A Revolting Middle East Policy

Daniel Greenfield

In the last three months we played a role in overthrowing nearly every Middle Eastern government we were allied with– that wasn’t supporting terrorism.

We pushed out Ben Ali in Tunisia, but let the Saudis move tanks into Bahrain. Egypt’s Mubarak was a monster who had to go, but Syria’s Assad is a reformer. Now Yemen’s Saleh who let us hunt terrorists in his country is on our hit list, but the Qatari royal family which is linked to Al-Qaeda and finances Al-Jazeera are our best friends. Gaddafi who cut a deal to give up his nukes got bombed, Iran which is pushing hard for a nuclear bomb has clear skies.

Middle Eastern leaders who support and finance terrorists got a pass, but our own allies in the War on Terror got creamed. Iran, Syria and the Gulf Arab states who are responsible for most of the terrorism against us have nothing to worry about. Saleh and Mubarak who aided the War on Terror got shown the door.

Want good relations with the US? Start funding terrorists and building nukes. That’s the only lesson any Middle-Eastern leader can take away from this disaster. The message we have put out there is that the worse they treat us, the better we will treat them. We will tolerate enemies and allies abusing us and plotting to kill us. But allies who actually go out on a limb to support us and act as if they have common interests with us. That we won’t put up with. They have to go.

The tally of stupidity in what fanciful pundits called the ‘Arab Spring’ is almost endless. Not only did we mistake factional protests for democratic change and the will of the people, but we got behind groups and organizations overtly hostile to us and took their side against governments that had actually been friendly to us.

Obama intervened politically in Egypt on behalf of Islamists and Anti-American leftists, bringing down the government of the only major Muslim country in the region that was not actively funding terrorists. A government that not only offered significant help during the War on Terror, but was the only non-Islamist bulwark against Iran. All that is almost certainly gone now.

Bush’s bloodless deal with Gaddafi got him out of the nukes and terror business. That too is gone now. The rebels are losing and Gaddafi isn’t going to be intimidated by us ever again. The US went in like a lion and out like a lamb. Bush’s invasion of Iraq intimidated Gaddafi into giving in. Obama’s botched assault on Libya has reassured every thug from Syria to Iran that they have nothing to fear from us.

On any threat level map, North Africa which was reasonably quiet under Bush has just gone dark red. And it won’t take much for it to go bright red now. From Tunisia to Libya to Egypt– the Islamists have gotten a major shot in the arm on the other side of the Mediterranean. Al-Qaeda fighters are swarming within sight of Italy. In a day, Libyan fighters can travel by boat to Italy’s Pelagie islands. When Eisenhower wanted to invade Italy from North Africa, he began with the islands as a jumping off point. Muslim ‘refugees’ have been doing their own version of ‘Operation Corkscrew’ by using the islands to invade Italy. And once inside Italy they have access to the entire European Union.

The ‘revolutions’ have targeted North Africa. Half of North Africa has either has either been wholly or partly overthrown. Morocco and Algeria are the sole holdouts. If the Brotherhood takes Egypt then they won’t be holding out for long. And then there will be a Caliphate within striking distance of Southern Europe.

But Europe supported all this in the name of democracy and human rights. And European leaders organized a bombing campaign against Gaddafi when he was the only thing keeping half of North Africa from moving to Europe. America, which could have saved Mubarak with a word, instead called for his removal in the name of a protest movement organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and the leftist Kefaya group which had gotten its start protesting against the American overthrow of Saddam.

What country in its right mind backs the overthrow of any ally by an enemy? We do. When Egyptian socialist thug Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and England and France sent in the troops, we threatened to destroy the British economy unless they withdrew. Our reward for that was that Nasser’s Egypt became the chief Soviet spearhead in the region. For the last two decades, our number one foreign policy priority in the Middle East is to force Israel to hand over territory to PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, a graduate of the KGB’s Patrice Lumumba University, whose other famous alumnus was Carlos the Jackal.

Carter backed the leftists and Islamists over the Shah of Iran. Then he backed the Islamists over the leftists. That’s what turned Iran into the paradise it is today. This time around we backed the leftists and Islamists over Mubarak. Now the leftists are being swallowed up by the Islamists who have been waiting 80 years for this moment.

From the halls of power to the front page, no Egyptian was a bigger enthusiast of the January 25 protests than our own political and cultural leaders. The press was full of posed photographs, glowing descriptions of a people’s revolution and denunciations of Mubarak. Activists whose chief political experiencing was retweeting memes got full page interviews. Governments and Soros’ pet NGO’s got behind Kefaya and Iranian puppet El Baradei. Columnists glowingly portrayed the pathetic El Baradei as the democratic future of Egypt.

Then Mubarak stepped down and the ‘heroes’ of Tahrir Square got stomped flat by the military and the brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood’s successful referendum campaign was an explicit mandate for Islamism over secularism. Protests have been banned, curfews imposed and the army is arresting and humiliating the remaining pro-democracy activists. And El Baradei and Kefaya are playing the only card left in their empty deck. Israel.

El Baradei is vowing war with Israel. Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey, the favorite Egyptian activist of so many neo-conservative bloggers, is encouraging Egyptians to support El Baradei over Amr Moussa, by tweeting that Amr Moussa is a Yankee-Zionist puppet and El Baradei is the only man Israel is afraid of. There’s your liberal Democratic Egypt trotting out xenophobia and warmongering in a futile bid to get ahead of the Muslim Brotherhood. And its campaign slogan sounds a lot like the cries of “Jew, Jew” by the men who beat and raped Lara Logan.

Baradei is the darling of the same pundits and politicians who denounce nationalist Israeli candidates as extremists. Yet no Israeli party runs on a platform of war with Egypt. And there’s your fundamental difference, not just between Egypt and Israel, but between the Muslim and non-Muslim world. A clash of civilizations between cultures with radically different moral codes and understanding of the value of human life. Much as Western pundits would like to believe that El Baradei is on their side of this moral equation, he isn’t.

Egypt’s problem was never Mubarak. It isn’t Israel or America or globalism. It was always Egypt. And the problem will go on being Egypt no matter who is at the wheel six months or six years from now. The fundamental problem of the Muslim world is not a lack of democracy. That is only the symptom. Just as our fundamental problem is not Obama. He too is only the symptom.

Changing governments may improve matters, but without altering the underlying dynamic, the big picture will not change. And that dynamic is rooted in the culture. It cannot be changed by elections. Leaders reflect the culture, and even the occasional ruthless leader who imposes change is a product of historic forces at work. Egypt does not have a political problem, it has a cultural problem. And the US does not have a political problem, it has a cultural problem. Problems are reflected in destructive behavior.

Imagine if the Soviet Union had aided in the overthrow of Cuba, East Germany and the rest of the Warsaw Pact. That might have happened if Reagan had been put in charge of the USSR. And putting Obama in charge of America was like putting Reagan in charge of the USSR. But who put Obama in charge of America? For all the Soros money, fraud and the maneuvering behind the scenes– it took a major cultural shift for that to be possible. The crisis of America can be found in that shift. And that of our revolting Middle East policy.