From the policy of wink and nod to active collusion: The Western role in the burial of Arab democracies!
(published on Palestine Chronicle)
More than eight months have passed since the
eventful coup in Egypt, which toppled the elected president Mohammad Morsi
after a one year in office. The coup shattered the enthusiasm (which had
accompanied the Arab Spring two years earlier) for a future democratic Arab
world. This enthusiasm was particularly at its high mark when Mubarak (a
dictator who had been in power for over 30 years in the most populous Arab
country) was toppled. By the time of Morsi’s removal from power, the Arab
Spring had started to look like a fall, at least in the eyes of those expecting
a smooth transformation to democracy in a region plagued by dictatorial
regimes, acting more like managers of imperial posts than national bureaucrats.
Hopes had never been this high in the Arab world for decades, and the
subsequent disappointment could have never been any bitter. The democratic Arab
world, which seemed so near, slipped away.
The obvious questions-- ones that many have
ever since volunteered to answer—were: Why did the Egyptian democratic
experiment unravel so quickly? Why after the so glorious revolution of the
Tahrir Square was Egypt’s first elected president toppled? What happened and
who is to blame? The answers for these questions always depended on some
evaluations of what the revolution was about, what took place during Morsi’s
one year in power and what happened ever since he is toppled. In the public
discourse in English, two interconnected narratives have emerged. Each of these
narratives try to explain in retrospect what went wrong during the revolution
and what derailed the revolution even since that joyous day of Feb. 2011, when
Mubarak finally stepped down. Both narratives place the blame either squarely
on the Muslim Brothers or on a general undemocratic culture of which they
represented the most striking example. These narratives have, of course, some
grain of truth, but they mostly conceal what is at the heart of the downfall of
the Egyptian democratic experiment. While they show, in fact exaggerate the
fragility of the democratic culture in Egypt, they deliberately obscure the
fact that Western powers and, to a greater degree, their regional and local
allies could not have accepted to live with a democracy in Egypt. These
narratives don’t take into account the West’s long history of preempting
democratic change in the region.
Although there is no conclusive evidence—at the
level of the self-confession of the 1953 coup in Iran and no one should expect such confession to be
made anytime soon— that Western powers have indeed orchestrated the recent coup
in Egypt, or in the minimum gave it the green light, the comportments of
Western powers and their allies in the region toward the current regime in
Cairo is quite revealing. It is only when these comportments are appreciated,
and closely read against a background of significant historical examples of
Western direct and indirect tampering with the popular will in Muslim
countries, and especially Arab countries, that a clear picture of what
culminated in the July 3rd coup could be sketched.
This essay is not a claim that the Muslim
Brothers didn’t commit some serious mistakes, which made the work of those who
sought to topple their regime relatively easy. The Muslim Brothers’ inability
to appreciate the extent of the corruption in the military establishment; their
inability to grasp the immaturity of the Salafi movement, the extent of
intelligence infiltration of their party, Nour; the Brothers’ failure to reach
out to, and assuage the fear of some of the few but principled liberals, and
the MB’s hesitancy to institute rapid measures to involve key individuals from
the large, albeit unorganized, segment of disgruntled youth; all these are
factors that contributed to the downfall of Mohammad Morsi’ regime. It should
be noted, however, that these are contributing factors; accelerants that
neither triggered nor could have per se brought Morsi’s regime down.
Egypt from the coup-etiology to koftalogy
The weeks that followed the coup constituted a
period for many to mourn the senseless violence that the regime carried out in
an effort to mute protests. The period was also a time of celebration for those
who thought this was a triumph for a certain loftier ideal: “liberal democracy.”
Like most coups, the overthrow of Mohammed Morsi was not presented as a coup.
That would have made it a rather a unique coup. What happened was portrayed as
a professional intervention of a national army, responding to the demands of
the majority of Egyptians to correct an experiment, which had gone terribly
wrong. It is a common knowledge now that the popular support, which was highly
stressed during the weeks and months after the coup, was extremely exaggerated.
Although the ludicrousness of the claims that
accompanied the coup was exposed bare, the trend of making diabolically
exaggerated claims continued to intensify as the new regime’s needs to supplant
the worsening situation on the ground with a world of hyperbole grew. The most
recent example of these exaggerations is the government’s allegation that an
army doctor had invented the panacea of modern times: a device that remotely detects and cures HIV, Hepatitis C and
possibly others viral infections. The
founder of Koftalogy—as a US-based Egyptian doctor sardonically referred to
this man’s research—turned out to be neither
from the army nor a medical doctor.
With Koftalogy, Egypt no longer lives in the twilight zone, as professor Khaled Abu El Fadl noted in the weeks after
the coup. It has soared far beyond that. To be sure, there is little that is
new in the nature of the lies themselves. Most are still reminiscent of the 1960s when Egypt tested on local
newspapers the first supersonic fighter-jet in the world. It is ironic that whenever Egypt is this
intoxicated with demagoguery and barefaced lies that it seems to coincide with
the Muslim Brothers being tortured behind bars.
