Baradei and the secular opposition need to make common cause with Morsi's supporters before they become the military's next targets themselves

El Baradei and much of the secular opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi in Egypt either don’t understand the meaning of democracy or else don’t believe in it. El Baradei rejected every offer of negotiations and compromise with Morsi, the elected President, blocking talks when other opposition leaders and groups like liberal Ayman Nour agreed to them. The demands of the opposition were ludicrous; including that Morsi, the elected President, resign before negotiations even begin (1) – (2).

Democracy doesn’t mean one faction getting everything their own way. In a democracy that’s impossible. It’s the opposite of democracy. Real democracy is a compromise between every single person in a country in which each has an equal say in the negotiated compromise reached.

By refusing any compromise or negotiations; and by welcoming a military coup that placed Mubarak’s people and the military back in power, El Baradei and much of the secular opposition have also made themselves powerless dupes (3).

There is only one way for them to redeem themselves and restore a chance of preventing a counter-revolution in which General Sisi will be the new Mubarak in all but name; they need to call for the military to release the elected President and the hundreds of other members of the Brotherhood arrested since the coup and then begin immediate negotiations with them.

When both Morsi protesters and their opponents were killing each other in ones and twos at a time El Baradei was claiming that Morsi had given up any right to remain in power.

Now the army and their hired thugs with swords and knives have killed hundreds of protesters against the military coup, the vast majority of whom were peaceful and unarmed.

They are likely the same thugs working for Mubarak’s people and the military who attacked anti-government protesters under Morsi . The opposition believed what they wanted to believe and have been taken for fools by the dictatorship and the military (4).

The military has introduced censorship, closing down every Muslim party’s media outlets as well as Al Jazeera Egypt and arresting their staff. This allows state TV to prevent Egyptians seeing that the protests against the coup are just as big as the pro-military and pro-coup protests (5).

 They’ve even taken cameras from CNN reporters to prevent them filming. If there’s nothing to hide why would they do this?

They’ve used live ammunition to massacre protesters twice – and showed their continued dishonesty by claiming they hadn’t (6) – (7).

Yet somehow this is all supposed to be acceptable because the elected President who was overthrown came from a Muslim party and the protesters are mostly from religious Muslim parties.

Everything is supposedly forgivable because those doing it are secular. Mubarak was secular. The military are secular and have killed, tortured, sexually abused and raped more protesters than any other group in Egypt. Stalin was secular. Pinochet was secular. Saddam was secular. Assad is secular. Hitler was secular.

I’m an agnostic and would never, ever vote for a religious party, but many Egyptians voted for Morsi and Muslim parties and their votes should count. Being secular does not make you automatically right and being religious does not make you automatically wrong.

Some point out that many voters in the Presidential elections in Egypt were voting against Shafiq, Mubarak’s former Prime Minister, rather than for Morsi. That’s true, but unexceptional. In pretty much every democracy with a first-past-the-post system a large proportion of voters are voting against the other party or candidate as much or more than for the person or party they vote for.

This winner-takes-all version of democracy is far from ideal in my opinion and not full democracy, which should involve every vote counting equally, for instance by a multi-member executive to give everyone equal say.

However it does not make a military coup, the jailing of the elected President and the massacre of protesters against this coup legitimate.

Protesters in Egypt who claim it wasn’t a coup are frankly full of shit. They are basically saying democracy is them getting their own way, by whatever method. They’re also fooling themselves if they believe they have any real power now.

The military and Mansour (Mubarak’s man) and the Chief Prosecutor (ditto) and General Sissi have the real power as long as they can play the secular opposition to the military and Mubarak off against the Muslim parties’ opposition.

Mansour (the interim President) has given the Prime Minister the power to call a state of emergency and the secret police units disbanded after the revolution are back (8). General Sissi, who lead the coup, has made himself not only Commander In Chief of the armed forces, a position only held by elected heads of government in a democracy, but also Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister (9).

So if the Prime Minister refuses to call a state of emergency, Sissi just gets Mansour to sack him – and Sissi, as Deputy Prime Minister, becomes Prime Minister and calls a state of emergency.

I hate the current Conservative government in the UK and didn’t vote for them. I’m completely against most of what they’re doing and so is most of the country. I was equally opposed to about 60 or 70% of the last Labour government’s more right wing policies. I don’t believe elections should be a blank cheque that let governments do whatever they want till the next election comes either. Does that mean a military coup and massacring those parties’ supporters would make it all better?

Only an idiot would think so. The same is true in Egypt. Negotiations, power sharing and referenda on major issues are the way to real democracy – not backing military coups and massacres by the old guard of the dictatorship.

