Chessboard: Balance of Power Changing Rapidly

Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely, US Army (Ret.)

What is striking about the Chessboard moves and the current crisis in Egypt is the rapidly changing scene and evolution of events and uprisings. The Chess Masters in Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are playing out their moves very judiciously and both fully understand the domino effect of radical Islam, the caliphate and Jihad. Yes, we do have three games in one: Chess, Poker, Dominoes! This is not a set of events that one has the luxury of focusing upon individually. Egypt is key but not the only chess move in play. The chess board, or match, is a series of matches with many simultaneous games being played at once. The master is adept at playing many at once as Grand Master Boris Spassky and others did in worldwide chess competition.

The moves on the chess board have global impact because of energy, global trade, and finances. If the trade routes are cut off or disturbed when oil and other goods cease flowing, the world economy (already at a precipice) could implode in hours and days with a twelve day global financial collapse scenario. After-all, it ostensibly started as a food problem in Tunisia; say the pundits, but of course, it is much more.

The dollar and global currencies, already falling in value, would plummet. The year 2011 may be, in fact, the year of the Apocalypse or at least a series of apocalyptic events that changes the United States and the world as we know it.

Why are there no serious initiatives on the part of countries outside of the Middle East? Iran and Syria continue to stir the pot unmolested! Iran no longer hesitates to state publicly that its forward defense line now passes through “Lebanon and Palestine.” In practice, the Lebanese-Israeli border is in fact Israel’s border with Iran. Let us not skip over the importance of Lebanon. Israel is now tightly surrounded by a well-organized radical Islamic effort, akin to the pre-1967 war status. Enemies became peaceful neighbors, and now those peaceful neighbors are no more.

Description: 1967 Attack

Power in Iran is closely held by the Mullahs and IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard) and no visible external support of the Iranian opposition forces. China and Russia comfortably play their pawns on the chessboard as they view the demise of the United and States and other semblances of historic Western power. I believe there is a real connection between Soros/Obama factions (the Progressive Socialists) in this global restructuring.

Speed is paramount now and political planning for 2011 and 2012 is a fool’s errand. The time is now to think outside of the daily routine. Chess Masters in Iran have played their cards well, and now it’s a domino effect. They have planned well, and useful dupes are doing their bidding. I am impressed that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is being talked about much more in depth, but we need to show that it is orchestrated, right down to Muhammad el Baradei. This is not a set of events we have the luxury of focusing upon individually.

Description: Ottoman Empire

No one knows what will happen in Egypt in the next few days. Will the Mubarak government succeed in clamping down on demonstrators and put an end to the reform movement? Will Mubarak manage to stay in power by offering political and economic reforms? Or is he finished? If so, what happens next? Today he offered to step down and stay out of the scheduled September election cycle in a speech the world awaited with baited breath. But alas, early word is that is not acceptable to the rioters.

No one knows the answer to those questions, including the Egyptians themselves. But these demonstrations have the potential of being like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Shah of Iran, with ramifications for every Muslim country, secular, or otherwise.

So far, the Obama administration seems unsure how to respond to the Egyptian demonstrations. They’ve done everything from seeming to support the country’s democratic movements to seeming to support Mubarak’s continued efforts to remain in office. They angle to arrive at a peaceful transition, a coordinated succession, but the cards left in the deck for the west are not Aces, Kings, or Queens.

February 1 has seen the largest congregation of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square since protests began in earnest there January 25. However, media reports appear exaggerated. Based on the size of the square and the average limit of one person occupying 2.5 square feet in a densely packed crowd, Tahrir Square can accommodate approximately 200,000 people. However, images from Tahrir Square show empty spaces in the middle of the square and along the edges, meaning it is not yet at capacity.

Description: Tahrir Sq

This is significant, as the difference between 200,000 and 2 million protesters is 3-4 percent versus 26 percent of Cairo’s population of 7.75 million. This difference holds political consequences, a small minority or a sizable part of the population indicate the driving forces, showing us that political inducement is underway, not just a band of hungry people.

For Iran, Hezbollah serves as a live and successful model for these revolutions, one which is reflected in other organizations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian terror organizations, as well as extreme Shiite organizations in Iraq trained by Lebanese Hezbollah. Hezbollah is nourished by the growing strength and power of Iran and draws upon its successes, and both parties recognize that the fall of one also signifies the demise of the other, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon investigating the Hariri murder, which is about to publicize its findings, may offer an opportunity for the West to reverse the trend and take the initiative to reduce Iranian influence in Lebanon, and weaken the power of Tehran. However, the current state of affairs will likely eclipse any opening there for the west. Confusion is a great cloak, and Iran now has a huge cloak to cover Hezbollah.

Description: Ikwan

It appears that our State Department and White House still remain asleep at the switch, while the Shiite Iranians and Muslim Brotherhood are very busy and fastidious in resetting the chessboard in the Middle East to their liking. What has Iran been doing in addition to moving their nuclear program forward? They are actively becoming the hegemonic power of the Middle East and are supporting the international jihad, and the recreation of the Caliphate, and unlike the United States, they are very clever at using proxies to do their dirty work.

Iran has planned a larger, bolder strategy for the demise of Israel, and it is unfolding now! There is far too much coordination to assume otherwise, and the proof is in the movement of the chess pieces now becoming manifest.

In Lebanon, the silent 2008 coup Hezbollah orchestrated is almost complete now. And now, the STL is ready to produce indictments. Will the West now be too cowardly to deal with the facts and conclusions in fear of Iran in light of recent events? Will it even matter now that Iran has, through its proxies and collusion with factions in so many countries, placed the term Caliphate back upon our lips?

Iran is also the behind the scenes on the Palestinian initiative to declare statehood in 2011. Coupling these efforts with the possible Islamization of so many other countries, along with extensive dealings and fraternization with Venezuela, North Korea, and others, one can see the global impact, and it does not bode well for the west.

The Iranian puppet master has set the chessboard of the Middle East in such a manner that they control almost all of the attack points, and a feckless west is doing nothing, thus appearing to have no power to change the tide. Continual signs of weakness in the West embolden Iran more each day. It is clear, Sharia Law is on our doorstep, and as Code Pink and other anti-American leftist groups support such efforts, our own fabric of society is disintegrating. Seen any new Mosques pop up around you lately? Mosques do not follow Muslim populations; Muslims follow the path to Mosques being built. Continual infiltration is a master chess move, and Iran and their Muslim Brotherhood allies are winning that battle as well.

The pawns are strong now and their ability to move has been changed. They are more akin to Rooks and Bishops and are ready to pounce. The Israelis have been effectively set into a corner, and the west is not a friend anymore, and they now have to deal with a paradigm they have faced in the past, a complete encirclement of enemy States. Jordan’s King Abdallah II just fired his cabinet for what some reports allege was consorting with the Muslim Brotherhood, and once again a real concern once again lies on the eastern Israeli border.

The change in the pieces on the Chess Board is virtually complete and the puppet master has won, again; because of the weakness of US and other western leadership. Consider this; Sunni uprisings in Lebanon after Hariri is removed from power took place just days before the Tunisian man self-immolated, sparking riots. Then countries across the entirety of the Mediterranean erupted in chaos. And now, supposed unrest is erupting across the globe, coincidence? NO!

Iran’s master chess moves now force Israel to fight a multiple front war with little help expected from the west. If this cycle continues, the west may be so embroiled with internal chaos that Iran can act with relative impunity. A preemptive strike by Israel now, will mean a simultaneous fight with Hezbollah as well as Hamas, a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel understands this is the new chessboard; US authorities do not, and the United Nations is now a caricature of odd proportions, dubious intent, and blatant conspiracy.

Iran is not getting distracted by its ongoing efforts to undermine the U.S. troops and interests in Afghanistan on one side and Iraq on the other, nor in Syria and Lebanon. It appears to welcome it, as chaos is their ally.

U.S. policy toward Iran and others must change now to better promote our national security interests and strengthen our resolve to face this growing threat and the coming global Caliphate. We must change our strategy soon before more of our men and women die for naught. We must also prepare for it to spill over right here, at home. Remember, Iran watches us closely, has prepared intensely, and is a master of exploiting any event for its own ends, and make no mistake, their proxies are already here.

Iran has set the chess board, held aces up their sleeve, and the dominoes are falling. They are firmly in control of the puppet strings and all the chess pieces are not just in the Middle East anymore; all the while Russia, the USA, China, and western nations just posture. Iran is an adept Puppet Master, a Poker-faced powerhouse, and a Grand Master Chess player (and we and others have allowed it to happen!).