The
West: blue-penciling and looking forward
Despite the brutality of the new regime, its
increasingly bizarre comportments received little attention in the West. The
meek expressions of concern and vague wishes ‘of a speedy return to
constitutional order’ coming from the West in the days and weeks after the coup
weren’t only short-lived but couldn’t hide the excitement in the
decision-making circles and also amongst media analysts. Instead of seeing the
coup as a flagrant violation of the constitutional order in an infant democracy
(which some academics did), the attention was shifted to speaking of the ills
of the Muslim Brothers, or sometime worse, the absence of a democratic culture
in the region. Many elatedly noted that you wouldn’t find a Thomas Jefferson
amongst the Muslim Brothers or anywhere, for that matter, in Egypt. The earlier promotion and gender change of the
controversial activist, Asmaa Mahfouz, to be the Thomas Jefferson of Egypt, was an exception.
Democracy,
many argued, is not just about elections. It is a culture and a process. And
the Muslim Brothers failed to rule democratically. The implicit message is that
the MB had to go and it was good they did, even if no explicit endorsement of
the coup was initially made. Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry,
followed the same line. Kerry has recently gone even further to parrot the
Egyptian military official line, describing the army’s venture as a restoration of democracy. One has to have read Audacity
of Hope too many times to call what is happening in Egypt “a restoration of
democracy.”
The support for the coup inside Congress was,
from the beginning, far more obvious. The early split on the Congress floor on Egypt was not about whether this was a good step but
rather on how best to protect US interests and reputation, specifically making
sure the US doesn’t look as if it was supporting a coup. To prevent that
perception some sugarcoating was needed—a poudre
aux yeux
technique. With the exception of a few levelheaded democrats,
most Congressmen saw no ‘good guys’ on either sides and certainly not amongst
the MB.
It is ironic— although expected— that Israel,
which sells itself as the sole democracy in the region, was rapturous. Although
aware of the sensitivity of being seen as backing any Middle Eastern power, the
Israelis did little to hide their joy. In the words of one of its high-ranking
intelligence officer, “there
is [sic] no two schools of thought in Israel” on the coup. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak as well as
other high ranking Israel military officers and diplomats were clear that the
change was positive and urged
the West to support Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Having defined its security in terms contrary
to the aspirations of the Arab masses, Israel has reasons—contrary
to rumors in the Arab world that Morsi had a good relationship with the
Israelis—to welcome with a sigh of relief the ouster of the Ikhwani president. Rather than
triggering Congress’s backing for the coup, AIPAC, Israel’s most powerful lobby in DC, only had to play a supportive role. For this one, the lobby needed only to
cheer the Congressmen as they marched. They didn’t need to cajole them.
Algeria: the genesis of Western
monomania of Islamism
What happened in Egypt is simply a more complex
version of some early problems (Algeria of 1992, Hamas of 2007 and the Iranian
coup of 1953). The problem is that a real democracy in the Arab world, and the
Muslim world for that matter--unless something slips out (it is still not
certain that Tunisia will be that exception despite the enormous sacrifices that the local Islamists made to keep
accord)--is not welcome from key
players in world politics. By jockeying local and regional allies, these powers
have rendered, and will seek in future to render fruitless, any attempt at real
democratization in these countries.
The fear of course is not of democracy--most
Western countries are fine with democracy in principle--although their allies
locally and regionally dread it. The fear is of a democracy that will bring to
power people who have an agenda at odds with the current arrangements of power
differentials, which could be traced back to the colonial era. The central
dilemma, however, is that no organized and meaningful political group--whether
one that would earn the liberals’ ‘benedictory’ descriptor of ‘civil society’
or not—would accept to continue to work within the existing paradigm because
its very own popularity must, by necessity, rest on a critique of that very
paradigm.
Since the existing world paradigm is clearly contrary
to the aspirations of the overwhelming majority of Arabs and Muslim, we are
then left with two scenarios; 1) the democratic ascension of a gradualist group
(such as the MB) who will not make radical changes warranting a global
fear-mongering, but who will not accept not to start undoing this paradigm; and
2) a violent rise to power of groups of similar inclination. The second scenario
is easy to deal with, and the West has dealt with leaders arriving to power
through such means and also with groups espousing radical tendencies.
Therefore, any new instance would simply look as déjà vu. The
first scenario is the most complex--from the perspective of major world
powers--and hence its undermining requires the deployment of all resources in
ways that ensure that the entire debacle is viewed as a local issue. Although
the details of who conspired to carry out what coup and how will eventually be
known, the temporary guarding of the information is important to continue to
promulgate the larger narrative of a benevolent West, supporting good causes,
and a messy rest continuing to languish under the weight of the contradictions
of its histories and cultures.
