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July 5, 2013
Cairo's military is the best friend the U.S. has got: Indyk
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Amid violent demonstrations orchestrated by Tamaroud group, Egypt’s pro-US army Wednesday (July 3, 2013) deposed and arrested the elected President Mohammad Morsi. Adly Mansour, the head of the Supreme Constititonal Court, with which Morsi had repeated confrontations, was sworn in as interim president.
Not surprisingly, President Obama expressed concern about Morsi's ouster, but he avoided describing it as a coup, which would trigger automatic cuts in U.S. aid to a longtime ally. Obama did not call for Morsi to be returned to power. He did not openly condemn the Egyptian military. President Obama said: “…..we are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsi and suspend the Egyptian constitution. I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process…..”
However, Martin Indyk, the Director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, was blunt. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine under the title "It's Time to Work With Egypt's Generals," he advocates that " in a turbulent time, Cairo's military is the best friend the U.S. has got."
The Egyptian military is now the key actor in Cairo -- the one actor that the United States can still influence, he wrote adding: The U.S. military has strong ties, developed over decades of close cooperation, with its Egyptian counterparts. The Egyptian officers are heavily dependent on U.S. military assistance for their all-American equipped forces.
Indyk, best known as the framer of the U.S. policy of dual containment aimed at containing Iraq and Iran during the 1993-97 Iraq-Iran war, says the United States has vital interests (in Egypt) that need to be protected and promoted. "Egypt is the largest, militarily most powerful, culturally most influential, and geo-strategically most important country in the Arab world. Its peace treaty with Israel is the cornerstone of America's five-decade long effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and build a pro-Western coalition of moderate partners in a region in turmoil."
The Egyptian armed forces have been buttressed since 1979 by U.S. military aid, receiving about $1.3 billion annually since 1987. The money has gone to buy fighter jets, tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and more. The aid, which will keep flowing as long as they maintain a peace treaty with Israel, has helped make the military a formidable force.
Egypt has the largest standing military in the Arab world, estimated at 450,000 troops. Most are conscripts and low-ranking officers who have little opportunity for advancement.
The armed forces stepped into the role of state rulers after they nudged Mubarak from power in 2011. They directly ruled over Egypt until Morsi was elected president, a period marked by authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
For six decades before the deposition of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, military men ruled Egypt. For most of his nearly three decades in power, Mubarak, a former air force commander, largely let the military operate as it liked. But after 18 days of a mass uprising in 2011 against his rule Mubarak’s long-serving defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who had been known as “Mubarak’s poodle,” ousted and jailed him.
Although many in the military distrusted President Mohammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood background — the Brotherhood had been outlawed before the revolution — they welcomed his inauguration in June 2012 as an exit from the accountability of governing. President Morsi granted two key demands: squashing the possibility of prosecutions of military officials for Mubarak-era crimes and passing a Constitution that excused the military budget from parliamentary oversight.
The Freedom and Justice Party, established by the Muslim Brotherhood several months ago, was officially recognized on June 7, 2012 by the interim military government that has ruled Egypt since Hosni Mubarak was removed from power. The FJP won the largest number of seats (235) under Egypt's complex electoral system. Egyptians voted in three phases over a six-week period (Dec. 2011 to January 2012) to elect the 498 members of the People's Assembly. Morsi won office with 51 percent of the presidential vote in June 2012.
On June 30, 2012, Morsi took his formal oath of office before the Supreme Constitutional Court and within weeks he tried to consolidate his grip over the powerful military. On August 12, he ordered the retirement of the top Mubarak-era leadership of the military. He announced the retirement of Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of the armed forces, and the chief of staff, Sami Anan. Tantawi's retirement was the latest blow in a tussle between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military over control of post-transitional Egypt.
President Morsi also cancelled the complementary constitutional declaration issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, announced days before he was declared the victor in June's elections. The addendum had curbed presidential power and kept much of it in the hands of the military council.
Field Marshal Tantawi was replaced by the head of military intelligence, General Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi who on Wednesday seized power and announced Morsi's deposition. Interestingly, General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, did not even utter Mr. Morsi’s name as he announced that the president had been deposed and the Constitution suspended. In a speech on TV General el-Sisi announced that the constitution has been suspended and the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court will have presidential powers.
On November 22, 2012, Morsi issued a decree that effectively placed his decisions above and beyond any court until a new Constitution and parliament governing the nation were put in place. His reason for doing so was to protect the assembly drafting a new post-Mubarak Constitution from influence from a judiciary with ties to the old regime. But the decree was met with massive protests from the opposition and members of the judiciary. Morsi was forced to back down on some of his power grab.
