Three-strikes policy: Egypt military fires AGAIN on unarmed civilians and now reporters.

No, I didn't embarrass you. You did that to yourself. And you are still doing it.

 

I didn't read the post above. It's probably just one attention-whoring person who posted about 80 times in his own thread, mostly enjoying the attention the topic got from me, babbling about himself.

 

Egypt is heading to a better place - people forget that revolutions are disorderly and ugly at times.

There will be no end to this unless all sides feel comfortable. The Army has to feel it is not going to be put under the control of radical elements and that they will still have plenty of money and respect in whatever gov't takes over. I think they realize they are not the group to be caretakers of the economy, nor do they want an autocratic rule that threatens their way of life. There's a reason the Egyptian army has high morale and hasn't fractured along religious lines itself.

The MB want power - they over-reached and looking back I am sure they realize that. But the opposition and the army screwed up by ousting them in my opinion - and that reflects their inexperience in democracy. All they had to do was do what Republicans do here - paint the MB as completely incompetent stewards and attack them politically until the next election cycle.

In the end, you won't stop the MB from protesting unless they are restored to power, and I think that needs to be done. But with the caveat of rewriting the constitution and the ability to ensure future and fair elections so the population can kick them out in a few years.

But rest assured - all sides are rational. They are making mistakes, but they are definitely not acting purely on emotion either. They are making calculated decisions - not the best ones, but they are calculated.


On another note - can I give you some advice. Don't engage someone who is abusing you, you are showing weakness by doing that...unless you are trying to put them on tilt.

 

Hezbollah are Shia, so Hamas is a fairer comparison, especially since Hamas is an offshoot of the MB. They have a lot of outreach to the poor combined with religious education that gives them their support, wheras Hezbollah is primarily an armed militia. I still like the 700 Club as a comparsion

 

Unfortunately, rarely are technocrats given power.

The coup was a mistake. As long as you have fair elections...but maybe it wasn't - that constitution was a joke. It needed to be scrapped.

The problem was the way they set up the gov't, there was no checks or balances to ensure one political party dominated the creation of the constitution. Instead, they should have made the constitution first from a committed made up equally of secular and religious representatives, then empowered the courts, and then elect a legislative body.

Hindsight is 30/30 i guess

As for the bloodshed - I am not sure you can entirely blame any one group or excuse any other. The facts are murky at best.

 

I admit I can enjoy it too. I actually crack up at times and there is a part of me that enjoys gets a rise out of people, but I realize that's juvenile in and of itself. It's also known as trolling.

If you return fire, then you become everything the other person is. If you defend yourself, it looks weak. All you can do it call the person out and let it go really At least that's what I have learned in my years in D&D.

I am sure he is in his day to day life.

You know, you can choose to laugh it off now, you can make that moment now, there's no need to wait!

It's not for us to do that. If history has taught us anything, it's that U.S. good intentions often backfire. And by often I mean almost always. Unless a country is actively open to us coming in and helping - like Japan post-War, then we should stay out. We haven't had much success whether it be in Latin America or the middle east.

If the Egyptian people want democracy enough, they will have it. That's true self-determination. I think it's fitting that something like democracy has to be taken, not given by another country. Americans won their independence (with a little help from the French), but mostly, we did it on our own. And that's why we treasure our democracy so much - it's part of our inherent culture.

You can't take that away from Egyptians. They don't trust us nor want us messing with this - and for very good reasons. Our role should be that as the impartial broker who can bring all sides together. This is what Obama should be working towards - cessation of violence and asking to bring all sides together to meet and discuss a path forward.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23732350

Not saying the MB is free of blood, just saying that they aren't necessary seeking to destroy churches either. It could very possibly just be mobs gone wild. Once you unleash a genie, that genie isn't under anyone's control - and the MB definitely is unleashing the genie.

 

yes educate the population and raise standard of living, see korea, taiwan

 

MB faking pictures. Oops. Guess they learned plenty from Palestine <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/7yHyQ1cWx6E" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Shia or Sunni, extremist is extremist regardless of the brand. I don't get the anger here. A brand of crazy took over the government, started implementing an extreme power grab (as many predicted would happen with MB) and the military stepped in. Now the crazies are up in arms and the military is taking it to them. And? What am I missing?

 

Stop self-analyzing and pitying yourself. You could try to start an "Anonymous posters" self-help group, but...nobody cares.

Your thread title already contains a mistake, they were not unarmed. And then throughout the whole thread you don't even understand the basics of that conflict, continuously talking about the Muslim Brotherhood supposedly having renounced violence (while they are murdering people and burning churches), not knowing the Muslim Brotherhood's history or key figures or anything.