Next move…CHECKMATE!

Iranian Book Celebrating Suicide Bombers Found in Arizona Desert

William La Jeunesse

A book celebrating suicide bombers has been found in the Arizona desert just north of the U.S.- Mexican border, authorities tell Fox News.

The book, "In Memory of Our Martyrs," was spotted Tuesday by a U.S. Border Patrol agent out of the Casa Grande substation who was patrolling a route known for smuggling illegal immigrants and drugs.

Published in Iran, it consists of short biographies of Islamic suicide bombers and other Islamic militants who died carrying out attacks. According to internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection documents, "The book also includes letters from suicide attackers to their families, as well as some of their last wills and testaments." Each biographical page contains "the terrorist's name, date of death, and how they died."

Agents also say that the book appears to have been exposed to weather in the desert "for at least several days or weeks."

Authorities told Fox News that there were no people in the area at the time the book was found, and no arrests have been made in connection with it.

"At this time, DHS does not have any credible information on terrorist groups operating along the Southwest border," a Department of Homeland Securityofficial said in a statement. "We work closely with our partners in the law enforcement and intelligence communities and as a matter of due diligence and law enforcement best practice, report anything found, no matter how significant or insignificant it may seem."

Statements from U.S. officials, including FBI director Robert Mueller, have raised serious concerns in recent years over "OTMs" -- or illegal immigrants other than Mexicans -- who have crossed the southwest border at alarming rates.

Mueller testified before the House Appropriations Committee in March 2005 that "there are individuals from countries with known Al Qaeda connections who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish and pretending to be Hispanic."

Just last year, the Department of Homeland Security had in custody thousands of detainees from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabiaand Yemen. U.S. Border Patrol statistics indicate that there were 108,025 OTMs detained in 2006, compared to 165,178 in 2005 and 44,614 in 2004.

Authorities would not release a picture of the book to Fox News, or reveal how long they believe it was lying in the desert. Immigration officials have previously discovered items along the U.S.-Mexico border from Middle Eastern origin, including Iranian currency in Zapata, Texas, and a jacket found in Jim Hogg County, Texas, that was covered in patches including an Arabic military badge that illustrates an airplane flying into a tower.

The Brotherhood factor

Pepe Escobar

Demands on the streets for a one-way ticket out for President Hosni Mubarak will forge a path to free and fair elections and a role in government for the Muslim Brotherhood. Contrary to alarmist rightwing sirens, no "Islamic fervor" envelopes the Middle East, and a Muslim Brotherhood refuting violence and bowing to secularist majority opinion in a post-revolutionary Egypt cannot possibly spook the West. - Pepe Escobar With Brent crude oil futures smashing the barrier of US$100 a barrel for the first time since September 2008; mounting fears for the oil flow through the Suez Canal; banks, schools and the stock market closed; people's committees running security; some police burning their uniforms and joining the protests; and rows of activists, protesters and bloggers tapping furiously at banks and banks of laptops to send the word (before the President Hosni Mubarak system "bravely" shut down the last functioning Internet service provider), the Egyptian revolution might be approaching the end game.

The Pharaoh and his "successor" Omar "the suave torturer" Suleiman's strategy to use the army to intimidate, and then reclaim, the street could only work if the Nile turned blood red this week. That seems unlikely. Still this ruthless military dictatorship will do whatever it takes to cling to power.

As the multiform Egyptian street sees it, the point is not, as the Wall Street Journal so quaintly put it, "maybe the new phase is a happy one for Washington". Those masses at Tahrir Square (Liberation Square) protesting with their lives couldn't care less - as they couldn't care less for the security of oil supplies to the West or the security of Israel. This is about Egypt, not America.

On Sunday, US President Barack Obama urged a meek "shift in Egypt's administration" - while the streets are yelling "out with the dictator". Al-Jazeera had to come out with an editorial reminding everyone that Obama's definition of "reform" simply cannot mean the same corrupt/repressive regime with a facelift.

This is a classic revolutionary situation; those few on top cannot impose their will like they used to, those many below refuse to be dominated like they used to. Infinitely puzzled, Washington and European capitals may play at best minimalist background vocals to the sound and the fury in the street. The street wants a solid political and institutional life, and to be able to make a decent living in a less corrupt environment. And that has proved to be impossible under the immutable rules of the game - the "our" dictator system supported by the industrialized West.

Among silly conspiracy theories that the Egyptian revolution is being funded by the Jewish lobby, the US Central Intelligence Agency, American financier George Soros or all of the above, the Egyptian street couldn't care less whether or not the Pharaoh decides to "lead an orderly transition"; they won't settle for anything less than his one-way ticket, perhaps to embrace his friends in the House of Saud. Especially now that the street has seen how, with Suleiman, Mubarak is pulling a Shah of Iran in 1978, when he installed Shapour Bakhtiar as his prime minister (it didn't work).

Talk to the Sphinx
The sensible way ahead points to an Egyptian civic alliance dominated by all the sectors opposed to the regime (virtually everyone in the country) and the inevitable component, the army. As much as sectors of the Washington establishment and US corporate media may have been frantically spinning it, there are no objective conditions for an Islamist takeover; this is just plain silly.

Washington may be about to give the green light to Mohamed ElBaradei - who has been crucially endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet not even the Sphinx in Giza knows whether this will be enough for the street.

ElBaradei is a credible outsider. During the Pharaoh's hardcore years he was abroad. He is no pushover, and stoically stood his ground against the George W Bush administration as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency over Iran. ElBaradei, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, may in fact emerge as the "bridge" before free and fair elections, a new constitution and a new order in Egypt.

But there's no evidence he will concoct an economic policy much different from the usual International Monetary Fund-World Bank "structural adjustment" scam, with lots of dodgy privatizations mixed with that hazy Davos mantra, "good governance". If that's the case the street is bound to get really angry - again.

For the moment, there's not much evidence that Egypt could go the way of Iran in 1979. The secular left was in charge of Iran's post-revolutionary government (in Egypt, the left has been decimated by repression). Iran only became an Islamic republic months later, after a national referendum (were that to happen, Egyptians would overwhelmingly support a secular republic). The most probable, positive, scenario is that by 2012 Egypt may be closer, politically, to Turkey.

That leaves us the burning unanswered question to burn them all; what will be the post-revolutionary role of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)?

Brothers to the rescue
The MB elicits panic fear all across the West because the Mubarak regime always effectively equaled them to al-Qaeda. This is nonsense.

The MB was founded by Hasan al-Banna in the port of Ismailia in 1928 - then moved to Cairo. Its initial concern was to concentrate on social services, establishing mosques, schools and hospitals. Over these past decades, the MB managed to become the most important fundamentalist political force in the Sunni world. It's also the largest dissident party in Egypt, with 88 seats of the 454 in the lower house of parliament.

The MB does not endorse violence - although it did in the past, until the 1970s. The aura of violence is mostly related to the legendary Sayyid Qutb, considered by many as the spiritual father of al-Qaeda. Qutb, a literary critic who had studied in the US, joined the MB in 1951, and split years later.

Qutb's ideas were radically different from al-Banna's - especially his concept of a "vanguard", which is more Lenin than the Koran. He was convinced that parliamentary democracy was "a failure" in the Islamic world (unlike the overwhelming majority of Egyptians today, who are fighting for democracy; the MB, moreover, is a full participant of civil and political society.) Qutb does not even qualify as the most influential modern Islamist thinker; mainstream political Islam, personified by the authority of the imam of al-Azhar in Cairo, mercilessly refuted him.

Contrary to US neo-conservative propaganda, the MB also has nothing to do with fascist movements in 1930s Europe or socialist parties (they are in fact in favor of private property). It is above all an urban, lower middle class nativist movement, as defined by University of Michigan professor Juan Cole. Even before the revolution, the MB was committed to bring down the Mubarak regime, but peacefully and politically.

The Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1930s in Mosul, is now the Iraqi Islamic Party, and an important political actor who always had a dialogue with Washington. And in Afghanistan, the Jamiat-I Islami party was inspired by the MB.

The MB certainly does not shun technology and intellectual innovation.

It's very much everywhere in the streets of the Egyptian revolution, but very careful not to display an "in your face" attitude. According to spokesperson Gamel Nasser, they see themselves only as a small sector of the revolution. And the revolution is about the future of Egypt - not Islam.

Some may argue once again this is what the mullahs were saying in Tehran in 1978/1979. The shah was indeed deposed by virtually all sectors of society, including the Communist Party. Then the theocrats took over - violently. According to its background over the past three decades, there's no evidence the MB would have the reach to attempt the same move.

