[Peace-discuss] Fw: Informed Comment - Greenwald video and more
Jenifer Cartwright via Peace-discuss
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Sun Jun 15 11:15:30 EDT 2014
Some good stuff here
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Informed Comment
Informed Comment
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* Lighting the Darkest Corners of Government: Review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide
* US Military Fail: Long Asian Land Wars a Route to Disaster since 1963
* And the Walls Come Tumbling Down: Israeli PM Netanyahu on Notice from both Left and Right
* Is Gen. al-Sisi Really good for Egypt’s Christians?
* The Fall of Mosul and the False Promises of Modern History
Lighting the Darkest Corners of Government: Review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide
Posted: 10 Jun 2014 09:39 PM PDT
Review of Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide
Lighting the Darkest Corners of Government: Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide Explores the Role of Journalism in the Internet Age and How Mass Surveillance Undermines Democracy (via EFF)
Book review and discussion questions for reading groups In No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald shows that a modern investigative reporter doesn’t just need the courage to take on the United States government and established media. He also needs a whole…
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This post was republished using Repost. Please read it on Informed Comment directly: http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/lighting-government-greenwalds.html
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Related video:
C-Span: “Glenn Greenwald (2014) “No Place To Hide” [New Book!]”
US Military Fail: Long Asian Land Wars a Route to Disaster since 1963
Posted: 10 Jun 2014 09:36 PM PDT
By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch.com
The United States has been at war — major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions — nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions.
Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face. They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again.
So here are five straightforward lessons — none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country — that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare:
1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn’t work. Ever.
2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn’t solve them. Never.
3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to “stabilize” or “protect” or “liberate” countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force.
4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its “warriors,” the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars.
5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in history,” the evidence is in: it isn’t.
And here’s a bonus lesson: if as a polity we were to take these five no-brainers to heart and stop fighting endless wars, which drain us of national treasure, we would also have a long-term solution to the Veterans Administration health-care crisis. It’s not the sort of thing said in our world, but the VA is in a crisis of financing and caregiving that, in the present context, cannot be solved, no matter whom you hire or fire. The only long-term solution would be to stop fighting losing wars that the American people will pay for decades into the future, as the cost in broken bodies and broken lives is translated into medical care and dumped on the VA.
One caveat. Think whatever you want about war and American war-making, but keep in mind that we are inside an enormous propaganda machine of militarism, even if we barely acknowledge the space in our lives that it fills. Inside it, only certain opinions, certain thoughts, are acceptable, or even in some sense possible.
Take for an example the recent freeing of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from five years as a captive of the Haqqani network. Much controversy has surrounded it, in part because he was traded for five former Taliban officials long kept uncharged and untried on the American Devil’s Island at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It has been suggested that Sgt. Bergdahl deserted his post and his unit in rural Afghanistan, simply walked away — which for opponents of the deal and of President Obama makes the “trade for terrorists” all the more shameful. Our options when it comes to what we know of Bergdahl’s actions are essentially to decry him as a “turncoat” or near-voluntary “terrorist prisoner” or ignore them, go into a “support the troops” mode, and hail him as a “hero” of the war. And yet there is a third option.
According to his father, in the period before he was captured, his emails home reflected growing disillusionment with the military. (“The U.S. army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good SGTs [sergeants] are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same.”) He had also evidently grown increasingly uncomfortable as well with the American war in that country. (“I am sorry for everything here. These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.”) When he departed his base, he may even have left a note behind expressing such sentiments. He had reportedly told someone in his unit earlier, “If this deployment is lame… I’m just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan.”
That’s what we know. There is much that we don’t know. However, what if, having concluded that the war was no favor to Afghans or Americans and he shouldn’t participate in it, he had, however naively, walked away from it without his weapon and, as it turned out, not into freedom but directly into captivity? That Sgt. Bergdahl might have been neither a military-style hero, nor a turncoat, but someone who voted with his feet on the merits of war, American-style, in Afghanistan is not an option that can be discussed calmly here. Similarly, anyone who took such a position here, not just in terms of our disastrous almost 13-year Afghan War, but of American war-making generally, would be seen as another kind of turncoat. However Americans may feel about specific wars, walking away from war, American-style, and the U.S. military as it is presently configured is not a fit subject for conversation, nor an option to be considered.