 

What is really going on with radical Muslims and in Egypt. The Egyptian Spring was a rebellion against not just our guys the oppressive miitary for civil liberties but also because of the crushing poverty of the majority working if at all for a $hr per hr while international speculators raise the price of wheat and other food stocks for ordinary Egyptians while our funded military dictatorship suppresses dissent.

I doubt there is anyone on this forum who supports their type of radical Muslim, but despite ATW and his ilk's obsession with that type of Islam it is their support for the type of policies that supports such grinding poverty for tens of millions in these countries that feeds this form of religion.

It is indeed striking to watch TV interviews with unarmed muslims at the barricades in Cairo saying they are willing to die facing our funded military without weapons shortly before they probably were about to die.

Chris Hedges nails it in this exert from a larger article.

*********
Murdering the Wretched of the Earth
Friday, 16 August 2013 09:21
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed


Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair.

The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists, along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope.

The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a caldron of blood and suffering.


The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give its followers a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness.

....

And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing economy of a world where the wretched of the earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18223-murdering-the-wretched-of-the-earth

 

Only that the military stepped in after long demonstrations on the street, demanding Morsi resign. It brought out even larger numbers than the ones protesting Mubarak. So, the military acted, but only after they knew they had a kind of mandate. Not exactlty parlimentary democracy, but this is Egypt.

 

It’s not about Democracy: Top Ten Reasons Washington is Reluctant to cut off Egypt Aid

Posted on 08/17/2013 by Juan Cole


1. The US doesn’t give much aid to the Egyptian people per se. Only $250 mn a year out of $1.55 bn is civilian. The aid is to cement a relationship between the Egyptian officer corps and the Pentagon.

2. The military aid, $1.3 billion a year, is mostly in-kind, a grant of weaponry . It must be spent on US weapons manufacturers.

3. The Congress gave the Egyptian Generals a credit card to buy weapons, and they’ve run up $3 billion on it for F-16s and M1A1 tanks. If the US cancelled aid, the US government would still have to pick up that bill.

4. Even most of the civilian aid is required to be spent on US goods and materiel. It is corporate welfare for the US

5. The aid was given as a bribe to the Egyptian elite to make nice with Israel.

6. The Israelis asked the US not to suspend the aid.

7. Congress even structured the economic aid to require some of it help joint Israeli-Egyptian enterprises in Egypt, so some of the aid to Egypt actually goes to . . . Israel.

8. It is not generally recognized, but the Egyptian military provides a security umbrella to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE against Iran ... Children, can you say oil?

9. Many in Congress don’t actually disagree with the generals’ actions in overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Freedom and Justice Party and driving it underground, since they agree it is a terrorist organization

10. ... in the Mubarak era ran black sites where they tortured suspected al-Qaeda for Washington. The US deep state would like to ramp that relationship back up.

http://www.juancole.com/

 

More from Chris Hedges who was trained as a theologian and has worked throughout the world as a journalist. I realize that those who have a faith, just about as fundamentalist and unforgiving as radical Islam wrt to the need for unfettered markets, cannot be appealed to emotionally but...
*******
The lifeblood of radical movements is martyrdom. The Egyptian military has provided an ample supply. The faces and the names of the sanctified dead will be used by enraged clerics to call for holy vengeance. And as violence grows and the lists of martyrs expand, a war will be ignited that will tear Egypt apart. Police, Coptic Christians, secularists, Westerners, businesses, banks, the tourism industry and the military will become targets.

Those radical Islamists who were persuaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that electoral politics could work and brought into the system will go back underground, and many of the rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood will join them. Crude bombs will be set off. Random attacks and assassinations by gunmen will puncture daily life in Egypt as they did in the 1990s when I was in Cairo for The New York Times, although this time the attacks will be wider and more fierce, far harder to control or ultimately crush.


... Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger, and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value.

An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at more than 70 percent.

The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism.

It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets.

Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo.

 

The only one I'm not 100% sure about is #8. Having a militarily strong Egypt is good for "stability", but they still have their regional rivalries. The US wouldn't want a weak Saudi Arabia or Turkey either, since they contain Iran and each other.

In a previous post I explained why Congress would never want to cut off the gravy train (which also is the same deal Israel gets). It also means that that the US controls their supply chain. All those F-16s and tanks won't go far without parts, ammunition and maintenance, so Uncle Sam has the ability to pull the plug.

Any Congressman who wants to scrap the treaty and aid package will be spun as anti-peace, and anti-Americn jobs. It's political suicide.