charge for military action in Syria.

John Kerry. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

When I’m wrong, I’m wrong—and I’ll admit it. I was wrong about John Kerry, President Obama’s secretary of state. I really did think that he’d instinctively put diplomacy above war, but he’s failed the first real test, in Syria, and he’s failed it badly. I overestimated him.

The first hint of Kerry’s bellicose approach to Syria was in a June 14 New York Times article, and I missed the reference to the State Department, in an article devoted to Obama’s decision to supply the rebels with arms. In it, the Times said—without naming Kerry—that “State Department officials” were pressing Obama to bomb Syria:

Some senior State Department officials have been pushing for a more aggressive military response, including airstrikes to hit the primary landing strips in Syria that the Assad government uses to launch the chemical weapons attacks, ferry troops around the country and receive shipments of arms from Iran. But White House officials remain wary.

Then we learn, in a piece by Jeffrey Goldberg for Bloomberg, that Kerry was virtually pounding the table for war in that June 12 meeting:

Flash-forward to this past Wednesday. At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime—specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces.

It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.

If that story is true, it ought to be grounds to fire Kerry.

The Washington Post is reporting that “other nations,” presumably the rebels’ chief backers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have taken Obama’s decision to arm the rebels by stepping up the supply of heavy weapons to the anti-Assad forces:

Syrian rebels said Friday that newly arrived shipments of heavy weaponry could swing the momentum on the battlefield in their favor, after a shift in U.S. policy opened the door for others to send them arms.

Worse, the Los Angeles Times reports that the CIA and US Special Forces are training rebel fighters in the use of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, and that they’ve been doing this for a while, apparently in anticipation of the Obama-Kerry decision to jump into the war:

White House officials refused to comment Friday on a Los Angeles Times report that CIA operatives and U.S. special operations troops have been secretly training Syrian rebels with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons since late last year, saying only that the U.S. had increased its assistance to the rebellion.

The covert U.S. training at bases in Jordan and Turkey began months before President Obama approved plans to begin directly arming the opposition to Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to U.S. officials and rebel commanders.

Assad’s forces are still making gains across Syria, after taking control of a strategic, rebel-held town, Qusayr, near the Lebanese border and moving toward rebel-controlled areas around Aleppo and in the Damascus suburbs. It isn’t clear, yet, if the US arms and the Saudi-Qatar arms pipeline can turn the tide. But it will certainly make things in Syria bloodier.

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Kerry, who is carrying out Obama administration policy, still insists that he’s working hard to get the Geneva peace conference on Syria rolling. However, if Kerry is indeed a war hawk behind the scenes, his credibility with the Russians will plummet. In any case, Kerry’s style is to keep his private advice to Obama private, as revealed in a New York Times profile of Kerry over the weekend:

As for Mr. Kerry, he has made clear from the time he joined the administration that he is not one to air his advice to the White House in public.

At his first meeting with his staff on the seventh floor of the State Department, officials say, Mr. Kerry used a Boston sports analogy to explain his role in the administration. The secretary of state would be like Bill Walton, the basketball star who helped the Celtics win a championship, and would help the Obama team by creating shots and passing the ball at the right moment.

“There’s no more ‘me,’ only ‘we,’ ” he told his aides.

I hate sports analogies when it comes to matters of war and peace, or life and death, and Kerry’s Bill Walton reference leaves me cold. In time, Kerry may make Hillary Clinton, the hawkish former secretary of state, look like a quiet dove.

Greg Mitchell reminds the administration—and the media outlets that continue to report its claims without question—that the public still opposes intervention in Syria. 

An Iraqi military helicopter flies over Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad. Reuters/Stringer

On the tenth anniversary of the April 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein’s secular, nationalist government, Paul Wolfowitz—a neoconservative and key architect of the American invasion of Iraq—wrote a lengthy apologia for the war. In it, he concluded: “It is remarkable that Iraq has done as well as it has thus far.” Besides Wolfowitz, various other members of the George W. Bush administration have similarly weighed in, insisting that the unprovoked, illegal war against Iraq was the right thing to do.

Many Iraqis would disagree.

Since that April anniversary, thousands of Iraqis have been slaughtered in sectarian and political violence. In May, more than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in a relentless wave of bombings, suicide attacks, assassinations and other violence, according to the United Nations, and nearly 2,000 have been killed since April. No doubt, those totals understate the true scope of the killing.

Some of the violence is a spillover from the civil war in Syria, where a panoply of Islamist militias, some directly linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), are waging a battle against the secular, authoritarian government of Bashar al-Assad. In Iraq, the AQI forces may or may not be allied with remnants of the old Iraqi order, including Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, the top Baathist official still active in the armed resistance to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government. Duri, who reportedly is still living underground in Iraq, has set up a group called the Naqshbandi Order, led by ex-Baathists. Both AQI and Duri’s forces draw strength from Iraq’s complex web of Sunni tribes, and—although most of the people killed by Sunni-led violence in Iraq are Shiites or supporters of Maliki—many of the dead are Sunnis who are cooperating with Maliki or are neutral.