It’s been a commonplace of official opinion and polling data for some time that the American public is “exhausted” with our recent wars, but far too much can be read into that. Responding to such a mood, the president, his administration, and the Pentagon have been in a years-long process of “pivoting” from major wars and counterinsurgency campaigns to drone wars, special operations raids, and proxy wars across huge swaths of the planet (even while planning for future wars of a very different kind continues). But war itself and the U.S. military remain high on the American agenda. Military or militarized solutions continue to be the go-to response to global problems, the only question being: How much or how little? (In what passes for debate in this country, the president’s opponents regularly label him and his administration “weak” for not doubling down on war, from the Ukraine and Syria to Afghanistan).
Meanwhile, investment in the military’s future and its capacity to make war on a global scale remains staggeringly beyond that of any other power or combination of powers. No other country comes faintly close, not the Russians, nor the Chinese, nor the Europeans just now being encouraged to up their military game by President Obama who recently pledged a billion dollars to strengthen the U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe.
In such a context, to suggest the sweeping failure of the American military over these last decades without sapping support for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex would involve making the most breathtaking stab-in-the-back argument in the historical record. This was tried after the Vietnam War, which engendered a vast antiwar movement at home. It was at least conceivable at the time to blame defeat on that movement, a “liberal” media, and lily-livered, micromanaging politicians. Even then, however, the stab-in-the-back version of the war never quite stuck and in all subsequent wars, support for the military among the political class and everywhere else has been so high, the obligatory need to “support the troops” — left, right, and center — so great that such an explanation would have been ludicrous.
A Record of Failure to Stagger the Imagination
The only option left was to ignore what should have been obvious to all. The result has been a record of failure that should stagger the imagination and remarkable silence on the subject. So let’s run through these points one at a time.
1. American-style war doesn’t work. Just ask yourself: Are there fewer terrorists or more in our world almost 13 years after the 9/11 attacks? Are al-Qaeda-like groups more or less common? Are they more or less well organized? Do they have more or fewer members? The answers to those questions are obvious: more, more, more, and more. In fact, according to a new RAND report, between 2010 and 2013 alone, jihadist groups grew by 58%, their fighters doubled, and their attacks nearly tripled.
On September 12, 2001, al-Qaeda was a relatively small organization with a few camps in arguably the most feudal and backward country on the planet, and tiny numbers of adherents scattered elsewhere around the world. Today, al-Qaeda-style outfits and jihadist groups control significant parts of Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and even Yemen, and are thriving and spreading in parts of Africa as well.
Or try questions like these: Is Iraq a peaceful, liberated state allied with and under Washington’s aegis, with “enduring camps” filled with U.S. troops on its territory? Or is it a riven, embattled, dilapidated country whose government is close to Iran and some of whose Sunni-dominated areas are under the control of a group that is more extreme than al-Qaeda? Is Afghanistan a peaceful, thriving, liberated land under the American aegis, or are Americans still fighting there almost 13 years later against the Taliban, an impossible-to-defeat minority movement it once destroyed and then, because it couldn’t stop fighting the “war on terror,” helped revive? Is Washington now supporting a weak, corrupt central government in a country that once again is planting record opium crops?
But let’s not belabor the point. Who, except a few neocons still plunking for the glories of “the surge” in Iraq, would claim military victory for this country, even of a limited sort, anywhere at any time in this century?