This was what we saw in Algeria in 1992. For long, the event was portrayed for the
public audience in the West as well as in the east as simply a bloodbath
instigated and sustained by Muslim fanatics—the same Muslim fanatics who had
overwhelmingly won the elections in 1991. We know for years now— thanks to
several publications and many testimonies of former Algerian intelligence
officers—that those claims were lies. While some Islamists were pushed to
violence, the most systematic forms of violence (the merciless and senseless
massacres) was done by the army, the intelligence services or by groups
infiltrated by them. The
targets were conveniently the residents of areas (villages and shantytowns) known in the past
elections for their strong support for the Islamists. For experts, many of the
secrets of that dirty war are
now known, but for the general public, especially in the West, the image was—
and more likely to continue to be—one of Islamist anti-democratic murderers.
In the Algerian case, Western support was too
evident. Although traditionally pompous in their progressive rhetoric and
support of ‘freedom and democratic ideals,’ the French made only lackadaisical
effort to camouflage their happiness at what took place in Algeria. Roland Dumas,
then France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, spoke as if Algeria had a cause to
celebrate, not a tragedy to mourn: “[it is] an important event of significant
consequences.” President Mitterrand spoke somewhat belatedly, stressing
France’s principled stance in support of democracy and human rights and hoped
democracy will soon be restored.
Although some has seen his response to the coup as ‘a master class
in obfuscation,’ describing
the coup as some point as ‘abnormal,’ Mitterrand, of course, said nothing about
the camps of torture that were being set up at the time throughout Algeria
because his government had met with and advised the very man who, upon his
return from France on Jan. 12th, ordered their construction: Algerian
Minister of Interior, Larbi Belkheir (See France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization
and Transformation).
Mitterrand’s statement that Algerians should ‘pick up again the thread’ sounds
eerily similar to the British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s comment on Egypt: ‘We have to look
forward. This has happened.’ Unlike those
who were shocked by the event, Hague was ready with that statement on July 4th
as if he was expecting the event.
Other Western countries, which equivocated in 1992 on Algeria
and on Egypt in 2013, would later
acknowledge that they took pragmatic, not principled stances, and deliberately supported
the suppression of democracy in Algeria. In America
and Political Islam, (a book published by Cambridge University Press),
Fawaz A. Gerges cites then Secretary of State James
Baker commenting on the US position from the events of 1992:
When
I was at the Department of State, we pursued a policy of excluding the radical
fundamentalists in Algeria, even as we recognized that this was somewhat at
odds with our support of democracy. Generally speaking, when you support
democracy, you take what democracy gives you. If it gives you a radical Islamic
fundamentalist, you’re supposed to live with it. We didn’t live with it in
Algeria because we felt that the radical fundamentalists’ views were so adverse
to what we believe in what we support, and to the national interests of the
United States.
Generally speaking, the only general wisdom that an astute
observer could glean from Western reactions to democratic experiments in the
Arab would is that the West is not willing to tolerate, much less cooperate
with, any government in the Arab world that rises through democratic means,
unless it looks Western, acts Western and serves Western interests. Note that
in Baker’s statement, the difference was not about democratic ideals (‘the
first and last election’ label), but rather about how their “views were so
adverse to what we [the US] believe in and what we support.” Forget the
“radical fundamentalists” descriptor in the Secretary’s statement because—as we
have seen— it mattered, and it will matter, little in future, whether the
victors of elections in the Arab world are radicals, as Baker described the
Algerian Islamists of 1992, or military resistance movement, as any sensible
observer would call Hamas of 2007, or evidently a gradualist and moderate
movement like the Muslim Brothers of Egypt in 2013.
Like in Iran in 1953, it took a whole year for
the execution of the coup to be completed in Egypt. Part of that time was
spent, one must confess, on attempts to make the MB accept to be an elected
Mubarak or an elected king Abdullah, or an elected version of UAE system, or in
the very minimum to force Morsi to accept a humiliating resignation like that
of Chadli Bendjedid
in 1992. When the MB proved to
have an agenda, which on the long term would have the effect of launching Egypt
on a different path, the work to dislodge them by force began. The billions
invested in the Egyptian military and intelligence services, the money spent on various organizations of the so-called
liberal and human right groups were
now put to use.
In the Egyptian case, the role of regional
allies was significant as well. With more money coming from the Saudis and the
UAE (Western allies who are worried of change and historically uneasy about the
MB as a speaker for Islam and Egypt as a leading power in the region), and with
the full support of the Israelis who were pushing their employees in DC to
hasten their move against a government that refused to talk, or meet or deal with them
at all, but who also showed no sign
of doing anything provocative to justify beating up the war drums, a campaign
of vilification of the MB started. Of course, many ‘useful idiots’ were duped
and many agents and local politicians gullibly fancied themselves being the new
leaders of the Cairo colonial post. Their enthusiasm was useful as it added to
the human mass necessary to provide a varnish of legitimacy for the coup that
was already planned. Events ever since have proven one thing: The only active,
truly determined, democratic, independent, non-violence (as much as such things
could be established in a fluid environment like Egypt), and the sole
organization which has in the Egyptian debacle taken the right side of history
against massacres and unrelenting campaigns of repression are the Muslim
Brothers. This is a plain fact now lucid to all who would like to see.
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