Are You Surprised?
In news from Egypt:
- The leader of Egypt’s largest political party – the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Freedom and Justice” Party – has indicated that the party’s goal is to “institute Islamic Sharia law.”
- The current Egyptian President, Mohammed Morsi, was recently seen mouthing the word Amen after a prayer that featured the line, “Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters”.
- The Egyptian government has just confiscated the assets of the secular candidate who lost to Morsi in the last election, Ahmed Shafiq – as well as assets belonging to his daughters.
Someone please refresh my memory. Tell me again why was it such a good idea for us to stand back and do nothing while Mubarek was overthrown?
Category: Foreign Policy, Terror War
Because he was denying the democratic process to the citizenry that was longing to be free. See Arab Spring. Bwahahahahahahahahahaha.
What exactly would we have been able to do?
Wow. This is a shocking development.
It’s not like anyone ever warned that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to take over or anything. We’d never have seen this coming.
Unfortunately, the first line of Iraq’s constitution states the same thing, that they are bound to Islamic law. We can give freedom to countries, but we can never determine what they do with it. Even if Syria gets straightened out (doubtful) fully expect the free people of Syria to hate Israel and love Islam.
No sweat. The Israelis will handle it. Right?!?! {:-o
I have to agree with @2. I agree things aren’t “optimal” in Egypt (see what I did there?) but what could/should we have done? Supported an even more brutal crackdown by Mubarek’s thugs? That approach doesn’t seemed to have worked with Assad and Assad, as a non-ally of the US, is free to use methods we would never allow Mubarek to use.
Bottom line, IMO sometimes the “least bad” thing to do is nothing, and from what I’ve seen, that’s pretty much what we did.
Serious question, what COULD we have done?
“Tell me again why was it such a good idea for us to stand back and do nothing while Mubarek was overthrown?”
Actually, it would have been better if we had done nothing but the Obama Administration gave the supposedly peaceful revolution his support. Even when it appeared obvious that the dominant power behind the movement was the Muslim Brotherhood, he told us that they were nothing to fear and that we could work with the “moderate Muslim brotherhood.”
” he told us that they were nothing to fear and that we could work with the ‘moderate Muslim brotherhood'”.
That’s the problem right there.
What could we have done? We’ll never know. Recent events have clearly highlighted that we don’t get the straight dope on things from the WH and the Admin. We will never be able to judge for ourselves with any sense of accuracy what the possible plays were, because we can’t be sure the man in the big chair isn’t lying or withholding information.
Of course there’s always going to be information we can’t and shouldn’t have. But the problem is, the Administration has proven to us it’s not above misrepresenting information.
Because our options were to either support a dictator against a democratic revolt -something which is entirely inconsistent with the principles we preach- or we could support the revolt and, in doing so, roll the dice.
Given the choice between subverting our own ability to espouse democracy as an improvement over dictatorship or taking a gamble, I’d take the gamble. Realistically, how much worse off are we? Egypt isn’t going to solidify overnight into a completely Islamist state threatening the US. It’s going to be in inner turmoil for a while and will likely spend the next twenty years dealing with various levels of oppression, upheaval and reinvention.
Was it a clear win? No, of course not. But it had a chance of a ‘win’. Supporting Mubarak didn’t.
No suprise here.
Always be careful of what you ask for, you just might get it.
How quickly some forget. We stood by and did nothing in Iran in 1978, too. We’re still paying for that fiasco 34 years later.
Sometimes the devil you know really is the better choice. And as Ben observed, my characterization of “stand back and do nothing” is at least arguable, and may be incorrect.
@11 I think it’s a question of balancing short term and long term goals – yes, sometimes in the short term, the devil you know is the better choice. You can certainly make the argument that backing Mubarak would have, in the short term, avoided an Islamist Egypt, at least in name. In practice, well, that’s a considerably more complicated story.
But what is the long-term effect of that? Mubarak wouldn’t last forever and in the meantime the frustration of the people would be directed not just at him, but at those supporting him. It would poison the well further against US interests in the region, and to what end? To have a dictator of questionable strength whose only real selling point is that.. well, he wasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood? He didn’t allow for Sharia Law to be considered the official law of the land, despite it being the de-facto case in many places?
Honest question: How would things be vastly different -and better, I mean- if Mubarak were still in power?
Hope and Change thingy?
@ 12 … Mubarack was a strategic ally in terms of military presence and the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Yes … I said GWOT … that is what it is all about. We don’t have relationship now … because the BHO administration allowed the violent transition to take place.
With Mubarack … we had assurances. With the Muslim Botherhood we have supporters of jihad running Egypt.
Short and long term … this was a bad move to allow it to happen!
@12: How would things be vastly different and better if Mubarak were still in power?
Well, Isreal wouldn’t be in the gunsights of a group that has as a platform the destruction of Israel. Egypt wouldn’t be a marshalling area for extremists to move about North Africa from. Yes, Mubarak was a brutal dictator, however, he did keep some stability in the region, which was a good thing for a lot of reasons. Assad in Syria can’t make the same claim, so it is a different scenario. Where was Obama’s support to the protestors in Iran a couple years ago? Seems he really is only interested in democracy in certain areas. Don’t forget that Obama spoke out against Honduras and tried to force his will on them at the same time he played “hands off” on Iran, when Honduras was following their Constitution and laws, which their own Supreme Court upheld. Obama’s foreign policy is all over the map and no one, including Obama, really knows what it is.
How would things be better? Well, for starters . . .