2. American-style wars don’t solve problems. In these years, you could argue that not a single U.S. military campaign or militarized act ordered by Washington solved a single problem anywhere. In fact, it’s possible that just about every military move Washington has made only increased the burden of problems on this planet. To make the case, you don’t even have to focus on the obvious like, for example, the way a special operations and drone campaign in Yemen has actually al-Qaeda-ized some of that country’s rural areas. Take instead a rare Washington “success”: the killing of Osama bin Laden in a special ops raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan. (And leave aside the way even that act was over-militarized: an unarmed Bin Laden was shot down in his Pakistani lair largely, it’s plausible to assume, because officials in Washington feared what once would have been the American way — putting him on trial in a U.S. civilian court for his
crimes.) We now know that, in the hunt for bin Laden, the CIA launched a fake hepatitis B vaccinationproject. Though it proved of no use, once revealed it made local jihadists so nervous about medical health teams that they began killing groups of polio vaccination workers, an urge that has since spread to Boko Haram-controlled areas of Nigeria. In this way, according to Columbia University public health expert Leslie Roberts, “the distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases that might otherwise not have occurred.” The CIA has since promised not to do it again, but too late — and who at this point would believe the Agency anyway? This was, to say the least, an unanticipated consequence of the search for bin Laden, but blowback everywhere, invariably unexpected, has been a hallmark of American campaigns of all sorts.
Similarly, the NSA’s surveillance regime, another form of global intervention by Washington, has — experts are convinced — done little ornothing to protect Americans from terror attacks. It has, however, done a great deal to damage the interests of America’s tech corporations and to increase suspicion and anger over Washington’s policies even among allies. And by the way, congratulations are due on one of the latest military moves of the Obama administration, the sending of U.S. military teamsand drones into Nigeria and neighboring countries to help rescue those girls kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram. The rescue was a remarkable success… oops, didn’t happen (and we don’t even know yet what the blowback will be).
3. American-style war is a destabilizing force. Just look at the effects of American war in the twenty-first century. It’s clear, for instance, that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 unleashed a brutal, bloody, Sunni-Shiite civil war across the region (as well as the Arab Spring, one might argue). One result of that invasion and the subsequent occupation, as well as of the wars and civil wars that followed: the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Syrians, and Lebanese, while major areas of Syria and some parts of Iraq have fallen into the hands of armed supporters of al-Qaeda or, in one major case, a group that didn’t find that organization extreme enough. A significant part of the oil heartlands of the planet is, that is, being destabilized.
Meanwhile, the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the tribal borderlands of neighboring Pakistan have destabilized that country, which now has its own fierce Taliban movement. The 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya initially seemed like a triumph, as had the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan before it. Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and the rebels swept into power. Like Afghanistan and Iraq, however, Libya is now a basket case, riven by competing militias and ambitious generals, largely ungovernable, and an open wound for the region. Arms from Gaddafi’s looted arsenals have made their way into the hands of Islamist rebels and jihadist extremists from the Sinai Peninsula to Mali, from Northern Africa to northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram is entrenched. It is even possible, as Nick Turse has done, to trace the growing U.S. military presence in Africa to the destabilization of parts of that
continent.
4. The U.S. military can’t win its wars. This is so obvious (though seldom said) that it hardly has to be explained. The U.S. military has not won a serious engagement since World War II: the results of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq ranged from stalemate to defeat and disaster. With the exception of a couple of campaigns against essentially no one (in Grenada and Panama), nothing, including the “Global War on Terror,” would qualify as a success on its own terms, no less anyone else’s. This was true, strategically speaking, despite the fact that, in all these wars, the U.S. controlled the air space, the seas (where relevant), and just about any field of battle where the enemy might be met. Its firepower was overwhelming and its ability to lose in small-scale combat just about nil.
It would be folly to imagine that this record represents the historical norm. It doesn’t. It might be more relevant to suggest that the sorts of imperial wars and wars of pacification the U.S. has fought in recent times, often against poorly armed, minimally trained, minority insurgencies (or terror outfits), are simply unwinnable. They seem to generate their own resistance. Their brutalities and even their “victories” simply act as recruitment posters for the enemy.
5. The U.S. military is not “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” or “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known,” or any of the similar over-the-top descriptions that U.S. presidents are now regularly obligated to use. If you want the explanation for why this is so, see points one through four above. A military whose way of war doesn’t work, doesn’t solve problems, destabilizes whatever it touches, and never wins simply can’t be the greatest in history, no matter the firepower it musters. If you really need further proof of this, think about the crisis and scandals linked to the Veterans Administration. They are visibly the fruit of a military mired in frustration, despair, and defeat, not a triumphant one holding high history’s banner of victory.
