Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is the great Adam Morrow, he's on the phone live from Cairo and there's been a hell of a lot going on there.
Welcome back Adam, how are you doing?
I'm good, I'm good.
How are you doing Scott?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us today.
It's IPSnews.net for Interpret Service, click the Middle East section there, you'll find Adam Morrow right away.
So the results are in and I guess everybody already knew but now it's official that the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, the second Muslim Brotherhood candidate after the first one was unchosen somehow by the military, Morsi I believe is his name, has become the new President of Egypt.
So is everybody happy and they won their revolution?
TV said that Tahrir Square was thrilled.
Yeah, people are very happy, people are very relieved.
Even people who weren't Morsi supporters are very relieved also that this last week is finally over, this long week of uncertainty is finally over.
There were a lot of fears, as you know the presidential runoff was actually held on the 16th and the 17th, that was more than a week ago now and we had to wait about 8 days for the results to finally be announced and there were a lot of fears but it certainly looked for a period there, it looked like they were about to just simply steal the election and name Shafiq the President, in which case people were really bracing for a wave of serious unrest or even possible violence or even a wave of false flag operations that would then be blamed on the Brotherhood and then would sort of plunge the country into this Algeria scenario that everybody was talking about.
So yeah, people are extremely relieved here that it's finally been settled.
All right, now all the reports were that the military had gone ahead and cancelled all the President's powers anyway, so that it didn't even really matter, this guy is just as much of a figurehead as if he was in favor of the whole system as it already exists like Mubarak was.
Sure, that being said though, I mean there's something to be said for the popular mandate that the Brotherhood won through elections, both the last presidential elections and parliamentary elections late last year, so they do have a popular mandate to start work, to start working.
Well, so when they disbanded the Parliament, was that just temporary until we're done with the results of the election kind of thing, or did they dissolve the Parliament?
Yeah, that's still up in the air.
The Brotherhood themselves and many members of Parliament are saying that, are basically refusing it.
I've heard statements from them saying, look, we'll hold parliamentary sessions in Tahrir Square if we have to.
And I also just heard that several legal appeals have been filed at different courts challenging that dissolution of Parliament, which itself was based on a decision by the high constitutional court here that found the regulations for last year's parliamentary elections to be unconstitutional.
It was a matter of, it had to do with the breakdown between seats reserved for individual candidacies and seats reserved for party affiliates.
So it's a very technical thing, and I know it's been challenged.
So the fate of Parliament, I think, is still sort of up in the air.
That is true.
Much more serious though was this constitutional addendum that the military council announced about a week ago, and that basically apparently strips the president of a lot of his prerogative.
It also takes the Parliament's right to choose members of a constitution-drafting body and co-ops it to itself.
So now not only have they sort of dissolved Parliament, but they've also assumed control of the constitution-writing process.
So I've heard it described by, I mean, lots of people describe it as nothing less than a soft coup.
How that's going to affect the new president, immediately we're going to find out in the coming days what the fate of the Parliament will be, I imagine, will soon be determined.
But I think there's going to be a lot of legal wrangling in the weeks ahead.
Alright, now, so when I read that this guy Morrissey is a graduate of USC, and that he taught at the University of California at Northridge, or one of these, I'm getting that wrong, wait a minute, CSUN professor, I don't know, whatever university that is, am I wrong to just leap to the conclusion that, oh, well, he's a CIA agent?
Yeah, I can't really say one way or the other, I do have to admit it is strange that a lot of these leading Islamist figures here do have these ties, one way or the other, to the U.S.
If you remember, there was a cellist candidate who was disqualified, I think it was in April, it was earlier this year, there was a big cellist candidate who was disqualified from the presidential race because it was determined that his mother had U.S. citizenship.
Which is strange, coming from these guys who, you know, really talk the talk against the U.S. and U.S. foreign policy and U.S. support of Israel, and that sort of thing, I have to admit, it is an interesting fact.
What it means, I can't say one way or the other, there's always been talk of CIA infiltration in the Muslim Brotherhood, I can't verify that one way or the other, but I think we'll certainly, I mean, the proof is going to be in the pudding in the coming months.
