US subversion of Mubarak will wreck Obama’s presidency

By Gerald Warner, Scotsman Feb 6/11

‘WHAT is clear and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful and it must begin now.” In case you were perplexed about how to resolve the crisis in Egypt, Barack Obama spelled out the solution last week. That is the great benefit of having The One to guide the world at times of tension.

The phrase “orderly transition” has become a mantra of the bien-pensant western liberal elite when addressing the Egyptian problem. An orderly transition to what? Oh, you know, democracy … freedom … Uh-huh? And who exactly in Egypt is about to effect that kind of transition? Oh, that’s easy, it has to be Mohamed ElBaradei; he ran the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – must be a safe pair of hands. And he is a Nobel laureate. Well, so is the buffoon in the Oval Office, having been awarded his prize by the celebrity-stalking Nobel committee at the start of his administration, on the reasoned assumption it would be much more difficult to cobble together a plausible citation at the end of it.

Déjà vu does not come any more vivid than this. Even those of us who predicted that Obama would be Jimmy Carter II are startled by how closely he has re-enacted the script. What Carter, with his hypocritical “human rights” agenda, did to undermine the Shah has been replicated by Obama in his subversion of President Hosni Mubarak. The West had no more effective ally than Mubarak.

Undeterred by the fate of his predecessor Anwar Sadat, murdered for making peace with Israel, Mubarak sustained that settlement. In a region where anti-Americanism is endemic he maintained an alliance with the United States and was a force for stability and pro-western moderation.

Since, however, he did not conduct democratic elections as flawless as a New Hampshire primary he became anathema to the Obama White House. Does anybody in Washington realise what the establishment of democratic governments in the Middle East would mean? War with Israel, because that is the settled will of the Arab street. Apparently western liberals want more democratic elections like the one that gifted Gaza to Hamas in 2006. Only dictators have the authority to suppress their bellicose populations and deliver initiatives such as the Camp David accord.

Mohamed ElBaradei is committed to a referendum on the peace treaty with Israel. You could announce the result of any such referendum today: the treaty would be torn up. Iran, the chief beneficiary of the destabilisation of Egypt, was also the beneficiary of ElBaradei’s indulgence of its nuclear programme when he headed the IAEA, protecting Iran from UN Security Council sanctions.

Last week, too, ElBaradei told Der Spiegel: “We should stop demonising the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is the main player in Egypt; no other faction could conceivably rival it in gaining power. Even under Mubarak’s carefully managed elections it managed to secure 88 deputies in the national assembly. Western appeasers have been trying to present a heavily sanitised image of the MB – a sort of New Labour reinvention of the doyen of jihadist movements. The Brotherhood (known as the Ikhwan) operates in more than 80 countries; al-Qaeda and Hamas are both offshoots. A report by the Center for Security Policy, in America, entitled “Shariah: The Threat to America”, claims: “It is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organisation in the United States is actually controlled by the MB or a derivative organisation.”

While it cultivates respectability on American campuses and in US government circles, its private views are unregenerate. Muhammad Mahdi Akef, its “Supreme Guide” until last year, described Osama bin Laden as “close to Allah on high”. A leading member, Muhammad Ghannem, was reported last week as having told an Iranian news network that gas pumped from Egypt to Israel should be cut off and “the people should be prepared for war against Israel”. With its network of schools, clinics, etc, the Brotherhood is firmly rooted among the Egyptian masses. Whether by manipulating ElBaradei as a transitional Kerensky or taking power directly, the Muslim Brotherhood is the only alternative Egyptian government to Mubarak.

Besides the uncanny parallel with Jimmy Carter, American conservatives are also comparing Obama’s mishandling of the Middle East to the “Who lost China?” presidential election of 1952 when the Communist takeover in the Far East cost the Democrats the White House. If by 2012 the Middle East were in Islamist hands the US electorate would annihilate Obama, however inadequate the Republican candidate: in that scenario Bugs Bunny could carry 50 states. Never mind Hosni Mubarak: what you are seeing in Cairo is the meltdown of the Obama presidency.