As for Peace, Not a Penny
Is there a record like it? More than half a century of American-style war by the most powerful and potentially destructive military on the planet adds up to worse than nothing. If any other institution in American life had a comparable scorecard, it would be shunned like the plague. In reality, the VA has a far better record of success when it comes to the treatment of those broken by our wars than the military does of winning them, and yet its head administrator was forced to resign recently amid scandal and a media firestorm.
As in Iraq, Washington has a way of sending in the Marines, setting the demons loose, leaving town, and then wondering how in the world things got so bad — as if it had no responsibility for what happened. Don’t think, by the way, that no one ever warned us either. Who, for instance, remembers Arab League head Amr Moussa saying in 2004 that the U.S. had opened the “gates of hell” in its invasion and occupation of Iraq? Who remembers the vast antiwar movement in the U.S. and around the world that tried to stop the launching of that invasion, the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to warn of the dangers before it was too late? In fact, being in that antiwar movement more or less guaranteed that ever after you couldn’t appear on the op-ed pages of America’s major papers to discuss the disaster you had predicted. The only people asked to comment were those who had carried it out, beaten the drums for it, or offered
the mildest tsk-tsk about it.
By the way, don’t think for a moment that war never solved a problem, or achieved a goal for an imperial or other regime, or that countries didn’t regularly find victory in arms. History is filled with such examples. So what if, in some still-to-be-understood way, something has changed on planet Earth? What if something in the nature of imperial war now precludes victory, the achieving of goals, the “solving” of problems in our present world? Given the American record, it’s at least a thought worth considering.
As for peace? Not even a penny for your thoughts on that one. If you suggested pouring, say, $50 billion into planning for peace, no less the $500 billion that goes to the Pentagon annually for its base budget, just about anyone would laugh in your face. (And keep in mind that that figure doesn’t include most of the budget for the increasingly militarized U.S. Intelligence Community, or extra war costs for Afghanistan, or the budget of the increasingly militarized Department of Homeland Security, or other costs hidden elsewhere, including, for example, for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which is buried in the Energy Department’s budget.)
That possible solutions to global problems, possible winning strategies, might come from elsewhere than the U.S. military or other parts of the national security state, based on 50 years of imperial failure, 50 years of problems unsolved and wars not won and goals not reached, of increasing instability and destruction, of lives (American and otherwise) snuffed out or broken? Not on your life.
Don’t walk away from war. It’s not the American way.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Projectand author of The United States of Fearas well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me.
Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt
Mirrored from: Tomdispatch.com
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Related video added by Juan Cole:
KTNV Channel 13 Action News: “5 US troops killed by apparent friendly fire in Afghanistan”
And the Walls Come Tumbling Down: Israeli PM Netanyahu on Notice from both Left and Right
Posted: 10 Jun 2014 09:31 PM PDT
By Carlyn Meyer
If there was any doubt about which side came out stronger from the failed Kerry peace initiative, it’s been put to rest by events since. Neither side wanted to be the first to disrupt the talks and be blamed for their demise. Once Netanyahu reneged on releasing the last contingent of Palestinian prisoners, under an agreement he made with Senator Kerry as incentive for Palestinian participation, Abbass fought tit-for-tat. First, he filed petitions for recognition with fifteen new international agencies. When Bibi called foul and still refused to hand over the prisoners, Abbas announced an agreement between Fatah and Hamas to reconcile.
Prime Minister Netanyahu should have known something was up. PM Netanyahu surely recognized trouble for Israel after a “senior US negotiator” (later revealed to be Martin Indyk) gave an interview to popular Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea that ran in Israel’s largest Hebrew-language daily. In it he said:
“There are a lot of reasons for the peace effort’s failure, but people in Israel shouldn’t ignore the bitter truth – the primary sabotage came from the settlements. The Palestinians don’t believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when, at the same time, it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state. We’re talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less. Only now, after talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale. That does not reconcile with the agreement.”
