Has The Insurgency In Egypt Already Begun? Car bombings, assassination attempts, and shootings in the Sinai. “The war has just begun,” says a local government official. Full story: http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/has-the-insurgency-in-egypt-already-begun Discuss.
So did I. Just been waiting for it to hit the news. So the violence that has been flowing into Gaza for the past decade is now flowing the other way. Hamas is a Brotherhood creation, so no surprise there. I think for the next few years we will be seeing insurgencies pop up all over the region. The MB has been sowing the seeds for decades. The Syrian rebels are fully MB backed, as are most other similar movements in the region. It's fairly predictable that when the Egyptian military presses them after Morsi's fall that this will be the result. So... No one really gives a crap about Syria. But Egypt? If it erupts into civil war it will affect the entire region. It's a hub and centerpiece of the Arab world. This is going to get very ugly.
It's also necessary, if the ultimate goal is to root out terrorism and if there is ever to be secular democracy in the region. Revolution is an ugly process, and this is part of it.
This seems a bit misleading. Insurgents have been fighting the Egyptian army and ruining the tourist trade in Sinnai for a few years now, even back to Mubarak. Also, there isn't much of a MB presence in Sinnai. It's mostly Bedouin and a lot of refugees from Sudan...well and Al-Quada-affiliated terrorists.
I'm reevaluating my position on tyranny. It might be the overall best form of government when you weigh the cost of killing and torturing a few to keep order for the many.
If you think that this is going to result in secular democracies lacing the ME then you are delusional. We will either end up with military dictatorships or Islamic dictatorships.
If you believe democracy in the region is impossible, then it really makes me wonder why you ever remotely supported the Iraq invasion.
You've got to live to learn. I'm learning that Democracy is very very hard to achieve. You need high-minded, altruistic, charismatic leadership educated in the works of Locke and Rousseau. You need a polarizing outside common enemy. It helps to have a judeo-christian-like ethic but one that is not dominated by a central theocratic hierarchy (France and Italy would say otherwise). You need an overriding sense of "one people" instead of a grouping of rival tribes. Again, the US has had it but it seems it is deteriorating rapidly into our own sectarianism so I can't really see it happening in the Middle east where the religious sects and tribalism are intrinsic.
Standing ovation (not figurative kind, ahem). Could not agree more. And if treeman changed his mind about the middle east (not saying he did), then he's not the only one.
Agreed - but if he did, you'd think one of the things he would learn after being so wrong on something he so strongly and confidently believed, would be that he can be wrong and can't predict how things will play out. Yet here he is again, 10 years later, acting as though he's the only one that can map out how events will play out and everyone else is simply wrong. Iraq didn't necessarily tell us that democracy is impossible in the Middle East. It just told us that the way we did it was wrong. It may be something inherent to the people. Or it may simply be that we mismanaged it (forcing the issue from the outside, leaving a security void, installing our own puppet leaders, or whatever else). In Egypt, we now have a military dictatorship fighting and trying to stamp out Islamic extremism, as opposed to what we had a few years ago, which was a military dictatorship co-existing with Islamic extremism. Which is better?
There are 78 countries around the world that are considered Democracies, including a whole bunch throughout Africa, in places with lots of religions and tribes. Democracy isn't easy, but it's not impossible either. The first step, if you do want democracy, is to defeat the people that are going to fight it. Isn't that what Egypt is going through now? Revolutions are an ugly process; they generally take years, if not decades. They involve a lot of violence. In our case, it involved a failed government and reboot of the system and then a massive civil war decades later to solve festering problems. I think people's expectations of how clean this would be were just unrealistic.
Because we didn't know how impossible it was back then. Now we do. And yet you still want to get involved...
Excuse me, but I don't remember you or anyone else telling us in 2003 that Arabs weren't ready for democracy. My memory hole isn't that deep and that was not the rationale AT ALL for staying out of it. We didn't realize that until after the fact. Bullsh^t. Here YOU are 10 years later agitating to make the SAME mistakes we made a decade ago. Learn from your goddamned mistakes and save a few lives, huh? Uh, yeah it did. Western-style democracy, at least. We gave them democracy and they crapped all over it, used it as a sectarian wedge against each other. If you think Egypt or Syria are going to be any different then again, you are delusional. We made alot of mistakes and we fixed most of them eventually, too. It was ultimately up to the Iraqi people - as it always had to be. And they failed. It is. And the Syrians and Eqyptians have the same problems. Wow man, you really need to read your history. Mubarak didn't "coexist" with Islamic extremists, he went on a decades-long crusade to suppress and stamp it out. The MB was outlawed under his rule for a reason. It was one of the knocks against him. You're painting a picture of a history that doesn't exist. The truth is that we are right back where we were in Egypt before Mubarak fell, only now Mubarak isn't there and the MB and the extremists are more powerful and are emboldened by the Arab Spring. This is a VERY dangerous period for the ME. The Egyptian military needs to nip this one in the bud or the consequences will be disastrous for the entire region.
We have $3 billion dollars worth of military leverage in Egypt. When it all goes to crap, who steps in? the military; American educated, American trained, American supplied. And if you are going to use derogatory terms about policy, you need to step up with what alternative actions we should have taken and what future actions you propose. In a war of hearts and minds, the local traditional (religious) leaders will always hold the upper hand.
We don't have CRAP for leverage anymore. We could end all payments to the Egyptian military tomorrow and the Saudis / UAE would just pick it up in our stead. That, od the Russians or Chinese would. There is interest in keeping the military there afloat, and there is money to be made. The Egyptians know that. We do too. And so does everyone else. And I have to ask you a question: why do you always demand "action"? There are situations where the best course of "action" is to stay the f^k out of it. Do nothing. Acknowledge that you have no leverage, try and play angles at the periphery (perhaps with the Saudis or Russians), but for the most part stay out of it and let them sort this crap out? If you want to come down on a side then be realistic and come down on the side of the military, because what we most need is stability in the region, and the military provides the best chance at achieving it. Let the democracy talk go for now -
(My God, I can't believe that I am arguing in concert with glynch... POTUS said he would unite us all, right?) When treeman and glynch agree on a subject that you are arguing you know it's either one of two possibilities: 1) We are both so far out there that we can't see an obvious truth, or 2) YOU are missing an obvious truth that even whackos like us can see. Polling on the issue should give you an indication of which is most likely.
