US considering engaging Muslim Brothers?

The rabidly Zionist, MEMRI outlet, New York Sun has an interesting piece by Eli Lake, a reporter formerly based in Cairo who knows the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, about how the State Dept. and other US agencies are considering engaging with the MB. Robert Leiken, who recently wrote a Foreign Affairs piece advocating engagement (see posts on that here and here), participated in the findings.

Today the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research will host a meeting with other representatives of the intelligence community to discuss opening more formal channels to the brothers. Earlier this year, the National Intelligence Council received a paper it had commissioned on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood by a scholar at the Nixon Center, Robert Leiken, who is invited to the State Department meeting today to present the case for engagement. On April 7, congressional leaders such as Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, attended a reception where some representatives of the brothers were present. The reception was hosted at the residence in Cairo of the American ambassador to Egypt, Francis Ricciardone, a decision that indicates a change in policy.

The National Security Council and State Department already meet indirectly with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood through discussions with a new Syrian opposition group created in 2006 known as the National Salvation Front. Meanwhile, Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, is a leader of Iraq’s chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. His party, known as the Iraqi Islamic Party, has played a role in the Iraqi government since it was invited to join the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003.

These developments, in light of Hamas’s control of Gaza, suggest that President Bush — who has been careful to distinguish the war on terror from a war on Islam — has done more than any of his predecessors to accept the movement fighting for the merger of mosque and state in the Middle East.

I personally think Leiken has a tendency to put the various Muslim Brotherhoods in the same basket. Whatever the links between them, they are clearly separate entities with local leaderships and warrant different approaches from the US. For instance, from a practical standpoint the US is forced to deal with the MB in Iraq, and from a political one engaging the Syrian MB makes sense if one is pursuing a policy of regime change in Damascus, particularly as exile Syrian groups have relationships with the Syrian MB. In Egypt, the situation is quite different: engagement with the MB has been extremely cautious, restricted to parliamentarians and is subject to close scrutiny from a regime that is close to Washington. In Palestine, engagement with Hamas is left to countries like Egypt since dealing with Hamas directly would contravene every ideological tenet the Bush administration holds dear, and presumably anger their neocon friends.

However, there are signs that the Egyptian MB can be useful: last week, reports emerged that Fatah’s strongman in Gaza and US-Israeli tool Muhammad Dahlan (who is blamed even by his Egyptian intelligence handlers for starting the recent violence in Gaza) had sent out an emissary to MB Supreme Guide Muhammad Akef, asking him to reach out to Hamas. The Egyptian intelligence services have used Akef’s good offices with Hamas for a while now, it seems, and despite the ongoing crackdown against the MB domestically, the regime realizes they can be useful (and perhaps the MB hopes to win some lenience in return), even if the MB’s official support for the Hamas government clashes with Egypt’s decision to only recognize the Fatah-backked Fayyad government in the West Bank (and Egypt’s help in making sure Hamas leaders cannot leave Gaza and other forms of coordination of the blockade with the Israelis, even if some Israelis are unhappy.)

It’s also worthwhile noting that Hamas is making an attempt to get the US to engage directly with them — note that Ismail Haniyeh’s advisor Ahmed Youssef had op-eds in both the NYT and WaPo yesterday advocating engagement and defending Hamas’ democratic credentials. Hamas has also been making noise about negotiating the release of of BBC journalist Alan Johnston (what were they waiting for, anyway?)

In the context of this debate about engaging the various Muslim Brotherhoods, it’s worth highlighting that Human Rights Watch has put up interviews of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood detainees who were imprisoned and tortured by the Egyptian security services. It’s a novel and unusual attempt by an establishment institution to put a human face on the MB, which tends not to make front-page news when its members are (routinely) arrested and mistreated. HRW is not only defending their human rights, but also the MB’s freedom of association and expression, which is bound to make many in Cairo (and not just in government) unhappy. The full list of interviews is on the page linked above, but here’s a YouTube version of the interview with Mahmoud Izzat, the Secretary-General of the MB, recalling the brutal 1965 wave of arrests, which was widely credited for radicalizing a part of the MB and creating the spinoff groups that would become Islamic Jihad, and ultimately join al-Qaeda.