The Constitution was put to a referendum in December 2012. It was passed easily with 63.83% votes.
All of these crucial decisions by Morsi came as the Egyptian economy continued to implode. Instability has driven away investors and tourists, and unemployment, inflation and debt have increased. A fuel shortage has helped send food prices soaring. For months, the government had been negotiating a $4.8 billion loan on fairly easy terms from the International Monetary Fund. In April, Egypt pressed to increase the loan size, but discussions were pending and won't start again until October.
Egypt launches crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood after Morsi's ouster
The Egyptian army has launched a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood movement following the overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi. Several leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested.
The deposed president was under house arrest at the Republican Guard Club, and most members of presidential team had also been placed under house arrest, according to a Brotherhood spokesman.
Judge Tharwat Hammad, head of the Cairo Court of Appeals, says judicial authorities have opened an investigation into accusations that Morsi and eight other senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood had defamed the judiciary. All were banned from traveling.
A prosecutor also ordered the arrest of the Muslim Brotherhood's supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, and a top deputy, Khairat el-Shater, for allegedly ordering the killing of protesters outside the Brotherhood's headquarters Sunday, judicial sources said.
Mohamed ElBaradei named interim Prime Minister
On July 5, a former trustee of US corporate-funded International Crisis Group, Mohammed ElBaradei, was named as interim Prime Minister of Egypt.
It may be added that the ICG is a non-governmental organization that enjoys an annual budget of over $15 million and is bankrolled by the Carnegie, the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Soros himself serves as a member of the organization’s Executive Committee.
Wall Street and London, via their corporate-media have been building up ElBaradei for at least a year before the "Arab Spring" even began, portraying him as the great hope for Egypt. Foreign Affairs magazine, in March 2010, literally printed an article titled, "Is ElBaradei Egypt's Hero?"
Media reports said that Tamarod movement, which engineered mass protests culminating in the overthrow of President Mohammad Morsi, had nominated ElBaradei to represent the movement in transition negotiations with the military.
ElBaradei, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2005 for his work with International Atomic Energy Agency, returned to Egypt in 2010 and became a prominent opponent of Hosni Mubarak in the lead-up to the 2011 uprising that overthrew him.
His appointment was not really a surprise since he was sitting next to General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi when he announced the ouster of President Morsi.
Al Jazeera TV reporting from Nasr City, said the reaction from the Morsi's camp to the appointment of Elbaradei was one of complete rejection and anger. One pro-Morsi protester was quoted as saying that the appointment of ElBaradei is a move directed at appeasing the United States and that he served them well, allowing for the invasion of Iraq when he was in the IAEA and will now be their puppet again - we all know he is a puppet.
Egypt's second largest Muslim group, which had initially backed a military-led political roadmap to guide the country to new elections, opposed the nomination of ElBaradei. The Al Nour Party's deputy leader Ahmed Khalil told the state news website Al-Ahram that the party would withdraw from the political transition process if ElBaradei was confirmed in his post as expected. "The nomination of ElBaradei violates the roadmap that the political and national powers had agreed on with General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi," he told Al-Ahram, referring to the chief of the armed forces.
Tamarrod protest movement and the U.S. connection
What is Tamarrod movement and who is behind it? According to BBC, Tamarrod, meaning rebellion in Arabic, was founded in late April by members of the Egyptian Movement for Change - better known by its slogan Kefaya (Enough) - which pushed for political reform in Egypt under former president Hosni Mubarak in 2004 and 2005. It was also supported by the April 6 Youth movement.
The New York Times reported on April 14, 2011 that the U.S. groups helped nurture Arab uprisings. A number of US-trained groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt. The April 6 Youth Movement observed the fifth anniversary of its establishment with anti-Morsi demonstrations in Cairo on April 6, 2013.
The New York Times also reported that some Egyptian youth leaders attended a 2008 technology meeting in New York, where they were taught to use social networking and mobile technologies to promote democracy. Among those sponsoring the meeting were Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department.
“We learned how to organize and build coalitions,” the paper quoted as saying Bashem Fathy, a founder of the youth movement that ultimately drove the Egyptian uprisings. Mr. Fathy, who attended training with Freedom House, said, “This certainly helped during the revolution.”
Three months earlier, the British Daily Telegraph reported on January 11, 2011 that the American government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning “regime change” for the past three years.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net)
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