Tag: Egypt

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Thirsty Lips

Should I travel to America, and become flimsy, and ordinary, like those who are satisfied with idle talk and sleep. Or should I distinguish myself with values and spirit. Is there other than Islam that I should be steadfast to in its character and hold on to its instructions, in this life amidst deviant chaos, and the endless means of satisfying animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins? I wanted to be the latter man. Sayyid Qutb

You have probably never heard of Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of radical Islam. In a way, this fact is enough to understand why the U.S. repeatedly screws up in the Middle East.

Is there a single success story? Is there a single example of a U.S. policy in the Middle East that has led to peace, prosperity, economic development, and stability, among any of the Arab states, or Iran, or Africa? Is there a single American who knows who Sayyid Qutb is?

You don’t know and you don’t care? Then stay the hell out of Middle Eastern politics. You can only make things worse.

The point is not that understanding Qutb will help you understand what the solutions are to the problems in Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria. The point is that if you don’t even know who Qutb is, you have no business even trying to understand the rest of the dynamics at play.

Sayyid Qutb is a seminal Islamic writer and theorist who briefly visited the U.S. in the 1940’s and was absolutely appalled at what he saw. Essentially, he was revolted by people enjoying prosperity and society and culture and their bodies. He found America vulgar and violent and “animalistic”. He ravishingly describes American girls as being experts in seduction.

Qutb decided that the Arab Islamic world must be spared this horrible descent into pleasure and so he returned to Egypt where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and wrote books and edited journals and befriended a military officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser. When Nasser overthrew King Farouk in July 1952 and installed a loyalist, Muhammad Naguib, as president, Qutb thought the Islamic Republic was at hand. He and Nasser would talk and talk and talk, sometimes, up to 12 hours without interruption.

As part of an agreement with the U.S. and Britain, King Farouk was politely exiled and the monarchy abolished.

Nasser begged Qutb to join the new government, in any capacity he wished, but Qutb sensed that Nasser was not a good Islamicist and wasn’t serious about imposing an Islamic state on Egypt making sure that Arabic women lived their lives peering through slitted hoods.

In October, 1954, Qutb, bitterly disappointed that Nasser appeared to be heading towards a secular, socialist state, joined at least six other Moslem Brotherhood members in an attempted coup, which included the attempted assassination of Nasser on the 26th, while he was giving a speech in Alexandria. Mohammed Abdel Latif fired eight shots at Nasser, from less than 8 meters away, and missed with all of them. Nasser remained calm and continued speaking, and had an Evita moment: Egypt c’est moi. Then he cracked down on the opposition. Qutb was eventually hanged. But he was right about Nasser: in 1957, he extended suffrage to women, prohibited discrimination based on gender, and implemented special protections for women in the workplace.

The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it. Sayyid Qutb

Qutb sounds like he is mentally ravishing those American girls.

There it is, in extreme abstraction: Egypt, coups, Islam, army, protests, the whole ball of wax, Middle Eastern history to 2013. Nasser, by the way, was “incorruptible”. That explains why the Western powers and their allies wanted to assassinate him too! Seriously, think about it– why the hell were the Western powers, all through the 60’s, 70’s, and ’80’s, so eager to overthrow leftist governments and install corrupt assholes like the Shah of Iran, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile? How has all that worked out?

Think about the fact that America joined the Islamic Brotherhood in wanting to assassinate Nasser!  Is the enemy of my enemy, in this case, my friend?

What nobody ever admits, of course, is that the first purpose of power everywhere, every time, is to take wealth away from people who earned it and hand it over to people who have acquired power and privilege, always– always– at the barrel of a gun. If not the titular leader, then the party that keeps him in power: the military officers, the cabinet officials, the corporate executives, the weapons makers, the killers, the oil companies, the phosphate companies, the rubber companies, the coffee companies, and so on and so on and so on.

Some notes about Nasser, Egypt, Syria, and the Whole Mess

The U.S. should study July 1956: Nasser announced that he was “nationalizing” the Suez Canal. The canal, built with Egyptian labour and British money, and owned and run by the British on Egyptian soil, was central to Egypt’s perception of it’s role in the world and it’s standing among the great powers. Nothing Nasser ever did, before or after, generated such broad, passionate support as this single act. It was so decisively supported by everyone in Egypt that even Britain could not resist.

Could not… but they did. In October 1956, together with France and Israel, they plotted to seize the canal back and occupy Egyptian territory adjacent to it. And they agreed to overthrow Nasser. This became known as the “Suez Crisis”. France, Britain and Israel quickly brushed aside the weak Egyptian army and occupied the canal zone, while Nasser ordered ships sunk in the canal to block it’s use. Some of Nasser’s own advisors were urging him to surrender to the British.

And here something remarkable happened. The United States, under President Eisenhower, and supported by the U.N., demanded that the British, French and Israelis withdraw.

And they did. By April, 1957 the canal was re-opened under Egyptian control.