Salah on US aid to Egypt

Al Hayat’s Muhammad Salah on Congress’ threat to withhold military funding from Egypt:

Strikingly, there are many objections raised by Egyptian opposition forces against the use of aid as a pressure card on the Egyptian government. Moreover, Egyptian political parties and opposition forces vied for opposing the US president’s statements and then the decision of the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee on the US aid to Egypt. This seems logical. The prevailing feelings in the Egyptian street are always against American policies, which the majority of Egyptians believe to be against Arabs and Muslims. Opposition newspapers also adopt a theory based on the fact that the US demands for reform do not reflect principled attitudes, but are rather used when the Egyptian government refrains from meeting a particular demand.

The ferrane

This is a nicely written story about the role of public bakeries in traditional Moroccan life — it made my mouth water at the thought of the tasty bread I grew up with. But it was slightly ruined for me towards the end with the author’s dinner at Mohammed Benaissa, the hapless and reportedly quite corrupt foreign minister (and former ambassador to the US).

Klein: How war was turned into a brand

Naomo Klein on Israel’s military-industrial complex:

Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-90s, when the country was in the vanguard of the information revolution – the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack, and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.

Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms, Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the “flat world” to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of 24-hour-a-day showroom, a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

Discussions of Israel’s military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country – US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank, and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2bn in “defence” products to the United States – up dramatically from $270m in 1999. In 2006, Israel exported $3.4bn in defence products – well over a billion more than it received in American military aid. That makes Israel the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called homeland security sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2bn, an increase of 20%. The key products and services are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror”.

There is a more sophisticated, highly original version of this thesis in the work of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, notably in their groundbreaking book The Global Political Economy of Israel.

World Refugee Day: Help Iraqis

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Click on the logo above to learn more about a campaign to get the White House to do more to help Iraqi refugees, the fastest growing refugee crisis worldwide. Refugees International is asking people to call the White House to ask them to increase the aid to Iraqi refugees to $290 million. Remember that, as we noted recently in a post on a recent Brooking report on Iraq’s refugee crisis, the US has given refugee status to only about 800 Iraqis since 2003, although new legislation will increase that to a still measly 7,000.

Notes on Gaza

Some readers have written to ask why I am not writing about the recent events in Palestine. The main reason, aside from not having internet access over the last few days, is that I am not there and do not follow events there very closely. For fresh analysis and reporting, you could do no better than head over to my friend Charles Levinson’s Conflict Blotter, which is shock-full of interesting tidbits such as this timeline of the recent clashes. I have some thoughts on how this links in to bigger regional issues, but that will have to wait.

I actually think the most important document you can read to understand the current crisis is Alvaro de Soto’s recently leaked UN report, revealed by the Guardian, in which he illustrates the sheer cravenness of US and Israeli policies towards the conflict, basically suggesting that the UN (and European countries) should withdraw from the sham that is the Quartet. The report is basically explosive, and considering this is widely believed to be one of the most important conflicts on the planet, it is an extremely important story. It has been fairly widely reported by the European press since the Guardian broke it. I just checked the websites of the New York Times and the name “Alvaro de Soto” does not show up at all in the past week; the Washington Post printed a story on page A16 last Thursday (I subscribe to the Post’s daily mailing list and to its mideast RSS feed and did not see it).

Below are clippings from a variety of sources, some very anti-Palestinian, but they illustrate well one thing: that the leaders of Fatah, by and large, may have not had control of a real state but were cut from very much the same cloth as most other Arab leaders.

Hamas Takes Over Gaza Security Services – New York Sun

World Net Daily’s Aaron Klein first broke the story of the document stash yesterday, publishing an interview with a spokesman for the Hamas allied Popular Resistance Committee, Muhammed Abdel-El. He told Mr. Klein, “The CIA files we seized, which include documents, CDs, taped conversations, and videos, are more important than all the American weapons we obtained the last two days as we took over the traitor Fatah’s positions.”

