To accelerate a workable solution, the global community of nations should exert diplomatic pressure and the use of force to stop the civilian bloodbaths in Egypt, suggests MAHBOOB A. KHAWAJA.
Egyptian military junta, historically hated and feared, appears to have gained the upper hand in cold blooded massacres of the innocent civilians demonstrating against the perpetuated military brutality – a threat to global human conscience that must be challenged with intervention to bring it to an immediate halt. After one year of political optimism and emerging hope for peaceful transformation of the anarchy-infested institutions, under democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, Egyptians were moving towards a rational path of democratic change and development. Out of nowhere, Egyptian Generals seem to have gone paranoid and more of incoming signal from the US Government that evolving democracy was not befitting to the American policies and practices in the Arab Middle East.
President Obama and others of the military-industrial complex in Washington view continuing conflicts and social-economic and political disruptions as necessary to their short and long terms aims of the foreign policy in the Arab world. They need ruthless authoritarian dictators as has been the case over half of a century to succeed and be in place for the US policy attainment at the cost of ruthlessness and military coups – a vision of America-led success leading to political destabilisation and vicious degeneration of the Arab societies. This corresponds to overwhelming militarisation goal – a warrior’s dream of glory and triumph to make the Arab-Muslims subservient to the western political mastery.
Simply, history cycle is repeating itself and nothing else. With exception of the politically elected Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders, all other Arab rulers who call themselves ‘leaders’ are devoid of knowledge, foresight and wisdom to assess the complex phenomenon of political change dominating the Arab world. Most of the contemporary oil-pumping Arab rulers are uneducated and self-centred maniacs lacking any viable political acumen and vision of the real world future. In all of their pursuits, they are subservient to the Western Masters involved in extending massive security and secret police apparatus to protect their dwellings and one-sided governance from the concerned masses in the region. Arab masses are fully awakened after prolonged neo-colonial darkness and do foresee their political future away from the conflicting political time-zones of the Arab authoritarianism.
Why the military coup in Egypt after an elected democratic Government? All available evidence suggests that it was a foreign instigated military intervention against the Egyptian people. Its immediate aim was to destabilise Egypt and perpetuate another political crisis beside Palestine, killings in Syria, instability in Yemen and already down to their knees the oil exporting Arab rulers, to make them all subservient to the US wild dictum and to fix their minds and crush their spirit ever to challenge US-Israel in the Middle East.
Egypt was politically incapacitated by the continued authoritarianism. But President Morsi was on a right course to rebuild Egyptian economy and political institutions. Undoubtedly, nobody else could have done better than the Muslim Brotherhood which is a well-established organisation for over 80 years to pursue a Welfare State in Egypt. There is no other party or leader in Egypt to exhibit any miracles and benefits to the masses out of nowhere. If one claims to have done unthinkable, it is false and delusional of the resources and capacity of Egypt.
So why a military coup under foreign dictates? Opportunist military dictators do not build progressive societies nor contribute to sustainable political change and people’s emancipation. Today’s Egypt under military rule is no exception to this sickening cruelty by man against man. Egyptian Generals do not represent an invincible army but a camouflaged combination of in-house corrupt and divided apparatus, often looking to opportunism of their own to control and manage the Egyptian economy.
It is widely known that many Egyptian political elite including the Generals own or have investments in the construction and developmental projects being carried out with foreign assistance. America provides some $1.3 billion annual aid to the Egyptian development projects and military institutions. John Grant (“Despite Having Wringing, Cairo Massacres Suit US Policy.” OpEdNews: 8/17/2013) illustrates the contemporary face of the Obama administration on the current Egyptian political turmoil:
“President Obama’s “condemnation” of the Egyptian military’s massacre of civilians sounded like obligatory ass-covering…. The sense of absurdity in the air takes one back to the halcyon days of Richard Nixon and his “credibility gap,” which now seems like child’s play. Incredibly, even John McCain has a more critical analysis of the Egyptian coup…. We have repeatedly called on the Egyptian military and security forces to show restraint,” he told the press. It was like the US was saying to General Sisi, “We wish you could be nicer…. Having watched two-faced US operations for decades now, I tend to lean toward the latter. That is, that policy formulators in Washington and Tel Aviv have concluded that an Egypt cleansed of Islamic influence is in their interests. So, therefore, it’s necessary to crank up instruments of public relations like Earnest Josh to run interference with reality.”
The daily planned massacres of the people cannot go unabated and unchallenged; otherwise, it is a burden on the civilized human conscience. After all, what is the role and importance of the UNO and its Council responsible for global peace and security matters. Those occupying the five major powerful seats in the UN Security Council must initiate immediate actions to stop this bloody unwarranted human carnage. So far, the UNO appears to be a silent spectator on the major political issues involving the peace and minds of global mankind.
