Egypt August 12, 2012: Mursi’s Move and a Day to Remember

Posted in Egypt, Middle East with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on August 13, 2012 by Odyssey753

On a day where the American media debated relentlessly and nonsensically the Paul Ryan VP pick and their European brethren salivated over the vacuous pageantry that finished London 2012 Egypt’s president Muhammad Mursi made a series of moves that in the long run will make the first two events only the forgotten conclusion to a long running joke.  The man in one stroke removed the Egyptian military leadership as an obstacle to implementing the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda for that country and to use the Egyptian state as a vehicle in an attempt to implement that same agenda across the Middle East.

First I will state openly that the usual suspects, our friends the pundits in the Western media who have sought to diminish the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in the Egypt’s upheaval since the first protests broke out against Mubarak eighteen months ago, would not agree with that last statement.  These would say that it is an absurd opinion and this is just another move in the long struggle between the Brotherhood and the military and is probably just a sign of rivalry between generals and certainly not anything like the Brotherhood cementing its control over the Egyptian state.  Pay them no mind.  They are either fools or enablers, and we must move on if we are to learn anything from these events.  So what did Egypt’s president do?

Muhammad Mursi moved his chief rival the defense minister and chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) Field Marshall Muhammad Hussein Tantawi out the door into retirement (http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/12/egypt-army-idINL6E8JC2IF20120812) and assumed the role of chairman of SCAF himself.  He then abrogated SCAF’s constitutional declarations of June that reserved legislative authority and military budgetary authority to SCAF and transferred these back to the presidency which he holds.  At this moment Mursi now holds all the cards in Egypt’s political life, with the authority to both write law and enforce it and to dispense money at will.  Of course his office stated that these powers are only to be held until a new constitution is written and a new parliament elected but I sincerely hope that no one is holding their breath waiting for either of those two things to occur, at least in any legitimate fashion.  Muhammad Mursi has made himself dictator of Egypt without firing a shot, and this has grave implications for Egypt, the Middle East, and the world at large.

It is important to understand that Egypt’s military has completely acquiesced to this move.  All it would have taken was a couple of tanks moving in on the presidential palace to stop Mursi in his tracks, but no such thing happened.  Even Tantawi himself seems to have gone rather quietly, an indication that he knew his time was up and his support had drained away.  All this is very odd considering that SCAF was portrayed as the one holding all the cards and who would never let their position in Egyptian society be threatened, least of all by Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood.  And since they are the ones who have all the guns the question to ask is just how Muhammad Mursi pulled this off?

Nobody seems to have a concrete answer to that question at the moment.  Perhaps the coming days, weeks, months, and years will provide that answer but for the moment all we have is informed speculation based on a reasonable examination of the available evidence.  Egypt’s president would not have contemplated this move if he had not felt one hundred percent certain of success.  What gave him this assurance?  Only some sort of base of support within the military itself would have given him this assurance.  The question of how Muhammad Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood managed to gain a base of support in the military, the one institution in Egyptian society we were told that was implacably opposed to them, leads us into the realm of speculation.  Perhaps the pundit class is correct and Mursi simply took advantage of the Sinai terror attacks and made a better offer than Tantawi to a group of generals to look the other way while the old Field Marshall was shuffled off to the nursing home, or perhaps it was something else…

The absolutely non-reported story of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt has been any suggestion of their infiltration into the military’s officer corps.  Zero mention of this possibility is ever made in any analysis of the political situation in that country by any media figure.  I do not know whether this is because these people assume that Mubarak’s intelligence apparatus would have stopped any Brotherhood move like this cold or they have another agenda, but it is time to start taking this possibility into consideration if we want to truly understand what is going on in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda is to restore Islam to its proper place in the world as they see it and they intend to do this both through domestic legislation and foreign policy.  If they have managed to get the Egyptian military with all of its American equipment and US trained officer class on their side this will have dire consequences for the Middle East and the wider world.

Israel would be their first target.  If Mursi keeps up his pattern of making unpredictable and dramatic moves the Jewish state will have to be constantly on watch over a border that has been neglected since the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979.  Another aspect is the issue of Iran: if Mursi with all of those F-16s starts making hostile moves toward Israel then would that country be willing to send the greater part of its air force one thousand miles away to strike Iran’s nuclear program.  The Israeli Air Force has been the balance of power in the Middle East since it destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground half a century ago to open the Six Day War.  What if it suffered severe losses striking Iran?  Israel’s massive military superiority over all of its enemies is generally taken for granted and such a thing is probably not even fathomed by most observers, but so many things have happened in the last couple of years that were never supposed to happen and it would be unwise to dismiss the possibility.