A CIA spokesman yesterday declined to comment. But a former CIA operations officer who worked in the Middle East, Robert Baer, said it was a major blow to Fatah, the party founded in 1966 by Yasser Arafat that America sought to prop up during the Oslo process as the CIA and Egyptian security services trained its members in the hopes that they would take action against jihadists such as Hamas.

“They are going to identify Fatah with the CIA. Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point. They are going to show a record of training, spying on Hamas, that’s about it. It’s what we all knew. But the point is they have undermined the secular Palestinians for a long time. No one wants to be publicly associated with the CIA in the Middle East, except for maybe the Albanians,” Mr. Baer said.

Mr. Baer said that most of the training the CIA provided in the Oslo years, aid codified in the Wye River Accords in 1998 between America, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, was fairly low level. “What we did was throw money at them. We give them dumb training, soft interrogation techniques, reports writing. All this stuff is a total waste of time. They will never get to the point where they do anything more than transmit a report verbally to someone they trust. That is just the culture.”

PA Chairman Abbas issues decree outlawing Hamas armed militias – Haaretz

According to the current plan, Abbas will continue to refuse to negotiate with Hamas or to reach a compromise with the movement’s leadership. This weekend he turned down a request to meet with Khaled Meshal. The emergency cabinet of Salam Fayad is sure to obtain broad Arab and international support. Since it contains no Hamas members, the boycott against the PA will be lifted and it will receive financial and diplomatic support from the whole world. This weekend, representatives of Abbas asked a number of non-partisan Gazan figures to join the new cabinet but so far none has agreed.

The blockade of the Gaza Strip will continue, under the plan framed by Abbas. Israel and Egypt will provide a small amount of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents, but the government of Ismail Haniyeh – dissolved by Abbas – will continue to be viewed as illegitimate in the eyes of the international community. Gaza’s borders will be nearly hermetically sealed, with only limited emergency supplies and intermittent water and electricity provided by Israel. The intention is to maintain the siege on Gaza for a few weeks – not to defeat Hamas or to reoccupy the strip, but to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a compromise according to terms dictated by Abbas.

Abbas sought and received Egypt’s blessing for this plan, in contrast to Cairo’s firm and public opposition to Abbas’ Plan B, which called for introducing an Arab or international force into Gaza. The Egyptians explained that such a move would provoke resistance from Hamas and would turn Gaza into Baghdad.

Abbas aide: Fayad completed formation of emergency gov’t – Haaretz

Hamas’ Damascus-based political leader Khaled Meshal said Friday his group does not want to seize power in the Palestinian Authority, and that the group recognizes Abbas as the head of the PA.

“Hamas does not want to seize power … We are faithful to the Palestinian people,” Meshal said, promising to help rebuild Palestinian homes damaged in the months of bloody infighting.

“What happened in Gaza was a necessary step. The people were suffering from chaos and lack of security and this treatment was needed,” Meshal continued. “The lack of security drove the crisis toward explosion.”

“Abbas has legitimacy,” Meshal said, “There’s no one who would question or doubt that, he is an elected president, and we will cooperate with him for the sake of national interest.”

How Hamas turned on Palestine’s ‘traitors’ – The Observer

Discreetly, Hamas had forged links with members and former members of Fatah with whom it was happy to deal. It had drawn up a list of buildings belonging to the security forces of Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to be overrun, and lists of Fatah loyalists it blamed for the murder of Hamas members. Finally, it had briefed journalists on the Hamas-controlled television channel al-Aqsa TV on the message to broadcast to Gaza’s 1.4 million people to reassure them, as the fighting turned from clashes to an all-out assault on Fatah-held positions.