It's hard for outsiders to imagine how brutal has been the Mubarak repression machine/police state. The system relies on 1.5 million police - that's four times more people than the army. Their salaries are paid to a great extent by the annual $1.3 billion of US "aid", which also served to crack down really hard on the working class and virtually every progressive organization.

This state of things has been in place way before Mubarak. History will ask questions directly to the ghost of former president Anwar Sadat. Sadat built a trifecta to make his intifah policies work; the IMF advised him to build a rudimentary export economy, he manipulated religion to extract funds from Saudi Arabia and thus undercut the MB, and he got billions from the US for cutting a deal with Israel. The key inevitable consequence of all this was a mammoth police state bent on, among other repressive gems, a total crack down on working class organizations.

Meet the antidote to al-Qaeda
Even also being ravaged during the Sadat/Mubarak decades, the MB at least kept a structure. In free and fair elections the MB would certainly get at least 30% of the votes.

Global corporate media could do worse than trek to the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, in El Malek El Saleh, and learn something. The new head of the MB, Mohammed Badie, is more concerned with the social than the political arena. On the possibility of Egypt eventually becoming an Islamic state, he insists the decision will be "by the people".

Unlike Badie, Sherif Abul Magd, an engineer professor at Helwan University and the head of MB in Giza, was much more loquacious talking to Italian daily La Stampa. He was careful to point out that the protesters should not antagonize the military. He emphasized, "Our people already control the streets."

Above all he delineated the MB strategy for the next stage; to an interim prime minister should be added five judges to set up a presidential committee charged of rewriting the constitution and then calling for elections for parliament and the presidency.

Magd was adamant: "An Islamic state is not in conflict with democracy - but the people should be able to choose it." Washington already knows it, but will be alarmed anyway that the MB does not believe in that famous geopolitical cadaver - the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; "peace is impossible without a deal with Hamas." As for al-Qaeda, "today it is just a CIA invention to justify the war on terror."

The Arab street knows - and largely approves of - the fact that the MB has always opposed the 1978 Camp David accords, and does not recognize Israel. Strategically, the MB has realized it's counter-productive to project itself now; later it's another story. The crucial point is that the MB is adamantly opposed to violence against civilians - and thus resolutely dismisses al-Qaeda. An MB refuting violence and very active in civil politics in Egypt cannot possibly spook the West. As an established party of political Islam, the MB could not be a better antidote to al-Qaeda style fanatics.

Contrary to alarmist rightwing sirens, there's no "Islamic fervor" enveloping the Middle East. On the contrary - what one finds at the moment is plenty of moral turpitude, on top of it on the wrong side of history.

Israel's position is self-explanatory - from the Jerusalem Post describing the Egyptian revolution as "the worst disaster since Iran's revolution" to a columnist in Ha'aretz newspaper blaring that Obama betrayed "a moderate Egyptian president who remained loyal to the United States, promoted stability and encouraged moderation".?

As for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, he phoned Mubarak to say how sorry he is for all this mess; and then ordered his goons to stop Palestinians demonstrating their support for democracy in Egypt.

There's no question - with the MB as part of an Egyptian government, a really sovereign Egyptian government, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt will be renegotiated (the MB favors a referendum). And so we reach the heart of the matter. After this revolution, US and Israeli interests cannot possibly converge - even as optical illusion.

This is not an anti-American revolution; it's a revolution against an American-supported regime. A legitimate, sovereign, post-Mubarak government cannot possibly be a Washington puppet - with all the regional implications that entails. And that goes way beyond the MB. This is about the millenarian heart of the Arab world possibly on the verge of a dramatic seismic shift.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Israel, Alone Again?

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

Jerusalem

ISRAELIS want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt’s city squares. They want to believe that this is the Arab world’s 1989 moment. Perhaps, they say, the poisonous reflex of blaming the Jewish state for the Middle East’s ills will be replaced by an honest self-assessment.

But few Israelis really believe in that hopeful outcome. Instead, the grim assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.

Either result would be the end of Israel’s most important relationship in the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas’s control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, an Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran’s allies or proxies. Mohamed ElBaradei, the icon of the Egyptian protesters, and many Western analysts say that the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood has forsworn violence in favor of soup kitchens and medical clinics. Even if that is true, it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism.

The Brotherhood and its offshoots have been the main purveyors of the Muslim world’s widespread conspiracy theories about the Jews, from blaming the Israeli intelligence service for 9/11 to accusing Zionists of inventing the Holocaust to blackmail the West.

Others argue that the responsibilities of governance would moderate the Brotherhood, but here that is dismissed as Western naïveté: the same prediction, after all, was made about the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The fear of an Islamist encirclement has reminded Israelis of their predicament in the Middle East. In its relationship with the Palestinians, Israel is Goliath. But in its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds, Israel remains David.

Since its founding, Israel has tried to break through the military and diplomatic siege imposed by its neighbors. In the absence of acceptance from the Arab world, it found allies on the periphery of the Middle East, Iran and Turkey. Peace with Israel’s immediate neighbors would wait.

That doctrine began to be reversed in 1979, when the Israeli-Iranian alliance collapsed and was in effect replaced by the Egyptian-Israeli treaty that same year. The removal of Egypt from the anti-Israeli front left the Arab world without a credible military option; indeed, the last conventional war fought by Arab nations against Israel was the 1973 joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur.

Since then all of Israel’s military conflicts — from the first Lebanon war in 1982 to the Gaza war of 2009 — have been asymmetrical confrontations against terrorists. While those conflicts have presented Israel with strategic, diplomatic and moral problems, it no longer faced an existential threat from the Arab world.

For Israel, then, peace with Egypt has been not only strategically but also psychologically essential. Israelis understand that the end of their conflict with the Arab world depends in large part on the durability of the peace with Egypt — for all its limitations, it is the only successful model of a land-for-peace agreement.

Above all, though, Israeli optimism has been sustained by the memory of the improbable partnership between President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin. Only four years before flying to Tel Aviv on his peace mission, Sadat had attacked Israel on its holiest day. Begin, Israel’s most hawkish prime minister until that time, withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, an area more than three times the size of Israel.

Though Egypt failed to deliver the normalization in relations Israelis craved, the thousands of Israeli tourists who have filled the beaches of the Sinai coast experienced something of the promise of real peace. At least in one corner of the Arab Middle East, they felt welcomed. A demilitarized Sinai proved that Israel could forfeit strategic depth and still feel reasonably secure.

The Sinai boundary is the only one of Israel’s borders that hasn’t been fenced off. Israelis now worry that this fragile opening to the Arab world is about to close.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor to The New Republic.
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If ElBaradei Can't Tell the Truth About the Muslim Brotherhood, He Can't Master It

Barry Rubin

Muhammad ElBaradei blatantly lied to CNN. Naturally, the reporter neither called him on it or followed up to ascertain the truth.

Here he is talking about the Muslim Brotherhood

ELBARADEI: "This is a myth that was sold by the Mubarak regime, that it's either us, the ruthless dictators, or above them the al-Qaida types.

"You know, the Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with the Iranian model, has nothing to do with extremism, as we have seen it in Afghanistan and other places. The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously conservative group. They are a minority in Egypt. They are not a majority of the Egyptian people, but they have a lot of credibility because all the other liberal parties have been smothered for 30 years.

"They are in favor of a federalist state. They are in favor of a wording on the base of constitution that has red lines that every Egyptian has the same rights, same obligation, that the state in no way will be a state based on religion. And I have been reaching out to them. We need to include them. They are part of the Egyptian society, as much as the Marxist party here. I think this myth that has been perpetuated and sold by the regime has no - has no iota of reality." Let's count the lies--and Elbaradei knew he was lying, though he used tricky arguments to circle around the blue whale in the room, his Muslim Brotherhood ally:

1. The Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with the Iranian model, has nothing to do with extremism, as we have seen it in Afghanistan and other places.

Obviously, the Brotherhood is not a clone of the Taliban or Ayatollah Khomeini but it has a great deal to do with extremism. Of course, the Brotherhood is distinctively Egyptian, but it is a distinctively Egyptian Sunni form of extremism.

"I've worked with Iranians, I've worked here. There is 100 percent difference between the two societies."

Precisely. But the Brotherhood is still a group that wants to set up an Islamist society to govern every aspect of life under Islamic law as interpreted by the Brotherhood. Germany and Japan are more different than Egypt and Iran but both had fascist regimes. The USSR and China are more different than Egypt abd Iran but both had Communist regimes.

2. "The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously conservative group."