In any case Muhammad Mursi is not a technocrat.  His mission in life is not to increase Egypt’s GDP, but to restore Islam to its rightful place in the world.  This means that war is coming.  I don’t know where or when exactly it will start, but it is coming as sure as the sun rises in the east.

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Whither the Sinai?

Posted in Egypt, Middle East with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 8, 2012 by Odyssey753

What is going on in the Sinai?  Honesty compels me to say that I do not know.  Stories fly left and right, theories come from the north and south, and general cluelessness gathers all around.  So let us here attempt to dig out some facts and observations and see if we can come to a conclusion about what seems to this observer to be the rising tide of risk in this strategic region of the Middle East and the world at large.

The Sinai peninsula forms an inverted triangle with the Mediterranean Sea on its north, the Suez Canal and Gulf of Suez on its west, and the Gulf of Aqaba and Egypt-Israel border on its east.  The coastlines of the southern half of the peninsula, especially on the Aqaba side, are lined with world famous tourist resorts and coral reefs while the interior is rugged and mountainous.  North Sinai is generally flatter, though interspersed with clusters of hills and low mountains, and is in the main more of the sea of sand dunes type of desert one imagines from movies and popular culture.

This rugged landscape has served as the bridge between Asia and Africa, between that land variously known as Palestine, lower Syria, Israel, and Canaan and the Nile Valley since the days of the first Pharaohs and has been inhabited by nomadic tribes now called Bedouin since time immemorial.  In more recent decades the Sinai has seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1956 Suez War, the 1967 Six Day War, the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal during 1969-70, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, all of which culminated in the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in which Israel returned the peninsula to Egypt in return for its demilitarization.

Egypt regained full sovereignty over the Sinai when the last Israeli forces and settlers evacuated in 1982.  The resulting three decades of peace gave an economic boom of sorts to the southern part of the peninsula.  Sharm al-Sheikh was no longer the fortified key to holding the Straits of Tiran which controlled the entry and exit to the Gulf of Aqaba and to Israel’s vulnerable southern port of Eilat which gave the country access to the Indian Ocean and the markets of Asia.  That citadel became a tourist maven with bikini lined beaches and excellent snorkelling, so much so that Moshe Dayan’s once famous quip about holding Sharm al-Sheikh without peace being preferable to peace without Sharm al-Sheikh seemed preposterous and was cast aside.

In Israel the port of Eilat boomed as well ,becoming a tourist hub in its own right as it provided easy access through the Taba border crossing just south of the city to the scenic wonders of the newly demilitarized and opened up Sinai.  Israelis flocked into the peninsula again, this time not as soldiers and occupiers but as tourists.  Peace had finally come and it was time to enjoy its fruits.  But then something happened.

Many of those high-end tourist trade jobs went to Egyptians from the Nile Valley, leaving the local Bedouin shut out.  Worse, in North Sinai tourism never got off the ground enough for its inhabitants to be able to make a living even on the fringes of the industry.  Discontent rose.  Then a truck bomb struck the Taba Hilton, adjacent to the border crossing with Israel, in October, 2004 killing 34 people.  Then in July, 2005 a series of bombings struck the main resort center at Sharm al-Sheikh killing 64 (the worst terrorist attack in Egyptian history) and a year later bombs struck Dahab on the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba killing 23.

The perpetrators of these attacks have all been either entirely made up of Sinai Bedouin or some mixture of Palestinians from Gaza and Bedouin from the Sinai.  It also seemed that transnational global jihad elements of the al-Qaeda sort who had cut their teeth fighting Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan were taking up residency in the Sinai taking advantage of local grievances to radicalize the Bedouin and create trouble in the peninsula.  This was new in the Sinai.  Even during the 1967-82 Israeli occupation there had been no armed resistance or guerilla warfare like that later seen in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, even though the terrain provided excellent opportunities for that kind of thing.  What if Nasser had been able to launch a massive guerilla campaign in conjunction with his War of Attrition?  That sort of zeitgeist was not yet present in the Arab world in those days and would only emerge following the Egypt-Israel peace treaty and the sidelining of Arab regular armies.

