It’s
not unusual for the United States and a Muslim country to be on the
opposite sides of the War on Terror. It is unusual for a Muslim country
to take a stand against terrorism while the United States backs the
right of a terrorist group to burn churches, torture opposition members
and maintain control of a country with its own nuclear program.
But
that’s the strange situation in what Egypt’s public prosecutor has
declared “the biggest case of conspiracy in the country’s history.”
The
media assumes that the charges accusing Muslim Brotherhood leaders of
conspiring with Hamas and Hezbollah, passing state secrets to Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard and plotting to help foreign terrorists kill
Egyptian soldiers is a show being put on for Western audiences. They
couldn’t be more wrong.
This
isn’t about winning international PR points. It’s about destroying the
credibility of the Brotherhood in the eyes of Egyptians and burying it
along with what’s left of the Arab Spring in the waters of the Nile.
Obama
assumed that cuts to military aid would force Egypt to restore the
Muslim Brotherhood to power. He was wrong and the latest round of
criminal charges show just how wrong he was.
The
charges that the Muslim Brotherhood conspired with Hamas and Hezbollah
to unleash a wave of terror against Egypt go to the heart of this
struggle between the Egyptian nationalism of the military and the
Islamic transnationalism of the Muslim Brotherhood. They paint the
Muslim Brotherhood as not merely corrupt or abusive, the way that many
tyrannies are, but as a foreign subversive element.
These aren’t merely criminal charges. They are accusations of treason.
There
are two narratives of the Arab Spring. In one of them, the people rose
up against the tyrants. In the other an international conspiracy of
Western and Muslim countries collaborated with the Muslim Brotherhood to
take over Arab countries.
To
destroy the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the state has to do more than
accuse Morsi of abuses of power; it has to show that he and his
organization were illegitimate because they were Un-Egyptian.
That
will prove that the differences between Mubarak and Morsi aren’t
incidental. Mubarak may have been thuggish and corrupt, but he was an
Egyptian patriot. Morsi will be charged with being an Iranian traitor
who conspired to take away the Sinai and turn it over to the terrorist
proxies of a Shiite state.
The
Egyptian public prosecutor’s charges speak of an Iranian conspiracy
dating back to 2005 that saw Muslim Brotherhood members being trained by
that country’s Revolutionary Guard and by Hezbollah. They allege that
the Muslim Brotherhood had been preparing to declare its own separatist
Emirate in the Sinai if it could not succeed in bringing Morsi to power.
Egypt
had already accused Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders of being
liberated from prison by terrorist infiltrators. It now accuses him of
importing foreign terrorists to attack Egyptian soldiers (which
provided him with a pretext for bringing the Egyptian military under
control by pushing out Field Marshal Tantawi and putting General Al-Sisi
in command of the Egyptian military) and after Sisi’s overthrow of him,
to intimidate Egypt into restoring him to power.
It’s
all about Iran now. Wildly unpopular for its support of the Syrian
government, an Islamic country whose religion the Sunni Muslims of Egypt
do not recognize as Islam, it is the perfect target. The Muslim
Brotherhood’s collaboration with a Shiite power murdering Sunnis is not
just treason; it’s heresy.
But as cleverly convenient as the charges may be, it’s entirely possible that they are also true.
There
is little doubt that Morsi conspired with Hamas. There is no reason for
him not to have. Hamas is just the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. And it
is exactly this sort of transnational arrangement that makes Arab
nationalists distrust the Muslim Brotherhood and its international
network.
Morsi
and Hamas’ actions after the murder of Egyptian soldiers in the summer
of last year strongly suggest that there was coordination. Morsi was
quick to exploit the attacks for a domestic power grab and a push into
the Sinai and the Army of Islam, which was allegedly responsible for
attacking Egypt, has worked together with Hamas and looks a lot like a
Hamas effort at plausible deniability.
If
there were really any doubt that the Egyptian military believed Hamas
was responsible all along, not just when it became politically
convenient to level those charges against Morsi, the way that it began
treating Hamas even before the overthrow of Morsi should put any doubts
to rest. Even before Morsi fell, Hamas had begun complaining that Egypt
was treating it worse than Israel.
Hamas
had every reason to exploit the Anti-Mubarak protests to help set
Muslim Brotherhood members free. And once they were in power, it had
every reason to intervene to keep them in power. The more the Egyptian
military turned on Hamas, the more it was motivated to help Morsi hold
on to power and to restore him to power once he had been overthrown.
Did
Hamas really believe that it could work with the Brotherhood to carve
out an Emirate in the Sinai? There’s no way to know. Hamas’ ambitions
may have been no grander than protecting its smuggling network, but it
certainly would have profited from a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist
kingdom in the Sinai.
Iran
is the joker in the deck. Would the Muslim Brotherhood have continued a
conspiracy with Iran even after taking power? Ahmadinejad visited Egypt
when the Muslim Brotherhood was in power and though he met with a mixed
reception, the visit had the air of a victory lap. Adding to that
impression were the Iranian warships passing through the Suez Canal.
The
willingness of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, to draw the bulk
of its support from Iran, made it and its allied Muslim Brotherhood
franchises vulnerable to charges of Shiite collaboration. Despite
Qatar’s infusion of money, Hamas was never able to fully break with Iran
even during the Syrian Civil War and before too long came crawling back
to Tehran.
And now Hamas’ lust for Iranian money and weapons may end up putting a noose around Morsi’s neck.
The
trial of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders is Egypt’s
opportunity to frame the events of the last few years on their own
terms. Egyptians are struggling to come to terms with what happened and
they will be told that a foreign conspiracy bringing together Iran,
Qatar and the United States took over their country for a little while
before being forced out of office by civilian and military patriots.
And strangely enough, it will almost be the truth.
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