False. Mainstream Egyptian clerics are religiously conservative. To be religiously conservative is to want to maintain the status quo. The Brotherhood is quite unhappy with Egyptian society and wants to change it drastically. That is why it is a revolutionary group even though it has been patient and careful about pushing the revolution.

And the claim that the Brotherhood is non-violent is also quite tricky. It dissolved its terrorist wing only because of government pressure and has advocated terrorism against Americans and Israelis. It applauded and incited the assassinations of secular activists and Egypt's leading novelist. As I've pointed out in previous articles, its rhetoric sounds quite like al-Qaida (though it is not at all friendly toward al-Qaida as an organization).

3. "They are a minority in Egypt. They are not a majority of the Egyptian people, but they have a lot of credibility because all the other liberal parties have been smothered for 30 years."

Well, they are less than 50 percent. But in a situation of severe repression and harassment they received 20 percent of the vote. Thus, it is reasonable to think they have more support than that. Polls show very hardline religious views among the majority of Egyptians. And no other group has anywhere near the level of support that the Brotherhood does. Once given a real chance it may grow quickly as has happened in other countries, like Iran.

Incidentally, the Brotherhood has been more smothered than have liberal parties yet remained far stronger than liberal parties. That tells you something about relative levels of support, toughness, and organization.

4. Here is the biggest lie of all by far:

"They are in favor of a federalist state. They are in favor of a wording on the base of constitution that has red lines that every Egyptian has the same rights, same obligation, that the state in no way will be a state based on religion."

This is so ridiculous that it can only be told to those who know nothing about the Muslim Brotherhood. According to its platform, the Brotherhood favors greater rights for Muslims; fewer rights for women, and a strong unitary state based on religion. ElBaradei knows he is conceal the group's true nature.

5. "And I have been reaching out to them. We need to include them."

Actually, since launching his candidacy for president, ElBaradei has been dependent on the Brotherhood, which has furnished most of the support for his political career. He is not merely including them, he must give them a big slice of power. And they are far stronger than he is, than any liberal democratic movement is in Egypt.

So is it a "myth" that the only alternative is either the Mubarak regime (or what might be called the Nasser-Sadat-Mubarak regime)? We are going to find out. But in judging that issue ElBaradei is lying to us. If he spoke the truth, he might have a better chance of disproving this "myth." But his lies make me suspicious that--even if a better alternative is possible--ElBaradei is going to prove Mubarak's myth to be accurate.

Egypt: The Turning Point, The Regime's Plan on What to Do Next

By Barry Rubin
February 1, 2011

http://www.gloria-center.org/gloria/2011/02/egypt-the-turning-point

In 1978 and 1979 I followed the Iranian revolution on a daily and hourly basis. Even before the hostage crisis, recognizing the importance of this event, I began work on a book. The title? Paved with Good Intentions. This came from the expression, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

This is precisely might be what is happening now. Out of "good intentions," the United States is headed--though I hopes it can still be averted--the biggest catastrophe in the history of its relations with the Middle East. Thirty years after Iran's revolution produced a similar situation, nothing has been learned by U.S. policymakers. Nothing. Let me be clear: Removing Mubarak is NOT the problem. There is little doubt that he will lose power personally, something that would have happened within months any way given his age. The most hated and corrupt figures will flee the country.

The question is whether the regime--the current system--will survive. As of this moment (for reasons you can read four paragraphs down) I believe that the regime that has ruled Egypt for 59 years is finished. Is that a good thing? Well, it depends on what happens.

It is not inevitable that the Muslim Brotherhood will take over. Even the Brotherhood doesn't want that in the near future. It is far more likely, though, that Egypt would become a radical, anti-American state perhaps with some restraint (see point 1, below). The army will play a critical role one way or the other.

But nobody should neglect the reality of public opinion. Here's a report direct from the massive demonstration in Cairo today by a friend interviewing people there:

Demonstrators in Tahrir Square are increasingly saying this is not a fight against Mubarak. This is a fight against Israel and the United States whose interests he's implementing.

But, many will say, isn't it the fault of these countries for supporting Mubarak? The answer is: And would the situation be better if they had never done so? At any rate, it is January 2011 and, like it or not, one has to deal with the existing reality.

We now have for the first time a glimpse of what the Egyptian establishment is planning, from a source very close to the vice-president Omar Suleiman, who is the closest thing to someone running the country. His plan is to dissolve parliament; write a new constitution; call new parliamentary elections; and later hold presidential elections.

Suleiman is a very positive force. He has wanted to be president for a long time, hated the idea that Gamal Mubarak, the son, would succeed Husni. If anyone in Egypt can save the situation, he's the man. For his candid views, read this Wikileaks document. Of course, precisely because he understands the Iranian and revolutionary Islamist threat, the opposition will want to get rid of him as fast as possible.

This is probably the best that can be expected. Notice that this would all be organized by Suleiman and the regime-appointed officials. If this could be implemented there would be some hope. If the incumbent ruling party and army can hold together, perhaps some continuity could be possible. Of course, a critical question is how many votes the current ruling party might muster. Would Egyptians fearful of extremism vote for those associated with Mubarak? Or would extremist Egyptians put an extremist government into office?

But note also that this plan is carefully formulated. Mubarak doesn't want to go and the establishment either doesn't want or fears confronting him. This plan, then, goes around the problem. Mubarak stays and after a year or so there would be a new election, by which time he might have died, been disabled, step down, or choose not to run. One can see the army liking this plan.

Yet for this very reason--Mubarak stays on for a while--the opposition, smelling blood, might reject it.

1. The Turkish newspaper Radikal has a very interesting item about Professor Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University, who it describes as "a close friend of U.S. President Barack Obama." Khalidi, it says, remarks:

"A democratic Arabic world will resemble the democracy of Turkey. The new Arabic world would be more assertive and be less willing to accept Israel's demands. The new Arabic world would also be more independent."

This is worth considering. In other words, if the worst-case scenario is a radical Islamist Egypt, the "best case" may be merely a Turkish Islamist style regime. That means: increasing Islamization in Turkey, an alignment with Iran-Syria-Hamas-Hizballah, and an indifference to U.S. interests.

I'm not being sarcastic here. The first is incredibly terribly horrendous, while the second is just incredibly terrible. Still, for those who think the first case is too exaggerated perhaps they will understand that the "best case" isn't so great either.

Presumably "willing to accept Israel's demands" means its demand for survival. And being "independent" means ignoring what the United States wants.

2. But in fact that isn't happening. I would estimate that for everyone on the mass media (experts or journalists) who are saying the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical, pro-terrorist, anti-American group, there are 10? saying the opposite.

It is rather frustrating to know the Brotherhood's history, see how extremist are its statements (including calls for Jihad against America by its leader), and then be portrayed as some marginal loony for holding that view. One major television network called the Brotherhood an admirable courageous organization fighting for the poor.

The "good news," though is that Israel and the relatively moderate Arabs are being treated on the same level. We have gone from confronting a merely anti-Israel to a pro-Islamist, anti-American interests line. And that's in America itself!

3. It is one thing for Egypt to have a revolution that might well lead into chaos and a regional disaster; it is quite another to see the U.S. government supporting this event.

One of the many amazing things left out of the current discussion is the irony of a U.S. government that came to office apologizing for past exercises in American power has now engaged in the greatest single bullying action in history. He has dismissed a 60-year-old Egyptian ally after a few days of demonstrations, reportedly telling that government it could not use American weapons to defend itself.

In other words, he treated the sovereign government of Egypt the way the United States used to treat South American "banana republics."

I realize that the previous two paragraphs might sound callous toward the fact that this regime was a repressive dictatorship. It is understandable that Egyptians want more freedom (though it might be defined differently than Americans think). If they were to attain a stable, democratic regime then that would be wonderful. I don't think that will happen; no one will be happier than me if it does happen.

4. But this raises an interesting question: Will a future American president one day apologize to Egyptians for what Obama is doing this week? Will Egyptians ten years from now hate America even more for helping saddle them with a new, even worse government?

5. There was a simple alternative: to support the regime while urging it to make some concessions and changes. A variation of this is the Tunisian model: remove the dictator, maintain the regime, but bring in some reformers and moderates. Why demand regime change?

Here is how Martin Kramer put it brilliantly in 2002:

"[When] mention [is] made of double standards in U.S. policy. I always find it striking when the Arab and Muslim worlds grow indignant about this, since in their own polities, the gap between rhetoric and reality, between principle and practice, can be positively breathtaking. But there is one gold standard that everyone in the Middle East understands: you reward your friends, and punish your enemies. They all do it. Now it is proposed that the United States reward its enemies and punish its friends...to win the good will of Middle Easterners.