Things changed when the thirty year long reign of Husni Mubarak began to totter and fall apart in early 2011 and large numbers of police began to disappear from the Sinai following the uprising in Cairo.  The first target was the Egypt-Israel natural gas pipeline which was attacked so many times that the world lost count, until it finally shut down earlier this year.  The remaining police stations and checkpoints in North Sinai have been attacked repeatedly with heavy weapons and their effectiveness has vastly diminished.  Into this fray more al-Qaeda elements have come launching a series of cross border attacks into Israel with the worst being August, 2011′s assault on Israel Route 12 which butts up against the Egyptian border north of Eilat that killed eight people and prompted that country to close the highway until a fence could be completed earlier this year.

It is hard to estimate the real danger to Israel’s security from these groups.  The most vulnerable area of that border is Eilat, its port facilities and major resort hotels within easy rocket or in some cases mortar range from the Sinai but no one has yet attempted a major attack on the city itself, perhaps fearing the inevitable Israeli response.  The region north of Eilat all the way to the environs of the Gaza Strip  is devoid of any urban areas and the weapons of the Sinai militants do not seem to be sophisticated or accurate enough to create prolonged closures of the major north-south highways (Routes 40 and 90 which are further from the border than 12) in the Negev that link Eilat to the rest of Israel.

The situation in Egypt is altogether different however.  Sunday’s attack in Rafah that killed 15 border police officers was a serious blow to Egyptian sovereignty and national pride.  In response Egypt’s army launched a limited operation Tuesday in coordination with Israel against militant groups in North Sinai and launched air strikes (from attack helicopters) in the peninsula for the first time since the 1973 war.

How much remilitarization of the Sinai will Israel allow?  Is the jihadi threat to them serious enough that they would allow a significantly larger Egyptian military presence in the peninsula?  How much of its military would Egypt wish to deploy in the Sinai?  Both Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood led government and its military command would each have their own reasons to wish to redeploy into Sinai but the question is open whether they could actually do it and get away with it.  American aid money has been flowing to the Egyptian army since 1979 and it has equipped itself with a lot of advanced equipment but this army has not seen any combat since 1973, under far different circumstances.  Sadat’s hardened army is long gone, and it is difficult to know what Egypt’s current military would do even in a relatively low level fight with Islamic militants.

These questions will likely begin to answer themselves as the momentous year of 2012 rolls on and will have enormous implications for the future of the Middle East.  Please comment if you have opinions on this subject.

 

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The World Order Since 1945: Its Foundations and Possible Future

Posted in World Order with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 26, 2012 by Odyssey753

A new order in the world emerged from the ashes of the Second World War that has been remarkably successful in keeping the general peace these last sixty-seven years.  This long peace has allowed fantastic economic growth in the Western world since 1945 leading to widespread levels of previously undreamed of prosperity.  It is important to understand where this system came from, how it has aged and what the future portends if the world at large is to retain any of its incredible benefits.

Our world emerged from the ashes of thirty-one brutal years that stretched from 1914 until 1945 and was framed by men who had witnessed first hand and even participated in the terrible decisions that led to so much carnage throughout the planet, but concentrated particularly in Europe.  Europe was the center of the world in 1914 to an extent unparalleled anywhere today.  For the previous half millennium its sailors, explorers, and traders had ventured around the earth gobbling it up one little piece at a time so that by the eve of the First World War Europe had largely subdued all the ancient civilizations that a few hundred years earlier had dwarfed it in terms of wealth and influence.

Then the unloved heir to a dissolute empire was shot down in a Sarajevo street on a warm summer’s day in 1914 and the continent bungled itself into a war from which it has never recovered.  Millions were killed in that awful war.  Worse, regimes led by revolutionary terrorists took power in the defeated nations and ripped up their social fabrics.  A second and far ghastlier conflict followed twenty years later that spread across the planet and led to unheard of advances in the technology of destruction.  After two world wars in a generation and a series of terrible genocides humanity had little doubt of what its members were capable of, especially as they were now armed with the superweapon known as the atomic bomb.  The question asked once victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan appeared certain was how do we keep this from happening again?

