Military Coup Disguised As A Popular Revolt?

Pundita has a must read, in-depth analysis of the Egyptian revolution.

 

Failure to consider the possibility of a people’s revolution in Egypt has been cited by many as a catastrophic U.S. intelligence failure. The latest to jump on the bandwagon is Niall Ferguson, professor of history and business administration at Harvard, senior research fellow at Jesus College at Oxford University and the Hoover Institution. In his debut as a columnist for Newsweek he smacked down Obama’s handling of the Egyptian crisis and got off this salvo:

I can think of no more damning indictment of the [Obama] administration’s strategic thinking than this: It never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt.

I don’t like defending the Obama administration but there’s actually a very good reason Obama’s advisors and U.S. intelligence agencies never considered such a scenario: they didn’t believe pigs could fly.

Only in a world where pigs fly can there be a popular revolt in Egypt — a point that was underscored in a classified State Department cable leaked by Wikileaks late last year. The gist of the cable is that President Obama had gotten it into his head to organize a stealth putsch against Hosni Mubarak by using the best organized of Egypt’s pro-democracy groups, the April 6 Movement, which had been formed in 2008. The cable disabused Obama of his fantasy by describing what had happened to the movement’s leaders. They’d been jailed in 2009, which meant the rest of the group had been driven so far underground, they’d had to content themselves with sniping at Mubarak’s regime from the pages of Facebook.

As to the best-organized group in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, everyone in the movement who was wacky enough to attempt a major public protest against the Mubarak regime was either executed, in jail, or driven out of Egypt by the secret police.

I add that anyone who thinks it was Hosni Mubarak or even the Egyptian military who called for the creation of the country’s dreaded secret police is ignorant of history. It was the Egyptian people who rose up and demanded a powerful secret police organization. This was after a large group of European tourists was slaughtered — and I mean slaughtered in the way sheep are butchered — at a major tourist site in Egypt. The terrorist attack was so gruesome that it threatened to destroy Egypt’s tourism industry, which was propping up the country’s economy.

All that is another way of saying that only if you believe in flying pigs do you believe that the April 6 Youth Movement organized the protests on January 25 without the express permission and backing of Egypt’s military.

Ditto for all the other youth groups that the Sixers corralled to help with the protests.

Ditto for the Muslim Brotherhood, which refrained from joining the protests until they were assured they wouldn’t be jailed or worse for their participation. The only authority they would have trusted to provide the assurance would have been a high level in the military.

That means there was no people’s revolution; there was a military-orchestrated coup disguised as a people’s revolution.

 

Go read the entire article.