Ken Silverstein has a feature in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine that is worth reading. He paints an annoyingly rosy picture of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, but makes an argument that merits consideration—and a solid response. The rise of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood as “ballot-box” political forces poses a serious challenge to Bush’s doctrine of spreading democracy as an ultimate strategy in the war on terror. The war on terror has come increasingly to rely on despotic regimes that use the fight against terrorism as an excuse to stifle democracy. Silverstein thinks that Hezbollah and the Brotherhood are no longer important sources of terrorism – and that they are in a way as much enemies of Al Qaeda as we are, because they legitimize democratic political systems simply by participating. I still think that all these groups are dangerous—and they sympathize with terrorism when they do not actually engage in it. But it will be increasingly important to understand them—what they think and what they do—if only because they may be ruling governments one day.
On the State Department and Egypt, Silverstein writes this:
The State Department has periodically criticized Egypt when it has jailed pro-Western figures, such as the former presidential candidate Ayman Nour. But it has uttered barely a word about the arrests this year (reported by Human Rights Watch) of more than one thousand Brotherhood members, many of whom have been charged, under the dubious Article 86 of Egypt’s penal code, with belonging to an organization that “impairs the national unity or social peace.” When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Cairo in June 2005, she gingerly pressed the Mubarak regime on the need for political reform and described democracy as “the ideal path for every nation.” Yet she declined to meet with anyone from the Brotherhood, saying, “Egypt has its laws, it has its rule of law, and I’ll respect that.”
A former CIA officer told me that the United States had unofficial but regular contacts with the Ikhwan until the late 1990s, before breaking off communication when the Mubarak regime complained. Since the September 11 attacks, the Egyptian government has worked closely with the CIA in the “war on terror,” serving as a favored destination for “extraordinary renditions,” i.e., the covert transfer of suspected extremists from U.S. custody to foreign intelligence agencies for the purpose of interrogation. Ironically, then, despite the dictates of the “Bush Doctrine,” it is precisely Egypt’s lack of democracy—the regime’s willingness to throw Muslim terrorism suspects into secret prisons and employ torture against them—that has made it such a valuable ally. At the same time, of course, the Mubarak government presents itself to the West as the only hope of preventing a radical Islamic takeover. “These regimes are not stupid,” the former CIA officer said. “They know the language they need to speak to ensure our continued support, so they raise the Islamist threat and we fall for it, because we want their counterterrorism cooperation. That has trumped the idea of democracy.”
Augustus Richard Norton, an adviser to the Iraq Study Group with whom I met in Cairo, told me that he admires a number of leading liberal opposition figures, who he said would eliminate corruption and establish a free press “if they could twitch their noses and do it.” But, he added, “they have no significant base. They are nice people with nice ideas and they have impressive handouts in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese for Western reporters, but there’s no grass roots. The only group that can turn out people is the Brotherhood.”
Norton believes that the question of whether or not the Ikhwan is fully committed to democracy—a standard to which, it should be noted, the Mubarak regime is never held—is a red herring. “If I had my way, I’d drive as fast as I could, sleep until noon, and have all sorts of romantic dalliances with beautiful women,” he said. “But life is constrained by practical realities. The question of the Brotherhood’s intentions is interesting to discuss over coffee, but it’s not a real question. There are structural constraints regarding what they could do, including what the army would allow and what the public would tolerate. There are 80 million Egyptians, and many of them, even devout Muslims who follow an Islamic lifestyle, are skeptical of the Ikhwan and would not tolerate anything like an Islamic takeover.”