You’ve read about Egypt’s strategic Suez Canal, through which passes nearly 10 percent of global maritime trade. In the near future, to ship goods via the canal, will the world have to pay a tithe to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is playing a key role in the Cairo street protests?
It’s not an abstract question, if you read Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt’s latest piece. Hewitt calls the Brotherhood an “enormous threat” that “will expand quickly — and with deadly results — if the wrong and the ruthless triumph in Cairo after [President Hosni] Mubarak’s exit.”
In his article, Hewitt draws parallels between President Mubarak and the fate of another Western ally – Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah (King) of Iran.
What can we learn about how US policymakers approached the Shah’s fall from power, that can give us some insight into their thinking about Egypt today – particularly as it relates to the chances for the Muslim Brotherhood to increase its influence?
In 1979, as detailed by US Air Force General Robert Huyser’s book Mission to Tehran, many Washington policymakers were under the impression that the Shah was too unpopular to stay in power (as demonstrated by continuing street demonstrations against him), and did little to stop the ailing monarch from going into exile.
Much like Mubarak today, these policymakers seem to have seen the Shah, despite his reliable positioning of Iran as a Western ally, as tired out and no longer of much use. They were not interested in scenarios where the Shah might have held on, perhaps as a constitutional monarch with reduced powers, for example.
Huyser was sent to Iran in early 1979 to provide the Carter White House with some on-the-ground analysis of Iran’s armed forces, and to determine if these institutions could hold together following the departure of the Shah and the expected return to the country of Ayatollah Khomeini, after a long exile.
Reading Huyser’s book, incredible as it seems today, one gets the idea that most policymakers were not much concerned about the potential for the Ayatollah to take power.
As Huyser recalls, in January 1979, following the Shah’s departure, just when the US should have been “assur[ing]” Iran’s “political and military leadership” of “whole-hearted support” and “full [American] encouragement” to push back on Khomeini over his extremist demands for a religious state, that leadership was “being publicly undermined” by “American official voices in both Washington and Tehran…”
And Khomeini? He was getting a free ride, and his 12th century view of the world was being paid little attention – just as little attention is being paid to the Muslim Brotherhood’s world view today.
“I think that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt,” President Obama recently said. “They don’t have majority support in Egypt but they are well organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti U.S., there is no doubt about it.”
But apparently not enough of an anti-US tilt for President Obama to strongly condemn them and their efforts to foment mob rule in Cairo, or to warn them the world will not stand by and allow Egypt to fall under theocratic tyranny.
The Brotherhood is just “one faction,” after all – just like Khomeini was only an elderly cleric, with a few loud-mouthed followers, and nothing close to majority support…at first.
The loss of Iran to the mullahs helped ensure Jimmy Carter was a one-term president. Will the loss of Egypt, and the possible triumph in Cairo “of the wrong and the ruthless” do the same for Barack Obama?
