Egyptians Eye and Baby Crying

With Jordan and Yemen the latest governments caught in a rising tide of pro-democracy protests, American diplomats are at a loss for words to explain the official about-face to once-friendly Arab regimes. Alliances are starting to unravel amid whispers of secret deals with the Brotherhood.

Hillary Clinton is now forced to convene the first-ever conference of ambassadors, scheduled for Monday. Diplomats from 260 embassies and consulates will be flying to Washington to ask questions, and for some, to raise accusations about “who lost the Middle East.”

Days of Rage

In TV sound bites, the majority of Tahrir Square protesters gave answers inconsistent with the White House pitch for a Twitter revolution of peace-loving Westernized youths. Most statements to Al Jazeera expressed hatred not only toward Mubarak but also against the entire membership of the ruling National Democratic Party, the primary defender of secularism in a society that has been moving toward religious conservatism. Angry crowds are demanding a complete takedown of existing institutions, starting with the wholesale purge of NDP members and the upper layer of the bureaucracy as well as capital punishment for police officers who shot or clubbed protesters.

The Egyptian president was hanged in effigy to the cheers of the crowd. Many a young man was shown dragging a forefinger across his neck in the cutthroat gesture. Frightened foreign tourists gave accounts of mobs storming hotels and assaulting police officers who were forced to retreat or fire at their assailants. An East Asian woman described how a tourist bus on its way to the airport was pelted with stones amid anti-foreign slogans. Radical elements have organized prison breaks, freeing hardened criminals and extremists convicted of terrorism. The very term used for the Egyptian protests — “days of rage” — harken back to the nihilistic Weathermen radicals in Obama’s former senatorial district, Chicago.

A sweeping revolution is under way. It is certain to be democratic in that the Muslim Brotherhood is likely to win a plurality of parliamentary seats representative of its power base, estimated at 20 to 30 percent of the electorate. After three decades of banishment, imprisonment, execution and exile, the Muslim Brotherhood is back as a major political force in the land of its birth.

The White House’s sales pitch is coming undone because only a Lotus Eater cannot but notice that the Brotherhood, or Al Ikhwal, has been linked, if just by circumstantial evidence or through its many splinter groups, to the 9/11 attacks, the assassination of Anwar Sadat and hundreds of other terrorist incidents. One fact is undisputed by their spokesmen, that the Brotherhood chapter in Gaza created Hamas.

Army as Protector?

After selling an uneasy narrative of “democracy” to an astonished world, the White House is now rolling out experts to reassure the public that the Egyptian army will not allow Islamists to take over the Cairo government. American strategists are therefore already contradicting the democracy rhetoric by projecting a Pinochet-type military protectorate. Yet any new constitution, once the entire Nasserite political structure is torn down like the palaces of the Shah of Iran, is likely to forbid any military intervention in politics.

A more practical challenge for American interests is that the Egyptian army has no incentive, financial or political, to become a domestic policeman — that noxious task goes to the police force, which decided to smash the rallies rather than stand trial for slaying protesters.

As for attempts to bolster the generals — all of them close associates of Mubarak — the current $1 billion-plus in U.S. military aid cannot cover the price of a dozen state-of-the-art jet fighters, much less the payroll of 400,000 men and women in uniform. The pro-Israel lobby in Congress is not going to back more military aid for a country with an uncertain political future.

The Egyptian military, humiliated in recent years by its powerlessness over Israeli air strikes against South Lebanon and Gaza, is a second-rate fighting force armed with obsolete American weaponry. A fleet of aging F-16s and Abrams tank are no match against the high-tech Israel Defense Force with its electronic countermeasures, smart bombs, video-guided missiles, cyber warfare teams, Dolphin submarines and nuclear warheads.

The present military imbalance stands in stunning contrast to the earlier era of Anwar Sadat and his air force commander Gen. Hosni Mubarak, who procured Soviet hardware to achieve technological parity with Israeli forces. Within six years of the Egyptian military debacle from Moshe Dayan’s surprise attack in the Six-Day War, Mubarak’s Sukhoi and MiG fighters were strafing Israeli airfields and bombing tank columns, enabling army engineers to build pontoon bridges across the Suez Canal to regain the Sinai. Since those glory days of the Yom Kippur War, American military aid has been on slow drip, minimizing Egyptian military strength and shrinking the country’s geopolitical horizons. Long past its heyday, the army has little choice but to remain inside the barracks and watch events go by.

Economic Slide

Public anger and a new stress on human rights will ensure that all opinions, including those of Islamist activists and sympathizers, will enjoy unprecedented freedoms of assembly, public speech, access to television broadcasts and publishing rights.

