Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > Obama Loses Egypt And Potentially Much Of The Middle East
Obama Loses Egypt And Potentially Much Of The Middle East
July 2, 2012
July 2, 2012 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - A column appearing in today's Washington Times, written by the Center for Security Policy's Frank Gaffney, paints a gloomy picture of the direction which the Middle East, specifically Egypt, has taken as a direct result of President Obama's foreign policy.
"Today, the question for voters in the 2012 election to ponder might be posed as Who lost Egypt?" To make matters worse, it is likely that the losses won't stop there.Indeed, before it's over, we may well see nearly all the Middle East fall under the sway of the team President Obama has helped come to power in Cairo - the Muslim Brotherhood, to the grave detriment of the people most immediately affected, of Israel and of our interests, there and here." [source, Who 'Lost' Egypt?]
When Mr. Obama assumed office in 2009 he was given a relatively stable, but obviously troubled Middle East to deal with. However the president immediately started implementing a program which led to the Muslim Brotherhood seizing power in Egypt and rapidly destabilized the entire region.
The lead vehicle in this wholesale assault on previous policy [one of a bipartisan nature, extending well before the G.W. Bush administration] was Mr. Obama's still hard to comprehend Cairo speech, to which we referred in a January 25, 2010 piece The Wake Up Call that Never Comes What made this address even more inexplicable is that it was delivered at Al-Azhar University, thelocus of modern Sunni jihadism. Al-Azhar is a thousand year old institution dedicated to training orthodox Sunni imams and spreading Islam through da'wa and jihad in both of its modes, the "hard" violent form as well as the relatively "softer" technique of cultural subsumation. Given the way events are rapidly developing in the region Mr. Obama's inviting senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders to attend the event - thus providing the creators of Hamas with, the WH Seal of Approval - looms even more ominously.
From the piece:
"Thus the origin of Mr. Obama's Muslim outreach, most forcefully detailed in his June 6, 2009 Cairo speech [see, Remarks of the President at Cairo University] with the below statement, emblematic of this approach.
"More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam. Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims."It must be remembered that the Cairo speech was only part of a grander apologia - offered in a particularly supplicating manner - to atone for [what the president perceives to be] America's past history of oppressive actions."
Though Mr. Obama and his hidebound State Department are in complete denial, the "democracy," which his administration stoked starting with his enthusiastic support of the Tahrir Square demonstrations - and his scuttling of then sitting Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak - was directly responsible for the fraud laden election of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, a long-time senior member of the organization.
Morsi throughout his campaign made it clear that if elected, his administration would be used to further the goals of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, as Mr. Gaffney's Washington Times piece highlights:
"For example, as captured in an Egyptian television report of May 13, 2012 translated by the indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reLigeHGKzE&feature=player_embedded&noredirect=1) – Morsi espoused during the course of the campaign the key tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood: "The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our path. And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration." He went on to add, "This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through Islamic shariah." Morsi concluded by saying, "I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text of [the constitution], Allah willing, the text will truly reflect shariah."Apparently completely lacking in this administration's understanding of the mechanics of power relationships is any sense that totalitarian ideologies find appeasement worse than simply being indicative of an opponent's lack of moral courage, rather they see it as being provocative. This leads them to redoubling their efforts accordingly.
This is perhaps the central weakness of Mr. Obama's foreign policy calculus. In a larger sense, this president's statecraft can be critiqued as having largely consisted of crisis management, resulting in disaster heaped upon disaster. Its few successes, for example taking out bin-Laden and the increased use of the drone program - which is now controlled by Mr. Obama having taken it from the military/intelligence community, where it formerly and properly resided - were only made possible by templates established by his predecessor. Thus, this issue should also prove fodder for a hopefully lively debate during the run up to the November elections.
Unfortunately due the MSM's silence on the matter, the public is largely unaware of the issues involved here and their bearing on American security policy. Therefore this topic should represent a fertile area for Mr. Romney to explore as this process moves forward, if he proves bold enough to go there.
©2012. PipeLineNews.org LLC. All rights reserved.
http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=egypt722012101%2Ehtm
Printer-friendly version 
Email this item to a friend