Martyrs for Islam
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Obama’s Reckless Foreign Policy
Mike Scruggs
Hosni Mubarak was Commander of the Egyptian Air Force during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Although Egypt and its Arab allies were defeated by Israel during that war, the Egyptian Air Force performed well, and Mubarak became a national hero. In April 1975, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat appointed him Vice President of the Egyptian Republic. He was a loyal supporter of Sadat and assisted him in negotiations that resulted in a March 1979 peace treaty with Israel that remains crucial to maintaining peace in the Middle East. Sadat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December 1978, a few months before the signing of the treaty. Because of this peace with Israel, however, Sadat came under heavy criticism from both the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East. Reacting to intelligence reports of an assassination plot against him in September 1981, Sadat cracked down on Islamist radicals and had 1,500 people arrested. The intelligence efforts, however, had missed the Jihadist plotters within the normally loyalist Egyptian Army.
On October 6, 1981, during a military parade, six Egyptian soldiers associated with the Muslim brotherhood and their Islamic Jihad offshoot emerged from a troop truck throwing grenades and firing automatic weapons into the reviewing stand. Sadat and eleven others were killed. Mubarak was wounded in the hand. The Jihadist assassins were violently opposed to the Egypt-Israel Treaty.
Hosni Mubarak thus became President of Egypt and continued to support Sadat’s policies, peace with Israel, and alignment with the United States. Is it any wonder then that Mubarak, having seen his mentor and eleven others gunned down by Islamist radicals, has ruled Egypt with an iron hand? He has, however, been a strong ally of the United States committed to peaceful coexistence with Israel despite considerable opposition from within Egypt and from other predominantly Muslim states. Former Vice President Dick Cheney recently pointed out that Mubarak assisted the United States in moving military aircraft into the Persian Gulf area during the 1991 Gulf War and provided Egyptian troops to help liberate Kuwait from Iraqi Army occupation under Saddam Hussein. Remarking on President Obama’s strident call for Mubarak’s immediate resignation, Cheney said, “President Mubarak needs to be treated as he deserved over the years, because he has been a good friend.”
Many foreign policy analysts have recently recalled the striking parallel between the Carter administration’s 1979 undermining of the Shah of Iran and President Obama’s undermining of Mubarak over the issues of human rights and repression of political dissent. In both cases, however, the political dissent was associated or heavily mixed with serious threats of assassinations and revolutionary violence to overthrow the established government. By undermining the Shah, we paved the way for radical revolution and theocratic tyranny under the Ayatollah Khomeini. Many realistically fear that an immediate removal of Mubarak could pave the way for the Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia Law, and Jihadist aggression against Israel and the United States.
Many American politicians of the last several decades have had idealistic dreams of Muslim democracies establishing peace and prosperity across North Africa, the Middle East, and the Muslim areas of South Asia and Indonesia. The reality is, however, that there is not a single real democracy among 57 Muslim nations with the possible exception—temporarily I fear—of Iraq. Now that Lebanon is predominantly Muslim, peace and democracy are mostly lost and may be irretrievable. Moreover, the spiritual leadership of Islam has generally been opposed to democracy. They believe the law of Islam (Sharia) has been decided by Allah and cannot be subject to democratic majorities or secular constitutions.
In 2005, President George W. Bush pushed for democratic reforms in the Palestinian territories of Israel. He got his way, and the Islamist terrorist group Hamas won a parliamentary majority in January 2006. With the anti-democratic Hamas Party in power, real democracy is highly improbable.
The liberal media often beats the drum for immediate social or political change without giving any thought to logical secondary consequences that might result in colossal political and human disaster. In 1963, liberal media misunderstanding and distortion of Buddhist protests in South Vietnam led President Kennedy to back a coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem was killed in the coup, and both the South Vietnamese government and military were thrown into two years of chaos. North Vietnamese forces immediately began to capitalize on the political and military instability, and President Johnson was forced to bring in several hundred thousand U.S. troops to prevent the fall of South Vietnam. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon later called Kennedy’s media provoked coup against Diem the biggest mistake of the Vietnam War.
Being an influence for positive social change usually requires understanding and patience. Insisting on immediate results is usually a blockbuster peace-killer leading to an avalanche of inhumanity and greater tyranny. We should never force our allies to surrender to internal revolutionary enemies, especially if they are also our enemies.
To be continued.
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