10/19/15 – Kelley Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
First guest today is Kelly Vlahos from the American Conservative Magazine.
Her latest is called No More Tweets from Tahrir Square.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Good to talk to you again.
And great peace here.
I'm glad that you're keeping this thing in the news because it doesn't get too much coverage.
So the only problem is we can't really begin the interview where you begin your article because we need kind of a rundown of how we got here, a map.
You are here, and this is how it came to be.
So we used to have this American-backed sock puppet military dictator named President Hosni Mubarak.
And then somehow now we got this guy, Field Marshal Fatah al-Sisi.
Can you explain how we got from there to here?
Well, as you can remember, and your audience will, too, there was a massive uprising that we call now the Arab Spring that was in concert with the revolution in Tunisia as well.
But it was part of this massive roiling revolution throughout the Middle East of people, a democracy movement against dictators that the U.S. had backed for decades, including, as you mentioned, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.
There was a fantastic democracy movement.
We remember the pictures from Tahrir Square.
The movement included both secular protesters and campaigners as well as Islamists.
What happened, there was an overthrow of Mubarak, the great victory for the democracy movement.
The Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, managed to win the election that the revolution had paved the way for, and President Morsi took power.
Unfortunately, he did not wield that power with the democracy that the protesters had fought and bled for, so he had made the mistake of instituting a number of new laws that favored the Islamist Brotherhood, including anti-blasphemy laws that looked no different than, say, the oppressive, draconian measures that Mubarak had enforced over the years that basically had repressed free thought and political will.
There was another mini-revolution, this time assisted by the military, that overthrew Morsi.
That is where we come to the present time, where we have President el-Sisi, former General el-Sisi, who basically took power and then held a, quote-unquote, democratic election in 2013, and what happened was he was elected, and we are now seeing, again, almost the identical measures and oppression that we had seen under Mubarak.
So basically, you have a military rule there under the guise of a democratic environment there, where now- Or it's the same thing under Mubarak, right?
Where he didn't wear olive green, he wore a suit and a tie and called himself president, but he was nothing but General Mubarak that whole time, and same thing here, right?
Oh, absolutely.
So you have the guise of democracy, but really you have a former general in charge of that country.
He has instituted election and anti-protest laws that have basically run the democracy, the remnants of that democracy movement, underground.
So what happened was, in resistance to what the Muslim Brotherhood had tried to do, the democracy movement had basically ushered in a new Mubarak period under el-Sisi, and I had, for the story, had interviewed some campaigners who are attempting to keep the flame alive in terms of a political, secular movement there in Egypt, but they find that they have basically had to have gone underground because he has put some 20,000 people in prison, political prisoners, since Morsi's ouster.
Morsi is in jail, has a death sentence hanging over his head.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been since run out of Egypt, which has created the circumstances for a whole new militancy and insurgency in Egypt right now.
So you have a lot of unrest, whether it be the oppression of democracy movement or the inflamed insurgency, Islamist insurgency, whether it be in Cairo or on the Sinai, which there was already unrest there, but the circumstances under el-Sisi have only exacerbated the troubles there.
So el-Sisi has reacted not as somebody who might be reflective and progressive, but has basically used these circumstances to issue new anti-terrorism laws, which basically calls anyone who has any beef with the state a terrorist, and there obviously are true terrorism, there's true terrorism going on there, but the protesters and people who have questioned the state have also been lumped into that.
So you have a situation where one activist had compared to 1984, where they feel they're being watched all the time, that they're including their thoughts, their writing, and they have had to operate in the shadows.
It hasn't been this bad since Mubarak, or maybe even way before Mubarak, because there is a real fear on the streets now that you can't speak out.
During the election of el-Sisi, for example, they actually threatened el-Sisi's government, or his people had actually threatened people if they didn't go to the polls and vote, that they would be somehow considered suspicious by the state.
So people were threatened to vote, but they were also threatened if they had tried to launch their own political ambitions, or had spoken out against his candidacy.