Some of the Arab rulers enriched with wealth generated by oil exports, and more precisely, equipped with small wisdom and big mouth make sluggish statements encouraging the Egyptian Generals to crackdown on the public and to destroy the well-organised publicly supported Muslim Brotherhood. They rejoice that General Sisi has geared to dismantle the democratically elected Government of Egypt as it offers encouragement to all the authoritarian rulers to maintain their grips over new emerging public awareness and the movement for political change and reformation across the neo-colonial dominated Arab governance.
If these rulers were wise and farsighted, they should have welcomed the peaceful change in Egypt and the election of President Morsi – a man of intellect and futuristic imagination for political change. If rationality is to assert its place, President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood had inherited essentially a corrupt culture of governance overthrowing more than sixty years of military governance. It was unthinkable that the phenomenon of peaceful change could produce positive economic and political results overnight for all the Egyptians. Egyptian youths and the ordinary folks showed marvellous imagination and courage to overthrow Hosni Mubarak and to get rid of the oppressive military control over the civilian life.
Jacob Heilbrunn (“Obama’s Egypt Address: A License to Kill”: Information Clearing House: 8/17/2013) provides a critical insight into Obama’s mind how he sees the US half-heated cynical engagement in the whole affair:
“If he was ever apprehensive, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi can relax. Obama spoke but he did not speak a language that the generals will interpret as anything but a license to kill. So much for Obama’s lofty expressions about a new beginning in his address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009….
“What Obama’s foreign policy appears to amount to is abdication, a passive surrender to events. Egypt is not Syria. America has long been directly, intimately engaged in its affairs. But Obama is acting as though he’s an innocent bystander, wringing his hands over the terrible things he’s witnessing but incapable of actually trying to influence events. No doubt Obama was right to state: “America cannot determine the future of Egypt.” But this is a straw man. Who said America could determine its future? What it could have attempted to do was nudge Egypt toward compromise. Now it may be too late. Obama may have acted like he was putting Egypt on notice, but the only thing the Generals will end up noticing is his passivity.”
America is becoming irrelevant and its global importance in political affairs is diminishing fast, observed the internationally reputable scholar Noam Chomsky because America acts contrary to the interests of its own people (“The U.S. Behaves Nothing Like a Democracy, But You’ll Never Hear About It in Our ‘Free Press’.” Information Clearing House: 8/17/2013):
“American power is diminishing, as it has been in fact since its peak in 1945, but it’s still incomparable. And it’s dangerous. Obama’s remarkable global terror campaign and the limited, pathetic reaction to it in the West is one shocking example. And it is a campaign of international terrorism – by far the most extreme in the world. Those who harbour any doubts on that should read the report issued by Stanford University and New York University, and actually I’ll return to even more serious examples than international terrorism….
“Well, another important feature of RECD is that the public must be kept in the dark about what is happening to them. The “herd” must remain “bewildered”. The reasons were explained lucidly by the professor of the science of government at Harvard – that’s the official name – another respected liberal figure, Samuel Huntington. As he pointed out, “power remains strong when it remains in the dark. Exposed to sunlight, it begins to evaporate.… As I mentioned, Obama’s now conducting the world’s greatest international terrorist campaign – the drones and special forces campaign. It’s also a terror-generating campaign. The common understanding at the highest level [is] that these actions generate potential terrorists. I’ll quote General Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus’ predecessor. He says that “for every innocent person you kill”, and there are plenty of them, “you create ten new enemies”.
All the monsters of history are to be found among the absolute leaders exercising absolute power in disregard of the interests of people. Military intervention and its anarchy turned insanity is unmindful of the innocent massacres in the streets of Cairo. Military dictators have replaced Pharaoh to make Egypt a land of unpredictable warring people. It makes no sense why the Egyptian Generals should intervene and stop a new chapter of democratic change and development in Egypt’s modern political history. Continued military coups and political chaos would serve the interests and priorities of the western political masters, not the hopes of the besieged Arab people or emerging democracy.
Noam Chomsky knows what America is doing in Egypt and its short and long terms strategic aims in the region to support Israel political supremacy over all other members of the Arab states. Arab rulers are entrapped and are willingly fulfilling the aims of the US intransigent foreign policy. They have no rational sense of time and history. They have no capacity of any kind to find a peaceful solution in Egypt or elsewhere.
To accelerate a workable solution, the global community of nations should exert diplomatic pressure and the use of force to stop the civilian bloodbaths in Egypt. It is not out of line to have the ICC threaten the military junta with charges of crimes against humanity for killings of the so many civilians. The Generals have no rational base to rule Egypt against its masses. There is no peace and no stability unless the major global powers come out to stop the vengeful bloody military insanity generating greater moral and intellectual darkness and political belligerency across the Arab world.
[DR. MAHBOOB A. KHAWAJA specialises in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Publishing, Germany, May 2012]