Still, none of these new freedoms can address Egypt’s underlying economic slowdown. Over the past three years, annual GDP growth has slipped from 7 percent to 5.5 percent, while inflation has soared from 8 percent to 11 percent. The rising cost of food and reduced fuel subsidies were a major factor driving anti-Mubarak sentiment. Household yearly incomes average around $5,500, but more than 20 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day. The underlying reality is that the Egyptian population has doubled in less than 30 years to more than 86 billion people.

Clearly, no new government can continue the consumer subsidies or the infrastructure mega projects that have kept the economy running throughout the Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak eras. Washington, for all the hype about progress and free enterprise, is unlikely to bail out distant Egypt when its own economy is mired in unemployment and runaway federal debt.

A Struggle for Hearts and Minds

A nationwide purge, like the one that wiped away Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athists in Iraq, will enable competing ideologies to fill the void left by the National Democratic Party’s blend of populism and pan-Arab nationalism. The leading contender is the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, which can be expected to take a go-slow path to Islamization, much like the Turkish Justice and Development Party.

On the economy, the Brotherhood is opposed to Nasser’s socialism and Sadat’s Open Door policy, which promoted foreign investment and corporate capitalism. The Islamic model of ownership clustered among the families of leading clerics, as in Iran, will probably replace the close ties between tycoon-owned corporations and government contracts. For the impoverished masses, the mosque serves as the center for collecting and distributing zakat, or charity, connections for employment, resolution of civil disputes, and education. Leading bodies including religious councils, or shura, and larger mosques will gradually steer schools, corporations, banks, the military and political parties toward Muslim values.

Although Hillary Clinton’s call for “an orderly transition” may not be quite what the Brotherhood has in mind, it could turn out to be the first step toward a complete transformation of Egypt.

Brotherhood Revival

What is the benevolent association known as the Brotherhood? Opinions vary as to its true nature, and whether it has really evolved beyond its past record of intolerance, intimidation and assassination. Allied with ElBaradei in the opposition National Association for Change, its current leaders deny the many accusations of its involvement in the lethal plot against President Anwar Sadat. What remains to be proven is whether any of the Egyptian hijackers in the 9/11 attacks were acting under clandestine orders from the Brotherhood

Formed in 1928, Al Ikwhal aligned with the Axis Power against British colonialism in the Middle East and, in World War II, allied with Nazi Germany to attack British forces in Palestine. In the postwar nationalist ferment, it was the main and often violent rival of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers Corps that declared Egyptian independence from the British Empire. Frustrated by the Nasserists at home, the Brotherhood went on to form 70 chapters worldwide, becoming the fountainhead of the modern Islamist movement. Its more ardent members broke away to form splinter groups, including Omar Abdel-Rahman’s Islamic Group, responsible for the Luxor massacre and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a core faction within Al Qaeda.

Conspiracy theories about CIA links to Islamicists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks are gaining some currency due to the White House backing of the Brotherhood-dominated coalition. The existence of such covert relationships has been known for a long time. Miles Axe Copeland, a founder of the CIA forerunner called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), disclosed: “Sound beatings of the Muslim Brotherhood organizers who had been arrested (by Nasser’s secret police) revealed that the organization had been thoroughly penetrated, at the top, by the British, American, French and Soviet intelligence services, any one of which could either make active use of it or blow it up, whichever best suited its purposes. Important lesson: Fanaticism is no insurance against corruption; indeed, the two are highly compatible.”

Worst-case Scenarios

The secularist establishment in Cairo isn’t folding the tents yet. Mubarak’s inner circle can be expected to strike against the Brotherhood’s soft-power strategy, much like how the Algerian military high command cancelled the 1991 election victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). The ensuing civil war claimed 200,000 lives and spawned throat slashing as a part of its psychological warfare. On a reporting assignment in the Magreb region, I was told by a counterterrorism official: “Although they won the democratic elections fairly, the FIS if it was allowed to form a government will never allow another free vote. After taking control of the state, they will end all freedoms, so they gave us no choice but to keep them outside of power.”

In stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s effort to be optimistic over democracy protests, Western counterterrorism experts are now busy drawing up worst-case scenarios. Some are forecasting an Algerian-style conflict between the military and the Brotherhood. A study by Mary Blankenship at the U.S. Naval War College hints at U.S. Central Command contingency plans for an American military intervention in Egypt in the event of an attempted coup by Islamists. An insurgency in Egypt would make the Iraq and Afghan conflicts seem like small peanuts. At his new blog, long-time American journalist in Cairo Steve Negus predicts a criminal takeover of Egyptian society and the economy, much like how the mafiyas scooped up Russian assets during the Yeltsin era.