At the outset there was little faith, if only because most people living then had seen so much hell they felt it right to assume that more was on its way.  Perhaps this was why they succeeded in creating a world order that has kept the general peace for almost seven decades now.  There seems to have been more of a hard focus on practical solutions than the naive idealism of post World War I period, though certain of Woodrow Wilson’s ideals were folded into the new order, among them collective security and self-determination.  Once the outlines of the conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western world became apparent the North Atlantic Alliance came into being in 1949.  The Western world had watched impotently throughout the late 1930s as Adolf Hitler intimidated, bullied, and divided his enemies in order to pick off countries one by one until it was too late and was determined never to let this happen again.  An attack against one was an attack against all.  With the United States now at the center of this alliance and fully on board with that philosophy the Soviet threat to Western Europe probably ended right then and there, though the conflict spread to the rest of the world and settled into a several decade long stalemate that would not abate until the early 1990s.

The overriding common ideology of the great powers since 1945 is that there is to be no acquisition of territory by force.  Throughout the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union both went around the world and overthrew various governments in order to install puppets who would do their bidding but they never conquered territory and annexed it to themselves.  The only time this central feature of the international order has been challenged was in 1990 when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq seized Kuwait and attempted to wipe it off the map.  The swift international action that liberated Kuwait and virtually destroyed Iraq was a sharp message to any other conqueror that the days of military adventurers bent on regional or world domination were over  .  This has been to date the only example of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of collective security ever practiced.

The other of Wilson’s principles though has altered the map quite a bit since 1945 however.  The nasty principle of self-determination has been rapidly shrinking great powers since 1945.  First it destroyed the far-flung European colonial empires following World War II then ripped apart the Soviet Union in 1991, and destroyed Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s.  The principle of self-determination has thus given each minority of every multi-ethnic country license to attempt to destroy that country.

But the salient and indisputable fact of the post-1945 era has been the nuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, without which none of the rest would have been possible.  This one invention eliminated territorial competition among the great powers.  After all, what difference does it make if you control this significant ridgeline, that river valley, or this other mountain range if a nuclear warhead can fly hundreds of miles over these would be natural obstacles and incinerate your capital city in minutes, no matter how much territory you control?  William L. Shirer stated in the introduction to his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that because of this fact Adolf Hitler would be the last of that tradition of world conquering military adventurers that went back through Napoleon, Caesar, and Alexander.  One’s entire would be world conquering army could be destroyed in seconds anywhere on earth from anywhere else on earth, so what is the point in even thinking of building an empire or wasting the resources building such a military as long as both these weapons and the will to use them exist on this earth.

Territorial expansion has then been eliminated from the vocabulary of international relations.  This has been the prime mover behind the general international peace since 1945, but will it last?  It is a difficult thing to predict the future, so instead I will give a brief analysis of the present and attempt to extrapolate out any trends which may shed light on the coming years.

First: in the Western world the generation that lived through the last world conflict has now been out of public life itself for a generation now and is rapidly dying off; very soon the terrors inflicted on humanity during the period 1914-45 will have gone completely out of living memory.  Will the lessons of that era be forgotten?

Second: the economic structure of the Western world has taken a beating over the last decade such as it has not experienced since the chaos of the inter war years.  How would a generation grown accustomed to everlasting prosperity and everything always going up, up, up react to a prolonged downturn into economic depression?  The potential for economic chaos now looms large in Europe and that continents’ leaders, whatever Mario Draghi says, seem utterly hopeless in facing up to it.  Perhaps this is because they were raised after two generations of good, peaceful, prosperous times and have come to power at the end of a third.  To them war and conflict and desolation are only things that happen in history books, or in far away Third Worldish parts of the planet.  It could never happen to them, could it?

Only time and history will provide the answers, but at the underlying foundations of the Western constructed world order look weak and old.  Certainly the West has immense military power and, despite everything, incredible economic power but does it remember anymore what it took to get and keep that power, and how best to employ it?  I will just say here that it looks doubtful.  I think that it would not be unwise to batten down the hatches for some interesting times ahead.

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Flamenco Sketches

Posted in debt crisis, European Union, world economy with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2012 by Odyssey753

I’m sitting here listening to Miles Davis and pondering the future as the US financial markets close on a day where yields on the Spanish government’s ten year bond climbed above 7.6% and the yield on the US 10 year Treasury bond dropped briefly below 1.40% for the first time in history.  Pondering the future is always sketchy, but it is important to nonetheless to watch these events and how they unfold on a day to day basis and their relevance to what more events are yet to come.

