Obama's Disastrous "National Security"
President Obama whitewashes the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
During Obama’s Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly, Egypt was in the midst of a revolution that eventually led to the ouster of longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Obama was asked about whether the Muslim Brotherhood was a threat. He responded:
I think they’re one faction in Egypt. They don’t have majority support in Egypt. But they’re well organized. There are strains of their ideology that are anti-U.S. There’s no doubt about it.
He went on to claim that there are many secularists and liberals in Egypt that wanted representative government. The rest of the administration followed suit, with Daniel Shapiro of the National Security Council assuring Jewish groups on a conference call that the Muslim Brotherhood would “be a minor player in Egyptian politics.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also pointed to questionable polls claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood only received 15 percent support.
As we’ve seen in recent weeks, the president was completely wrong in his assessment (as were the administration flacks and media lapdogs who parroted the president’s claims). In the first two rounds of elections, the Muslim Brotherhood has come out on top, and with their Salafist Al-Nour allies, they aim to control the Egyptian parliament with a significant legislative majority — possibly enough to rewrite the country’s constitution. In the first round, they secured 37 percent of the seats; in the second round, they won 47 percent of the seats up for grabs.
Now, the Obama administration’s think-tank allies are spinning the Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral success by assuring the Beltway’s “smart set” that the group is savvy and politically flexible, meaning there’s nothing for us to fear.
How did Obama miscalculate so poorly on the Muslim Brotherhood’s support in Egypt? Well, that brings us to …
2) Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tells Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” group (February 10)
Just a few days after Obama claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood lacked major support in Egypt, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went before the House Intelligence Committee and was asked by Rep. Sue Myrick about the organization. He gave this response:
The term “Muslim Brotherhood” … is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam. … They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera. … In other countries, there are also chapters or franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.
Catcalls poured in from all quarters. Richard Engel on MSNBC called Clapper’s comments “a wild misreading of the organization.” Sen. Mark Kirk expressed his concern about Clapper’s remarks and the Obama administration’s position with respect to the Muslim Brotherhood. ABC News noted that the State Department’s own background note on Egypt described the Brotherhood as a “potent political and religious force.” Even FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was testifying with Clapper, had to add: “Obviously, elements of the Muslim Brotherhood here and overseas have supported terrorism.” This put the lie to Clapper’s claims that they had “eshewed violence” (e.g., Hamas).
It wasn’t even the close of business that day when Clapper’s spokesman issued a “clarification” of the director’s remarks.
What is important about this episode is that Clapper was not speaking off-the-cuff, but was reading verbatim from a set of written briefing notes that had been prepared by the top intelligence analysts in the intelligence community. They had apparently ignored ( unlike PJ Media’s Barry Rubin) that the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood had declared war on the U.S. just a few months before, just as the Clinton administration ignored al-Qaeda’s declaration of war in 1998.
As we continue to see the Middle East devolve into fundamentalist Islamic totalitarianism over the next year — perhaps the worst foreign policy disaster in the past century — we can be reminded that the U.S. intelligence community not only didn’t see it coming but actively aided in the collapse by blinding policy makers to the reality of the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda.
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