Those who claim that Islam and democracy are incompatible are wrong, because there are multiple interpretations of Islam, many of them progressive enough to be entirely reconcilable with democracy.
For instance El Tayeb, the head of the Islamic University in Cairo, which was given the power to rule on the meaning of sharia and Islam by the constitution passed by referendum under Morsi, is a moderate who has said women should not wear hijabs or head coverings as there’s nothing in the Quran about them (10) – (11).

Tayeb has also condemned the killing of Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-coup protesters by the army.

Not only are those saying Islam and democracy are irreconcilable wrong though, they are helping out Al Qa’ida and similar extreme Jihadist groups who also condemn any involvement in elections and democratic politics as un-Islamic (12).

Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the head of Al Qa’ida has claimed that elections “did not follow Sharia” (i.e Al Qa’ida’s extreme version of Islamic Sharia law) (13).

True, in the month or so before the coup Morsi did begin to appoint and ally with some extreme Sunni Islamist groups and clerics. This was foolish but likely an act of desperation after over a year of trying to get the opposition to agree to negotiate had failed and when these groups seemed like his only allies against a military coup.

The opposition to Morsi claim that if Morsi had been allowed to remain in office Egypt would no longer have been a democracy. Obama’s opponents in the US make the same claims about him with as little evidence.

If this coup is allowed to stand and the current line among the media and governments that the Muslim Brotherhood must “be reasonable” and “make concessions” which are to include accepting the overthrow of the first democratically elected President in Egyptian history, the jailing of members of his party and the massacre of peaceful protesters, then it makes Al Qa’ida’s propaganda about how we don’t really mean it when we say we support democracy, about how secularism is corrupt and hypocritical, about how Islam and democracy are irreconcilable seem true.

Then there will be a lot more radicalisation of Muslims in Egypt and worldwide, more terrorist attacks like the one that killed the police recruits and civilians recently. General Sisi and the Egyptian military like to pretend the coup and the killing of protesters is a response to this terrorism. In fact they’re the cause of it (14).

It’s just like Tony Blair and George Bush’s ludicrous nonsense about how it was necessary to invade Iraq to stop Al Qa’ida, who weren’t even in the country until after the invasion.

Compulsive liars, dishonest rulers and those who can’t tell the difference between reality and what they want to believe will all try to pretend that the relationship of cause and effect can just be reversed wherever they feel like it. As the White Stripes pointed out, they can’t.

El Baradei and the rest of Morsi’s opponents need to wake up, see their own faults and stupidities which are as severe as any of those of Morsi or the Brotherhood. They need to call for his release and sit down to negotiate before the revolution is over and Sisi place as a new version of Mubarak, this time the puppet master controlling the President rather than the President himself, is so firmly entrenched in power he can turn his guns on the secular opposition, having crushed the Muslim opposition.

The US government meanwhile can shut up about how it promotes democracy and human rights as long as it keeps funding the coup regime and refuses to even call the coup a coup.

(1) = AP / Independent 11 Dec 2012 ‘Masked gunmen attack opposition protesters as crowds gather for rallies in Egypt’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/masked-gunmen-attack-opposition-protesters-as-crowds-gather-for-rallies-in-egypt-8405979.html , 12^th paragraph, ‘Cracks in the opposition's unity first appeared last weekend when one of its leading figures, veteran opposition politician Ayman Nour, accepted an invitation by Morsi to attend a "national dialogue" meeting. On Monday, another key opposition figure, El-Sayed Badawi of the Wafd party, met Morsi at the presidential palace.’

(2) = LA Times 08 Dec 2012 ‘Egypt protesters demand that Mohamed Morsi step down’, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/08/world/la-fg-egypt-rallies-20121208

(3) = CNN 08 Jul 2013 ‘ElBaradei: Morsy's ouster was needed so Egypt cannot 'fail'’, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/04/world/meast/egypt-elbaradei

(4) = LA Times 28 Jan 2013 ‘Egypt protests continue; opposition rejects talks with Morsi’, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/28/world/la-fg-wn-egypt-protests-opposition-rejects-talks-morsi-20130128

(5) = Al Jazeera 04 Jul 2013 ‘Egypt's military shuts down news channels’, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/07/2013740531685326.html

(6) = Guardian 18 Jul 2013 ‘At the second kneel of the prayers, the attack began’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/18/egyptian-security-attack-on-morsi-supporters

(7) = NYT 27 Ju 2013 ‘Hundreds Shot in Cairo Attack on Morsi Rally’, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/world/middleeast/egypt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

(8) = Guardian 29 Jul 2013 ‘Egypt restores feared secret police units’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/29/egypt-restores-secret-police-units ; 5^th paragraph ; ‘Ibrahim's announcement came hours before Egypt's interim prime minister was given the power to place the country in a state of emergency – a hallmark of Egypt under Mubarak.’

