All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Aren't you guys introducing Bill Law?
He is an award-winning journalist who reported extensively from the Middle East and North Africa for the BBC, and he now runs thegulfmatters.com.
And here he has this really important piece in MiddleEastEye, MiddleEastEye.net.
It's called How the Death of a President Shed Light on Egypt's Brutal Dictatorship.
Welcome to the show, Bill.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm fine, and good to have you, to be here, rather.
Yeah, great.
Happy to have you here.
So this is about Fatah al-Sisi is the current dictator of Egypt, but the death of the president you mentioned there, you're talking about Mohamed Morsi, who was elected in the elections of 2000, and I forget if it was 11 or 12, after, yeah, 2011, after the Arab Spring came to Egypt, and of course he was overthrown in a coup about a year and a half later in the summer of 2013.
And as you mentioned here, he died in court, or collapsed in court, in June of this year of a heart attack, and so that's sort of the start of your article, is based on that, on his treatment after the coup, and then that goes on, and you illustrate some more things about Egypt that we need to know in the post-coup new military dictatorship era here.
So can you first talk to us a little bit about the Arab Spring protests, and how Mohamed Morsi came to power, and then what happened to him?
Yeah, the Arab Spring protests began in February 2011, actually they began in Tunisia, and it was a vendor who was protesting against unfair treatment, and he set himself alight, and that led to street protests, and the overthrow of the Tunisian dictator.
The protests spread, they spread next door, they went to Egypt, and there were massive demonstrations in Egypt, in Cairo, the capital, Tahrir Square, Freedom Square, Tahrir means freedom in Arabic, Freedom Square became the focus point for protests.
The protests began peacefully, they were supported by many, many women, and I think that's an important point to note, that women came out to join the protests in a society that's very patriarchal.
Interestingly, the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Mohamed Morsi was a senior leader, they held back in that protest to see which way the wind would blow.
When they realized that indeed the street was gaining the upper hand, and that the then-president Hosni Mubarak was heading towards a fall, they joined the protests, and it was the generals, and I think it's important, Scott, to understand that the generals really dictate the politics and the business interests of Egypt, and the generals decided that Hosni Mubarak's presidency was turning out to be bad for business.
It was particularly impacting on the tourist trade.
Tourists weren't going to Egypt, and tourism is a huge part of the Egyptian economy.
So they decided to remove Hosni Mubarak.
There was a transition period.
The Muslim Brotherhood initially debated whether they should even run a candidate.
They decided they would run a candidate.
That candidate became Mohamed Morsi, and in the election in 2012, and it's important to note this was the first democratically-run election for a president in Egypt's history, he won that election.
It was a close vote.
He won against actually a former member of Mubarak's government, and he won that vote by 51% to 49%, but he won it.
He was the president.
His presidency only lasted one year, and he was, in fact, overthrown by his defense minister, Sisi.
He had appointed Sisi because he thought that Sisi was a religious man and could be trusted.
Sisi, together with other generals, decided that Mohamed Morsi was taking the country down a path they didn't particularly want to go, and so they overthrew him.
When I was looking back, Scott, to the coverage in 2013, and there was this real hesitancy on the part of Western media to describe this as a coup, a coup d'etat.
The defense minister used the army to overthrow a democratically-elected president.
For example, we get language like removal, ousted, replaced.
President Obama himself was rather mild, shall I say, in his critique and criticism of the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi.
Once Mohamed Morsi was arrested and put in jail, together with thousands, tens of thousands of people eventually, the treatment in the jail of these prisoners who were political prisoners, and bear in mind, this is a democratically-elected president, was simply appalling.
He was denied medication.
He suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure.
They withheld medication.
They withheld treatment by doctors.
They gave him food that simply caused further affliction for his diabetes.
He had several incidents where he passed out into a diabetic coma.
All of this was brought to the attention of the authorities.
They did nothing about it.
That led a UN report to decide that this could be called a state-sanctioned killing.
That is the state, in refusing to provide proper medical support and medicine to keep Mohamed Morsi alive, that they were, in fact, responsible for his death.