In quick succession, chief Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni held an unauthorized meeting in London with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas; the US and most of the world announced it would deal with a new technocratic government in Palestine so long as it adhered to Quartet principles; and yesterday Finance Minister Yair Lapid gave PM Netanyahu a six month deadline to make peace with the Palestinians and to stop building outside the near-Jerusalem settlements..
The abrupt break-up of the peace talks was the best thing to happen for Palestinians in years. Twenty years after the Oslo process turned into the ‘walking dead]’, Israel itself drove the final stake through its heart by stone-walling and refusing to negotiate seriously and constantly trying to back Abbas into the corner he now occupies.
NETANYAHU ATTACKED FROM BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT
According to most accounts, Netanyahu sees the handwriting on the wall as clearly as Daniel. He ‘supports’ a two-state solution as essential to Israel remaining democratic and Jewish into the future.. Along with his cohorts on the Israeli right, however, he envisions a rump Palestinian state, one not only demilitarized but accepting IDF troops stationed in the Jordan Valley for ten-plus years, sliced up by an eery and imposing barrier wall and a ‘border’ defined not by the pre-war 1967 boundaries but by decades of Israeli usurpation and settlement of Palestinian land.
Big on bluster and having no strategic options of his own to offer, Netanyahu is out on a limb with nothing but air under his feet. Instead, he face almost universal condemnation of the occupation, more economic pressure from Europe, a growing BDS movement and dissatisfaction in the business community. Famous for indecision, he’s overreached and drawn the ire of both left, right and centrist Israeli politicians
Enter Yair Lapid, head of centrist party Yesh Atid. According to the Jewish news service Ynet, pLapid read the riot act to the Prime Minister Monday night.
page 2
“Extreme right-wing forces are pushing us toward the delusional idea of annexation…but we will not allow this to happen. Yesh Atid will not only bolt from the government, it will bring it down… There’s no reason to continue building settlements in areas that won’t remain inside Israel’s border in any future accord, and there’s no reason to invest billions in infrastructure that we would eventually give the Palestinians as a gift… “
Perhaps alluding to the 2002 Arab Peace Agreement, recently reaffirmed by the Arab League, he added:
“{Israel} needs to come to the next round of peace talks with detailed maps, prepared by us, that express a side national consensus. These maps would allow us to formulate a three-part move that, at the end of which, we will be completely separated from the Palestininans and reach a wide-reaching accord with the moderate Arab states.”
Lapid called on Netanyahu to reach a treaty with Palestinians within the next six months, pointedly before new Palestinian elections take place.
Meanwhite, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman took Netanyahu on from the Right:
“”What happened yesterday, when four senior ministers gave public addresses one after the other with each proposing a different political solution, was a grotesque performance,..one minister spoke of annexation, another minister spoke of deliberation, a woman minister spoke of segmentation, and the last spoke of stagnation. That is not a government policy. We need to cut down and adopt a single political plan to bind all parts of the coalition.”
MOMENTUM SHIFTS TOWARDS PALESTINIANS
Freed from the confines of the US framework for negotiations, the Palestinian President Abbas rapidly built on his diplomatic strategy and reconciliation talks. President Abbas had already stated that Israel must freeze all settlement building for three months and agree to first negotiate borders before the Palestinians would return to the talks. Lapid’s plan dovetails with Abbas’ pledge.
The two wings of Netanuahu’s coalition are closing in on him with Lapid. Conditions are being set for the possible collapse of Netanyahu’s fragmented coalition. If the right wing falls off, The Labor Party has pledged to join a new coalition with a peace agenda. Still, the right will do everything in its power to maintain control. A month ago, Israelis ‘in the know’ were saying Netanyahu was secure. But Israeli politics is fierce and unpredictable. Nothing stays the same for long.
Both sides will go back now and try to put their houses in order for the next round, perhaps initiated by the two parties themselves.
Carlyn Meyer, former editor of the blog Read Between the Lines writes on politics from her home in Chicago.
