What 'staying the course' really means
By Robert Dreyfuss
Nearly three years into the war in Iraq, the Bush administration tells us that
it wasn't about weapons of mass destruction or Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, but
about America's holy mission to spread democracy to the benighted regions of
the Middle East. However, postwar Iraq is anything but a democracy. In fact, if
Iraq manages to avoid all-out civil war, it is likely to end up with a
government that is fiercely undemocratic - a Shi'ite theocratic dictatorship
that rules by terror, torture, and armed might.
What President George W Bush has wrought in Iraq is just the latest in a long
string of US efforts to make common cause with the Islamic right. But like the
Sorcerer's Apprentice, whose naive and inexperienced use of magic blows up in
his face, American efforts to play with the forces of political Islam have
proved to be dangerous, volatile and often uncontrollable.
The problem goes far beyond the Shi'ites in Iraq. In the Sunni parts of the
country, the power of Islamism is growing, too - and
by this I do not mean the forces associated with al-Qaeda. but the
radical-right Muslim Brotherhood, represented there by the Iraqi Islamic Party,
and other manifestations of the Salafi and Wahhabi-style religious right.
In Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, the radical religious right is also gaining
strength. Meanwhile; sometimes deliberately, sometimes by sheer ignorance and
incompetence, the Bush administration is encouraging the spread of political
Islam. Were the US to "stay the course," not only Iraq but much of the rest of
the Middle East could fall to the Islamic right.
Does this mean that al-Qaeda-style fanatics will take power? No. Whether in the
form of Iraq's Shi'ite theocrats or the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and
Egypt, the Islamic right cannot be compared to al-Qaeda. Yet, just as the US
Christian right has its abortion clinic bombers, just as the Israeli Jewish
right spawned the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin and settler-extremists who kill
dozens at Muslim holy sites, the Islamic right provides ideological support and
theological justification for more extreme (and, yes, terrorist) offspring.
Even the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization with a long history of violence,
which once maintained a covert "secret apparatus" and a paramilitary arm, has
not convincingly renounced its past, nor demonstrated that it sees democracy as
anything more than a tool it can use to seize power.
Shi'ite "Islamofascists" rule Iraq
The case of Iraq could not be clearer. In 2002, as Vice President Dick Cheney
pushed the White House and the Pentagon inexorably toward war, it was
increasingly obvious to experienced Iraq hands that post-Saddam Hussein Iraq
would be ruled by its restive Shi'ite majority. It was no less obvious that the
dominant force within that Shi'ite majority would be the Supreme Council for
the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, and a parallel force associated with
al-Dawa (The Islamic Call), a 45-year-old Shi'ite underground terrorist party.
From the mid-1990s on, and especially after 2001, the US provided overt and
covert assistance to these organizations as part of the effort to force regime
change in Iraq. Like Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, with which both
worked closely and which had offices in Tehran, SCIRI and Dawa were based in
Iran. SCIRI, in fact, was founded in 1982 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and
its paramilitary arm, the Badr Brigade, was trained and armed by Iran's
Revolutionary Guards. Certainly, to the Bush administration, SCIRI and Dawa
were known quantities.
David Phillips, the former adviser to the State Department's war-planning
effort and author of Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco,
has assured me that, in the run-up to the war, many of his colleagues were well
aware that SCIRI-type Islamists, not Chalabi, would inherit post-Saddam Iraq.
Other insiders, too, have told me of foreign-policy professionals and Iraq
specialists in the US intelligence community who warned (to no avail) that
SCIRI would be a major force in Iraq after any invasion. The point is, whether
they bothered to pay attention or not, the Bush-Cheney team was informed, well
in advance, that by toppling Saddam there was a strong possibility they would
be installing a Shi'ite theocracy.
Today, the unpleasant reality is that 150,000 US troops, who are dying at a
rate of about 100 a month, are the Praetorian Guard for that radical-right
theocracy. It is a regime that sponsors Shi'ite-led death squads carrying out
assassinations from Basra (where freelance reporter Steven Vincent, himself
murdered by such a unit, wrote that "hundreds" of former Ba'athists, secular
leaders and Sunnis were being killed every month) to Baghdad. Scores of bodies
of Sunnis regularly turn up shot to death, execution-style.