That's a pretty shocking thing to have happened.
And yet when he died, there was really scant comment, scant concern in the Western media.
It often strikes me, Scott, and I'm sure it strikes you too, that we talk a lot about the values of democracy, but when people in the Middle East in particular put their lives on the line, I'm talking about these people who went into the streets to try and fight for democracy in a peaceful way, when those people do it, we tend to just leave them swinging in the wind.
And I would say this goes back to President Obama.
It certainly has continued under Donald Trump.
You know, the situation here is that the people who have gone into the streets and are going into the streets today, it's happening in Iraq.
It happened in Iran.
It's happening in Lebanon.
It's happening in Algeria.
These people need to hear that we support them.
And you know what?
Don't you think it's a- We're not hearing it.
Doesn't it make a big difference whether we're supporting revolutions in countries like Iran that our government is targeting versus supporting the people who are overthrowing American-backed sock puppet dictators like Mubarak or Sisi?
Yeah, I think there's a political rationale, you could say, for speaking about support for the people who went into the streets in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran in the past weeks and have paid a terrible price because many have been killed, hundreds have been killed.
Yeah, I think that there is certainly a political motive in supporting those protests.
But you know, we should be supporting the people in Algeria.
They've been protesting peacefully for nine months to end this corrupt crony clique that has run that country into the ground for the past four decades.
We should be supporting them.
That's my argument.
Other people may say, you know what?
It doesn't matter.
We don't really need to worry about that.
Well, I argue, and I've argued persistently over my time covering the Middle East, that we do.
We do need to care.
We let the people in Bahrain down.
We let the people in Iraq down.
We're letting the people in Algeria down.
We're letting these people down who are coming out now and saying, we want an end to the corruption.
We want jobs.
We want a decent life for our kids.
We want all the things that we in the West take for granted.
I think that the voices are muted, to put it mildly, here in the West.
Sure.
Well, and I guess I was just trying to emphasize the point about who we're letting down and in what way.
So if the people of Bahrain are trying to protest and want some of their rights protected, and then America supports Saudi and the Bahraini monarchy crushing their uprising, that's certainly letting them down.
I don't know that we need to support them in their uprising, but supporting their monarchy crushing them is certainly a betrayal.
And sort of same thing with Iraq.
I mean, the USA is the one who foisted the Dawah-Skiri government on the people of Iraq.
And so to support them, anything more than rhetorically, that like, geez, hope things work out for you guys, sorry about what we did, is probably just going to be counterproductive and all we're going to do is help them to put worse people in power rather than make any kind of improvements.
Right?
Yeah, I think that's right.
And if you look at Iraq, I mean, what was really inflicted upon the Iraqi people was this sectarian government with 39 parties in the parliamentary system in Iraq, 39 political parties and each one has to have a chunk of the action.
So there's all of these deals that go on and the powerful ministries, defense and electricity and oil, they get to dole out the corruption contracts.
Meanwhile, the ordinary people of Iraq are seeing none of the wealth that they should be experiencing as a result of the great oil resources they have.
And that is a government that, you know, we encouraged and we allowed.
And as I say, I mean, it's always the temptation to park everything at the door of President Trump.
Believe me, I hold no flag for President Trump, but I think it's important to acknowledge that this process began under previous administrations and that, you know, one of the great disappointments of the Obama presidency was the way that Iran aside, the nuclear deal aside, he effectively abandoned the Middle East.
He left those people, as I said, swinging in the wind and he decided that he was going to pivot to China.
That was going to be the geopolitical approach.
Well, fine, you can pivot to China, but that doesn't mean you abandon people who have had the courage to go into the streets to fight for rights that we all take for granted.
And I think that, you know, Donald Trump said in September, he said, where's my favorite dictator?
Well, I thought, my goodness, there is the president of the United States making a joke.
And in my article, I wrote about the terrible prison conditions, more than 60,000 prisoners of conscience in jails.
They're being tortured.
Well, that's why they don't like Donald Trump, right, is because he's so uncouth in what he meant to say was, where is Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Bill Clinton and George Bush and Barack Obama and my favorite dictator, right?