First let us deal with Spain and its debt laden government.  During the middle part of last week the Spanish central government announced that it would be setting up an 18 billion euro fund to assist in solving any potential problems that regional governments may have in meeting their debt obligations.  On Friday the government of Valencia announced that it would be tapping the fund because it could not pay its bills, and over the weekend the government of Murcia further down the Mediterranean coast followed suit.  Suspicion began to grow in the bond markets that most, if not all, regional governments would go down this path, leaving the Spanish central government on the hook for all of their debt.  This amounts to a grand total of something like 160 billion euros with 36 billion (http://economywatch.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/24/12931119-spain-teeters-on-the-edge-of-a-steep-fiscal-cliff?lite) needing to be refinanced before the end of this year.  Could the Spanish government afford this?

The bond markets are betting that the answer is no.  Yields have surged now to euro era records and money is fleeing toward safer havens such as the German bund (though this has abated with Moody’s downgrade of Germany’s outlook) and, despite everything, that safe haven of safe havens: the US ten year Treasury bond.  Spain however needs financing, and needs it fast since its economy is locked in a depression and the central government’s fast dwindling tax revenues can’t even come close meeting the staggering new costs of assuming regional debt.  So one month after a European fund was established to bailout Spanish banks with much hand wringing so that the funds would go (against strong German objections) straight to Spanish banks, bypassing the government so not to add to its debt, it appears that the Spanish government will need a bailout after all and in fairly short order.

After tortuous negotiations over the coming weeks and months I am almost certain that this bailout will be approved as it has been obvious for some time now that the scales will have to be ripped from the eyes of the European elites who make these decisions as to the profound foolishness of this policy.  A bailout here only breeds a bailout there and so on.  Soon massive amounts of debt which cannot possibly be paid back pile up with whatever central authority that dispensed these bailouts, and since these central authorities are usually responsible for the maintenance of law and order and stability over a wide geographical area, their insolvency represents a potential civilizational crisis.

The fundamental internal challenge that the Western world faces are as follows: a massive and unsustainable housing boom in the United States developed in response to the Federal Reserve’s irrational post dot.com bust/9-11 attack policy of keeping interest rates at near zero for the better part of a decade.  Then when they attempted to raise rates again in 2007 it crushed the housing boom which put a knife into the heart of a banking system that had become by that point all too dependent on buying and selling other people’s mortgages to finance themselves.  For obvious reasons governments could not allow their globally interconnected banking system to collapse, so they bailed them out and assumed massive amounts of debt themselves and now these chickens are all coming home to roost.

It started first in the smaller and weaker countries (Greece, Portugal, Ireland) as it always does.  Now though it appears as though the government of the fourth largest economy in the eurozone will need to be put on life support with a bailout.  And don’t think that it will stop there.  If the EU somehow scrapes together the funds to get Spain temporarily out of the lurch, then the bond market will attack Italy next.  There is not enough real wealth in Europe to sustain all of these massive bailouts.

Meanwhile incredible amounts of capital would flow to US Treasury bonds.  It is conceivable that the yield on the 10 year could drop to zero in the event of a euro area breakdown.  The hazard in this is that monumental amounts of productive capital will be tied up financing a government that already has too much debt to begin with.  Economic activity will slow and capital will flow with greater speed toward the US government where it does little or nothing to promote economic growth, which would be the only way out of the conundrum we are sure to find ourselves in during the coming years.  And at some point someone with a great deal of resources will realize that the United States government has acquired so much debt that there is no way it can ever be paid back, at least not in terms of real value, and will put their money into real assets or hide it in a very large mattress.  If it gets that far then the jig will be up for Western Civilization.

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Michele Bachmann, Huma Abedin, and the Muslim Brotherhood

Posted in Egypt, US politics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2012 by Odyssey753

Michele Bachmann is known as a rhetorical bomb thrower.  The Minnesota Republican congresswoman regularly makes bombastic statements that seem to have little evidence to back them up, which is one of the reasons her presidential candidacy went nowhere.  Now she has really let loose a doozy, accusing the longtime aide to Secretary of State Huma Abedin of having various family members who had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in a letter to various intelligence and security heads  and using this as evidence that the Brotherhood has in fact infiltrated the highest levels of the United States government.

Predictably, a storm of denunciation has been directed against her ranging from accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry to inaugurating a new era of McCarthyism in the United States.  Fellow Republican Arizona Senator John McCain went to the floor to condemn Bachmann and the four other congressmen who sent the letter and called her actions sinister, saying that they defamed America.  On a personal note, I think that McCain’s condemnation of the congresswoman is the biggest asset to her credibility she could muster, since the Senator’s record of being correct on any major issue is specious at best.