The latest revelation is that SCIRI's Badr Brigade, now a 20,000-strong
militia, operated a secret torture prison in Baghdad holding hundreds of Sunni
detainees. There, prisoners had their skin flayed off, electric shocks applied
to their genitals, or power drills driven into their bones. SCIRI and Dawa are
the senior partners in an Iraqi government which has imposed a unilateralist
constitution on the country that elevates the power of the Shi'ite-dominated
provinces and enshrines their vision of Islam in the body politic.
Two weeks ago, during his visit to Washington, DC, I asked Adel Abdul Mahdi, a
top SCIRI official and Iraq's deputy president, about the charges of death
squads and brutality. "All of the terrorists are on the other side," he
sniffed. "What you refer to is a reaction to that."
Perhaps the ultimate irony of Bush's war on terrorism is this: while the
president asserts that the war in Iraq is the central front in the struggle
against what he describes as "Islamofascism", real "Islamofascists" are already
in power in Baghdad - and they are, shamefully, America's allies.
Of course, among the Iraqi opposition, too, the Islamic right is growing. The
forces of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq have gained some limited
support from Iraqis, and Zarqawi is using the war to rally support from jihadis
throughout the region.
More broadly, the US occupation is pushing ever larger numbers of Sunni Arabs
toward support for Islamists. In Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood is represented by
the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP). Although it draws much of its strength from
radicalized Sunnis who hate the occupation, the IIP has shown itself to be the
part of the Sunni opposition most willing to cooperate with the US-allied
Shi'ite theocrats.
It has, from time to time, taken part in the various interim governments that
the US has set up in post-war Iraq; and, in October, the IIP endorsed the
ersatz Iraqi constitution, setting itself apart from the vast majority of
Iraq's Sunnis. (For that, its headquarters in Baghdad was attacked by the
resistance, and many of its offices around the country were blown up or
assaulted.)
Still, the growth of the IIP and other similar manifestations of the Islamic
right among Iraq's Sunnis has encouraged some Shi'ite theocrats to envision a
Sunni-Shi'ite Islamist partnership in the country. However unlikely that may
be, given the passions that have already been inflamed, the growth of the
radical right among Sunnis cannot possibly be a good thing for Iraq, for the
region, or for US interests.
Syria: The Muslim Brotherhood waits
Now, consider the broader issue of Bush's supposed push for regional democracy.
That effort, it should be noted, is being coordinated under the know-nothing
supervision of none other than Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president's daughter.
She is currently the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near
East affairs and is charged with the task of democracy-building in the "Greater
Middle East".
Undeterred by the failure of the US experiment in installing democracy in Iraq,
next on the chopping block - that is, next to receive the benefits of
US-imposed democracy - is Syria. That small, oil-poor, militarily weak state
is, at the moment, feeling the full force of Bush administration pressure. Its
army and security forces have been driven out of Lebanon, at the risk of
sparking civil war in that country again.
The country has been targeted by the Syrian Accountability Act (reminiscent of
the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act) and hit with related US economic sanctions. It
has been accused, by John Bolton and other neo-conservatives, of maintaining a
weapons-of-mass-destruction program far beyond the very limited chemical arms
it probably possesses. It is accused, by many US officials, including the US
ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, of sponsoring the resistance fighters in
Iraq - though there is nearly zero evidence that it is doing so. Liz Cheney and
other top US officials are already meeting with Chalabi-like Syrian exile
leaders to plot "regime change".
As in Iraq, where Islamic fundamentalist Shi'ites stepped in to fill the
vacuum, so in Syria the most likely power waiting in the wings to replace the
government of President Bashar Assad is not some group of Syrian secular
democrats and nationalists but Syria's Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is an underground secret society
with a long history of terrorism and the use of assassination. With financial
and organizational help from Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi establishment, the
Brotherhood has spread to every corner of the Muslim world.
Although it now officially eschews violence, in recent years it has given
succor to, and even spawned, far more radical versions of itself. One of its
chief theoreticians, Sayyid Qutb, created the theological justification for
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. Even today, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda are at
least fellow travelers. It is far from clear how to draw the line between the
Muslim Brotherhood and other forces of "conservative" political Islam and those
associated with radical-right, violence-prone Islamists. Certainly, many
experienced US diplomats and intelligence officers disagree about where one
stops and the other starts.