(9) = Independent 24 Jul 2013 ‘Showdown in Cairo: Egyptian general demands permission to take on the ‘terrorists’’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/showdown-in-cairo-egyptian-general-demands-permission-to-take-on-the-terrorists-8729903.html

(10) = The National Review 06 Jul 2013 ‘Elections Are Not Democracy’, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352778/elections-are-not-democracy-andrew-c-mccarthy

(11) = The National (UAE) 21 Mar 2010 ‘Mubarak appoints a new chief of Al Azhar’, http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/africa/mubarak-appoints-a-new-chief-of-al-azhar#page1

(12) = CRS Report for Congress May 2005 ‘Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology’, http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32759.pdf ; see pages 10 to 11

(13) = Egypt Independent 29 Jul 2013 ‘’, http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/07/06/al-zawahiri-calls-for-victims-and-sacrifices/

(14) = guardian.co.uk 24 Jul 2013 ‘Egyptian general calls for millions to protest against 'terrorism'’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/24/egypt-general-sisi-protest-terrorism

Iyad Allawi is back as Saddam Mark II

but don’t worry, his torturers and death squads are secular like Saddam’s, not like that scruffy, rabble rousing ‘sectarian’ Sadr

So Iyad Allawi (or Ayad Allawi), the man groomed by the Bush administration and Blair government to be their client Prime Minister in Iraq, seems to have won the latest elections there. He was first appointed as unelected ‘Interim Prime Minister’ by the Iraqi Governing Council in 2004 (that Council having been appointed by US ‘governor’ of Iraq George Bremer), but lost elections to a Shia list, with the first two elected Prime Ministers since the invasion having been first by Ibrahim al Ja’afari and then Nouri Al Maliki, who both formed a coalition government largely made up of the Iranian backed ‘Supreme council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq’ and it’s successors, along with the Kurds ;and an uneasy and unstable alliance with the Sadrists (also Shia, but less willing to accept the continuing presence of foreign troops).

Allawi lost the first national elections despite the Bush administration providing him with covert aid and conspiring with him to rig the election (according to UN officials), despite Blair sending Labour party official Margaret McDonagh to advise Allawi in his election campaign; and despite some officials under Allawi , threatening to cut food rations to people who didn’t turn out to vote (There was also rigging on the part of the Shia list and the Kurds according to UN staff in Iraq). (1) , (2)

There has been some condemnation of former Ba’athists being banned from standing and even some being threatened with having their candidacies revoked retrospectively after they’ve been elected. Most of these are Sunnis on Allawi’s secular electoral list. This is due to what Seymour Hersh called “the redirection” in US policy in Iraq when the focus switched from using Shia proxies to target Sunnis who were seen as ‘dead enders’ for Saddam and Ba’athism, back to using Sunnis and secular Iraqis to target Shia who are simplistically seen as all ‘pro-Iranian’. Certainly not all Ba’athists were murderers – anyone wanting a career under Saddam had to become a Ba’athist or else hope they could flee into exile without being killed. Allawi does not seem to have been a great democrat or interested in upholding the law or his people’s basic rights either under Saddam or since his overthrow. (3), (4)

There’s been little discussion of Allawi’s own past. Seymour Hersh interviewed former CIA agents and Iraqis who knew Allawi in the 1960s and 70s. They said he was involved in helping Saddam into power and posed as a doctor to assassinate Iraqi dissidents under Saddam from at least 1971 till 1975 (the CIA also having been involved in backing Saddam in the 1960s through till 1991). This is supposedly a sin washed away by his break with Saddam and Saddam subsequently sending assassins to try to kill him, most famously in a failed attempt with an axe in London in 1978. From exile in the 1990s Allawi ran a programme of bombings of cars, cinemas, newspaper offices and Ba’ath party offices in Baghdad as a CIA proxy. Under Allawi as ‘Interim Prime Minister’ (and under his successors Ja’afari and Al Maliki) US-trained ‘police commandos continued the torture methods used under Saddam (even employing many of Saddam’s former Mukhabarat secret police and torturers) and began the ‘Terror in the hands of justice’ TV programme in which torture victims confessed live on television to being terrorists before being executed.(5) – (12)

Some western diplomats say they also ,witnessed Allawi personally shoot six suspected insurgents in front of them(13).

