Annals of the Arab Spring: Obama Administration Backs Muslim Brotherhood in Syria
NRO ^ | 8/18/11 | Andrew C. McCarthy
Before running off on his latest vacation, at the conclusion of his three-day, publicly-funded campaign swing, President Obama boldly called for Bashar al-Assad to step down — in the midst of what is the Iran-backed Syrian president’s brutal, months long repression of his opposition, a campaign in which thousands have been killed and are missing.
As John Bolton observes, calling on Assad to step down doesn’t tell us what Mr. Obama is prepared to do to make that happen. John suggests that the answer is nothing, and that this will expose the U.S. to the “charge of just being a rhetorical power” — in this instance, sounding off but “giving Assad and his Iranian cohorts license to continue the brutality[.]“
I wish that were all there was to it. At the Hudson Institute, Herb London takes note of various reports that the State Department is backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts (supported by the Islamist regime in Turkey) to replace Assad, just as the Brotherhood will soon be replacing Mubarak in Egypt.
This underscores, yet again, that the phenomenon we are seeing in the Middle East is not “the Arab Spring” but the Islamist Ascendancy. The unavoidable fact is that there is not a robust democratic movement in the region — not in the sense of Western democracy. Yes, there is a faction seeking secular democracy (“secular” in the sense that they want real pluralism, not sharia). The Brotherhood and other Islamists say they want “democracy,” and many Americans (particularly in media and government) are taken in by these claims. But the Brothers don’t want democratic culture — they want sharia. What they suddenly like about democracy is popular elections. Democracy, as they construe the term, is just a route to power, which would enable them to Islamize their societies.
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