But let us assume that Bachmann is simply up to her old tricks of throwing rhetorical bombs with little evidence to back them up.  After all, before this Huma Abedin’s only notoriety was as the wife of disgraced former New York congressman Anthony Weiner.  She apparently was unaware that she had married a philanderer who was posting half-naked pictures of himself all over the internet, and it is reasonable to question whether this is the stuff a master spy is made from.  If this is the case then why would anyone, even Bachmann, be convinced enough that she was a possible enemy agent  to make career threatening public accusations against her?

If one takes into account the events of the last eighteen months in Egypt the picture becomes clearer.  On January 25, 2011 protests erupted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that ultimately overthrew long-time American ally Husni Mubarak in less than three weeks and began a process which led to the Muslim Brotherhood gaining the Egyptian presidency last month.  The US government first waffled over the events in Cairo before finally demanding that Mubarak step down.  A curious move considering that Mubarak had been America’s go-to-guy in the Middle East for three decades and was always happy to do the bidding of the United States as long as he was able to cash those military aid checks.  But then the United States stepped out of the way, let him be overthrown, and seemed to do everything possible to clear the path for the virulently anti-American Muslim Brotherhood to take power.  Odd huh?

Then there has been the media coverage of the events in Egypt.  In the first flush of the uprising we were told by our purveyors of information that this marked the rise of liberal democracy on the banks of the Nile.  Sure, the Brotherhood was Egypt’s longest lived opposition group, but this was a new generation and the Ikhwan had outlived their usefulness.  Then the Brotherhood’s promises of only contesting a few parliamentary seats and of course never run a candidate for president were echoed across conventional media as evidence of their weakness and increasing irrelevance.  But low and behold they contested all of the parliamentary seats and won so many of them that the military was later forced to dissolve that parliament, and we won’t even mention that they didn’t run just one but two candidates for the presidency with the Ikhwan’s own Muhammad Mursi emerging as the victor.  Hmmmm…

I don’t know what, if anything, Huma Abedin had to do with any of this.  And while I would never discount the possibility that news coverage of Egypt’s revolution is solely the product of the abject idiocy of contemporary journalism, it does seem like the skids have been greased (at least in the circles of power in the Western world) for acquiescence to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent to power in the most important country in the Arab world.

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In the Balance: Egypt July 10, 2012

Posted in Egypt, Middle East with tags , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2012 by Odyssey753

Dr. Muhammad Mursi has now made his first move.  Many claimed when this man was announced victor of the presidential race in Egypt that he would be a toothless figurehead.  The Army had struck a convincing blow against him by dissolving the parliament dominated by his allies.  Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court had ruled just days before his election (undoubtedly at the behest of the Army) that the law governing that parliament’s election was unconstitutional.  The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces then dissolved the parliament and reserved all legislative and executive power to itself thus leaving the new president with little ability to control the government.

Now the man has struck back.  On Sunday President Mursi called the dissolved parliament back into session and it met this morning for fifteen minutes in order to file suit on its own behalf in court to quash SCAF’s dissolution order.  Moments ago the Supreme Constitutional Court fired its own shot by invalidating Mursi’s order calling the parliament back into session and postponing the hearing of the parliament’s suit against SCAF until July 17.

The courts in Egypt are not the sort of independent institutions one grew accustomed to in the Western world that are supposedly independent of political interference and decide cases on the merit of the evidence.  The Egyptian judiciary, especially at the higher levels, is massively politicized and stocked with appointees from the Mubarak era who share the interests and worldview of the military elite.  We will doubtless see many analysis of Egyptian law over the coming days in order to divine the future moves of the president, the army, and the courts.  It is important to understand though that this is not about law but politics.  The decisions of the court and the law itself in Egypt have been and will continue to be treated with a high degree of scepticism by the vast majority of Egyptians.

What is going on now is a bare knuckles political brawl over who has the real power.  Mursi is pushing the Army here to see how far they will go in striking back.  Most likely then he and his allies will make their next move based upon its reaction.  There has been speculation of a deal between Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood, and SCAF.  After all the Army did not deploy tanks to block the entrance to parliament after Mursi called them back into session.  I am doubtful though.  It seems as though Mursi really did take SCAF by surprise and on the wrong foot.  Also SCAF knows the power that the Brotherhood can bring to bear against them and would not start something unless fully prepared, and they weren’t.

