The Egyptian Civil War

The Sphinx is mysterious. The current situation in Egypt is not. I wrote a blog piece on January 29, 2011 that events in Egypt have pretty much since mirrored. It said that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood were going to slug it out and the military was on the sidelines but a counterweight to both of them. The Muslim Brotherhood via Morsi ran the show for awhile, but a massive revolt by the Egyptian people made it clear that they were not going to go back to the 5th century as planned by the Brotherhood without a fight. The Egyptian military agreed and it looks like a fight to the finish is now joined.

It helps to be clear about the situation. In any war, someone wins and someone loses - to the victor goes the spoils. There will not be a negotiated peace in Egypt. In our own Civil War, the South surrendered and the North ran the show for 100 years after. Japan and Germany lost and the Allies, primarily the U.S. and U.S.S.R., called the shots for decades. That is the nature of what is happening here. There will be no quarter given, it's winner-take-all, and that is why we must back the military.

Henry Kissinger once said that no great power has friends, only interests. He is right and the Western-trained Egyptian military has a worldview much closer to our own than the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood which sees life through a feudal lens. The military just wants to run its own country; the Brotherhood wants to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate. Which will be easier to work with in the long term? This is not a tough call. Which is why, of course, President Obama has come out for the Brotherhood. 

It is quite amazing, really, that the President can get virtually every call wrong in such a wide variety of important areas. He has sent Secretary of State off to try and re-start the "Peace Process" between the Israelis and Palestinians for the umpteenth time and which isn't going to happen. It is only a sideshow at the moment to the main act in Egypt. 

The leading Arab country in the Middle East intellectually and politically is Egypt and some semblance of peace only came to the Middle East when Egypt laid down its sword against Israel at Camp David. Some say that this happened because the Israelis told them on the QT that if there was another war like 1956, 1967, or 1973, they would nuke the Aswan Dam and flood Cairo. Leaving that aside, though, they did make peace and it has held and Egypt gradually began to orient at least little bit to a Western-way of thinking, which has been a stabilizing influence in a very unstable region. If the MB gains permanent power, this would all be lost and Egypt would begin its march back to the 5th century and probably take the rest of the Arab world with it. 

I hope that somebody comes up with a way to make supporting the Egyptian military seem trendy or cool, or whatever other basis the President uses for making decisions. If the U.S. is serious about stabilizing this part of the world in a manner consistent with U.S. interests, it needs to take strong steps now to support the Egyptian military and the millions of Egyptians depending on it to keep the would-be Islamic feudal lords at bay.