"If the United States were to do this, no one would ever again risk aligning himself with this country....People may not always like U.S. policy, but they have to admit that the United States has stood by its allies, friends, and proxies. You tamper with that credibility at your very great peril."

6. Americans tend to think people in the Middle East will be grateful when they do "good" things like toppling dictatorships, be they friendly (Egypt) or unfriendly (Iraq). But an editorial in the Syrian-controlled newspaper, al-Watan, reminds us of how things really work:

"The United States dropped Mubarak not because he carried out their agenda of repressing, starving and impoverishing his people, but because he failed to control and subject them."

In other words, the United States will reap no gratitude for what it's doing now. The line will be: the revolutionary forces of the people overcame the United States once again! Just as it happened in... (following a list of real or alleged victories.) The fantasies that the United States can somehow maintain good relations with Egypt under a completely new regime are word for word the same things being said about Iran in 1978 and 1979.

7. But why take my word for it? Here's the head of the "moderate" Muslim Brotherhood explaining how people think:

The United States is at "the beginning of its end and is heading towards its demise....Resistance is the only solution....It is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. Its warplanes, missiles and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance - and the wars of Lebanon and Gaza," are proof of this.

It won't be long before revolutionary Islamists in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere add to this: "and the wars of Lebanon and Gaza, as well as the people's revolution against America and its flunkies in Egypt!"

8. The White House spokesman on January 31 said the United States would accept the Muslim Brotherhood in government if it rejected violence and recognizes "democratic goals." Funny, that was the U.S. government position on Hizballah (which now rules Lebanon) and Hamas (which now rules the Gaza Strip). How did that work out?

What does "violence" mean? They won't need to use violence against the government if they control the government! They will advocate violence against U.S. forces in Iraq, against Israel, and to overthrow the remaining (they seem to be shrinking in number) relatively moderate regimes. Hamas--but not Hizballah--terrorists will be trained at camps in Egypt. The Egypt-Gaza border will be open and weapons will flow steadily every day.

Then, of course, it will be too late. The same people who set or backed this U.S. policy will say that the United States must now recognize reality and accept the regime unconditionally.

* Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books, go to http://www.gloria-center.org. You can read and subscribe to his blog at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.

Muslim Brotherhood Declares Jihad on America; America Declares Muslim Brotherhood is Moderate!

RubinReports
Barry Rubin

The best thing I can do for you to understand the Muslim Brotherhood is to ask you to read what I wrote last October 7. In that article I asked whether the United States would notice that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, through its leader, declared Jihad on America. At the end of the article I noted that an Egyptian friend said I was the only one who noticed outside of the country.
Here's the key quote:

The United States is "experiencing the beginning of its end and is heading towards its demise....Resistance is the only solution…. The United States cannot impose an agreement upon the Palestinians, despite all the means and power at its disposal. [Today] it is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. [All] its warplanes, missiles and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance – and the wars of Lebanon and Gaza, which were not so long ago, [are proof of this].”

And here's what the previous supreme guide, Mahdi Akef, said:

"Question: Regarding resistance and jihad…do you consider Osama Bin Laden a terrorist or an Islamic Mujahid [a holy warrior, literally someone who wages jihad]?

"Akef: Certainly, a mujahid, and I have no doubt in his sincerity in resisting the occupation, drawing closer to God Almighty."

What I never imagined is that 3.5 months later people would be claiming--in contradiction to every Muslim Brotherhood speech and writing (in Arabic)--that the Muslim Brotherhood is some harmless nonviolent reform group. So please click on the link and read that article. These are the people who may be running the most important country in the Arab world.

Note that even if President Husni Mubarak resigns that is not what is important. What is important is whether the current regime survives or there is a totally new government.

The Muslim Brotherhood won't take over immediately but would be the power behind the throne. Remember that after the Free Officers took power in July 1952--the beginning of the current regime--it took three years for Gamal Abdel Nasser to step out as the country's dictator. Then he nationalized the Suez Canal company, made an alliance with the USSR to get weapons, and began subverting every other state in the region.

One explanation is laziness and ignorance. I have not seen any evidence to date that any journalist who wrote about it either read the "Palestine Papers" (except for the Guardian and al-Jazira people who--to put it politely--creatively interpreted the materials) or have ever read or heard any statement ever made by a Muslim Brotherhood leader.

How can you explain it? The leader of the Brotherhood calls for Jihad on America and destroying all US influence in the region and then the media says they are moderates!

Here's my (satirical) theory: Being against revolutionary Islamists seizing power in any country has now been declared to be Islamophobic.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The GLORIA Center's site is http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.

Muslim Brotherhood leader: Prepare for war with Israel

Jihad Watch

Remember that Obama went out of his way to invite Muslim Brotherhood representatives to his speech in Cairo in June 2009. So it is unlikely that he even sees the need to stand up to them. "Muslim Brotherhood Wants War With Israel," from Forex Crunch, January 31 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Mohamed Ghanem, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, calls Egypt to stop pumping gas to Israel and prepare the Egyptian army for a war with it's [sic] eastern neighbor.

Speaking with Iranian television station Al-Alam, Mohamed Ghanem blamed Israel for supporting Hosni Mubarak's regime. Ghanem also said that the Egyptian police and army won't be able to stop the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
Update: February 1, 11:15 GMT: Opposition plans to Declare Liberated Zone in one Delta City

A multitude of people is gathering towards the million man march in Cairo. Similar protests are planed in other cities. The strong force in Egypt is the army, that enables the current huge protest.

There are doubts about the loyalty of the Egyptian army to president Mubarak. If the brotherhood takes control over Egypt, it will be very messy from the whole region.

In the meantime, EUR/USD , GBP/USD other pairs have enjoyed the relative calm in the Egyptian crisis and regained most of their losses on Friday. An escalation will send them down, and will strengthen the dollar, yen and Swiss franc.

Update: Israel was attacked by Grad rockets fired from the Gaza. While Israel approved that 800 Egyptian soldiers reinforce the limited forces in Sinai, the Islamic movement Hammas, which is in good ties with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, fired at Israel.

The one-million march is expected on Tuesday in Cairo. Will this be the end of Mubarak?

State of the Union Address 2012

Daniel Greenfield

Jan 13th, 2012, Capitol Hill

Mister Speaker, Vice President Biden, Supreme Leader Hu Jintao, distinguished lenders and fellow indebted Americans

I would like to begin this address by congratulating the brave women and men of the 113th congress who managed to make it here tonight. I know that it was not easy reaching Washington D.C. due to the furious blizzard of what appears to be the onset of a new Ice Age. My administration has been focused on combating Global Warming, now as our planet falls farther and farther away from the sun, and polar bears have come streaming in force from the North Pole-- I pledge to you that I will put just as much effort into battling the new Ice Age, as I did in resisting Global Warming. Some of those sitting here in this chamber may take issue with me on this. And they have a right to do so. Under our North American Union system, we still have free speech. For now. But as I stand here looking down on congresspersons who have lost their limbs to polar bear attacks, Democrats, Republicans and Neo-Monarchists, I am reminded that we are all one single family. And that is why I believe that we will get through this crisis, and all the others that I will continue to cause if the voters of the North-American Union are foolish enough to elect me once again to misrepresent them.

Should my administration have seen the Ice Age coming? That is a valid question that millions of North-Americans are asking themselves tonight. Maybe we should have. If only NASA had not spent all its time on outreach to the Muslim world instead of noticing the dramatic shift in our planetary orbit around the sun, we might have been ready. But sadly when the temperature reached twenty below in Miami, top NASA scientists were busy teaching Muslim suicide bombers feel good about themselves by helping them solve a Rubik's Cube with vivid hand gestures. I have no idea whatsoever who was responsible for misdirecting NASA so badly, but I intend to find out. Even if I have to be reelected to a second term to be able to do so.

But directing blame is not what truly matters. For example some resentment has been voiced at the 2 trillion dollars we spent last year on a high speed rail system between Hawaii, Chicago and Washington D.C. If you recall in the last State of the Union address, I pledged that 80 percent of Americans would have access to High Speed Rail. And by 80 percent of Americans, I meant the 80 percent of the Americans that I knew and liked personally. The project did run into trouble building a bridge between Hawaii and Washington D.C. for the high speed trains to run over. Not only did more men die on the project, than were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, but two trains were accidentally swallowed by blue whales. My thoughts and prayers, and Michelle's go out to the unfortunate Global Warming researchers on those trains, and the whale who ate them.