In the following, The Nation has compiled a partial list of the major incidents of mass killing since the tenth anniversary of Saddam’s fall:

April 5: 20 dead, 55 wounded in two bombings in Baquba, Diyala province. Eyewitness: “It was like a red pond. People were running over the dead ones. The place was full of blood.”

April 15: 37 dead, 140 wounded in twenty separate attacks, “mostly car bombings, in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Hilla, Fallujah, Nasiriya and Tikrit.”

April 15: At least fifteen candidates assassinated in local election races.

April 18: twenty-seven dead, dozens wounded by suicide bomber in a Baghdad café.

April 23: forty-four killed in clashes between Sunni protesters and government forces.

May 20: eighty-six killed, 250 wounded in nine car bombings and a wave of suicide attacks in Baghdad, Basra, Hilla, Balad and other Iraqi cities.

May 21: forty dead in another wave of bombings and suicide attacks.

May 27: fifty-three killed and 100 wounded in wave of bombings in Shiite areas of Baghdad. “Eight car bombings hit Shiite neighborhoods, including Huriya, Sadr City, Baya, Zafaraniya and Kadhimiya.”

May 30: thirty dead, dozens wounded in another bombing wave.

June 10: “Insurgents attacked cities across Iraq on Monday with car bombs, suicide blasts and gun battles that killed more than seventy people in unrest that has deepened fears of a return to civil war.”

June 16: 33 killed, 100 wounded in car bomb attacks in five southern Iraq provinces and two of Iraq’s major northern cities, Tikrit and Mosul.

There are many more such horrific incidents.

Much of the recent violence stems not from the war in Syria but from the April 23 clash between peaceful Sunni protesters, who object of Maliki’s increasingly authoritarian rule, and Maliki’s heavy-handed security forces. As Michael Knights described it:

On April 23, the federal military miscalculated when its raid on a protest site in the northern town of Hawija turned into a bloody firefight, and scores of civilians were killed. This event has the potential to become an iconic rallying call for insurgent groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the neo-Baathist Naqshbandi movement, which can fit it into its calls for ongoing resistance against a “Safavid occupation” of Iraq—a reference to the Persian dynasty that evokes Sunni Arab fears of the Shia-led government in Baghdad.

Anthony Cordesman, a conservative military strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, usefully points out that Iraq, not Syria, is the pivotal nation in the Middle East, and that its unraveling could become catastrophic. Still, it would be folly for the Obama administration to reengage in Iraq, and even Cordesman notes that the United States “has limited cards to play”:

The U.S.-Iraqi Strategic Framework Agreement exists on paper, but it did not survive the Iraqi political power struggles that came as the United States left. The U.S. military presence has been reduced to a small U.S. office of military cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and it is steadily shrinking. The cumbersome U.S. arms transfer process has already pushed Iraq to buy arms from Russia and other suppliers. The U.S. State Department’s efforts to replace the military police training program collapsed before they really began. The United States is a marginal player in the Iraqi economy and economic development, and its only aid efforts are funded through money from past years. The State Department did not make an aid request for Iraq for FY2014.

The neoconservatives, having promoted and launched the war in 2003, have lately turned against the very Iraqi government they installed. Back in 2003, the Bush administration and the folks at the American Enterprise Institute happily made common cause not only with Ahmed Chalabi, the Shiite activist who, it turned out, had close ties to Iran, but also with a whole array of Iranian-linked Shiite groups, including the aptly named Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Maliki’s Dawa Party. Now that those same Shiites are working closely with Iran, the neoconservatives have turned sharply against Maliki, and they’ve released a long series of reports condemning his rule. Consider, for instance, the recent report by the neoconservative-led Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Back in 2003, the neocons bitterly assailed the Sunnis of Iraq, and they called for the United States to adopt the “80 percent solution,” that is, to ally with Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds, who together makeup about 80 percent of Iraq’s population. Now, the ISW says:

The political participation of the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq is critical to the security and stability of the state. At present, they are functionally excluded from government, with those that do participate coopted by the increasingly authoritarian Shi‘a Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Without effective political representation, the Sunni in Iraq are left with few alternatives to address their grievances against the Maliki government. The important decisions lie ahead on whether to pursue their goals via political compromise, federalism, or insurgency.

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Just as in the civil war in Syria, in which many neoconservatives can’t find “good guys” to support—because Assad’s government has been demonized and the rebels are shot through with Al Qaeda types—in Iraq they have the same problem. They don’t like Maliki, because he is more and more allied with Iran, as evinced by the fact that Maliki is allowing Iran to airlift arms and ammunition to Damascus over Iraqi airspace. On the other hand, the neocons—and the Obama administration, too, it appears—can’t ally themselves with the Sunni-led Iraqi resistance, since it also has Al Qaeda connections. Indeed, the Iraqi and Syrian Sunni-led rebels tied to Al Qaeda have announced that they are in fact a single organization.

The lesson here: the Middle East is a very complicated place. Invading it, occupying it, and changing its ethnic and sectarian balance should be avoided at all costs. President Obama, who opposed the war in Iraq, should heed that lesson and stay out of Syria ten years later.

Is the media responsible for the “male gaze”? Read Jessica Valenti’s argument here.