Saddam was also ‘secular’, also relied heavily on the Sunni minority for support and was also backed by the US, British and French governments right up until the invasion of Kuwait - all through the period in which he gassed the Kurds in his genocidal (but secular) ‘Anfal’ campaign and invaded Iran (leading to the deaths of millions, but never mind, he was secular). After the 1991 Gulf War he switched all oil contracts to Russian, French and Chinese firms and their governments became his supporters.

The only major difference between Saddam and Allawi is that Allawi is from a Shia family rather than a Sunni one (though, like Saddam, his family is not a religious one) and has some claim to be democratically elected, though his methods in government are likely to continue to be those of Saddam – torture, murder and execution without fair trial (often with the conviction based on a confession made under torture). It’s true that he hasn’t attempted wholesale genocide against the Kurds, but then he doesn’t have the free hand, nor the huge flow of money and arms that the governments of most of the world (especially the US) gave Saddam during the Anfal and the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s

Moqtadr Al Sadr is meanwhile demonised as a man “who maintains an overlord's hold over more than two million Shia Iraqis”, despite the fact this “overlord’s hold” is based on his widespread popularity among the poorer Shia of Baghdad, who do not see their interests being represented by the main Shia list of Iranian backed politicians from wealthier backgrounds, nor by Allawi with his links to the occupying forces. Could the hostility to him in the media be anything to do with briefings against him by British and American government and military spokespeople? Could those have anything to do with his opposition to the presence of foreign forces in Iraq? A balanced account of Sadr does not suggest that he is either particularly pro-Iranian (though US attempts to capture or assassinate him forced him into exile in Iran) and he seems to have tried to restrain Sectarian violence by his followers against Sunnis, with many of those responsible having broken away from his organisation (For details and sources on Sadr and the Sadrists go to http://www.duncanmcfarlane.org/GetSadr/) (14).

Propaganda from the British and US governments has now come full circle from lauding Saddam for his ‘secularism’ against Iranian extremism in the 1980s to condemning him for his unprovoked aggression against Iran in 2001 till the last couple of years and now back to supporting Allawi as a new ‘ secular strong man’ who will ‘oppose extremism’ and ‘provide stability’. Sceptics might wonder whether being tortured or summarily killed without any trial by Allawi’s death squads who are ‘anti-sectarian’ or ‘secular’ is really that different from being tortured by those who justify their actions on religious grounds, or if the governments of the ‘free world’ just prefer Allawi because he’ll do their bidding by giving their firms oil contracts and opposing the Iranians just as Saddam did – plus allowing them military bases in Iraq to secure it’s oil and make it easier to get hold of Iran’s in future.

(1) New Yorker Magazine 25 Jul2007 ‘Get Out the Vote -
Did Washington try to manipulate Iraq’s election?’ by Seymour Hersh ,http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/25/050725fa_fact?currentPage=4

(2) = Dahr Jamail / IPS 01 Feb 2005 ‘Some just voted for food’, http://www.countercurrents.org/jamail010205.htm

(3)= Guardian Comment Is Free 29 Mar 2010 ‘Iraq's new ruling elite show contempt for voters’, by Toby Dodge, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/29/iraq-elite-contempt-voters

(4) = New Yorker magazine ‘The Re-direction’ by Seymour Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh

(5) = New Yorker magazine 28 Jan 2005
, ‘Annals of National Security : Plan B’ by Seymour Hersh’, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/28/040628fa_fact?currentPage=5

(6) = Aburish, Said K (1997) ‘A Brutal Friendship’ , Indigo, London, 1997&1998, paperback, pages136-143

(7) = Aburish, Said K (2001) ‘Saddam Hussein – The Politics of Revenge’, Chapter2, esp p54-9

(8) = New York Times 9 Jun 2004 ‘THE REACH OF WAR: NEW PREMIER; Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks’ ,http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0912F83D540C7A8CDDAF0894DC404482

(9) = Human Rights Watch 25 January 2005 ‘Iraq: Torture Continues at Hands of New Government -
Police Systematically Abusing Detainees’ ,http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/01/26/iraq10053.htm

(10) = Amnesty International 6 Mar 2006 ( AI Index: MDE 14/001/2006 ) ‘Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq’ ,http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde140012006

(11) = Amnesty International 20 Apr 2007( AI Index: MDE 14/020/2007 ) ‘Iraq: Televised 'confessions', torture and unfair trials underpin world's fourth highest executioner
’ ,http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE140202007

(12) = Times 07 Jul 2005 ‘West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article541123.ece

(13)= Sydney Morning Herald 17 Jun 2004‘Allawi shot prisoners in cold blood: witnesses’ ,http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/16/1089694568757.html

(14) = guardian.co.uk 28 Mar 2010 ‘Exiled Iraqi sheikh may hold key to power in Iraq’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/28/iraq-al-maliki-shia-al-sadr