Because Syria - with a mostly Sunni population (though, as in Iraq, highly
complex with a rich mix of minorities) - is a closed society, it is impossible
to say just how powerful the Muslim Brotherhood is there. But with an exile
leadership in London and other cities in Western Europe, with a network of
supporters among the Sunni Arab petit bourgeoisie, and with power centers in a
string of cities from Damascus to Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, it is widely
considered a major player in future Syrian politics.
Recently, the Brotherhood joined with secular intellectuals and others in an ad
hoc, anti-Assad coalition, but the rest of the coalition has few forces on the
ground. Only the Brotherhood has "troops". In that, this coalition is
reminiscent of the one that formed in 1978 to overthrow the Shah of Iran. After
the Shah's fall, Khomeini's gang picked off its erstwhile allies one by one -
the communists, the National Front (the remnant of the nationalist forces
associated with prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in the 1950s), the
intellectuals, and finally the moderate Islamists such as president Abolhassan
Bani-Sadr - to establish the authoritarian theocracy that is the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
It cannot be that the Bush administration is unaware of the power of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Syria. Rather, they evidently simply don't care. Their enmity
for the Assad government is so all-powerful that, as in Iraq, they evidently
are willing to risk an Islamist regime. How can it be that Mr War on Terrorism
blithely condones one Islamic extremist regime in Baghdad and courts another in
Damascus?
History shows that there is precedent. In the 1970s and early 1980s, two US
allies - Israel and Jordan - actively supported the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood
in a bloody civil war against the government of president Hafez Assad, Bashar's
father. The Israeli and Jordanian-sponsored terrorists killed hundreds of
Syrians, exploded car bombs and assassinated Soviet diplomats and military
personnel in Syrian cities.
All of this was known to the US at the time - and viewed benignly. The Syrian
civil war came to a brutal end when Rifaat Assad, the president's brother, led
elite units of the military into Hama, where the Muslim Brotherhood had seized
power and where hundreds of Syrian government officials had been dragged from
their offices and murdered. Rifaat Assad carried out a massive repression in
which many thousands died. Yet the forces of the Brotherhood recovered, and
today the Bush administration seems content to squeeze the brittle Assad
government until it collapses, even if it means that the Muslim Brotherhood
takes power.
Middle Eastern dominos?
Aficionados of the Cold War domino theory often suggested that communism,
allowed to topple a single state, would then be able topple country after
country; that if communism was victorious in South Vietnam, then Indonesia,
Thailand, the Philippines and other distant lands would follow. That may have
been silly, but in the Middle East a domino theory might actually have some
application.
At the very least, it is important to understand that the Muslim Brotherhood is
a supranational force, not simply a country-by-country phenomenon. From Algeria
to Pakistan, its leaders know each other, talk to each other and work together.
In addition, the virulent force of religious fanaticism, fed by anger,
bitterness, and despair, knows no national boundaries.
Egypt, the anchor of the Arab world and by far its most populous country, is
threatened with a Muslim Brotherhood-style regime. Virtually all observers of
Egyptian politics agree that the Muslim Brotherhood is the chief opposition
party in Egypt. Mere prudence suggests that the US should not press Egypt too
hard for democracy and free elections, given how difficult it is to transition
from an authoritarian state to a democratic one. Moreover, it is arguably none
of America's business what sort of government Egypt has. The very idea that
democracy is the antidote for terrorism has been proven false, most
authoritatively by F Gregory Gause in his essay, "Can Democracy Stop
Terrorism?" in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Yet the Bush administration is pushing hard for its brand of democracy. Two
weeks ago, at a regional forum in the Gulf, Egyptian officials bluntly rebuffed
the imperial US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who seemed stunned that
the government in Cairo did not want meddlers from the National Endowment for
Democracy, USAID and other agencies pouring money into Egyptian opposition
groups.
