What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (38 page)

The young people and democrats who had propelled the early days of the Egyptian revolt were cast out, like the useful idiots they were, and the Brotherhood immediately set out to forge an alliance with the ruling military regime. The Muslim Brothers had waited eighty years for this moment in Egypt. They’re not about to blow it.

In the eyes of Obama, Mubarak was a horrible dictator who had to go, but the Muslim Brotherhood is a reasonable bunch of chaps who are just misunderstood. Under President Bush, all brands of Islamists were considered threats. Under Obama, we’re killing some of them and getting into bed with others. It shows the Islamic enemy—whether it’s al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, or any other group—that we are unserious about waging the broader war against Islamism in all its forms.

On Super Bowl Sunday in February 2011, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly sat down with Obama in the White House for a pregame interview. He asked Obama point-blank if the Muslim Brotherhood was a threat to the United States. “I think that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt,” Obama replied. “They don’t have majority support in Egypt. But they are well organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti-U.S.”

Saying that the Muslim Brotherhood has “anti-U.S.” elements is like saying al-Qaeda has “anti-U.S.” elements. We have long been clear that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah are the enemy. We’ve been less clear as to whether the Brotherhood is the enemy. According to their own statements and beliefs, the Muslim Brothers are sworn enemies of the United States and our allies. But Obama’s reluctance to identify them as a threat speaks volumes.

First, if he answered that the Brotherhood is indeed an enemy of the United States, he’d then be obliged to take them on here by getting tougher on the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), and other organizations frequently referred to as Muslim Brotherhood “front” or “associated” groups. He’d also have to confront his pro-terror pals like Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers. And he’d have to take on the Islamists in Egypt and elsewhere. He is unwilling to do those things. And second, by refusing to identify the Brotherhood as a threat, he revealed his position on Islamism, which is to let it set up shop anywhere it likes.

The only way to defeat an enemy is by first being honest about who they are and their intentions and then to be relentless and, if necessary, ruthless in battling them.

Obama not only refuses to call the Brotherhood an enemy of the United States, but he’s moved toward proactively embracing them as a potential partner. Did Obama
want
the Muslim Brotherhood to control Egypt all along? Is that why he rushed to toss Mubarak under the bus? Did Obama also see the University of Maryland’s WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of Egyptian Muslims conducted between late 2006 and early 2007 that showed that 67 percent of those interviewed wanted “to unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate” and that a whopping 74 percent of those polled wanted “a strict application of sharia law in every Islamic country”? Did he also see a more recent 2011 Pew Research Center poll that showed that 62 percent of respondents in Egypt wanted sharia and 50 percent said that it was “very important” for religious parties to be part of any future government? Did Obama know that if the secular regime of Mubarak collapsed, the vast majority of Egyptians would choose an Islamist replacement and sharia? Obama knew that the Muslim Brotherhood was the most organized and well-funded political organization in Egypt, and therefore he knew that it was the group most likely to ascend to power if elections were held quickly. Rather than push for a delay in the elections to give more secular groups time to establish themselves as legitimate opponents to the Brotherhood, Obama demanded speedy polling and a “full transfer to a civilian government” to those best positioned to take it over: the Islamists.

Given the Egyptian people’s feelings about Islamism and sharia, it should have shocked no one that the Muslim Brotherhood did, in fact, prevail in the first parliamentary elections since Mubarak’s ouster—particularly after the Islamists won big in the two first Arab Spring elections, in Tunisia and Morocco. The Islamists have been very clever in cloaking their true affiliations and intentions. In Tunisia, they called themselves the Revival Party. In Morocco, they were the Justice and Development Party. And in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood christened itself the Freedom and Justice Party. The even more openly extreme Salafists called themselves the Light Party. Of course, no one in the White House or in the West at large considered what the Islamists
meant
by “revival,” “freedom,” and “justice.” They meant justice under sharia and the freedom to follow sharia, certainly not our conceptions of “freedom” and “justice.”

By the end of polling in early 2012, it was clear that the Islamists had walked away with Egypt: 70 percent of the vote went to the Brothers and the Salafists, giving them full majority control of parliament.

The results of the first post-Mubarak elections likely
did
shock Jimmy Carter, who had earlier said, “I think the Muslim Brotherhood is not anything to be afraid of in the upcoming political situation and the evolution I see as most likely. They will be subsumed in the overwhelming demonstration of desire for freedom and true democracy.” Right again, Jimmy!

Here’s the extent of Carter’s myopia: the only shining achievement in his sorry record as president is the Camp David accords formalizing the peace between Israel and Egypt. And yet, over thirty years later, he’s cheering on an Islamist mob committed to destroying that peace and, along with it, his legacy.

Even before the elections that cemented the Brotherhood’s hold on power, the Egyptian military began wooing some of Israel’s and our biggest enemies. The glorious new government set out to empower Iran and its regional clients, including terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. In February 2011, two Iranian warships were permitted by the “New Egypt” to sail through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea for the first time since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. They were en route to participate in war games with their ally, Syria. Iran appointed an ambassador to Egypt in April 2011 for the first time in three decades; Egypt’s new foreign minister reopened the Rafah crossing into Gaza, allowing the freer flow of weapons and militants there; and Egypt’s new intelligence chief chose to visit Syria on his first foreign trip. The “New Egypt” also allowed the repeated bombing of the major oil pipeline into Israel while it considered whether to abrogate the Camp David accords. In one massive Brotherhood rally at Cairo’s most prestigious mosque right before the elections in November 2011, thousands of Egyptians vowed to “one day kill all Jews.”

Now that the Islamists are going pedal to the metal in Egypt, they’ll make sure the new Egyptian constitution is Islamist, overwhelm the military’s listless attempt to blunt the Islamists’ influence, increasingly threaten the Coptic Christians, and shift away from the United States and Israel and toward Iran. All in the Islamists’ day’s work.