This is America always backs the dictatorship in Egypt.
But you're just not supposed to call it that and be so rude about it.
As John Kerry said, when Sisi overthrew Morsi, this is the restoration of democracy.
Because democracy means when you have a government that is compliant with American wishes.
Full stop.
Simple as that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, Scott, it's such a it's such a short term process.
And yeah, I mean, Donald Trump in his in his comments, he empowers these dictators.
He says to them, it's OK.
It's OK to torture prisoners.
It's OK to arrest.
It's OK to shut down the media.
You know what?
Hey, I might like to shut down the media in this country.
Right.
You know, he's saying all of those things to these dictators, publicly, publicly, whereas George Bush and Bill Clinton, they just sent these, sent Mubarak people to be tortured and murdered.
But they didn't talk about it on TV like that and say, boy, does Mubarak torture and murder people for us a lot.
Yeah, you're right.
And Trump perhaps has made public what may indeed have been American policy for a long, long time.
But in so making it public, he's made it so much easier for these awful acts to be carried out.
All we need to do is look at the the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
I knew Jamal and he was he was not a man who actually posed any danger to the Saudi family, royal family, and certainly to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince who the CIA has argued and that is ultimately responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
There again, America's response from the White House has signaled we can get away with these things.
We can do it.
It's OK.
And think about that.
It's OK to to lure a journalist into the consulate in Istanbul to murder him, to chop him up into bits and get rid of the body parts somewhere we do not know where.
You know, I really do worry about what's going on in our world.
And I think that if we go back to the Egypt situation, it's really a dangerous time because Sisi, he's not a good politician.
He's not a good leader.
The country is in a mess economically.
The middle classes are being pulled down.
I was just talking to a colleague who told me that at the second level of the military, so the middle ranking officers, they, too, are feeling the pinch.
They, too, don't have enough money to send their kids to private schools anymore.
They're getting cross as well.
This guy is not an effective leader.
You could argue perhaps that some of the dictators America chose to to support were reasonably effective leaders.
I mean, people in Egypt now, Scott, look back to Mubarak and say, God, those are better days.
Yeah, man.
Those are better days.
That just says it all right there.
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OK, let me ask you a little bit more about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, because, you know, I know the Muslim Brotherhood varies from place to place.
They were some of the worst al-Qaeda like fighters in the war in Syria, whereas in Egypt even Daniel Pipes says, hey, if you're going to have Islamists in a conservative political party run for election and come to power, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is about as good as it gets.
And they're really not that bad.
And I guess the idea being that they're old and wealthy enough that they're really not radicals.
They really are like very right wing conservative religious Republicans is what they were trying to be.
And but I just wonder, because apparently there were huge factions inside Egypt, obviously in the military and in whatever counts as the left half of Egyptian politics who absolutely wanted nothing to do with them.
The liberals stayed out and protest and protested, not wanting to wait for another election.
They wanted the military to come in and cancel the conservative party's rule right away in 2013.
So I wonder, you know, how bad were they or weren't they or or what what do we need to know about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood here?
Yeah, I think the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the founding brotherhood group.
And you're right, Scott, to make that point that various Muslim Brotherhood groups do not necessarily make one great monolithic whole that somehow is going to conspire to overthrow the ruling factions in the Middle East.
You know, I first encountered the Muslim Brotherhood back in 2011, and I interviewed Herat El Shattar, who was one of the leaders very close to Mohammed Morsi.
He's in jail now, and I interviewed his daughter, Zahra, who I believe is in jail as well.
And at that point, the Muslim Brotherhood was performing the following function.
That is, they were delivering to the poor what the government was not delivering.
So they were a kind of alternative welfare system, and that included education.
And the education was, as you say, conservative.
And in that, they were performing this function.
Now, Hosni Mubarak was quite adept at how he used the Muslim Brotherhood, in that whenever the Americans pushed him to say, look, you know, you got to do it, let's make it a little more democratic because we're getting a bit of heat here about, you know, all the repression going on.
And Mubarak would say, well, you want a democracy, but as soon as you have a democracy, guess what?