It was a message that would dramatically underline the nature of last week’s assault. It was not an attack on Fatah, the broadcasts would insist, or Gaza’s people. Instead, those under attack, the supporters of Gaza’s head of the Preventive Security Force, Mohammed Dahlan, were ‘collaborators with Israel and the US and traitors’.

What they did not say, but what was understood by all Gazans, was that the leadership of Hamas has a more personal grudge against the deeply unpopular Dahlan. Specifically, they blamed him for ordering a series of killings of members of Hamas that in their view had fuelled the cycle of violence that stepped up
after Hamas swept Fatah from power in January last year.

The reality is that the only people who are really behind Salam Fayyad are the European and US diplomats who have long sung his praises behind the scenes to any journalist prepared to listen. So yesterday President Bush and the other members of the Quartet got what they wanted. Abbas trooped dutifully in to see the US consul-general in Jerusalem with Mohammed Dahlan, the man widely credited with beginning the cycle of violence in Gaza, in tow. And when they emerged, the boycott of US monies to the Palestinian government had been lifted.

Israeli official: Dayton failed – Jerusalem Post

As security coordinator between Israel and the PA, US Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton was responsible for training and financing equipment used by the Presidential Guard, Abbas’s elite force that was in charge of the Rafah and Karni crossings. During last week’s fighting in Gaza, the forces proved their ineffectiveness and together with the rest of the Fatah military and political wing, failed to demonstrate a real opposition to Hamas.

“Dayton’s plan completely failed,” a senior defense official said. “The Presidential Guards which he was responsible for were easily run over by Hamas.”

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with a noted analyst of Palestinian politics. We were talking about the dynamics of the Hamas-Fatah fighting. I asked him what he thought would happen if Dahlan is assassinated. He paused, thought a while, smiled and then answered: “Palestine is liberated.”

Iraqi refugees

The Brookings Institution put out a report last week that describes in detail the situation of the 1 to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees currently living in Syria (there are an estimated 2 million in the region, in addition to 2 million internally displaced).

The report discusses the reasons refugees are leaving Iraq: getting caught in fighting between US and Iraqi forces and insurgents (200,000 refugees arrived after the fall of Fallujah in 2004); fleeing sectarian violence; fleeing crime, violence and the impossibility of making a livelihood generally; and being in need of medical services that are no longer available in Iraq. The report describes the ways in which refugees travel to Syria, and their living conditions there. It points out that while many Iraqis arrive with some resources and skills, and can count on support from relatives across the border, many of them are running out of money (and turning to child labour and prostitution) and that their numbers may yet continue to swell dramatically.

The Syrian goverment, for all its (countless, enormous) faults, has been by far the most generous host to Iraqi refugees, letting them in easily and giving them access to state health care and education. The Syrian government has been much more generous than, say, the American government, which has given refugee status to about 800 Iraqis since 2003. But we just passed legislation that will allow us to resettle “nearly 7,000.” So we’re doing our bit.

State Department: Human trafficking report

Most of the Gulf countries have made it onto the Tier 3 list (those countries with the worst record in human trafficking, according to the report) of the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2007: Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. UAE is on the Tier 2 watch list.

So is Egypt. From the report:

Egypt is a transit country for women trafficked from Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, and other
Eastern European countries to Israel for the purpose of sexual exploitation, and may be a source for
children trafficked internally for commercial sexual exploitation and domestic servitude. Reports indicate
that some of Cairo’s estimated 1 million street children — both girls and boys — are exploited in
prostitution.

I’m surprised at this large number of street children in Cairo. Does anyone have other sources on this?

In addition, wealthy men from the Gulf reportedly travel to Egypt to purchase “temporary
marriages� with Egyptian women, including in some cases girls who are under age 18, often apparently as
a front for commercial sexual exploitation facilitated by the females’ parents and marriage brokers.

What I also heard is that Cairo’s chronically underfunded state-run orphanages are using this to make some extra money (or their employees).

The full report can be downloaded here.

The “Gay Bomb”

You really can’t make this stuff up:

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsequently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”

. . .

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

“The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay,” explained Hammond.