I think one of the first real tests that we're going to see is the Rafa issue, which we talk about a lot, is the Gaza border crossing issue, which I know he has said that one of his first acts would be to open the Rafa border, so now he will have a chance to put his money where his mouth is, and we'll see if they actually do that, or if they ham and haw.
But what's interesting in this case, though, and again, this is an important point, what makes it better, what makes a Morsi presidency better than a Shafiq presidency is, at the very least, even if you assume that the upper ranks, the upper echelons of the group are infiltrated somehow, or co-opted, or whatever, they still have a very broad base of popular supporters who definitely can't all be co-opted, you know?
I mean, this is like, that's a grassroots, or very authentic base of support that sincerely believes in these principles, and if he does, if the president or if the leader of the group does start to ham and haw, and try to, you know, try to somehow get out of these promises that he's made, you're going to see pressure from the lower ranks, which is something you already saw in the days of the revolution, and shortly afterwards, when the group leadership started to, you know, started to make decisions that were, that many deemed questionable.
You had the lower ranks, or the youth groups associated with the Brotherhood, started to defect, or at least threatened to defect, and I think large swathes of them actually left.
So, that is the difference between, at least the Brotherhood president is going to come under extreme pressure from his rank and file, whereas a Shafiq presidency, I mean, would have been co-opted from top to bottom, if you see my point.
Sure, yeah, I mean, I guess it's within the realm of imagination that once the parliament and the presidency has been established, and they have such a broad-based popular constituency that they have to represent, or, I don't know, lose out to who, it seems possible that they could ebb away at the power of the military and create a more civilianized economy and society there, instead of having all the power in the council, although that sure is a long way to it.
I don't know how else to do it, other than get in a war with them, which doesn't seem like it would work very well.
They're the military, I think.
Well, they're very pragmatic.
I think we also mentioned that last time, the pragmatic nature of the Brotherhood.
And they've done a lot of negotiating, and they've sort of played this delicate political dance with the military council here, ever since the revolution, they've sort of gone back and forth.
I'm sure it's involved lots of behind-the-scenes closed-door meetings and that sort of thing, which led a lot of their critics on the left here to accuse them of selling out the revolution, you know, cooperating with the ruling council, with the ruling military council, to the detriment or at the expense of the revolution and the revolutionaries.
And I think that's kind of a naive, I think that's sort of a naive way to look at it.
I think, in fact, they're just being pragmatic, and I think they're looking at doing things in a much more gradual way.
Yeah.
All right, wait, I'm sorry.
Hold it right there, Adam.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Adam Morrow from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net, and we'll be live on the phone from Cairo after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Adam Morrow.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
He's in Cairo, Egypt, and we're talking about the results of the election.
Now, tell me real quick here, Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, has won the election.
When does he actually become president?
Has he already been sworn in, or how does that work?
This is another interesting thing.
Exactly where he's going to be sworn in is another issue, because I think the Brotherhood wants him to be sworn in in front of Parliament, which is dissolved, and I think the military council wants him to be sworn in in front of this high constitutional court.
And it's that same high constitutional court that was ultimately responsible for the dissolution of Parliament.
So if he ends up being sworn in in front of that high court, it's the same as if he was acknowledging or recognizing the validity of the court's order to dissolve Parliament.
So I think that, too, is still up in the air.
But he will be sworn in one way or the other, I think, within a week.
Within a week, okay.
Well, that'll be interesting to watch and see.
According to the official timetable, that's the plan.
Yeah, I see what you mean about the symbolism there, about whether he goes along with that or not.
But you can see, I mean, you can see just how convoluted and how sort of confused, you know, the entire political scene is here.
You know, voting in a president whose powers are still undetermined because of the lack of a constitution, the fight over who is going to write that constitution, who has the authority to appoint the members of the body that will be mandated with drafting that constitution.
Very things are very, very much up in the air politically.
But as I was saying earlier, I just wanted to say very quickly that I think the Brotherhood – I don't know how this is being covered in the Western media.
I imagine there's probably a lot of scaremongering, you know, Egypt falls to the Muslim Brotherhood and all this sort of thing.