You're going to wind up with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then the Muslim Brotherhood, he would ease up on them.
They'd go into the streets and they'd shout death to America, burn some flags, American flags.
And Mubarak would say, you see, you see what I mean?
The Muslim Brotherhood are your enemy.
So there was this kind of game that he played where he would come down on them hard, then he'd let them out of jail.
And you know, certainly when I was there, I was told there actually were deals between the ruling party and the Muslim Brotherhood.
OK, it's time to go out in the streets and make a few protests so we can convince our American friends that you guys are really dangerous.
So there was that kind of curious balance that Mubarak was able to play.
What happened then was that the Muslim Brotherhood won an election and they won it admittedly on a small, small majority, but they won it.
That's what shook up the generals really seriously.
Yeah.
They won parliament and the presidency, right?
Yeah.
So, so they, so when Sisi overthrew Morsi, it wasn't enough to round up.
There had to be a much stronger reaction.
So there was this massacre, there was a protest, a rabah, where at least 800 people were killed.
Some people say it was about a thousand.
I mentioned this in my article.
The people who survived that were all arrested, thrown in jail, and in a mass trial last September, they're all sentenced in terms of 15 years to life, to death.
So the victims who had survived were, were, you know, arrested, tortured, thrown into these mass trials, sentenced, you know, to up to death.
Meanwhile, the perpetrators have been no investigation.
No one's ever been charged.
So the, the military got really spooked by what had happened in that election of Morsi, because they realized that if the Muslim Brother was able to function reasonably, capably as a government, and you could argue that Morsi didn't have that capability, and I wouldn't disagree with you, but if over time they've been shown to be a relatively capable government, then the military is suddenly, you know, losing a big chunk of their power.
And there would then be an exploration, the corruption that has been going on for years and years and years and involves the military and involves retired generals.
All of these things threatened them in a way that you could say previously they weren't as threatened.
So the reaction was absolutely brutal, absolutely brutal.
When you look at, you know, the, the descriptions of the treatment, I mean, I've seen videos of these cells crammed full with 60, 80, 100 people, someone is dying on the floor.
Other prisoners are calling out for help.
No one comes.
Yeah, you know, it reminds me of that footage from the, I guess, very late 70s, 78, 79, where the Muslim Brotherhood by the thousands were rounded up after the assassination of Sadat and the rise to power of Mubarak.
And it's chaos in this prison, and everybody's just screaming and yelling and carrying on.
And then all of a sudden, Dr. Zawahiri starts talking, and everybody goes silent out of respect for this guy.
And he goes on to say, this is why we're going to war from now on.
And this is a guy who, you know, became one of the leaders of Al-Qaeda from Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
And, and, and to this day denounces the Muslim Brotherhood for being a bunch of stupid old fools who would participate in American democratic, American backed democratic processes, only to get screwed just like he warned them they would.
And this kind of thing.
And this is how we, this is how our government's sock puppet government in Egypt helped create our Al-Qaeda problem.
Way back then.
It's the same kind of thing that's likely to come from this.
If you cannot, as a conservative Islamist, you know, political party, if you cannot participate, you mentioned Algeria, same as 93, or in Gaza in 2006, or whatever it is, if Islamists win, the Americans cancel the election results.
So what does that mean?
That means that there's only one way to go.
And that is not conservative old Islamism, but radical young suicide bomber Islamism by Al-Qaeda types who will settle for nothing than total victory.
And at any cost.
Hmm.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that that when you, when you create situations where there's no hope, there's only despair and, and, and people feel like there is no way out and they do turn to violence.
And certainly I, you know, I've in my time in the West Bank and interviewing families of suicide bombers and you talk to these, these people and you cannot justify what their family member has done, nor should you.
But the level of despair creates this sense of there is no way out.
And then as you say, the extremist Islam comes along and says, well, yeah, there is, there is a way out.
Here's what you can do.
And by the way, you know, you will, you will go to paradise and, and, and that becomes a very compelling message.
However, I do want to say, we mentioned Algeria now for nine months, hundreds of thousands of Algerians have been protesting peacefully.