And there was a 95% turnout, which is unbelievably facetious, and he had won with a heavy majority, and most people believe, and this is underscored by the foreign observers there, that this was a majorly fraudulent vote, but nobody can do anything about it.
And the United States has certainly backed off quite a bit in criticizing the new government there, in hopes, I believe, that they have some sort of secular strongman there who will keep to its terms with Israel, the peace agreement in 1979, but also keep Islamists at bay.
Yeah, well, yeah, it's really too bad the way it seemed like, you know, at the time that they overthrew Mubarak, it was virtually all of Egyptian society came out and just said, we want rid of this guy.
And as Giraldi, Phil Giraldi reported, Mubarak tried to get the junior officers to go ahead and massacre the protesters in Tahrir Square, but they wouldn't do it.
And that was when he finally was forced to leave.
But then instead of the left reformers and the Muslim Brotherhood working together to share power in a democratic form of government, they just simply fought between left and right.
And so they both lost.
And now the military dictators are back.
Basically, the Egyptian Democrats, if you could call them that, sided with the military against the Republicans.
And now the Republicans are outlawed.
And so are the Democrats in the military.
Dictatorship is right back in power.
And you're right.
I mean, the Muslim Brotherhood overreached and and did a really lousy job, you know, for the short time they were in power at reaching out to the left.
But I don't know if there's anybody to reach out to.
It's like all sides just did exactly what the Americans, the Israelis and the dictators wanted and fell right into their trap after such gains just thrown right away.
Now, I'm sorry we got to take this break.
That's what the drums mean.
But we'll be right back in just a sec.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Kelly Vlahos from the American Conservative magazine.
That's the AmericanConservative.com.
This one is called No More Tweets from Tahir Square.
And it's about the totalitarian police state in Egypt right now.
You thought they were fascists before under Mubarak.
And there's so much to go back over here that you wrote about and talked about.
But I think I wanted to really focus on what you said about the rise of a new militancy in response to the outlawing and the persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood, which, after all, was basically run by a bunch of rich old men.
But since they're all being completely driven underground or into prison or worse or just shot in the streets like they were after the coup in 2013, then that gives the angry young men basically that sets them free from having to do what the old guys say.
And and so we see the rise, the perfectly predictable rise of al-Qaeda and Islamic State type terrorism in response.
And I don't know how bad it really is, actually.
And there's not much accurate news out of the Sinai Peninsula about everything that's happening there.
But the precedent is is obvious when you look at Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda in the world.
The reason that he's not a surgeon anymore is because he was he knew a guy who knew a guy who was involved in the Sadat assassination, basically as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was rounded up and tortured with the rest of them and then decided, well, guess what?
I got higher priorities than surgery now and decided to declare war against the Egyptian state and its American patrons.
And so here we are.
So this kind of thing, it's so obvious, you know, what's going to happen when they you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was already outlawed, but basically tolerated in Egypt and was kept at a low simmer.
But now, you know, I don't know.
How bad is it?
Do you know how many attacks, you know, in Cairo or or, you know, up near the coast?
Is it out of control?
It's still in Sinai?
Or can you take the temperature of of that whole question?
Well, I know that I can't give you an exact number on Cairo.
I know that there have been sporadic attacks in Cairo by by militants who are Islamist extremists that I would imagine that they had sprouted from just what you had described that the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and the imprisonment of Morsi and driving the entire Brotherhood underground or out of the country completely.
I know that when working on this over the last month that I had counted about 17 fatal attacks in the Sinai.
And so there was there's been plenty more than that, but ones that included a loss of life since 2011 and the attacks of becoming more increasingly more sophisticated.
So I had quoted one gentleman that was at the conference that I attended at the Middle East Institute a couple of weeks ago as being pretty much in awe of the of the the level of of heavy artillery that these Sinai militants have in their position position at this at this point.
I know that there was one attack over the summer in which they actually attacked a ship that was off the coast, and that that brought a lot of surprise from international observers that they had gotten to the point where they were they were launching these preplanned, sophisticated attacks against the Egyptian military.
