Egyptian
president Mohammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood were elected
a year ago in what the so-called “International Community”
judged a free and fair election. They and Egypt’s Salafist
movement garnered nearly 65-percent of the vote. On Friday,
Egypt’s military intervened in the political arena and overthrew
and detained Morsi.
Why? Because those who
deservedly and miserably lost to the Islamists in 2012 did not
care to wait for the next election to try to defeat Morsi. Those
in the West who have contended that some Muslims are not capable
of democracy have been proven right, although the proof lies in
the behavior of those pro-democracy Egyptians the West praises
and supports. Egypt’s Islamists, on the other hand, played by
the political game’s rules and—if the military’s diktat
holds—they have lost and war is now their main option.
What next in Egypt? After
a period of post-coup semi-quiet, I think, the likeliest answer
will be escalating violence for the foreseeable future. If the
Brotherhood and their Salafist allies cannot hold the power to
govern they legitimately won by an overwhelming margin, they
will decide quite correctly that it is time to reach for the
Kalashnikovs. They will be encouraged to make this decision by
the Western-dominated International Community‘s tepid criticism
of Morsi’s anti-democratic overthrow, which was made while it
loudly applauded the Egyptian army‘s promise of new elections
relatively soon.
Egypt’s increasingly
popular and bin Laden-like Salafist movement was never happy
with the idea of Western-style popular elections nor did they
believe the West would tolerate a Sharia government. Still, they
put their religious scruples on the backburner and participated
in the 2012 vote. To the West’s shock and horror, they finished
on the Brotherhood’s heals.
Today the Salafists know
that all future Egyptian elections will be rigged against them
and the Brotherhood. (NB: Egypt’s coup-against-democracy will be
read the same way by Islamists worldwide.) The Salafists will
tell Morsi and his colleagues “we told you so” and head for
their arsenals, as well as to Egypt’s borders to welcome fellow
Salafist fighters coming to their aid from Eastern Libya,
elsewhere in Arab-Spring-ed Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Somalia. And all of them will be supported with guns, money, and
more volunteer mujahedin from the Sunni states of the Arab
Peninsula.
The Brotherhood, on the
other hand, is in an impossible situation; it can only opt for
war. If Morsi and his lieutenants accept the military’s action
and reward the losers of the election the Islamists won in 2012,
they may form some kind of illegitimate temporary regime but
only at the cost of their political and religious credibility.
In addition, such a
blatantly corrupt and anti-democratic compromise will drive
large numbers of the Brotherhood’s members—especially its young
males, some of whom are in Egypt’s armed forces—into the arms of
the Salafists. If this occurs, Egypt will have a civil war with
part of the army siding with the Islamists and the other part
with the effete, militarily useless pro-democracy forces. In
such a scenario, the Egyptian Islamists will win, though, as in
Syria, it may take a while.
What should concern
Americans most about the near certainty of war in Egypt, and
thus the broadening of the mujahedin’s overall war against the
West, is whether Obama’s administration—in league with
pro-Israel Republican and Democratic senators, Britain, and
Israel—used its intelligence services to help the leaders of
Egypt’s anti-democratic opposition to organize, fund, and train
the democracy-killing forces that filled Cairo’s streets with
demonstrations and prompted the Egyptian army to use that most
democratic of all tools—a military coup.
Readers will recall that
former-Secretary of State Clinton and her diplomatic
minions—when they were not getting Americans killed in
Benghazi—bank-rolled the intervention of a number of Western
NGO-like groups to operate inside Egypt to build a secular,
pro-democratic movement meant to overthrow the Islamists. When
Morsi and his cabinet identified this violation of Egyptian
sovereignty they—like Putin when he found the same U.S.-backed
threat in Russia—arrested and jailed Clinton’s agents and then
threw them out of the country.
Was that the end of it?
Well if Obama, the Senate’s bipartisan Israeli shills, the
British, and the Israelis were smart, they would have stopped
right there. But events of recent decades suggest they probably
just shifted gears and went from overt, NGO-type interventionist
activity to covert action interventionist programs conducted by
their intelligence services.
As the Western media—and
no outlet more flagrantly than the BBC—have been busy
cheerleading for Morsi’s removal, I have heard no journalist who
has bothered to ask how Egypt’s spectacularly fractured
pro-democracy movement—it fielded 17 disunited, feckless
presidential candidates in the 2012 election Morsi won—has in a
twelve-month become a better organized, better-funded, and more
united and logistically effective force. While it is only a
guess, my money would be placed on a bet that Obama, Cameron,
Netanyahu, McCain, Lieberman, Schumer, and Graham cooperated in
devising a covert program that used their long-time friends in
the Egyptian army and those Egyptians who this week proved
themselves utterly incapable of democracy to invalidate Egypt’s
free-and-fair 2012 election.
If this proves to be the
case, the composite force of young Egyptians intolerant of the
democratic process and Western and Israeli leaders who pretend
Muslims do not hate their constant, cavalier interventionism
will have ensured that al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri’s 2005 forecast
that only jihad can defend Islam and install Sharia rule is
accepted as truth by more tens of millions of Muslims. And then
we will have to face an ever intensifying, Salafist-led
religious war against the West, a war which America will end up
fighting overseas and at home.
Michael
F. Scheuer is a former CIA intelligence officer, American
blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political
analyst.
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