But I think something we were mentioning, we were touching on earlier, is just the very pragmatic nature of the Brotherhood and their very gradualist way of doing things.
And they've come out several times – Morsi himself has come out and declared that there would be no radical changes to, you know, the way women are expected to dress or, you know, things about the selling of alcohol or these, you know, these red-button issues have sort of come out and said there wouldn't be any radical things like that.
They've come out and said that, you know, the Camp David peace agreement will remain intact, you know, for the time being.
It may eventually – certain clauses of it may eventually be put before a popular referendum, but nothing really big is going to happen, certainly in the near-term future.
They're not going to make any massive, insane policy decisions in the near-term future, I don't think.
Certainly when, like we said, you know, his authority is still indeterminate.
I think we're going to spend a considerable amount of time still, you know, focusing on the domestic issues, domestic political issues before any major policy changes will be seen.
Yeah, well, you know, I was going to ask you about both of those things, in fact, because I think as far as, you know, the TV propaganda for the Rubes goes, the question is whether the new regime is going to be like the Taliban and throw adulterous women down the well and all this crazy stuff, or act like our Saudi allies and cut thieves' hands off and that kind of thing.
But then in D.C. what they're worried about is that other thing, independence, and whether, you know, Islamic extremism is going to mean an insistence that D.C. has to butt out at least most of the time.
And that's probably what's got everybody in a panic there at, you know, the State Department at the Pentagon.
Right, right.
That is what it boils down to.
I mean, in the 30 years of Mubarak, and I mean, I can't speak for before that, but probably the same.
But certainly in the 30 years under Mubarak, I mean, Egypt, as far as I could tell, Egypt didn't have an independent foreign policy.
And if this means, if this means that the Morsi victory actually means that Egypt from now on will have an independent foreign policy, that is definitely something that has got to be freaking out Washington big time, especially given the size of Egypt, its strategic importance, its location.
You know, it's got the Suez Canal, not to mention the very long border with Israel, which is probably the most important thing in Washington to the, you know, to the policy makers in Washington.
So yeah, that is a very good question.
Will Egypt actually pursue an independent foreign policy from now on?
You know, I'm not an insider enough to be able to answer that question.
I think we'll be able to see in the months ahead.
Like I said, the...
Well, one thing that's clear is that them being Muslimists, Islamists, in whatever degree, in no way precludes the idea that the Americans would work with them just fine or try to, as we see in Afghanistan of old, in Syria and Libya right now.
Right.
Well, I mean, as an American, I say I don't think it should.
I mean, it certainly shouldn't.
I mean, if you're dealing with, certainly if you're dealing with another democratically elected government, I mean, there's no reason why it should pose a problem.
Well, that is always the American government standard.
Like they said, they always said to the Israelis that you don't have to deal with Yasser Arafat.
He's not the democratically elected leader of anything.
And then they democratically elected Hamas.
And then for some reason, that didn't gain them any legitimacy.
Right, right.
I know Hamas is certainly very happy about this win, but...
Because they, what, they're just a break-off group of the Muslim Brotherhood in the first place, right?
Yeah, yeah, they are a break-off group.
It's very ambiguous exactly how those two groups were.
I think they're, from what I understand, that they're entirely independent of one another.
I mean, they're sort of under the same general umbrella, but from what I can understand, I don't, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt certainly is not telling the Hamas people what to do in the Gaza Strip or in Syria or...
But at least they can predict warmer relations.
From what I can tell, they both do their own thing.
All right, so as you mentioned already, they announced that, you know, they don't expect any of their foreign policies to change anytime soon.
If they change at all, it's not like they're going to become an aggressor against Israel, like in somebody's fears or something like that, I'm sure there are people freaking out right now in Israel, but really, if anything, what they're going to do is open up the border with Gaza and allow Gaza to be something other than a big prison.
That's like the most likely near-term effect of this, if anything, is to change at all.
Right.
Well, another knock-on effect of this will be that I don't think the Israelis will have as free a hand as they used to, you know, to beat the crap out of the Gazans like they did in the 2009 CAF-led operation.
If you remember at the time, I mean, Egypt kept its border closed even when they were being, you know, I think 1,500 of them were killed in that operation.