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Related video added by Juan Cole:
The Young Turks: “It’s Great News, So Why Is Israel Upset?”
Is Gen. al-Sisi Really good for Egypt’s Christians?
Posted: 10 Jun 2014 09:29 PM PDT
By Mina Fayek
One can’t argue against the fact that the year under Islamist rule was one of the worst years in recent history for the Coptic Christians of Egypt. Many Copts view former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Abdel Fattah El Sisi, as their saviour from fundamentalist rule. During the months after the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi there was an unprecedented number of attacks on Coptic churches and Christian institutions throughout the country. This sparked renewed fears among a Coptic community who had already been suffering from discrimination for years.
Prior to the current presidential elections, the Coptic Church officially announced that it would not support any candidate and instead would encourage Copts to read the electoral programmes of both Sabbahi and Sisi, urging them to vote.
But what does Sisi offer the Middle East’s largest minority? In a recent interview, Sisi disclosed some views about Copts. He was questioned on many topics including the [Ottoman] Humayuni Decree, which is a law enacted under Ottoman rule that regulates church construction and maintenance and is notorious for the obstacles it put in place. Asked whether he thought it should be replaced by a unified law for places of worship, and also about discrimination against Copts in government institutions including the military, SIsi looked surprised at the questions. He reserved his comments to the role of Copts in the military, denying that there was any discrimination. The anchors tried to expand on their question, detailing misrepresentation of Copts inside the army especially with regards to their promotion to higher ranks. But Sisi still avoided answering the question and told them to check the lists of those who join the army. So, according to Sisi,
there’s no discrimination against Copts in the military.
This, of course, is not true. There’s not a single Coptic Christian officer in the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), the top military body, and you can barely find any Christian officer at the rank of ‘Major General’ (eighth rank in the Egyptian military) or any higher rank. Even low-rank Christian officers or soldiers can’t join sensitive branches inside the army, like intelligence.
Elsewhere in the interview, he praised the Coptic community saying that they played a “patriotic role after June 30”, yet whereas every unit inside the army has a mosque where Muslims can practice, Christian soldiers may spend up to three or four weeks inside their units with no chapels. Copts face discrimination in other state institutions too, such as the ministry of interior; top governmental ranks such as governors and ministers; as well as university presidents.
Sisi, pushed under questioning, finally said: “we will try to offer a comfortable climate for everyone in Egypt”, which is a vague statement that promises nearly nothing.
When asked about the ultraconservative Salafi Al-Nour party, who announced their support for him in the elections, Sisi described them as “national patriots” and “aware of the threats that surround the country”. The Salafis are known for having very controversial views about Copts and minorities in general. For example, they oppose Copts’ right to run for presidency or to holding senior posts in the state. Their clerics also prohibit their followers from greeting Christians on Christmas or at Easter because it is “haram.” They have strongly supported the forced displacement of Christians after sectarian tensions in many regions across the country (Alexandriaand Shurba Al-Kheima, for example). Sisi, however, has nothing but praise.
In another interview, Sisi addressed the position of the state towards religion. Regarding the religion of the state, he said: “The president of the state is responsible for everything in the state, including its religion”, which is Islam according to the first article of the constitution. “I’m responsible for the values, principles, ethics and religion” he continued. More like the speech one might expect from a caliph rather than a president of a republic, if these views are implemented they are likely to raise further fears in Coptic Christian breasts.
The attempt seems to be under way to portray Sisi as no less pious and devout than the Islamists. This coincides with a vast crackdown campaign on atheists and homosexuals by the government. The head of the Alexandria police department said that he was forming a special squad for the purpose of arresting atheists who ‘promote their ideas’: “We will identify them and legalize the procedures of arresting them”. At the same time, gays and transgenders are being arrested and sentenced to prison. This is very likely to continue under Sisi’s rule.