1. The current regime in Egypt would not today be hostile to the West and western ideals.
2. The current regime in Egypt would not be dominated by Islamic Fundamentalists.
3. Egypt would not be acting as a conduit for missing Libyan weapons to get to the Gaza Strip.
4. The Coptic minority in Egypt would not be one dropped shoe away from genocide.
Was Mubarek a bastard? Yes, he was. But so was Sadat. And before him, Nasser. And King Farouk. And just about every other ruler in that part of the world throughout recorded history.
North Africa and the Middle East does not have a history of democratic rule, or anything approaching democratic ideals; the societies there do not practice tolerance. In fact, for millenia, all they’ve seen is dictatorship – since about AD 700, largely theocratic; before then and recently, otherwise. Except for relatively brief periods of colonial rule, of course.
If you really think the Egyptian “man on the street” will feel grateful towards the US for “freeing him” from oppression, think again. Most are conservative Muslims. They regard us at best with distain – the “decadant West” – and at worst as Shaytan.
The educated elite in Egypt might have welcomed our assistance in getting rid of Mubarek. But the educated elite by and large aren’t members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they’re getting squeezed out and bullied into submission by those who are.
Taking the facts as presented, I’m of two minds.
Mubarak was/is a scumbag. No doubt about that.
But he was a scumbag we could control. I have no illusions that he held the MB in check because of any great love for the US. It was out of enlightened self-interest that he kept things quiet there. He did it because he knew damn well that if things were messy there, we’d be all up in his shit.
Kinda like mafia bosses of old wanted their neighborhoods to be violence free, to keep the cops from needing to come around checking on things.
But tyranny is supposed to be socially-just for left/liberals…
“Stood by and did nothing!?!?” Not in Iran (78-79) and not in Egypt!
Obama himself, on international broadcasts, ordered Mubarrak to step aside. He pimped up the Muslim Brotherhood and then asked Egyptian Generals to commit a coup d’etat. He then pushed the Generals to hold elections BEFORE ANY secular political parties could organize or create a base of supporters. The Adminstration told us that the Muslim Brotherhood, was “just political Islamism,” even though their goals of tyranny are the same as Islamist terrorists. And on 9/11/2012, Islamists attacked the US Embassy in Cairo, raising the flag of al-Qaeda over it.
Carter, in 1978, ordered the Shah to allow the return of the Ayatollah Khomeni, and then asked the Iranian Generals to commit a coup d’etat, which they refused. And on 11/4/1978, Islamists, including Mahmood Ahdiminijihadist, attacked the US Embassy, holding our diplomats hostage for the next 444 days. Today, the US Embassy remains occupied, by the Sepah Pasdaran, or Iranian Revolutionary Guards, recognized as a terrorist organization by the US State Department.
http://waronterrornews.typepad.com/home/2010/11/on-this-date-1979-tehran-embassy-invasion.html
http://waronterrornews.typepad.com/home/2009/11/former-iran-hostages-recall-us-embassy-takeover-30-years-ago-.html
“Those who fail to learn from History are doomed to repeat it.”
And while the Iranian government is pimping Obama for a win on November 6th, on November 9th 2009, the Iranian PEOPLE were questioning his “commitment” to democracy: http://waronterrornews.typepad.com/home/2009/11/persian-protestors-defy-government.html
The “long term effect” of keeping Mubarak in power would have been, “It would poison the well further against US interests in the region”? Good thing we followed O’s foreign policy and kept that from happening, right? Glad to see that everything in Egypt and the Middle East is unicorns and skittles because O and Hillary have done such a wonderful job.
Disagree; the uprisings were inevitable– there was a growing pool of angry people who could organize faster than governments could marshal their forces.
Sharia and suppression is the only thing they know, so it is equally unsurprising that the Arab Spring turned out the way it did. To resist would be cost lives and materiel (thank goodness our aviators were not killed by the crowd when shot down by Ghaddafi over Libya).
Under the circumstances, I would argue to renew the lobbing of cruise missiles at strategic facilities until the Arabs behave themselves. It’s not like terrorism would go away on its own, so I don’t see any down sides to this– live fire exercises would even keep US personnel’s training schedules up to date 🙂
@14, 15,16 & 17: All of that assumes that Mubarek would still be in power if we had not encouraged him to give up. I don’t think that’s the case. He would be gone either way, either peacefully like he did or by violent overthrow like Gaddhafi. Either way he was out of there and although it may not have been neccessary to ingratiate ourselves with the new rulers, it seems smart to not overly antagonize them by engaging in a doomed attempt to keep him in power.
@22
Fair enough. He very well might have lost control. Good point.
The problem, martinjmpr, is not the fact of Mubarek’s departure. Saleh’s departure in Yemen proves that a government need not change when an unpopular leader departs, even in the Arab world.
The problem is that the current administration handled Mubarek’s departure abysmally badly.
In Egypt, we (the US) stood by (or possibly actively encouraged) the takeover of a reliable ally by a government dominated by those we knew or should have known would be antithetical to the US/West and our interests. The Muslim Brotherhood was the anti-Western forerunner of and ideological father to al Qaeda. A guy named al-Zawahiri was al-Qaeda’s chief ideologue and now runs it. Where in the hell do you think al Zawahiri got his start?
We did the same thing in Libya (Qadaffi had turned from terror to cooperation over the last 10 years or so). That also turned out “very well” for the US.
We got lucky in Tunisia – so far. That one could still go bad.
We got lucky in Yemen – so far. But that one too could still go bad.
And it looks like we’re trying to do the same thing in Syria. Assad is truly a bastard – but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that the folks opposing him aren’t likely to be much better, and could well be even worse. And if they’re dominated by al Qaeda, Assad’s overthrow could well hand al Qaeda WMD and working delivery systems to play with.
In international relations, sometimes the choices are dance with a cooperative devil or with a devil who wants to destroy you. Rarely do you get to dance with the belle of the ball.