It was just an incredible humanitarian disaster, and for the whole 21 days that it happened and Egypt, under Mubarak, kept the border firmly shut to medical aid and, you know, to food and stuff.
I mean, it was really, really bad.
Something like that would absolutely never, would never be allowed to happen.
If a similar incident happened again, the pressure for Egypt to get directly involved would be much, much greater.
So this is something, this is one thing I think, like I said, the Israelis will have.
Well, we hope that would deter the Israelis from doing something like that again, rather than just be a recipe for a big war coming soon.
Right, exactly.
I think it's a deterrent, I think it's a very strong deterrent.
Yeah.
Well, I definitely hope so.
And yeah, you know, I don't know too much about it, but I know that Robert Dreyfus's book, Devil's Game, he talks all about how the CIA worked with the Muslim Brotherhood, how really the British did before that, and we kind of inherited the Muslim Brotherhood from them, because they were an alternative to the Nationalists, Nasserites, and also to all the Socialists and Communists as well, and so they supported, you know, right up through at least the 1980s, and I guess in the Balkans too, went, aligned with the most right-wing Muslims around as best they could in pretty much every situation.
Right, right.
I haven't read the book, and nor do I consider myself really an expert in the Muslim Brotherhood, but that being said, I do think there's a lot of propaganda going on, you know, there's a lot of propaganda out there, and it is possible that a book like that might be, you know, might be some kind of, you know, some kind of propaganda against them to paint them.
Well, I don't think so, but actually, I don't mean to misparaphrase the book either, because I don't think he makes any claim that the Muslim Brotherhood works for the CIA right now.
This is all historical work here.
Okay, okay.
I'd just be very careful of a lot of the...
It's worth your read.
I think you'll really like it, actually.
I'd be interested to hear what you think of it.
No, no, I'll definitely look for it.
I'll definitely look for it.
Yeah.
I would just be careful of a lot of the stuff you might find floating around in the mainstream media about, you know, about the Muslim Brotherhood, and the sort of thing.
I'd just be wary, you know what I mean?
Just double-check its sources, and that sort of thing.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, you just have to use your best judgment.
In the case of Libya, there was one where they said, I think McClatchy Newspaper said, hey, wow, our new man in Libya has been living just outside of Langley, Virginia for the past 20 years.
So at that point, I think we can all be 100% confident he's just a CIA spy.
This guy, well, he was living in California, over there near the Rand Corporation.
Flip a coin.
I don't know.
Anyway.
Well, then you have the president of Afghanistan, Karzai, over there, who was a UNICAL executive for years.
Yeah, well, it was Khalilzad who chose him.
But yeah, same difference.
Yeah.
In fact, Khalilzad was the guy that wrote the 1991 defense planning guidance that Wolfowitz took the credit for.
The big no more near-peer competitor imperial plan.
So in your face.
Isn't that interesting?
It's a very small world, that neocon world, it turns out.
I've got to say, though, there's nothing direct, nothing as direct as those two examples that we just gave, though, that you could get on the Muslim Brotherhood, at least as far as I know currently.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I would doubt it.
I think, and I didn't mean to make Bob Dreyfuss's book sound that way, either.
I think, if I'm just guessing, the last time, the last, you know, documented friendship going on there would have been, you know, back in the late 70s or something, who knows?
Maybe before then.
That being said, though, Scott, I'm not entirely dismissing it.
You know, I mean, people really, really have to watch.
You know, people really, really have to be worried, because there are agents everywhere, especially in post-revolution Egypt.
You know, it's sort of like, hey, the Americans and the Saudis have a tremendous task of trying to undo and or co-opt the Arab Spring in every place that they possibly can here.
So, you know, everybody watch your back.
All right.
Well, thank you.
It's always great talking with you, Adam.
I appreciate it.
And I hope we can do it again soon as events develop over there.
Looking forward to the next time.
And the way things are going here, I'm sure it won't be long before there's some new breaking development.
Yeah.
Well, you just keep writing and I'll keep reading them.
Excellent.
All right.
Thanks again, everybody.
That is Adam Morrow from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net, and we'll be right back.