If anything, history shows that this type of a strategy to confront Islamists will not end well for the Coptic minority. Former president Anwar El Sadat also tried to quell the Islamist critique by trying to prove that the regime was no less devout than them. He introduced article two into the constitution, which states that “the principles of Islamic Sharia are the main source of legislation”. He is well remembered for saying that he was, “a Muslim president for an Islamic country” and that Egypt was, “a country of faith and science”. By the end of Sadat’s tenure, he had ordered the late Pope Shenouda to be banished to a monastery, and jailed a number of bishops and priests.
Although the majority of Copts are perceived as supporters of Sisi and many do see him as a saviour from the Islamists, time may reveal that Sisi is not striving for their aspirations of equality or their attainment of full rights as first degree citizens. At some point, those he fails might well be expected to jump off the bandwagon and join the revolutionary arena along with their fellow Copts who already see through this.
Mina Fayek is a Cairo-based blogger and activist. He can be found on Twitter: @minafayek or his blog
Mirrored from Open Democracy
This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
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Related video:
Euronews from before the election: “Egypt’s Copts hope presidential poll will provide security”
The Fall of Mosul and the False Promises of Modern History
Posted: 10 Jun 2014 09:03 PM PDT
By Juan Cole
The fall of Mosul to the radical, extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a set of historical indictments. Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city, population roughly 2 million (think Houston) until today, when much of the population was fleeing. While this would-be al-Qaeda affiliate took part of Falluja and Ramadi last winter, those are smaller, less consequential places and in Falluja tribal elders persuaded the prime minister not to commit the national army to reducing the city.
It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments.
Those who will say that the US should have left troops in Iraq do not say how that could have happened. The Iraqi parliament voted against it. There was never any prospect in 2011 of the vote going any other way. Because the US occupation of Iraq was horrible for Iraqis and they resented it. Should the Obama administration have reinvaded and treated the Iraqi parliament the way Gen. Bonaparte treated the French one?
I hasten to say that the difficulty Baghdad is having with keeping Mosul is also an indictment of the Saddam Hussein regime (1979-2003), which pioneered the tactic of sectarian rule, basing itself on a Sunni-heavy Baath Party in the center-north and largely neglecting or excluding the Shiite South. Now the Shiites have reversed that strategy, creating a Baghdad-Najaf-Basra power base.
Mosul’s changed circumstances are also an indictment of the irresponsible use to which Sunni fundamentalists in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Oil Gulf are putting their riches. The high petroleum prices, usually over $100 a barrel, of the past few years in a row, have injected trillions of dollars into the Gulf. Some of that money has sloshed into the hands of people who rather admired Usama Bin Laden and who are perfectly willing to fund his clones to take over major cities like Aleppo and Mosul. The vaunted US Treasury Department ability to stop money transfers by people whom Washington does not like has faltered in this case. Is it because Washington is de facto allied with the billionaire Salafis of Kuwait City in Syria, where both want to see the Bashar al-Assad government overthrown and Iran weakened? The descent of the US into deep debt, and the emergence of Gulf states and sovereign wealth funds is a tremendous shift of
geopolitical power to Riyadh, Kuwait City and Abu Dhabi, who can now simply buy Egyptian domestic and foreign policy away from Washington. They are also trying to buy a Salafi State of Syria and a Salafi state of northern and western Iraq.
The fall of Mosul is an indictment of the new Iraqi army, which is well equipped and some of its troops well trained , and which seems to have just run away from the ISIS fighters, allowing some heavy weapons to fall into their hands.
It is an indictment of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and of the Shiite political elite that took over Iraq from 2005, and which has never been interested in reconciliation with the Sunni Arabs. It is not merely a sectarian issue. The particular Shiite parties that have consistently won elections are those of the religious right among Shiites. Before the CIA cooperated with the Baath Party to destroy the Iraqi Left, many Shiites were secular and the Iraqi Communist Party united them with many of the country’s Jews back in the 1950s. The Shiite religious parties dream of a Shiite state. Many want to implement a fundamentalist vision of Islamic law. There is little place for Sunni Kurds or Sunni Arabs in such a state. Al-Maliki himself seems to have a problem with the Sunnis, and his inability to integrate them into his government means that he is losing them to Sunni radicals. His inability to reach out to Sunni Arabs made plausible what the
entire Iraqi parliament rejected when it came out, the Biden plan for the partition of the country. Usama Nujaifi, parliamentarian from Mosul and speaker of the Iraqi parliament, was driven to say a few years ago that for the first time since WW I, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement (envisioning a French Syria and British Iraq) was up for renegotiation.