President Hosni Mubarak, a long-time American ally, was considered
indispensable by a succession of administrations during the Cold War. A fierce
anti-communist who kept the peace with Israel and helped the US in its
anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and again in the 1991 Gulf War, is
now regularly denounced as a dictator by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Richard
Perle.
Because of Egypt's history as an ally, no Bush administration official (and not
even many neo-cons) dare say that they want "regime change" in Cairo, but that
is precisely what they do want, and many of them may be willing to risk the
creation of a Muslim Brotherhood-style regime to get it. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a
leading neo-conservative strategist and former Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) officer who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote
the following in his book The Islamic Paradox, comparing Khomeini
favorably to Mubarak:
"Khomeini submitted the idea of an Islamic
republic to an up-or-down popular vote in 1979, and regular elections with some
element of competition are morally essential to the regime's conception of its
own legitimacy, something not at all the case with President Hosni Mubarak's
dictatorship in Egypt ... Anti-Americanism is the common denominator of the
Arab states with "pro-American" dictators. By comparison, Iran is a profoundly
pro-American country.
True, Mubarak rigs Egyptian elections,
but in recent parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood still showed
tremendous strength. With a third round of elections still to go, it is on
track to win up to a quarter of the seats in the new national assembly.
Gerecht isn't worried: "It is certainly possible," he writes, "that
fundamentalists, if they gained power in Egypt, would try to end representative
government ... But the United States would still be better off with this
alternative than with a secular dictatorship."
In the 1950s, British intelligence and the CIA worked with the Muslim Brothers
against Gamal Abdel Nasser, the founder of modern Arab nationalism. Said
Ramadan, the son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna, who set
up the organization's global nerve center in Geneva, Switzerland, was a CIA
agent. Twice, in 1954 and in 1965, the Brotherhood tried to assassinate Nasser.
From this period to the present, the Brotherhood has received financial support
from the ultra-right Saudi establishment.
A formula for endless war
Iraq, Syria and Egypt are not the only places threatened by fundamentalism. In
recent Palestinian elections, Hamas - the official branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood there - has shown remarkable strength, threatening to undo the
Palestinian Authority's accomplishments and wreck any chance of a
Palestinian-Israeli accord.
Ironically, a great deal of Hamas' present power exists only because of the
support offered its founders by the Israeli military authorities in decades
past. From the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 well into
the 1980s, Israel supported the growth of Hamas-style Islamism as a
counterweight to the nationalists in the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO). Ahmed Yassin, Hamas' founder, was backed by Israel during those years,
as his followers clashed with PLO supporters in Gaza and the West Bank. Too
late, Israel recognized that it had created a monster and began to wage war on
Hamas, including assassinating Yassin.
From Israel and Palestine to Egypt, Syria, Iraq and beyond - in Algeria, Sudan,
the Gulf states, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia - the region is beset by
Islamist movements. The right way to combat this upsurge is not through
military action or a Bush administration-style "war on terrorism". That, as
many observers have pointed out, is likely to further fuel the growth of such
movements, not subdue them.
Only if the temperature is lowered throughout the region might the momentum of
the Islamic right be slowed and, someday, reversed. Unfortunately, the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have raised that temperature to the boiling
point. So has the long-term American military build-up in the Persian Gulf and
Central Asia.
So have the proclamations from Bush and Co about a nonsensical "World War IV"
against "Islamofascism". So has the Israeli policy of expanding settlements and
building a giant barrier that virtually annexes huge swaths of the West Bank
for greater Israel. All of these policies cause Islamist sympathies to grow -
and out of them bubble recruits not only for organizations like the Muslim
Brotherhood, but for al-Qaeda-style terrorist groups.
The Bush administration has put into operation an utterly paradoxical and
self-defeating strategy. First, its policies inflame the region, feeding the
growth of political Islam and its extremist as well as terrorist offshoots.
Then, as in Iraq - and as seems to be the case in Syria and Egypt - it seeks
"regime change" in countries where it knows that the chief opposition and
likely inheritor of power will be the Muslim Brotherhood or its ilk. This is a
formula for endless war in the region.
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States
Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling
Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the
Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post,
and other sites, and writes the blog, "The Dreyfuss Report," at his web site. To order a copy of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam,
click here.
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