RICH LOWRY: THE BROTHERHOOD DELUSION
http://www.politico.com/story/2012/11/the-brotherhood-delusion-richard-lowry-84358.html
The great, acerbic 19th-century satirist Ambrose Bierce defined a revolution as “an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.” He would understand events in Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak very well.
In the signature revolution of the Arab Spring, the country turned its back on a secular dictatorship only to fall into the arms of what looks like a budding Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship. Meet the new pharaoh, same as the old pharaoh. Except Egypt’s old form of misgovernment may soon look progressive by comparison.
Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi’s decree neutering the judiciary is the latest act in his steady consolidation of power. While he assiduously builds a dictatorship, the Obama administration just as assiduously tells itself bedtime stories about his good intentions. It’s a perfect division of labor — he goes about his empire-building with a clear-eyed realism; we consider it through a gauzy lens of delusion.
Since the end of Mubarak, the air has been thick with descriptions of the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi as moderates, as basically no more than Islamic social democrats. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called the Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular.” If he had been speaking of the Church of England, he might have been right.
Unfortunately, the Brotherhood’s credo is, “Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law; the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.” And it’s not kidding. Morsi summarized his program during the campaign as “the sharia, then the sharia, and finally the sharia.” (Unlike President Barack Obama, at least he had an agenda.)
Eric Trager of The New Republic describes how Brotherhood recruiting emphasizes rigidity. “Throughout this process,” he writes, “rising Muslim Brothers are continually vetted for their embrace of the Brotherhood’s ideology, commitment to its cause, and — most importantly — willingness to follow orders from the Brotherhood’s senior leadership.” In sum, he says, it is “a cultish organization that was never likely to moderate once it had grasped power.” Obviously, Trager would never make it as national intelligence director.
After Mubarak’s fall, we fooled ourselves about the level of support for the Brotherhood. We fooled ourselves about the Brotherhood abiding by its promise not to run for the presidency. We fooled ourselves about what a Morsi victory would mean for democracy. Why stop fooling ourselves now?
Morsi staged his latest power grab on Thanksgiving Day in the immediate aftermath of working with Obama to get a cease-fire in hostilities between Hamas (a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot) and Israel. In a New York Times piece that ought to be preserved in amber as a record of 21st-century liberal naiveté, the paper reported that in his talks with Morsi, “Mr. Obama felt they were making a connection.” How sweet.
“He was impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence.” And who can resist the lure of pragmatic confidence?
“He sensed,” the paper continued, in a gushing tone, “an engineer’s precision with surprisingly little ideology.”
This is the most embarrassing man-crush misjudgment of a noxious foreign leader since George W. Bush claimed to have peered into Vladimir Putin’s soul.
Obama famously disdained Mitt Romney. But the devotee of an Islamist organization about to stage a self-coup in the most important Arab country in the Middle East? Now, that’s a man he can understand and work with.
The business about an engineer’s precision is priceless. What did the president expect? Morsi to try to convert him to Islam and harangue him about Malia and Sasha not wearing head scarves?
Morsi didn’t get where he is today without rationally calculating his interests and those of the Brotherhood. He probably has many crisply precise conversations every day; that doesn’t make his ultimate goal any less unreasonable. Mussolini might have talked with Obama calmly and impressively — like an engineer, even — about the rail line from Rome to Florence; that wouldn’t have made him any less noxious.
The administration’s reaction to Morsi’s decree has been, “Well, golly, we hope everyone can talk things through.” White House spokesman Jay Carney thundered during his daily briefing, “We have expressed and raised concerns about the decisions and declarations of Nov. 22, and we’ll continue to do that as appropriate.” State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland chimed him with her own memorable condemnation: “It’s a little bit unclear to us … whether the various constituencies have all felt that they’ve been heard and had their views taken into account.”
In its mealy-mouthed non-condemnations, the Obama administration does no favors to the actual moderates who are in the streets of Egypt pushing to get Morsi to back down.
But delusion is hard to give up. We always want to believe that other people are just like us, that they must not believe the crazy things that they say, that they have the same practical concerns as we do. It’s simply not true of revolutionary fanatics. “This revolution was not about the price of watermelons,” Ayatollah Khamenei once told an aide worried about inflation.
Obama is subject to a more personal delusion, which is the belief that he is uniquely suited to deal with people hostile to us by convincing them we want to be their friends. This might make for nice phone calls, but it’s not going to change the convictions of a Mohamed Morsi.
The right has its own delusions, captured by the more extravagant expressions of the democratizing Bush Doctrine. Liberty may be the longing of every human heart, as Bush said, yet we have other longings as well — for power, for honor, for purity. And it isn’t always pretty. “It is human to hate,” the late political scientist Samuel Huntington once wrote.
The fall of Mubarak was heartening, but it turns out that the most prescient commentators on Egyptian events have been the so-called alarmists like the Middle East expert Barry Rubin and my National Review colleague Andy McCarthy (just out with an excoriating book on the administration’s Middle East policy, “Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy”).
If our leverage in Egypt is limited, we should still be using every bit of it to resist Morsi’s power grab. The first step is to let go of delusions — and perhaps read more Ambrose Bierce.
Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.
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