It is also an indictment of the shameful European imperial scramble for the Middle East during and after WW I and the failed barracuda colonialism of the interwar period, as London and Paris sought oil and other resources, and strategic advantage, in areas they had promised the League of Nations they would prepare for independence. In one instance, they just gave away Ottoman Palestine to a European population, leading to 12 million stateless and displaced people to this day.
During WW I, British diplomats promised lots of people lots of things, and were not embarrassed to double book. The foreign office promised France Syria but the Arab Bureau in Cairo promised Syria to Sharif Hussein of Mecca. Cairo wanted Iraq for Sharif Hussein, but so did New Delhi (the British Government of India couldn’t see the difference between ruling Iraq and ruling Sindh or Rajasthan).
As the war was winding down it was clear that the Ottoman Empire would collapse. The French saw Mosul, with its oil wealth, as part of Syria. The British in New Delhi and in Cairo, for all their wrangling, agreed that it should be part of Iraq, which British and British Indian troops were conquering.
When British Prime Minister Lloyd George met with French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau at Versailles, he was eager to push back French claims on Mosul. Since the British and their Arab allies had taken Damascus from the Ottomans, some wanted to renege on the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 altogether. President Woodrow Wilson was also there, with his ideas of self-determination for the peoples of the former empires, and he didn’t want to just see an imperial grab for them. Clemenceau is said to have remarked that he felt he was caught between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.
When Lloyd George met with Clemenceau, the latter is said to have asked him, “What do you want?” Lloyd George said, “Mosul.” Clemenceau agreed. Anything else? “Jerusalem.” You shall have it. In return, the French were assured of Syria, which meant that Lloyd George had betrayed Sharif Hussein and his son Faisal b. Hussein, then in Damascus, for the sake of Mosul’s oil. Afterwards it is said that Lloyd George felt he had gained these boons from Clemenceau so easily that he should have asked for more.
Integrating Mosul into British Iraq, over which London placed Faisal b. Hussein as imported king after the French unceremoniously ushered him from Damascus, allowed the British to depend on the old Ottoman Sunni elite, including former Ottoman officers trained in what is now Turkey. This strategy marginalized the Shiite south, full of poor peasants and small towns, which, if they gave the British trouble, were simply bombed by the RAF. (Iraq under British rule was intensively aerially bombed for a decade and RAF officers were so embarrassed by these proceedings that they worried about the British public finding out.)
To rule fractious Syria, the French (1920-1943) appealed to religious minorities such as the Alawites and Christians to divide and rule; Alawite peasants were willing to join the colonial military as proud Damascene Sunni families largely were not, but when the age of military dictatorships overtook the postcolonial Middle east, the Alawites were in a good position to take over Syria, which they definitively did in 1970.
The countries now known as Syria and Iraq came into modernity having been for 400 years part of the Ottoman Empire. Sometimes it ruled what is now Iraq as a single province with roughly its modern borders, sometimes it ruled it as a set of smaller provinces. At some points the city of Mosul was the seat of a province of the same name. More often its top official reported to the Sultan in Istanbul through Baghdad. Mosul, a large urban center on the caravan and river trade routes stretching to Aleppo and Tripoli to the west and to Basra and India to the southeast, was a major urban place. It was very different from southern Iraq, which through the 19th century converted to Shiite Islam (in part under Indian Shiite influence) and was less urban and more tribal. Still, it was united with the south by trade along the Tigris and by the structures of Ottoman rule.
PM Nouri al-Maliki can only get Iraq back by allying with nationalist Sunnis in the north. Otherwise, for him simply brutally to occupy the city with Shiite troops and artillery and aerial bombing will make him look like his neighbor, Bashar al-Assad.
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Related video:
DW: “Islamists take Mosul, Iraq”
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Related book:
The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East
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