The coming days will answer many questions about the future of Egypt.  One thing is clear though that should have been clear to all of the commentators all along, if they had not been blinded by juvenile ideologies or base stupidity: Muhammad Mursi will not be, or at the very least does not intend to be, a toothless figurehead.  The man is a member of an organization (the Muslim Brotherhood) that is fanatically devoted to achieving its goal of restoring Islam and the Arabs to what it sees as their proper place in the world.  Now that they have their first taste of real power they are not going to give up this chance without a fight.

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Why the World Should Pay Attention to Mali

Posted in Africa with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2012 by Odyssey753

It all started with the NATO attack on Libya in March, 2011.  The army of Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi was on the verge of recapturing Benghazi and ending the Libyan revolt, until NATO intervened under the rubric of a somewhat questionable United Nations Security Resolution that purported to provide protection for the Libyan civilian population and ended up being air support for the overthrow of Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi.  Al-Qadhafi’s overthrow and eventual death created a state of borderline anarchy and an incredible opportunity to loot his vast arsenals of heavy weaponry.  Some of these weapons have made their way across Egypt toward the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula while more formidable weapons went down the ancient trans Sahara trade routes into the Sahel to wreak incredible havoc in Mali.

Mali’s Tuaregs have been an off and on source of instability for the country since its independence in the early 1960s.  The Tuaregs are a nomadic people who stretch the length and breadth of the Sahara.  Their territory was cut into several pieces by the random drawing of borders during the colonial era and with decolonization their plight worsened.  These new countries inhabited by Tuaregs either were dominated by black Africans in those that stretched past the southern reaches of the desert into the savannah of West Africa such as Mali, or by Arabs in the states which lay upon the Mediterranean coast.  Thus the Tuaregs have always been outsiders and, cut off from their traditional way of life in the harsh climate of the Sahara, have launched periodic independence movements.

The plight of the Tuaregs was exploited expertly by Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi.  He supported both Libya’s southern Tuaregs to use them as a possible wedge against dissident Arabs in the north, and the Tuaregs of neighbors such as Chad, Niger, and Mali to wreak havoc in those countries and further his ambitions to dominate Africa.  These were hardy fighters against both NATO and the Libyan rebels during the revolt against al-Qadhafi, but they ultimately lost that battle.  However, freed from their loyalty to al-Qadhafi by his death they went streaming back to their own countries armed with heavy weapons looted from his vast arms stocks.

Thus armed Mali’s Tuaregs launched a lightning campaign at the beginning of 2012 to take over the north of Mali and make of it the world’s first Tuareg state.  They conquered two-thirds of Mali, completely occupying its desert regions along with several cities including the ancient center of Timbuktu declaring this to be the new state of Azawad.  But they were not alone.

Jihadis joined them.  Members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb went across the border from Algeria and joined with the Tuaregs to facilitate the quick conquest of Azawad.  The Malian army fell back in disarray and certain of its members launched a coup against the civilian government that was quickly condemned by the rest of the world.  The coup plotters stepped into the background and a new ramshackle civilian government was formed and led by a president who has been in France since protestors attacked the presidential palace in May.

Meanwhile in the north the jihadi militants fell out from their alliance of convenience with the Tuaregs.  They have driven the Tuaregs from the cities and started a campaign of destruction against the ancient shrines to Muslim saints in Timbuktu.  The whole north of the country has now become a haven for jihadi militants and doubtless more of these are crossing into Mali every day.  Since the country’s army has fallen into complete disarray the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) now proposes sending in a force of 3-5,000 soldiers to defeat the jihadis and recapture the north of Mali.

It seems a dubious proposition that some 5,000 West African soldiers on their own are going to march north into the heart of the Sahara and defeat these jihadi militants to recapture the north of Mali, but we shall see.  Intervention of this sort would need to be actively supported by some Western power and at present, especially with Syria occupying everyone’s attention, it does not appear that any such support is on the table.

Most likely a stalemate of some sort will develop.  A dangerous scenario that will result in an incredible number of refugees flowing south towards Bamako in a fashion that whatever government exists there will not likely be able to handle.  The jihadis will gain time to consolidate their position making their overthrow that much bloodier.  In the worst case scenario they could expand their reach into Niger and back into fragile Libya itself and give themselves a secure base to take on their real enemy Algeria.  This may seem farfetched but it should be remembered that all of North Africa is in a state of flux right now and it would only take a nudge for very bad things to start happening.

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