Okay.
They forced out Bouteflika who was this crippled president that was going to run for another term even though he's mentally and physically incapacitated.
He was being supported by, by the generals and the business elite.
They forced him out.
They, the, the, the ruling elite tried to drive through a quick presidential election and people said no.
They tried it twice.
People have said no.
Now the people have, you know, there's another election coming up this week actually, but, but those people have said, because of what happened in the 1990s, it was a terrible situation.
As you said, a conservative Islamist government was elected, the, the, the ruling elite didn't like it.
The military didn't like it.
So there was slaughter, terrible slaughter on both sides.
I think more than 200,000 people killed.
This one chap said, you know, peaceful protest is the only weapon we have because the people of Algeria remember just how terrible those days were.
And we're seeing, I think, a difference now in 2019 than we saw in 2011.
In 2011, there was a kind of naivete, there was a sense of give us democracy, give us the right to have a free media, give us the right to speak our minds openly, to criticize our governments.
And you know what?
We didn't come and support that.
We just let these regimes come in.
You mentioned Bahrain, for example.
I know many, many people, I have good friends in Bahrain, who are certainly not militants, anything but, anything but, who were out in Pearl Roundabout, which was the Bahraini center of protest.
And that was crushed with extreme violence, which carried on for several months, and indeed continues to this day in terms of the numbers of people who've been jailed in Bahrain.
But I do think that if you look at Lebanon, Lebanon, a largely peaceful protest, despite the fact that Hezbollah has tried to make it violent, they've sent in their thugs to try and beat up these peaceful protesters.
But what people are saying now is different from 2011.
What they're saying is, forget about the democracy line.
They've learned that mistake, and they know what'll happen if they throw it out there.
We'll just ignore it.
No, what they're saying is, we want an end to corruption.
We want jobs.
We want a decent education system.
We want an electricity grid that works.
We want clean drinking water.
You guys are not providing it.
Don't give us the BS.
Don't tell us, oh, we'll do this, or we'll do that, or we'll replace this minister, or we'll have another.
No, no.
We actually want you guys out.
But we're not going to do it with violence.
We're going to do it peacefully.
And I think that, for me anyway, has a different resonance.
And I think that this next generation of protesters, because if you look at the Arab population, 60 to 70% is under the age of 30.
And these young people are not going to take what their parents took.
They're simply not going to do it.
And even in the most repressive societies, the message is seeping through.
Right.
And that's such an important point about the youth.
And I know it's not completely across the board, but more or less right from Algeria to Pakistan.
And this is the case.
You have at least substantial pluralities, if not outright majorities, or even super majorities of millennial youth.
I mean, for all the talk about bringing the third world, and especially the so-called Arab world, into modernity and all of that, well, here's your opportunity.
All you got to do is stop killing them and stop setting them on fire and calling it freedom.
And actually just, you know what, we are living, and they are too, in the 21st century.
The appeal of bin Laden night, let's go back to the 700s when everything was paradise or whatever kind of narrative, is completely self-limiting.
You know, if we need, if I think we all agree, what Islam needs is an enlightenment era, well here you go.
You got these huge numbers of millennial youth who, there's no reason for them to be, you know, right-wing religious fundamentalists or political extremists in any way.
It's only, that's the situation that our, you know, your government and mine are creating for them.
These are choices that they're left to make, but shouldn't have to be that way at all.
These are the people who should be absolutely ripe to hear the good part of what Americans have to say about liberty.
Yeah, and I know, Scott, I agree with that entirely, but also I think the other lesson they've learned is that we don't need to turn to the West and expect them to support us.
We know that they're not going to support us, so we're not going to count on that.
So let's not talk about democracy or freedom of expression or free media this time.
Let's talk about what really matters to us.
Let's talk about the fact that this is so corrupt that we are being denied the basic rights, the right to be able to feed our families, the right to a decent education, to health, to decent housing.
That's what we need to focus on.
And you know, I do take, I mean, we live in very difficult times, don't we?
But I do take hope and optimism from this young generation of Arabs who are taking their destiny in their hands in a way that their parents just, it was inconceivable they could even think to do that.
