RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://melaniephillips.com/the-earthquake-in-the-arab-and-islamic-world

Is Foreign Secretary William Hague still hymning the brave new dawn of democracy in Egypt? The Daily Telegraph reported this morning:

‘To the dismay of the secular liberal forces behind February’s overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, Islamist parties dominated the first phase of the Egyptian election, according to provisional results.

‘The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, as expected, emerged with the largest share with 36.6 per cent of the vote. Defying expectations, the far more fundamentalist al-eNour – the “Party of Light” – emerged in second place with 24.4 per cent. It is backed by Egypt’s growing community of Salafists, adherents of one of the most puritanical strains of Islam.

‘With the moderately Islamist al-Wesat winning 4.3 per cent of the vote, religious parties are just shy of a two-thirds majority that would give them the power to draft a new constitution without reference to secular rivals, which made a poor showing.

‘The rise of al-Nour has caused particular alarm among liberals. Their leaders openly espouse the introduction of the harshest interpretation of Islamic law. They call for women to be segregated and veiled, the ban of alcohol, the stoning of adulterers and the amputation of the hands of thieves.

You don’t say. Well folks, you read it here first months ago.

It is hard to overstate the extent to which the UK and US governments have helped bring about the very opposite of what they declared they were promoting in Egypt. They helped oust Mubarak, a leader who was not only explicitly useful to the west but who had kept down the Muslim Brotherhood, on the crassly idiotic grounds that the ‘Arab spring’ revolt there would usher in democracy.

What they have helped bring about instead is the now almost certain installation of a hyper-Islamist government.  In domestic terms, its near-guaranteed tyrannical and medieval subjugation of the Egyptian people to the dictates of fanatical Islam will doubtless make them look back on the hated Mubarak regime as a relative golden age of freedom. As far as the rest of the world is concerned it means that, thanks to the UK and US, a huge Arab country which helped keep anti-western forces at bay will now be (notwithstanding its bankruptcy and the fact that it cannot even feed its own people) at the forefront of those forces. What a legacy Obama and Cameron have bequeathed to the world: subjugation and the grand jihad.

The radicalisation of Egypt is taking place, however, against the backdrop of a wider ferment in the region whose ultimate outcome cannot at present be discerned. In Syria, Assad seems doomed. What follows once he departs the stage there will most likely be civil war in Syria – but with the capacity to escalate rapidly into a full-blown regional sectarian conflict.

For Syria’s backers, Shi-ite Iran, will be desperate to stop the ascendancy of Sunni Islam in Syria. What may develop, therefore, is a regional war between, on one side, the Shia of Iran, Iraq and perhaps those in Saudi Arabia too against on the other side the Sunni bloc including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco (whose newly elected regimes are in fact Islamist wolves in democratic sheep’s clothing) and the Gulf States.

In other words, the Sunni Islamists who are at war with the free world will be at war with the Shia Islamists who are at war with the free world. So what does all this mean for the free world? If its enemies are fighting each other, will the threat to the west diminish – or increase?

The question is of course unanswerable – too many unknown unknowns, as someone once said, not to mention all the known unknowns.

Meanwhile, Iran may be on the brink of making its first false move in a long while. The unexplained explosions at its military installations, one of which almost completely destroyed its missile testing facility near Tehran along with a slew of top officials,  appear to be driving the regime nuts – as they are doubtless intended to do. As Lee Smith writes, the destabilisation of the regime caused by these explosions, the paranoia induced by the suspicion that America and/or Israel have managed to infiltrate these programmes so effectively they can destroy them, may provoke the regime into making the first open move in a war which will eventually bring it down.

Hold on to your hats.