Perhaps the bitterest outcome for Washington could come from the Obama-Clinton “orderly transition” itself, a squeaky-clean legal reform that will make it safe for the homecoming, a return of jihadis from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan as well as the North American and European battlefronts. The red carpet will be rolled out for the old lions who fought the Mubarak regime decades before it became fashionable for the Twitter generation. Unquestionably the most honored place among resistance heroes will go to Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who as a teenager joined the Brotherhood and went on to become the co-leader of Al Qaeda. Yesterday’s terrorist, tomorrow’s patriot — history’s been written that way since Sam Adams and John Paul Jones.

The total eclipse of secularism over the Nile won’t be the end of the world; it will simply herald the arrival of the crescent moon of a new Islamic order.

Yoichi Shimatsu, a former associate editor of Pacific News Service in the 1980s, is now a Hong Kong-based journalist. He covered the rise of Islamic militancy in the North African Magreb region for the Japan Times Weekly.

Desperate Somalis pursue asylum via ‘back-door’ route to United States

LANCASTER, CA _ The asylum seeker from Somalia hung his head as an immigration judge grilled him about his treacherous journey from the Horn of Africa. By air, sea and land he finally made it to Mexico, and then a taxi delivered him into the arms of U.S. border agents at San Diego.

Islamic militants had killed his brother, Mohamed Ahmed Kheire testified, and majority clan members had beaten his sister. He had to flee Mogadishu to live.

The voice of the judge, beamed by videoconference from Seattle, crackled loudly over a speaker in the mostly empty courtroom near the detention yard in the desert north of Los Angeles. He wanted to know why Kheire had no family testimony to corroborate his asylum claim.

Kheire, 31, said he didn’t have e-mail in detention, and didn’t think to ask while writing to family on his perilous trek.

It seemed like the end of Kheire’s dream as he waited for the judge’s ruling. He clasped his hands, his plastic jail bracelet dangling from his wrist, and looked up at the ceiling, murmuring words of prayer.

Obama says al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen apparently responsible for airliner bombing plot

HONOLULU _ An al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen apparently ordered the Christmas Day plot against a U.S. airliner, training and arming the 23-year-old Nigerian man accused in the failed bombing, President Barack Obama said Saturday.

“This is not the first time this group has targeted us,” Obama said, reporting on some of the findings of an administration review into how intelligence agencies failed to prevent Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding Detroit-bound Northwest Flight 253.

In his most direct public language to date, Obama described the path through Yemen of Abdulmutallab. He also emphasized that the United States would continue its partnerships with friendly countries _ citing Yemen, in particular _ to fight terrorists and extremist groups.

The U.S. plans to more than double its counterterrorism aid to the impoverished, fragmented Arab nation in the coming year to support Yemen’s campaign against al-Qaida.

Obama’s homeland security team has been piecing together just how Abdulmutallab was able to get on the plane. Officials have described flaws in the system and by those executing the strategy and have delivered a preliminary assessment.

Karzai, rebuked, must rethink his Cabinet after Afghan lawmakers reject 17 of his 24 nominees

KABUL _ A chastened President Hamid Karzai must submit new Cabinet picks after defiant lawmakers rejected 17 of his 24 nominees Saturday, including a powerful warlord and the country’s only woman minister.

The Afghan parliament rejected nominees viewed as Karzai’s political cronies, those believed to be under the influence of warlords and others deemed unqualified.

“I think, unfortunately, that the criteria were either ethnicity or bribery or money,” lawmaker Fawzia Kufi said of Karzai’s picks.

The vote was a setback to Karzai, though one political analyst in Kabul speculated that it could free up the president to appoint qualified professionals rather than settle political debts.

“There were lots of demands on Karzai from people asking for Cabinet positions because they campaigned for him,” Mohammad Qasim Akhgar said. “This was the only way he could reward them and if parliament didn’t approve them, it wasn’t his fault. Very soon, Karzai will come out with a new list with the names of people he really wants to have in his Cabinet.”

Somali charged with attempted murder for attack on Dane who drew Prophet Muhammad cartoon

COPENHAGEN _ An ax-wielding Somali man with suspected al-Qaida links was charged Saturday with two counts of attempted murder after breaking into the home of a Danish artist whose Prophet Muhammad cartoon outraged the Muslim world three years ago.