After their wedding, the couple moved into a house in Manshiyat al-Bakri, a suburb of Cairo, where they would live for the rest of their lives. Nasser’s entry into the officer corps in 1937 secured him relatively well-paid employment in a society where most people lived in poverty. His social status was still well below the wealthy Egyptian elite, and his resentment of those born into wealth and power continued to grow. Wikipedia

In 1957, Egypt’s only ally was– wait for it– Syria! Syria had a leftist government which Eisenhower and other Western powers were eager to topple. King Saud of Saudi Arabia tried to have Nasser assassinated. You couldn’t make this shit up.

The first, most pertinent fact about Egypt today is that the army controls the means of production, the corporations, the infrastructure that generates wealth. All the speeches about democracy and freedom and stability and so on is just so much bullshit. The longer one is in power, the more elaborate, sophisticated, and oblique the relationship seems– Kings are crowned, monuments are erected, spectacles organized– but the fundamental is always the same: he who has the gold makes the rules and he who rules gets the gold.

Qutb did not, as some assert, lay down the groundwork for an Islamic war upon America and the West. He laid the groundwork for the real dynamic in the Middle East today: the war between Sunni and Shia, Alawite, fundamentalist, warlords, Kurds, and secularists. The war between what he saw as true Islam and the heretics. The war in Syria is not between a dictator and the democratic will of the people: it is between two, maybe three sects of Islam, and they will never, in our lifetime, learn to share power or to live in a pluralistic state.

If the U.S. arms the rebels, they will murder the Alawites and then they will turn on each other.

 

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The Muslim Brotherhood: Egypt’s Revolution

Perhaps the most disturbing report I have seen on the Egyptian Revolution was also the least inflammatory, the least categorical, the least certain of what was happening.

Frontline (PBS) documents the low-key role played in the revolution by the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. While the elders were clearly out of touch about what was happening, the younger leaders were not. Very savvy about technology and the media, the Frontline documentary revealed how the youth leaders carefully toned down any overt expressions of the faith in favor of generic, pro-democracy statements and ground-roots support for the secularist demonstrators. A number of well-informed reporters and human rights analysts thoughtfully dissected their role and wondered aloud just what their goals really were. They pointed out how the Muslim Brotherhood organized clinics and food distribution points and were the first and most courageous about confronting the pro-Mubarak thugs that tried to invade Tahrir Square at the height of tension.

Towards the end of the program, both the youth leader, Mohammed Abbas, and an elder, make more explicit their desire for an Islamic society.

This is not to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will attempt to seize control of the country and build an Islamic state as in Iran. It’s not to suggest they are suddenly pluralists who want to share their message of spiritual enlightenment on Facebook and Twitter.

Frontline is unparalleled in its ability and willingness to suggest that the situation is complex and the outcome, at this point, is unknown.

And where does the U.S. government want to cut spending? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If they do and if these cuts prevent Frontline from continuing to produce documentaries like this, it will be as a great a crime as any committed by the Republicans since the days of Tail-Gunner Joe.

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Egypt and the freedom nazi: No Democracy for You

At least one BBC reporter on the ground in Egypt insists that the Islamic Brotherhood is not a significant factor in the protests — they are just a canard offered by Mubarak consistently for 30 years to scare the Americans into blindly supporting his dictatorial regime.

So the 85 million people of Egypt– no democracy for you! The U.S. has several important interests in the Middle East– your freedom and prosperity don’t figure into any of them.

No doubt the Obama Administration is giving considerable thought to Iran these days. The U.S. backed the Shah’s despotic regime for 25 years. When protest rallies spun out of control in 1979, the Carter Administration appears to have backed away from their proxy. There was short struggle for a secular, constitutional government, but when Ayatollah Khomeini was allowed to return, the radical Islamacists succeeded in wresting control of the government away from the moderates.

It could be argued that the lesson to be learned is that repression by the Shah would have been better. But you could make an equally cogent argument that the extremists were able to take control because long-term unconditional support for the Shah had weakened the moderates.

It is possible that if Mubarak leaves, the Islamic brotherhood may succeed in eventually seizing power. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. Iran today is really not the caricature that the U.S. likes to present to the public, and Afghanistan and Iraq are not exactly sterling models of the kind of alternative society the U.S. has in mind. But it also may be the result of the U.S. supporting Mubarak for 30 years without pressuring him to democratize gradually, to allow the establishment of a moderate opposition with real power, and to cultivate the institutions of society that moderate political power, like labour unions, universities, and regional governments.

The long sad history of U.S. support of anti-democratic regimes.  [Sorry– the website has been taken down, but my comments still apply.]

I don’t totally buy the list. Yes, we know that U.S. corporations like Standard Oil and ITT continued to do business with the Nazis during the war, and that Henry Ford was a big fan of Adolf Hitler, and it is clear that the U.S. allowed many Nazi war criminals to escape responsibilities for their crimes so they could be used elsewhere for American interests, but I think those complaints are more in the nature of the world being an unjust place than a steaming indictment of U.S. foreign policy.

