This is a sober report that needs
to be understood. The Arab world is in
crisis and the Islamist movement which is strictly a political movement hiding
behind religious sentiments and scriptures is presently unsuppressed and is
moving to seize control of power everywhere they can. They are Islamic Nazis including irregular
militias and barbarism. Any success will
generally see all western style institutions suppressed as for example we are
seeing the Turkish independent judiciary been presently suppressed.
It all leads to authoritarian and
no freedom for the population and much worse it means genocide applied against
selected minorities. The question that
needs to be addressed aggressively is how external forces can stop this slide
to horror. Islam itself is been outright
hijacked by the Islamists and internal opposition is been crushed and has been
below the radar for decades. This is why
the hijab is so visible.
Success generally means that the
economy is also deeply depressed as we see in Iran were the middle class is
unable to throw off the Mullahs who have even crossed over to millennial
thinking.
Islamicism will delay modernism
in the Muslim world for decades to come unless it is stopped soon.
On the other hand, while the Arab
Spring has given the Islamicists an open door, it has also created a crisis
point that can be exploited in many ways to possibly stem the tide of
Islamicism.
The good news, if we can call it
such is that the underlying economies are nascent at best. Real authoritarian control will simply block further
development as actually occurred in the USSR and has happened everywhere else
except when a step backward was taken as in China. This implies that they are not a creditable military
threat nor ever will be.
The problem of course, it that we
have just spent a decade also proving that military means will not suffice to
end their threat as there will always be a fresh supply of naive horny young
men to convert to the cause however ill prepared. Recall that a monkey with a club can surprise
and wantonly kill. The real role of the
military is to confront and support demands on the source communities. On that basis, it is sufficient to demand
changes as the community responds to the reality of force in place.\
\If I were Alexander the Great, I
would promulgate a new set of rules and demand that the community implement those
rules and provide security to ensure their success. If the leadership failed to earn my trust,
then after an appropriate period, I would merely extract the women and children
for relocation to safe protection and reeducation within nearby safe
communities. I cannot think of anything
that could focus the mind better. That
is how one achieves an enthusiastic change in attitudes. Likely a couple of good examples would end
the nonsense.
My point is that the Islamic
population needs to do what the German population did after the war with some
slight encouragement.
The Al Qaeda-Muslim Brotherhood
Coalition
Not long ago the Arab Spring was seen as a harbinger of democracy. It
turns out that, instead, it’s creating breeding grounds for international
terror—and safe havens for al-Qaeda itself.
That is not just a polemical opinion but the somber assessment of the
director-general of Britain ’s
MI5 internal security agency, Jonathan Evans. The Telegraph reports
that Evans, in a rare lecture this week in London , warned that
Today parts of the Arab world have once more become a permissive
environment for al-Qaeda.
This is the completion of a cycle—al-Qaeda
first moved to Afghanistan
in the 1990s due to pressure in their Arab countries of origin. They moved on
to Pakistan
after the fall of the Taliban.
And now some are heading home to the Arab world again….
Evans specifically said that British jihadis, who have been training
for years at al-Qaeda strongholds in Yemen
and Somalia , “are known to
be receiving training in the likes of Libya
and Egypt ”—supposed
beneficiaries of what some saw as a wave of Facebook-driven liberalization.
The MI5 chief also confirmed that al-Qaeda is now active in Syria , and “warned against suggestions that
al-Qaeda’s threat has ‘evaporated’ following the death of Osama bin Laden and
significant victories in Pakistan .”
He noted that Britain ,
for its part, has “experienced a credible terrorist attack plot about once a
year since 9/11.”
Evans didn’t say in what part of Egypt the jihadis are training.
Israel, though, has been aware that—particularly since the winds of “spring”
toppled Egypt’s pro-Western Mubarak regime—the presence of al-Qaeda and other
global-jihad elements has been rapidly growing at least in Egypt’s Sinai
Peninsula.
It was only last week that what is believed to be an al-Qaeda-linked
group carried out a deadly
attack at the fence Israel is trying to build quickly along its border
with Sinai.
But Evans’s words carry implications beyond the region and beyond Britain ’s own
very real security concerns.
For one thing, his point that bin Laden’s assassination (along with the
killing of other terror leaders in Pakistan ) has hardly finished off
al-Qaeda tends to undercut the great emphasis President Obama has put on that
exploit.
Still more significant, though, is the fact that “permissive
environments” where al-Qaeda is coming back to roost—“Arab Spring” countries
like Egypt, Libya, and Syria—are also places where the Muslim Brotherhood has
been gaining strength.
And Obama, while readily identifying al-Qaeda as evil and an enemy of America
and the free world, notoriously looks at the Brotherhood differently. Indeed,
his administration has made a point of repeatedly lauding the election of
Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi as Egypt ’s new president.
For those free of a sentimental affinity for the Brotherhood, it of
course makes perfect sense that it would be cultivating environments where
al-Qaeda feels welcome. The Brotherhood is, after all, the organization from
which Al-Qaeda sprang. Bin Laden had Brotherhood teachers in his youth, and
current al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri was a member of the Brotherhood in his
native country of Egypt .
Indeed, the
Brotherhood condemned Bin
Laden’s assassination, proclaiming that “legitimate resistance against foreign
occupation in any country is a legitimate right” and “request[ing] that the US
stop…intelligence operations against dissenters, and halt its interference in
the internal affairs of any Arab or Muslim country.” In other words, a direct
rebuff to what the U.S.
president flaunts as a heroic moment.
A rational U.S., and Western, approach to the rapidly changing—and
deteriorating—Arab Middle East requires not only recognizing that al-Qaeda is
returning there, as MI5 chief Evans underscores. It also requires realizing
that, while they have tactical differences and sometimes frictions, al-Qaeda
and the Muslim Brotherhood are two closely related facets of the same
global-jihadist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-Western phenomenon.
Specific policy implications would include ceasing to back the wrong
side—the Brotherhood—in Egypt instead of the right side—the more moderate and
much more pragmatic Supreme Military Council; ceasing to back the Syrian rebels
now that the Brotherhood-al-Qaeda front is spearheading them; and trying to
prevent (which, according to one report from Middle East News Line, the U.S.
is now
starting to do) al-Qaeda-aligned militias from taking over Libya while
there is still time.
Forestalling the region’s descent into an even worse, world-threatening
maelstrom depends on finally starting to see it clearly.
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