Most ominously, Obama’s actions suggest that he
preferred and sought
the rise of the Islamists. After the Brotherhood secured power, Team Obama okayed $1.5 billion in aid to Egypt. Obama was also fine with the Brotherhood and other Islamists positioning themselves to take over in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. Mubarak’s Egypt was no flower bed of freedom, but the successor regime is even less committed to human rights and openly hostile to our interests. Mission accomplished, Mr. President. Pandora’s box had been opened, and all across the Muslim world the mobs on the Arab street were seeking armed revolution in the name of Islam.

The successful overthrow of Mubarak emboldened the Syrian people to attempt to dispose of their own brutally oppressive regime, headed by Bashar al-Assad, the former ophthalmologist and son of the previous dictator. Thousands of people poured into the streets of Damascus and other cities, but unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, where the armies largely stood down, Syrian security forces cracked down with extreme violence, as they had in Iran. Over the many months of upheaval, thousands of people have been killed and scores more injured by the Syrian regime, which is propped up by its brother-in-terrorist arms, Iran.

Although Obama had helped to shove longtime ally Mubarak from power, when an actual enemy of the United States was under pressure from within, Obama invoked the same response he gave during the 2009 Iranian revolt. He summoned some weak outrage over the slaughter and then announced that Assad had “lost legitimacy.” Hillary Clinton, like Obama, resisted the call to publicly demand the removal of Assad. In fact, months earlier, she had indicated that the administration had big hopes for him: “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

Say what? Assad had always run the same vicious police state as his father, the mass-murdering Hafez al-Assad. And yet, Hillary and Obama believed that the younger Assad was moments away from becoming a committed democratic reformer and human rights champion. That’s probably why Clinton exploded with frustration when someone dared to ask her why Team Obama wasn’t demanding Assad’s exit. “It’s not going to be any news if the United States says, ‘Assad needs to go.’ Okay, fine. What’s next?” she asked.

Neither she nor Obama wondered “what’s next” in Egypt before they called for Mubarak’s ouster—and we got the Muslim Brotherhood. If her point was that in Egypt our words carried more weight because Mubarak had been an ally but would carry none with an enemy such as Syria, then she and Obama once again dismissed the importance of a moral declaration on the part of the United States. As usual, Team Obama went to the United Nations for a typically toothless resolution condemning the violence, expressing “grave concern,” and levying some weak sanctions on the regime. It was as if he had taken his response to the Iranian regime’s mass murder and read from a Xeroxed copy. Months into the slaughter, Obama and Clinton ultimately did call for Assad to pack up his “lost legitimacy” and “step down,” and by early 2012 they were whispering about an international “militarization” of Syria—perhaps because by that point, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists were better prepared to ascend. Assad, of course, ignored the White House. Meanwhile, his thugs stormed our embassy in Damascus; the U.S. ambassador, whom Obama had re-posted in an ill-conceived attempt at “engagement,” was ultimately forced to flee. Team Obama’s response? To request compensation from Damascus for the property damage to the embassy. This is what happens when you put liberals in charge of foreign policy.

So pathetic was Obama’s response to the Syrian slaughter that even the grossly corrupt Arab League moved more aggressively against the regime, suspending Syria’s membership and levying stronger sanctions. In January 2012, the most direct denunciation of Assad came from, of all people, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who called publicly for Assad to step down. Meanwhile, as with Iran and Egypt, Obama’s policy toward Syria was strategically and morally bankrupt—and that wasn’t by accident.

There is, after all, one thing that all of Obama’s responses to the Arab revolts have in common: he has supported the revolutions that will ultimately turn previously secular states into Islamist ones. He has supported those who are either defending Islamist regimes (in Iran) or those who seek to establish them (in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Turkey, and Yemen). He has refused to stand by more secular allies (Mubarak, Yemen’s Saleh, Libya’s Gadhafi, who had his more secular moments) while reaching out to Islamists, particularly of the Brotherhood.

It’s either a wild coincidence that Obama has sided with the forces of Islamism, or it’s by design. If large swaths of the Middle East fall to the Islamists, many observers will ask, “Who lost Egypt, etc.?” But if Obama’s
intention
were to encourage the Islamists’ ascent, he won’t view it as a loss at all. In fact, he’ll view the Islamist revolutions as the expression of what he
meant
by “democracy” in the Muslim world.

It’s not up to America, you see, to choose governments for the rest of the world or even to try to influence pro-American outcomes. The United States is simply a passive observer, a facilitator at best, declining in power anyway. If much of the Muslim world chooses Islamists, then the United States would respect that choice and work with them. Under Obama, moral equivalence between allies and bad guys rules the day, and the bad guys are the preferred choice of the American president. The kooks are community-organizing the Muslim world, and what better way to do that than by working side by side with the ultimate community organizers of the Muslim Brotherhood?

I don’t oppose all wars.... What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.

—Illinois state senator Barack Obama speaking on Iraq, October 2, 2002

On that autumn day in 2002, Barack Obama stood before an antiwar rally in Chicago and said that Saddam Hussein’s extreme brutality wasn’t enough to justify removing him from power using military force.

“I also know,” he said, “that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

Instead of deposing Saddam by force, he said, we should “fight” for democratic reforms in nations such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt (right on track!), tougher international nuclear safeguards (welcome to the nuclear club, Iran!), and energy independence (yes to Solyndra and other green jobs boondoggles but no to the private-sector Keystone XL pipeline!). “Those are the battles that we need to fight,” he said. “Those are the battles that we willingly join—the battles against ignorance and intolerance, corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.” Note the shades of the “social justice” speech he gave just days after the September 11, 2001, attacks.