Now, the militants in in the Sinai are they just didn't appear over the last few years as as a direct reaction of LCC's government crackdowns.
They had actually been pretty active all along since the, you know, since the 1979 agreement there.
You know, these these are Bedouin and nomadic and the indigenous people there have been pretty restive.
It's just that after the 2011 revolution, they had become more emboldened and then more so after Morsi and the Brotherhood were driven out.
So they've become more, I would say, organized and there has been this element of an outreach or at least an identification with the Al-Qaeda element and leading to actually the allegiance that was supposedly or reportedly pledged to ISIS more recently.
So it's taken on more of a cross-border complexion.
So you have some there's been, you know, news of foreign fighters coming in as well.
So it's expanded from the original, I guess, the the original insurgency or rebellion to one that has has been more Islamist, more has incorporated this sort of more of a global insurgency that we're seeing in other parts of the Middle East that really has LCC pretty scared.
It's just that he, like I point out in my article, is not taking and probably wouldn't expect him to to acknowledge that a lot of this is a result from his own crackdowns.
So I personally, you know, have talked to people who are a little bit more knowledgeable about what's going on on the ground there.
We do have a multinational force there.
They're not there to help LCC against this insurgency.
They're there to as part of the 1979 agreement.
So there's this this very tiny force of which Americans are a majority of that are sitting out there like sitting ducks and they're starting to get more heavy equipment and intelligence out there because they've been attacked as well.
Right.
So the international troops that are there are getting attacked by these militants, which wasn't happening before either.
Yeah, I think everybody had forgotten that there were American GIs in the Sinai Peninsula.
Wait, they got attacked by who?
What?
Oops.
Right.
So there's this sense that things are getting much worse out there rather than better.
And, you know, and it's being attributed to what's going on in Cairo as well.
So I think the best way to compare what's going on in Cairo is is is and of course in this this comparison I can go so far.
But, you know, in the United States, after 9-11, there was this massive security state had been, you know, brought to bear, you know, in order to protect us.
You know, so all of this new these new laws that affected citizens were justified by the Bush administration and the majority in Congress saying that we have to pass these laws to protect the citizenry.
And it was all done in the name of national security and anti-terrorism.
I mean, you know, talked about that many times.
Here you have El-Sisi taking that, you know, that that theme or that justification to a whole new level where he actually has 20,000 political prisoners, many of whom have been given death sentences for things as as as as little as a as a Facebook post or or blog, you know, or, you know, having the audacity of going out and protesting.
So but he is using the protection, you know, of his people as a justification for cracking down on genuine democracy movements there.
That's what he has used.
And, you know, so you can go and maybe go into different neighborhoods in Egypt and they say, well, we're happy because we're being protected.
We feel safe now.
But then, you know, you talk to the activists, you talk to the people who had so much hope for bringing a whole new era to Egypt.
And they say, you know, he's just using this to crack down on us and we can't do anything about it.
It's like the minute they pop out there, they could be jailed within seconds.
So it's a scary time there.
And I think that on the most part, the international community has largely ignored what's going on in Egypt.
And that's in part, I blame the United States and the West, because, you know, if anything, that they, you know, and we've seen this many times before, they don't talk the talk when it comes to democracy.
And so by releasing the $1.3 billion in military aid back, and that's annual, that's not just one lump sum, the annual $1.3 billion in military aid to al-Sisi's government, that is a tacit acknowledgement and, you know, acquiescence to his behavior.
I don't care what the State Department says.
You know, if he's receiving all that, all that, all that weaponry and military equipment, that that's basically giving him permission to do what he's doing to his people.
Yeah.
Kerry said it's the restoration of democracy, meaning, great, now a loyal sock puppet of America is back in power, and whoever doesn't like it can die, or maybe get tortured in prison and then die.
Right.
That's the American way.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, so that is the great Kelly Vallejo.
She's at theamericanconservative.com.
No more tweets from Tahrir Square.
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