So, you know, it's not all gloom and doom.
I do wish, though, I do wish, though, I would like to hear, I mean, you're right about Trump.
Trump is Trump, but I would like to hear some other voices, both here in the United Kingdom, but also most particularly, I think, in America, speak to, speak to what's happening in the Middle East in a thoughtful and constructive way.
And of course, those who have attempted are often pilloried and terribly, you know, I'm thinking about Rashida Tlaib and Omar Ilhan, but there are other voices that should be speaking up, I think.
And I think, you know, it really is important, and this is what I keep kicking the can and being frustrated about, that, you know, we show some commitment to the courage and acknowledge it and support it.
And of course, Trump's not going to do that.
I mean, what did Trump say about the demonstrations that were crushed in Egypt back in September?
He said, everybody has demonstrations.
I'm not concerned.
Egypt has a great leader.
OK, that's Trump.
Well, you know, you've got all these Democratic contenders.
Let's hear from them.
One of my frustrations in this election that we've got coming up on on Thursday is no one's talking about foreign policy.
No one's talking about the Middle East, Middle East, the particular area of expertise and a market, indeed, for the United Kingdom.
No one's talking foreign policy.
And I find that, you know, really frustrating.
Well, you know, as we're discussing, there's essentially nothing to say about it.
It's negative stuff about what the U.K. government and the U.S. government have done and have been doing over there.
There's a thing today I'm not sure if you saw is just breaking in The Washington Post.
It's a secret history of the Afghan war conducted by the special inspector general for Afghan Reconstruction.
And essentially, it says that the critics were right all along, that the government knew it all along and lied all along.
For now, the longest war in American history, 18 years of war in Afghanistan.
And they always knew this is never going to work on its own terms.
We're going to do it anyway.
And they've killed tens, maybe more than 100,000 people.
There are certainly more than 100,000 Afghans, more than 2000 Americans, 2400 and around 20 dead Americans and other hundreds of other NATO guys.
And they knew they were lying all along.
They knew that they were never going to figure out how to put Kabul in charge of the whole country as some strong national government and all of this stuff.
And they just keep going anyway.
And so, you know, again, about what you're saying about there's no discussion of it.
What's to discuss other than all of these guys ought to be, you know, banished from our countries and, you know, let them go live in Fallujah and see how they like it.
And so there's since there's really nothing else to say about it, it all goes unsaid, I guess.
Well, you know, you got to keep you got to keep shouting into the into the void, I think.
And I think it's really important that we hear these voices and that we give opportunities for these voices to to be heard and to speak.
And I really I go to a lot of conferences and years ago I go to these conferences and I was a bunch of white guys sitting around telling the Arabs what they were doing wrong, you know, and there'll be a few old Arab guys nodding their heads and saying, oh, you're being too critical.
You don't understand.
Change comes slowly.
Now, I go to these conferences, I look around the table, there's a few old guys like me, but you know what?
It's young Arabs, young Arab academics, young Arab journalists who are really taking the bull by the horn and are speaking now in a way that, you know, is positive.
I want to stress the positive on this thing.
I think it is important that that we have an I believe we have an obligation to create a space and opportunities and moments.
And when we have, you know, appalling, you know, statements from our leaders or just the decision to completely ignore, for example, what's happening in the jails in Egypt.
I think we have to challenge that.
I think we owe to those people.
I think we owe to ourselves, actually, really, if we believe in democracy, if we care about who we are and what our core values are, then we need to be speaking up.
And I'll keep calling for that.
I'll keep shouting.
So yeah, I won't shut up, Scott, I won't.
That's good.
Well, you're a great writer and focus like a laser right on what matters the most.
I'm completely with you there.
And I'm very happy to have made your acquaintance here and to have your time on the show today.
Thanks, Bill.
Okay.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Bill Law.
He used to be a reporter for the BBC, and now he runs the gulfmatters.com.
He's at BillLaw49 on Twitter, BillLaw49.
And you can find this piece at Middle East Eye, How the Death of a President Shed Light on Egypt's Brutal Dictatorship.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