At a national, policy level, Roosevelt clearly opposed Hitler. That’s different from George Bush Sr. cozying up to Marcos, or Jimmy Carter welcoming the Shah of Iran to the U.S. for medical treatment or Nixon instigating the coup in Chile.

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Give Peace a Chance

There was a moment a few years ago when some Republican leaders in Florida came to a startling realization.

As Republicans they held two cardinal values. Well, “cardinal” to Republicans. Firstly, they were in favor of small government, efficient, and free of wasteful extravagance. Secondly, they were strongly in favor of an effective, strict criminal justice system that promoted law and order and reduced crime.

The realization that they came to was that the same strict law-and-order platform they espoused was at odds with their first goal– small and efficient government. They realized that throwing hundreds and thousands of teenaged hoodlums into jail for long sentences without possibility of early parole or rehabilitation was actually costing the government a lot more money than… gasp… prevention programs.

What they realized was that a relatively small amount of money invested in youth programs in the inner city would actually have the effect of reducing the number of youths that would proceed into a life of crime and violence. It would also thereby reduce the costs of policing, criminal prosecution, and incarceration, by a very substantial amount. They came to this conclusion on the basis of solid research conducted by– gasp– intellectuals with college degrees.

So these Republicans found themselves in the odd position of advocating greater spending on social programs and prevention– Democrat icons– in order to further their goal of smaller, more efficient government.

They were far-sighted and wise. They foresaw a win-win situation: less crime, and more opportunity for the poor in their community. They were willing to re-examine dogmatic belief in the light of scientific evidence.

National governments today spend over $800 billion on defense. They spend about $10 billion on the primary tool of averting wars, the United Nations.

The Republicans have worked very hard to demonize the United Nations over the past few years. They claim that it is a bloated bureaucracy–which it is–and that it is inefficient and works against the interests of the United States.

What they really see is that the United Nations tries to work in the interests of all peoples of the planet, and that sometimes means that the U.S. is called upon to share, and Republicans don’t want to share. They don’t want to share the fish in the sea, or the profits of pharmaceutical corporations or the responsibility of reducing global warming. They do want to share in the profits to be made by selling weapons to antagonists in local conflicts. They don’t even hesitate to sell land-mines which, more often than not, end up harming civilians rather than soldiers. Thousands and thousands of children. Children with missing limbs. Bill Clinton wanted to sign the International Land Mine Treaty. The Republicans, with a majority in Congress, blocked him.

But these Republicans in Miami realized that their long-range goals are best served with foresight and planning, and with consideration of the causes of the problems they mean to address.

Why is this lesson so hard to absorb on a national level? These terrorists are global thugs and our immediate reaction is to demand death, or long prison sentences. We launch a military attack which, in substance if not formal organization, is similar to the action that provoked it. We bomb the hell out of them.

If we keep waiting for more terrorist attacks and then simply retaliate and punish, not only will we have the very thing we are trying to stamp out– as every retaliation provides righteous fodder for the next generation of suicide bombers– but we will increase it, and it will cost us more and more to deal with.

The United Nations is the world’s inner-city program. It should be funded. It’s not perfect, but it does better than most people think it does. We don’t keep statistics on wars prevented but the truth is that the world is a far more peaceful place today than it used to be. The United Nations should be empowered. It should be employed to resolve the issues that give rise to terrorism. The U.S. will have to change it’s tack from “how can we directly benefit” to “how can we reduce the global tensions and economic disparities that give rise to insurgencies and terrorist acts”.

Redneck America scoffs: what we need to do is kill them all. If you want Ireland or the Middle East, you shall have it. But if the real goal is to reduce terrorism, to reduce death and destruction and violence, we have to follow the path of the British, who decided 20 years ago that the only way to bring an end to violence in Northern Ireland was to end the cycle of attack and retaliation and bring the interested parties to the negotiating table.

And every cop knows that the first step to preventing trouble is to win the trust and respect of the people who might or might not eventually go on to make trouble. The U.S. has to show Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt that it can develop new policies in the region that are principled and fair, and that don’t always only benefit themselves. Step #1 is that Israel must be dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, not because they are wrong or because they are at fault or because they are bullies– they might or might not be all of these– but because it is the only way to begin to resolve the Palestinian issue, and the Palestinian issue is at the heart of most conflicts between Islamic fundamentalists and the west.

The U.S. must also review it’s relationships with Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Those nations need to gradually incorporate more democratic elements into their governments or they will eventually be over-thrown by militant Islamic fundamentalists, as Iran was. Most of the September 11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. There is serious resentment in the Moslem world over the conspicuous U.S. presence in this nation that is custodian to the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

The sanctions against Iraq should end. Saddam Hussein, though vilified by the U.S. media, is really no better or worse than most of the other leaders of nations in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria.