Jonathan Marshall, an independent researcher and writer, discusses his article “Obama’s Egypt Policy Breeds Terrorism;” and why even neoconservatives want the Egyptian military-led government to dial back its “campaign of indiscriminate repression.”
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Alright, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm here, I'm here, I know, music's fading out, huh?
Gettin' my ear goggles on, here.
Alright, on the line, I've got Jonathan Marshall.
He's been writing, well, at least a thing or two here at consortiumnews.com, and I paged down past his bio, unfortunately.
Here we go.
Independent researcher from California, and quite a few articles here for consortiumnews.com.
Welcome to the show, Jonathan.
How are you?
Thank you very much.
Doing fine, thank you.
Good to have you here.
Now, I read this article and I thought, you don't say, but actually it did kind of ring a little bit familiar.
There's been a Crystal Kagan split, actually, unbelievably, on the issue of Egypt ever since, I think, 2011, whether to support the rise of, the democratically elected rise of the Muslim Brotherhood or military junta to replace them again.
And so now, you've got this article about, talk about a broken clock, gettin' it right, a letter signed by Robert Kagan and Elliot Abrams, really?
Along with Ruehl-Marc Gerecht, and I don't know who Ellen Bork is, but anyway, those three are pretty hardcore neoconservatives, and they sound just like a Democrat or a Libertarian or something on Egypt confronting the Obama administration for supporting this military coup and pressing them to press the government of Egypt to back off of their police state repression.
Really?
That's right.
And I can usually count, you know, going in blindfolded on any issue, I'll disagree with them, usually pretty vehemently.
So I was pretty stunned myself to see that they had written a letter that I agreed basically word-for-word with.
I mean, especially Elliot Abrams, I mean, anyway, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Just for the benefit of your listeners, in case you didn't preview this, their letter to Secretary of State Kerry, who is now, or just a day or two ago was in Cairo, was asking him to press the case very hard with the military-backed regime in Egypt to really promote human rights, and not just to pay lip service as we usually do, but in the deeper interests of our own national security, because supporting the government while it throws thousands of opponents in jail, throws journalists into jail, disappears journalists the way they used to in Argentina under the military regime, and so on, is turning Egypt into a breeding ground for Islamist terrorism, I mean, not surprisingly, and the stakes are huge in Egypt, given that it's one of the most populous countries in the Middle East, and signatory to the Camp David Accords, and so on.
So this kind of repression is likely to blow up in not only Egypt's face, but our face, and instead, unfortunately, the Obama administration has been so intent on trying to curry favor with the regime, it's resumed arms shipments, training, all sorts of collaboration, and in past months, the State Department, even Kerry was saying in public statements, oh, the regime is moving forward nicely on human rights, well, human rights organizations have put the lie to that, the State Department's most recent human rights report put the lie to that, and these signers, not all of whom were neoconservatives, but as you mentioned, three of the leading lights in the neoconservative movement signed it, are saying, hey, this is really bad policy, time for a change.
Yeah, well, and that's the thing, too, people should know that this is not, you know, and take a look at the article, you'll see that this is not some very superficial, oh, wow, you know, Bill Kristol's buddy said something that sounds sort of kind of like something that I said one time, but in some other horrible twisted pro-war context or something, it's really not like that, I mean, they're really saying the very, you know, like, you know, intelligent analysis here that if we completely ban, more or less, relatively speaking, moderate Islamist political participation, then we force them to be radicals.
In other words, just like I've been saying since 2011, is Zawahiri is watching right now, and he's getting ready to shout his I told you so, when that was his thing all along, is that the Muslim Brotherhood were a bunch of sellouts for participating in Western power schemes and democracy and the laws of man and all this stuff, when the Americans have never let you win, they'll take it from you anyway, if you did win, watch, and then as soon as they win, that's exactly what happens, America and Saudi come and do a military coup, and it was predictable enough, and I only found out, I think sometime earlier this year, that in fact, Zawahiri did put out a podcast in the summer of 2013, saying, see, I told you so, a real Islamist fights for Al Qaeda, nevermind trying to participate in, you know, the political process.
And so the Muslim Brotherhood, who are basically a bunch of old rich Republican conservatives, get displaced and replaced by, you know, displaced by the military coup, but replaced by a bunch of radical young Bin Laden nights, who, you know, are what's left after the old conservatives humiliation here.
Yeah, yeah, the Muslim Brotherhood has had a peaceful strategy of winning through superior organization.
And ultimately, they were able to take advantage, and in the most proper way, of the kind of democratic opportunities offered by the Arab Spring.
And they won fair and square.
I think a lot of observers would agree that the government under Morsi was not particularly inclusive, he alienated a lot of people by trying to centralize power in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is kind of not very surprising, given Egypt's lack of democratic tradition.
But nonetheless, the way to get rid of them was through the ballot box, not through a coup.
And so the young Turks in the Muslim Brotherhood are tired of getting thrown in jail and being told by their elders that they should stay peaceful.
And naturally, the siren call of ISIS and other radical groups, Al Qaeda, are very, very strong in Egypt right now.
And when you think about it, Egypt's economy is very easy to disrupt through terrorism.
It's very heavily dependent on tourism.
A few bombs placed in Cairo, or at some of the major tourist sites would keep American and European tourists away from the country and dramatically reduce the country's balance of payments, and things could go downhill very fast.
So I think it's interesting, maybe I'll quote a couple of the sentences from this open letter that they wrote regarding, you know, following the resumption of arms shipments to the regime of the new President al-Sisi, who seized power in 2013.
They said, state violence, several thousand killed during street demonstrations, tens of thousands of political prisoners, hundreds of documented cases of torture or forced disappearance, sexual assault of detainees or family members, reported collective punishment of Sinai communities, possibly with weapons provided through U.S. military aid, is creating more incentives for Egyptians to join militant groups.
By carrying out a campaign of oppression and human rights abuses that is unprecedented in the country's modern history, and by closing off all avenues of peaceful expression of dissent through politics, civil society or media, al-Sisi is stoking the very fires he says he wants to extinguish.
Well, I certainly couldn't have said it better myself.
What's really remarkable about this, this is the kind of rhetoric you would tend to hear from these neocons about a country they don't like, like Syria, which is, you know, they've, as I'm sure you, your listeners are aware of this whole project to remake the map of the Middle East dating back to the mid-1990s with supporters of Netanyahu, wanting to bump off Iraq, Syria, Iran, etc.
Well, that's the kind of rhetoric they would use appealing to human rights.
But to do it against Egypt, that's something that the Netanyahu government is very opposed to doing anything that would undermine the military government of Egypt.
So this is a very interesting split.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, hold that thought right there.
And that's exactly where we'll pick it up on the other side of this break with Jonathan Marshall at ConsortiumNews.com.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jonathan Marshall writing at ConsortiumNews.com.
And we're talking about this letter by the Working Group on Egypt that they wrote to John Kerry.
It includes Robert toward a neo Reaganite foreign policy Kagan and Elliott, Iran Contra conviction and oops, arms to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Abrams.
I'm very clever with the middle name sometimes, you see.
And we're talking about how they're telling Kerry to tell the Egyptian dictatorship not to stop being a dictatorship, not the whole free elections and let the Muslim Brotherhood come back to power or anything like that.
But at least to back off the internal war against the Muslim Brotherhood and their friends that were thrown out of power because it's counterproductive.
You end up creating a real bunch of terrorists to fight by pretending that the Muslim Brotherhood are terrorists.
Basically, you're digging yourself a hole.
And so, hey, Kerry, tell Sisi to knock it off before things get out of control here.
So well, basically, I summed that up, right?
I scanned through this letter here.
I didn't see anything about it's not fair to do a military coup d'etat.
And so we ought to have free and fair elections here.
They're just saying, hey, lighten up on the torture a little bit before you turn Egypt into Syria.
We want stability there on Israel's southern border, not madness like on their northern border.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that despite all of our rhetoric, people who run our foreign policy are very ambivalent about elections.
As you may remember, when people of Gaza voted the wrong way and elected Hamas into government, the Bush administration suddenly didn't like democracy so much.
Yeah, they had Elliott Abrams funnel a bunch of guns to Fatah that fell into the hands of Hamas.
Right.
So, you know, we I think it was President Wilson or someone who said we have to teach those people to elect good men and, you know, sending the Marines if they don't.
But nonetheless, I want to give these guys and women credit for saying some very profoundly true things.
And Kerry listened a little bit a couple days ago when he was in Egypt, holding a press conference, instead of just saying things are great in Egypt the way he used to.
He said, and I quote, obviously, there has been a little bit of tension over certain issues.
Boy, that's a hard hitting statement.
And he went on to say, of course, we have to support Egyptian security forces fighting terrorists.
But then he did say we have to take care, you know, to also recognize that some are trying to seek peaceful change and political dialogue.
And if we don't, we just throw them all in jail.
We'll just get some more terrorists and we won't be safer.
It was an extremely mild rebuke of the government.
So mild that I think it basically sent, unfortunately, a message to the government, which is Washington doesn't really mean it.
They're sending they just sent us eight F-16 jets, which flew over Cairo in formation telling everyone in Egypt, hey, the Americans support the military government here.
We sent a whole bunch of other arms as well.
For Kerry to say in an English language press conference, we have a little bit of tension, was not much of a rebuke.
So I was personally quite disappointed.
I think we have a long way to go to have a sensible policy in Egypt, as in most of the rest of the Middle East.
But I guess he heard something.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
You mentioned the clean break policy there.
David Wumser and Richard Perle and the boys and, you know, obviously, Abrams and Kagan are not very far removed from that.
It does seem kind of well, I guess they have a peace deal with Egypt, but it's not like the Muslim Brotherhood nullified it or anything like that when they got elected.
And for that matter, even without a peace deal with Syria, Assad was really no more of a threat up in Syria on their northern border than the Muslim Brotherhood or for that matter, Mubarak or Sisi were on their southern border.
So why do you think the discrepancy in the policy there where they'll even support al Qaeda in order to try to overthrow Assad?
But, you know, they want such stability in Egypt at any cost, basically.
Yes.
And I would point you, I did a long article about a week or two ago for Consortium News on the history of our diplomacy with Assad and how it basically helped create the civil war.
It was an absolute disaster that Assad kept reaching out to both Israel and the United States to make a comprehensive peace deal.
He was actually negotiating with the Israeli government and had most of the peace deal nailed down and Bush and Cheney vetoed it, just stomped on the Israelis and told them not to do it.
And then once Netanyahu took power in 2009, bam, he closed it all down.
He's a much tougher ideologue.
He wants kind of total victory.
And, of course, it was his American supporters who wrote that roadmap for remaking the map of the Middle East.
So, yeah, that's one that Ron Paul complained about back in the campaign in 2008, that, you know, we don't just support the Israelis in all of their wars, but we intervene and stop them from making peace when they're trying to make peace.
I mean, that should have been the scandal of the century right there.
Ironically, the US, which is supposed to be, you know, is the world's greatest superpower, ends up constantly doing the bidding of its allies, whether Israel, you know, we sent troops into Lebanon under Reagan and we've been supporting their wars, you know, all over the place.
We also, if you think about what Iraq was all about, we were basically put up to that war by an agent of the Iranian government, Chalabi.
And so our policy has never been one to kind of think clearly what American interests are and to pursue them intelligently.
It's led to no end of catastrophe in terms of human lives and national treasure.
So I give these guys some credit.
They're ideologues.
As I say, I vehemently disagree with them most of the time.
They're usually wanting us to get into more wars, but maybe they've learned something.
And so it's not so much that I have new huge moral agreements with them, but anytime these guys can strike a note of realism, I'd say we've made a step forward because at least they're not in fantasy land of, oh yeah, we can bump off the government of Iraq and be in and out in 60 days and everything will be fine.
It's that kind of unrealism that is so catastrophic.
Well, I like to joke sometimes that I'm a reverse truther.
And I think that the Republicans and the Democrats, especially the neoconservatives, have all been working for Osama and Zawahiri all along, playing out their end of the script, exactly what Al Qaeda would have us do in any given situation for the last 14 years or something like that.
And it sounds like here you have at least Kagan, if not Crystal, scratching his head a minute and saying, well, wait a minute, do we really have to prove Zawahiri right about us on every occasion?
And again, it's not like he's saying we should have let the Muslim Brotherhood stay.
Although I think he did defend the elections and the results of the elections back in 2011 and 12.
Am I wrong about that?
Didn't he say, let's wait and see what happens here, guys, where Frank Gaffney and them are screaming to high heavens that it's, you know, the end of the world?
I can't say for sure.
But I will say, you know, the key difference is Crystal is sort of in that I hesitate to say Israel right or wrong, because a lot of these guys are not just pro-Israel.
They're pro one particular wing of Israeli politics.
It's a big mistake to think someone is pro or anti-Israel.
These guys support, you know, a very hardline Netanyahu-first policy.
And so Kagan, in a column last year in the Washington Post, had a remarkable statement where he was distinguishing his own views from those of the Israeli government.
And he said, this is not something you'd hear from Crystal.
He said to Israel, which has never supported democracy anywhere in the Middle East except Israel, the presence of a brutal military dictatorship bent on the extermination of Islamism is not only tolerable, but desirable.
But he said in Egypt, U.S. interest in Israel's perceptions of its own interest sharply diverge.
If one believes that any hope for moderation in the Arab world requires finding moderate voices, not only among secularists, but also among Islamists, America's current strategy in Egypt is producing the opposite result.
So that's a very remarkable, you know, independent view of things.
I give him credit.
Yep, absolutely.
All right.
Well, thank you, Jonathan.
I sure appreciate your work and your time on the show today.
Thank you very much.
All right.
So that's Jonathan Marshall.
He's got quite a few really great articles over there at ConsortiumNews.com.
Check them out.
This one is Obama's Egypt Policy Breeds Terrorism.
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