However as North-Americans, we have a 4 month tradition of refusing to bow to bad news. Not the collapse of the dollar, nor the invasion by China, or the polar bear takeovers of Seattle and Toronto and a mainstream fashion magazine calling Michelle ugly can break out spirits. Because we are committed to Thriving the Future.

Some of you may not know what Thriving the Future means. I'm not entirely sure I do either. My speechwriters have never been the same since their fingers froze off when the White House solar panels were covered over with snow. Sometimes they type things that don't really make sense. Sometimes they cry for their mommies. We could let them out of the cages, but then all hope would be lost. For my reelection campaign anyway.

And so I tell you now once again, that we will Thrive the Future. That may mean that we will thrive in the future, at some future point in time. Possibly it means that only by thriving, will we have a future. Maybe my speechwriters meant something else entirely, but their frozen tongues could not properly pronounce the word. I don't know, and it doesn't matter. Because thriving is what we do. And the future is when we do it in.

Chinese troops may be occupying most of California. Their Supreme Leader Hu Jintao is here with us right now. He has come with an ultimatum demanding that we surrender or he will kill us all. And by way of reply, I have let him know, how much I and Michelle love Chinese food and respect their ancient culture and wise traditions. China has been a world leader in industry and technology. It is an example to us all. And I am fully committed to negotiating with the Supreme Leader on any and all topics, so long as he agrees to give me more spending money.

But to the American people, I say that we will not give in. We will negotiate our hardest and come away with an agreement that we can all live with. Especially me. I draw inspiration in this from some of this nation's greatest presidents. Franklin Pierce, James Earl Carter and James Earl Jones. The words of these wise men have accompanied me into my deliberations, and when combined with the herb, Cannabis Sativa, have allowed me to reach an entirely new level of enlightenment. I am one with the molecules, Buddha, the Twelfth Imam and James Earl Jones are a part of me now. Their wisdom informs my decisions.

There are some who have called on us to use force. Like my idol, Martin Luther Gandhi, Jr, I have made a decision to strive for peace, rather than war. Only through peace can we Thrive the Future. Those who make war will not be permitted to Thrive the Future at all. Or even be told what it means.

Also when 32 of the 57 states of the union defected to join the Independent States Union, they took most of the military with them. We still have some of the coast guard and a great many angry paid union picketers. Thus far the picketers have not done well against either the Chinese army or the polar bears, but if congress approves my call to invest 40 billion dollars in educating our nation's angriest youth to protest against working conditions in Chinese factories, I have every faith and confidence that we will prevail. Or someone will anyway. Possibly the Chinese in the tanks. I'm not a military man, I don't actually know how these things work.

The good news is that our economy is recovering. We have not only broken the back of the recession, but kicked in the spleen of its brother the depression, and karate chopped the wrist of its uncle, the complete economic meltdown. The stock market is riding high thanks to its transformation from an index of companies, to an index of racehorses and greyhounds. I have been told by GE CEO Jeff Immelt that his horse, Foreseeable Disaster is coming up 4th, behind Microsoft's Blue Nag of Death, GM's Safety Issues and EcoTech's Al Gore. Betting is high and anyone who wants to get in on the action, please come see Vice President Biden in the cashier's cage to the right.

And there is still more good news. After yesterday's speech commemorating those killed in the Seattle Polar Bear Invasion, my popularity has shot up all the way to 27 percent. This puts me ahead in the polls, in front of my rivals, Republican challenger, George Prescott Bush III and my Neo-Monarchist challenger, the King of Nebraska, but still well behind Chinese Supreme Leader Hu Jintao, who has seized control of several key states.

Additionally with my new proposal to take all our remaining money and bury it in Michelle's vegetable garden, we may finally have a plan to cut spending that really works. At least until we dig it up that same night and spend it on one of those really bad ideas that I and my advisers come up with when we get high together.

I would like to direct your attention to a woman seated in the audience. Patricia Balogney from Canton, Ohio. Patricia lost her right arm to a polar bear and her left leg to frostbite. Yet she went on to enroll in a community college and come out with a degree as a professional solar panel synthesizer. And while there are no more working solar panels due to the ice age, and no job for her, I salute her courage and determination. And so should you.

Last week I spoke to a 3 month old baby who had not even learned to read yet. But he was determined to read. In his crawling and mewling, I recognized an eager mind. I recognized myself. That is why I am announcing a new plan to teach 3 month old babies to read. It is Michelle's initiative. Some experts say it can't be done. Just as some experts said that we could never get to the moon or invent Algebra or get me elected. But we proved them wrong. And I am confident that we will prove them wrong again.

Patricia's example reminds us that we should never give up on a bad idea, whether it be building a high speed rail bridge to Hawaii so I don't have to sleep overnight in the cold White House, or letting China invade half the country while the other half secedes, or electing me to this office even though I have no idea what I'm doing. Bad ideas are what make the North American Union great. Only through truly bad ideas will we Thrive the Future (TM).

So while we could waste time arguing and debating and thinking for ourselves, I ask you to join with me. To stand by me as we Thrive the Future together. When we stand united doing whatever crazy idea comes into my head, there is no force on earth that can defeat us except reality. Healthier live snail lunch program for kids. We're on it. Taxing all barbers at the highest possible rate. Done. More hair leads to less heating which leads to higher energy use, which isn't something we need to worry about because it's an Ice Age, not Global Warming, but we're on it anyway. We're on everything and under everything. We don't know what we're doing, but we're doing it anyway. Together!

We may be crazy, but sanity is overrated. Like experience. And not wrecking the country. What matters is that we're Thriving the Future. Together.

Four more years. Allah bless you and Allah bless the North American Union. Why isn't anyone applauding?

Turmoil in Egypt

Daniel Pipes
The Washington Times
February 1, 2011

http://www.meforum.org/pipes/9391/turmoil-in-egypt

As Egypt's much-anticipated moment of crisis arrived and popular rebellions shook governments across the Middle East, Iran stands as never before at the center of the region. Its Islamist rulers are within sight of dominating the region. But revolutions are hard to pull off and I predict that Islamists will not achieve a Middle East-wide breakthrough and Tehran will not emerge as the key powerbroker. Some thoughts behind this conclusion: An echo of the Iranian revolution: On reaching power in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sought to spread Islamist insurrection to other countries but failed almost everywhere. Three decades had to go by, it appears, before the self-immolation of a vendor in an obscure Tunisia town could light the conflagration that Khomeini aspired to and Iranian authorities still seek.

Part of a Middle Eastern cold war: The Middle East has for years been divided into two large blocs engaged in a regional cold war for influence. The Iranian-led resistance bloc includes Turkey, Syria, Gaza, and Qatar. The Saudi-led status quo bloc includes Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, the West Bank, Jordan, Yemen, and the Persian Gulf emirates. Note that Lebanon these very days is moving to resistance from status quo and that unrest is taking place only in status quo places.

Israel's peculiar situation: Israeli leaders are staying mum and its near-irrelevance underlines Iranian centrality. While Israel has much to fear from Iranian gains, these simultaneously highlight the Jewish state as an island of stability and the West's only reliable ally in the Middle East.

Lack of ideology: The sloganeering and conspiracy theories that dominate Middle Eastern discourse are largely absent from crowds gathered outside of government installations demanding an end to stagnation, arbitrariness, corruption, tyranny, and torture.

Military vs. mosque: Recent events confirm that the same two powers, the armed forces and the Islamists, dominate some 20 Middle Eastern countries: the military deploys raw power and Islamists offer a vision. Exceptions exist – a vibrant Left in Turkey, ethnic factions in Lebanon and Iraq, democracy in Israel, Islamist control in Iran – but this pattern widely holds.

Iraq: The most volatile country of the region, Iraq, has been conspicuously absent from the demonstrations because its population is not facing a decades-old autocracy.

A military putsch? Islamists wish to repeat their success in Iran by exploiting popular unrest to take power. Tunisia's experience bears close examination for a pattern that may be repeated elsewhere. The military leadership there apparently concluded that its strongman, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had become too high maintenance – especially with his wife's family's flamboyant corruption – to maintain in power, so it ousted him and, for good measure, put out an international arrest warrant for his and his family's arrest.

Gen. Omar Suleiman – Egypt's fourth military ruler since 1952?

That done, nearly the entire remaining old guard remains in power, with the top military man, Chief of Staff Rachid Ammar, apparently having replaced Ben Ali as the country's powerbroker. The old guard hopes that tweaking the system, granting more civil and political rights, will suffice for it to hold on to power. If this gambit succeeds, the seeming revolution of mid-January will end up as a mere coup d'état.

This scenario could be repeated elsewhere, especially in Egypt, where soldiers have dominated the government since 1952 and intend to maintain their power against the Muslim Brethren they have suppressed since 1954. Strongman Hosni Mubarak's appointment of Omar Suleiman terminates the Mubarak family's dynastic pretensions and raises the prospect of Mr. Mubarak resigning in favor of direct military rule.

More broadly, I bet on the more-continuity-than-change model that has emerged so far in Tunisia. Heavy-handed rule will lighten somewhat in Egypt and elsewhere but the militaries will remain the ultimate powerbrokers.

U.S. policy: The U.S. government has a vital role helping Middle Eastern states transit from tyranny to political participation without Islamists hijacking the process. George W. Bush had the right idea in 2003 in calling for democracy but he ruined this effort by demanding instant results. Barack Obama initially reverted to the failed old policy of making nice with tyrants; now he is myopically siding with the Islamists against Mr. Mubarak. He should emulate Bush but do a better job, understanding that democratization is a decades-long process that requires the inculcation of counter-intuitive ideas about elections, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.

Mr. Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, lived in Egypt for three years.

Fear the Muslim Brotherhood

ANDREW McCARTHY

At the Daily Beast, Bruce Riedel has posted an essay called “Don’t fear Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,” the classic, conventional-wisdom response to the crisis in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood is just fine, he’d have you believe, no need to worry. After all, the Brothers have even renounced violence! One might wonder how an organization can be thought to have renounced violence when it has inspired more jihadists than any other, and when its Palestinian branch, the Islamic Resistance Movement, is probably more familiar to you by the name Hamas — a terrorist organization committed by charter to the violent destruction of Israel. Indeed, in recent years, the Brotherhood (a.k.a., the Ikhwan) has enthusiastically praised jihad and even applauded — albeit in more muted tones — Osama bin Laden. None of that, though, is an obstacle for Mr. Riedel, a former CIA officer who is now a Brookings scholar and Obama administration national-security adviser. Following the template the progressive (and bipartisan) foreign-policy establishment has been sculpting for years, his “no worries” conclusion is woven from a laughably incomplete history of the Ikhwan.

By his account, Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna “preached a fundamentalist Islamism and advocated the creation of an Islamic Egypt, but he was also open to importing techniques of political organization and propaganda from Europe that rapidly made the Brotherhood a fixture in Egyptian politics.” What this omits, as I recount in The Grand Jihad, is that terrorism and paramilitary training were core parts of Banna’s program. It is by leveraging the resulting atmosphere of intimidation that the Brotherhood’s “politics” have achieved success. The Ikhwan’s activist organizations follow the same program in the United States, where they enjoy outsize political influence because of the terrorist onslaught.

Banna was a practical revolutionary. On the one hand, he instructed his votaries to prepare for violence. They had to understand that, in the end — when the time was right, when the Brotherhood was finally strong enough that violent attacks would more likely achieve Ikhwan objectives than provoke crippling blowback — violence would surely be necessary to complete the revolution (meaning, to institute sharia, Islam’s legal-political framework). Meanwhile, on the other hand, he taught that the Brothers should take whatever they could get from the regime, the political system, the legal system, and the culture. He shrewdly realized that, if the Brothers did not overplay their hand, if they duped the media, the intelligentsia, and the public into seeing them as fighters for social justice, these institutions would be apt to make substantial concessions. Appeasement, he knew, is often a society’s first response to a threat it does not wish to believe is existential.

Here’s Riedel again:

By World War 2, [the Brotherhood] became more violent in its opposition to the British and the British-dominated monarchy, sponsoring assassinations and mass violence. After the army seized power in 1952, [the Brotherhood] briefly flirted with supporting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government but then moved into opposition. Nasser ruthlessly suppressed it.

This history is selective to the point of parody. The Brotherhood did not suddenly become violent (or “more violent”) during World War II. It was violent from its origins two decades earlier. This fact — along with Egyptian Islamic society’s deep antipathy toward the West and its attraction to the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism — is what gradually beat European powers, especially Britain, into withdrawal.

To this day, the Brotherhood’s motto remains, “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!” Still, our see-no-Islamic-evil foreign-policy establishment blathers on about the Brotherhood’s purported renunciation of violence — and never you mind that, with or without violence, its commitment is, as Qaradawi puts it, to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” It is necessary to whitewash the Ikhwan’s brutal legacy and its tyrannical designs in order to fit it into the experts’ paradigm: history for simpletons. This substitute for thinking holds that, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice famously told an Egyptian audience in 2005, America has too often opted for stability rather than freedom. As a result, the story goes, our nation has chosen to support dictators when we should have been supporting . . . never mind that.

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But we have to mind that. History is rarely a Manichean contest between good and evil. It’s not a choice between the pro-Western shah and Iranian freedom, but between the shah and Khomeini’s ruthless Islamist revolution. It’s not a choice between the pro-Western Musharraf and Pakistani freedom, but between Musharraf and a tense alliance of kleptocratic socialists and Islamists. Back in the 1940s, it was not a choice between the British-backed monarchy and Egyptian freedom, but between the monarchy and a conglomeration of Nasserite pan-Arab socialists, Soviet Communists, and Brotherhood Islamists. And today, the choice is not between the pro-American Mubarak and Egyptian freedom; it is a question of whether to offer tepid support to a pro-American dictator or encourage swift transition to a different kind of tyranny — one certain to be a lot worse for us, for the West at large, and for our Israeli ally: the Muslim Brotherhood tempered only, if at all, by Mohamed ElBaradei, an anti-American leftist who willfully abetted Iran’s nuclear ambitions while running the International Atomic Energy Agency.

History is not a quest for freedom. This is particularly true in the Islamic ummah, where the concept of freedom is not reasoned self-determination, as in the West, but nearly the opposite: perfect submission to Allah’s representative on earth, the Islamic state. Coupled with a Western myopia that elevates democratic forms over the culture of liberty, the failure to heed this truth has, in just the past few years, put Hamas in charge of Gaza, positioned Hezbollah to topple the Lebanese government, and presented Islamists with Kosovo — an enduring sign that, where Islam is concerned, the West can be counted on to back away even from the fundamental principle that a sovereign nation’s territorial integrity is inviolable.

The Obama administration has courted Egyptian Islamists from the start. It invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the president’s 2009 Cairo speech, even though the organization is officially banned in Egypt. It has rolled out the red carpet to the Brotherhood’s Islamist infrastructure in the U.S. — CAIR, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Ground Zero mosque activists — even though many of them have a documented history of Hamas support. To be sure, the current administration has not been singular in this regard. The courting of Ikhwan-allied Islamists has been a bipartisan project since the early 1990s, and elements of the intelligence community and the State Department have long agitated for a license to cultivate the Brotherhood overtly. They think what Anwar Sadat thought: Hey, we can work with these guys.

There is a very good chance we are about to reap what they’ve sown. We ought to be very afraid.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Muslim Brotherhood Wants War With Israel

Forex Bits | Yohay

Mohamed Ghanem, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, calls Egypt to stop pumping gas to Israel and prepare the Egyptian army for a war with it’s eastern neighbor.

Speaking with Iranian television station Al-Alam, Mohamed Ghanem blamed Israel for supporting Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Ghanem also said that the Egyptian police and army won’t be able to stop the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

There are doubts about the loyalty of the Egyptian army to president Mubarak. If the brotherhood takes control over Egypt, it will be very messy from the whole region. * About
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Muslim Brotherhood Wants War With Israel
Forex Bits | Yohay | January 31, 2011 2:54 pm GMT

Mohamed Ghanem, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, calls Egypt to stop pumping gas to Israel and prepare the Egyptian army for a war with it’s eastern neighbor.

Speaking with Iranian television station Al-Alam, Mohamed Ghanem blamed Israel for supporting Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Ghanem also said that the Egyptian police and army won’t be able to stop the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

There are doubts about the loyalty of the Egyptian army to president Mubarak. If the brotherhood takes control over Egypt, it will be very messy from the whole region.

In the meantime, EUR/USD , GBP/USD other pairs have enjoyed the relative calm in the Egyptian crisis and regained most of their losses on Friday. An escalation will send them down, and will strengthen the dollar, yen and Swiss franc.

Update: Israel was attacked by Grad rockets fired from the Gaza. While Israel approved that 800 Egyptian soldiers reinforce the limited forces in Sinai, the Islamic movement Hammas, which is in good ties with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, fired at Israel.

The one-million march is expected on Tuesday in Cairo. Will this be the end of Mubarak?

THE DUAL NATURE OF ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM

Johannes Jansen

Fundamentalism fuses religion and politics, and in this compelling book Johannes J. G. Jansen describes and analyzes from original Arabic sources the Islamic incarnation of such a fusion. He offers comparisons with millenarian and revivalist movements in other religious traditions to suggest a basic structural similarity in fundamentalism of different creeds. Fundamentalism rejects a core belief of modernity—the separation of religion and politics—and so, according to Jansen, always has an antimodern or reactionary basis. To explore the logic of contemporary fundamentalist ideology, Jansen draws on the work of the two dominant Islamic commentators on religion and politics, Al-Afghani from the nineteenth century and Ibn Taymiyya from the fourteenth. He examines the theological bases of Muslim militancy, and in particular the justification of violent political action, in the more recent writings of Sayyid Qutb. Further chapters discuss the execution of Shukri Mustafa in Cairo in 1978, in an unsuccessful attempt by the Egyptian authorities to intimidate the fundamentalists; inventory antifundamentlist arguments within contemporary Islam; and examine fundamentalist attitudes toward other Peoples of the Book, particularly Jews, and toward women as political agents. Jansen concludes with an analysis of various attempts within Arab political culture to deal with Islamic fundamentalism.

and see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb

Clueless in Washington

CAROLINE GLICK

The Egyptian multitudes on the streets of Cairo are a stunning sight. With their banners calling for freedom and an end to the reign of President Hosni Mubarak the story these images tell is a simple one as old as time.

On the one hand we have the young, dispossessed and weak protesters. And on the other we have the old, corrupt and tyrannical Mubarak. Hans Christian Andersen taught us who to support when we were wee tots.

But does his wisdom apply in this case?
Certainly it is true that the regime is populated by old men. Mubarak is 82 years old. It is also true that his regime is corrupt and tyrannical. Since the Muslim Brotherhood spinoff Islamic Jihad terror group murdered Mubarak’s predecessor president Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been governed by emergency laws that ban democratic freedoms. Mubarak has consistently rejected US pressure to ease regime repression and enact liberal reforms in governance.

This reality has led many American commentators across the political spectrum to side enthusiastically with the rioters. A prestigious working group on Egypt formed in recent months by Middle East experts from Left and Right issued a statement over the weekend calling for the Obama administration to dump Mubarak and withdraw its support for the Egyptian regime. It recommended further that the administration force Mubarak to abdicate and his regime to fall by suspending all economic and military assistance to Egypt for the duration.

The blue ribbon panel’s recommendations were applauded by its members’ many friends across the political spectrum. For instance, the conservative Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol praised the panel on Sunday and wrote, “It’s time for the US government to take an active role… to bring about a South Korea/Philippines/Chile-like transition in Egypt, from an American-supported dictatorship to an American-supported and popularly legitimate liberal democracy.”

The problem with this recommendation is that it is based entirely on the nature of Mubarak’s regime. If the regime was the biggest problem, then certainly removing US support for it would make sense. However, the character of the protesters is not liberal.

Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN’s Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.

WHAT ALL of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak’s military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US’s greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel’s peace partner will again become its gravest foe.

Understanding this, Israeli officials and commentators have been nearly unanimous in their negative responses to what is happening in Egypt. The IDF, the national security council, all intelligence agencies and the government as well as the media have all agreed that Israel’s entire regional approach will have to change dramatically in the event that Egypt’s regime is overthrown.

None of the scenarios under discussion are positive.

What has most confounded Israeli officials and commentators alike has not been the strength of the anti-regime protests, but the American response to them. Outside the far Left, commentators from all major newspapers, radio and television stations have variously characterized the US response to events in Egypt as irrational, irresponsible, catastrophic, stupid, blind, treacherous, and terrifying.

They have pointed out that the Obama administration’s behavior – as well as that of many of its prominent conservative critics – is liable to have disastrous consequences for the US’s other authoritarian Arab allies, for Israel and for the US itself.

The question most Israelis are asking is why are the Americans behaving so destructively? Why are President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charting a course that will necessarily lead to the transformation of Egypt into the first Salafist Islamic theocracy? And why are conservative commentators and Republican politicians urging them to be even more outspoken in their support for the rioters in the streets?

Does the US not understand what will happen in the region as a result of its actions? Does the US really fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood either forms the next regime or is the power behind the throne of the next regime in Cairo?

Distressingly, the answer is that indeed, the US has no idea what it is doing. The reason the world’s only (quickly declining) superpower is riding blind is because its leaders are trapped between two irrational, narcissistic policy paradigms and they can’t see their way past them.

The first paradigm is former president George W. Bush’s democracy agenda and its concomitant support for open elections.

Bush supporters and former administration officials have spent the last month since the riots began in Tunisia crowing that events prove Bush’s push for democratization in the Arab world is the correct approach.

The problem is that while Bush’s diagnosis of the dangers of the democracy deficit in the Arab world was correct, his antidote for solving this problem was completely wrong.

Bush was right that tyranny breeds radicalism and instability and is therefore dangerous for the US.

But his belief that free elections would solve the problem of Arab radicalism and instability was completely wrong. At base, Bush’s belief was based on a narcissistic view of Western values as universal.

When, due to US pressure, the Palestinians were given the opportunity to vote in open and free elections in 2006, they voted for Hamas and its totalitarian agenda. When due to US pressure, the Egyptians were given limited freedom to choose their legislators in 2005, where they could they elected the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood to lead them.

The failure of his elections policy convinced Bush to end his support for elections in his last two years in office.

Frustratingly, Bush’s push for elections was rarely criticized on its merits. Under the spell of the other policy paradigm captivating American foreign policy elites – anti-colonialism – Bush’s leftist opponents never argued that the problem with his policy is that it falsely assumes that Western values are universal values. Blinded by their anti-Western dogma, they claimed that his bid for freedom was nothing more than a modern-day version of Christian missionary imperialism.

It is this anti-colonialist paradigm, with its foundational assumption that that the US has no right to criticize non-Westerners that has informed the Obama administration’s foreign policy. It was the anti-colonialist paradigm that caused Obama not to support the pro-Western protesters seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime in the wake of the stolen 2009 presidential elections.

As Obama put it at the time, “It’s not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the US president meddling in the Iranian elections.”

And it is this anti-colonialist paradigm that has guided Obama’s courtship of the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian regimes and his unwillingness to lift a hand to help the March 14 movement in Lebanon.

MOREOVER, SINCE the paradigm claims that the non-Western world’s grievances towards the West are legitimate, Obama’s Middle East policy is based on the view that the best way to impact the Arab world is by joining its campaign against Israel. This was the central theme of Obama’s speech before an audience dominated by Muslim Brotherhood members in Cairo in June 2009.

Like the pro-democracy paradigm, the anti-colonialist paradigm is narcissistic. Whereas Western democracy champions believe that all people are born with the same Western liberal democratic values, post-colonialists believe that non-Westerners are nothing more than victims of the West. They are not responsible for any of their own pathologies because they are not actors. Only Westerners (and Israelis) are actors. Non-Westerners are objects. And like all objects, they cannot be held responsible for anything they do because they are wholly controlled by forces beyond their control.

Anti-colonialists by definition must always support the most anti-Western forces as “authentic.” In light of Mubarak’s 30-year alliance with the US, it makes sense that Obama’s instincts would place the US president on the side of the protesters.

SO THERE we have it. The US policy towards Egypt is dictated by the irrational narcissism of two opposing sides to a policy debate that has nothing to do with reality.

Add to that Obama’s electoral concern about looking like he is on the right side of justice and we have a US policy that is wholly antithetical to US interests.

This presents a daunting, perhaps insurmountable challenge for the US’s remaining authoritarian Arab allies. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, until now restive publics have been fearful of opposing their leaders because the US supports them. Now that the US is abandoning its most important ally and siding with its worst enemies, the Hashemites and the Sauds don’t look so powerful to their Arab streets. The same can be said for the Kuwaiti leadership and the pro-American political forces in Iraq.

As for Israel, America’s behavior towards Egypt should put to rest the notion that Israel can make further territorial sacrifices in places like the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley in exchange for US security guarantees. US behavior today – and the across-the-board nature of American rejection of Mubarak – is as clear a sign as one can find that US guarantees are not credible.

As Prof. Barry Rubin wrote this week, “There is no good policy for the United States regarding the uprising in Egypt but the Obama administration may be adopting something close to the worst option.”

Unfortunately, given the cluelessness of the US foreign policy debate, this situation is only likely to grow worse.