The July 3 move by the Egyptian military to stabilize the country signals the collapse of Obama’s Middle East policy.
Washington’s present interventionist regional policy began during the George W. Bush administration and was fatally flawed from the start. The Obama administration simply compounded the mistakes while moving it forward.
Vice President Dick Cheney and his neo-con team created a crusade against the Shia branch of Islam targeting Iran, its ally Syria, and Hizbullah in Lebanon. The strategy called for a coalition of Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Gulf states plus Israel plus Turkey.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Neoconservative fellow-traveler Republicans, like Senator John McCain, have blown trumpets for the policy for years. The Obama White House adopted it as its own. The basic idea is to crush if not Balkanize Syria, go after Hizbullah, and then go to war against Iran.
While the pro-Israel Lobby in Washington DC is gung ho, some Israeli military and intelligence officials have grave doubts about all this. They believe with good reason that this reckless and destabilizing strategy will make the security situation much worse for Israel in the near, medium, and long term.
The Obama administration threw itself behind the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the January 25 Revolution in 2011. The White House ignored the millions of Egyptians, moderate Muslim and Christian, who hoped for modernization of the economy and the political system.
The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood was created in 1928 as a secret militant political organization. Its long-term goal has always been to create an Islamic dictatorship in Egypt. In such an outcome, the country’s minority Coptic Christians would be savagely repressed just as the world is witnessing the fate of Syrian Christians at the hands of the Islamic terrorists. Moderate Muslims and members of various minority sects would share the same fate.
Washington’s regional strategy included using the Muslim Brotherhood as a tool to control Egypt and also as a factor in the crusade against Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah. As early as 2005, the Bush administration was in contact with the Brotherhood to work out behind the scenes cooperation.
The Brotherhood’s leadership fully backed this strategy as they saw it as a way to power in Egypt and a way to regional influence. Years ago, they had established secret Brotherhood organizations in Syria and in Palestine. The Hamas organization, for example, is a branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood established friendly relations with the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia as far back as the 1930s. During the Nasser years, when the Egyptian government cracked down on them for being subversive, many of their leaders and intellectuals got asylum in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden’s favorite teacher in college was an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader in exile in Saudi Arabia.
In recent years, Qatar linked with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its branches in Syria and in Gaza. The spiritual leader of Qatar is a member of the brotherhood’s Egyptian branch.
Washington supports the so-called Free Syrian Army in the crusade against Syria and its people. The Free Syrian Army is well-known to be controlled by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. This Syrian branch, in turn, over the years has interfaced with al-Qaeda and terrorist organizations in Iraq. The US military and intelligence community know this full well.
Because the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s policy to create an Islamic dictatorship in Egypt brought the country to ruin, the military moved in this week after a warning. The military was concerned not only about the increasingly extremist behavior of the brotherhood in Egypt but also by President Mursi’s recent very public declaration of jihad against Syria and reckless foreign policy.
The Obama White House and its neo-conized Republican allies have gravely undermined long term US national interests in the Middle East with their reckless interventionism.
It’s time for a real change.
Copyright © 2013, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted provided full credit is given and a live link provided.