The suspect, who was shot twice by a police officer responding to the scene, was rolled into a Danish court on a stretcher, his face covered. He was ordered held for four weeks on preliminary charges of attempting to murder the cartoonist, as well as the police officer who shot him.

Efforts to protect the artist _ 74-year-old Kurt Westergaard _ were immediately stepped up, as he was moved to an undisclosed location.

The suspect, described by authorities as a 28-year-old Somali with ties to al-Qaida, allegedly broke into the house late Friday armed with an ax and a knife. The house is in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, 125 miles (200 kilometers) northwest of Copenhagen.

Jakob Scharf, head of Denmark’s PET intelligence agency, said Saturday the man might have attacked spontaneously.

US commander in Iraq says troop drawdown on track despite election delay

FORWARD OPERATING BASE COBRA, Iraq _ The top U.S. general in Iraq says the country’s delay in holding elections will not keep American combat forces from leaving as scheduled by the end of August.

Gen. Ray Odierno said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he expects the U.S. to have about 100,000 troops in the country during the March 7 elections.

About 60 days after the vote, he will assess whether the country is on stable footing and then begin moving troops out.

Iraq was originally scheduled to hold elections in January but political wrangling over the election law delayed the nationwide vote until March.

Under a U.S. plan, all combat troops are slated to leave Iraq by the end of August.

Yemen sends hundreds of troops to regions of strongest al-Qaida presence

SAN’A, Yemen _ Yemen deployed several hundred extra troops to two mountainous eastern provinces that are al-Qaida’s main strongholds in the country and where the suspected would-be Christmas airplane bomber may have visited, security officials said Saturday.

The reinforcements, aiming to beef up the military’s presence in a remote region where the government has little control, were Yemen’s latest move in a stepped-up campaign to combat al-Qaida. The United States plans to more than double its counterterrorism aid to the impoverished, fragmented Arab nation in the coming year to boost the fight.

Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. general who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who announced the increased aid, arrived in Yemen on Saturday and met with President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Yemeni government official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

The confrontation with al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen gained new urgency after the failed attempt on Christmas Day to bomb a U.S. airliner headed to Detroit.

President Barack Obama said Saturday that al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen was behind the attempt. A 23-year-old Nigerian accused in the attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has told U.S. investigators he received training and instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen.

Cities, counties take back tax breaks they gave companies that broke promises to create jobs

CHICAGO _Cash-strapped communities have a message for corporations that promised jobs in return for tax breaks: A deal’s a deal.

As the economy sputters along, municipalities struggling to fix roads, fund schools and pay bills increasingly are rescinding tax abatements to companies that don’t hire enough workers, that lay them off or that close up shop. At the same time, they’re sharpening new incentive deals, leaving no doubt what is expected of companies and what will happen if they don’t deliver.

“We will roll out the red carpet as much as we can (but) they are going to honor the contract,” said Brendon Gallagher, an alderman in DeKalb, Ill., where Target Corp. got abatements from the city, county, school district and other taxing bodies after promising at least 500 jobs at a local distribution center.

So when the company came up 66 workers short in 2009, Target got word its next tax bill would be jumping almost $600,000 _ more than half of which goes to the local school district, where teachers and programs have been cut as coffers dried up.

The newfound boldness comes from communities and states that have long bent over backward to lure companies and jobs by offering abatements and other incentives _ to the tune of an estimated $60 billion a year in the United States, according to the Washington-based economic development watchdog group Good Jobs First.

Muslims, Hindus crank up volume in stereotype-smashing ‘Taqwacore’ punk rock bands

WAYLAND, Mass _ Artwork from the Punjab state of India decorates the Ray family home. A Johann Sebastian Bach statue sits on a piano. But in the basement _ cluttered with wires, old concert fliers and drawings _ 25-year-old Arjun Ray is fighting distortion from his electric guitar.

For this son of Indian immigrants, trained in classical violin and raised on traditional Punjab music, getting his three Pakistani-American bandmates in sync is the goal on this cold New England evening. Their band, The Kominas, is trying to record a punk rock version of the classic Bollywood song, “Choli Ke Peeche” (Behind the Blouse).

“Yeah,” said Shahjehan Khan, 26, one of the band’s guitarists, “there are a lot of contradictions going on here.”

Deep in the woods of this colonial town boils a kind of revolutionary movement. From the basement of this middle-class home tucked in the woods west of Boston, The Kominas have helped launched a small, but growing, South Asian and Middle Eastern punk rock movement that is attracting children of Muslim and Hindu immigrants and drawing scorn from some traditional Muslims who say their political, hard-edged music is “haraam,” or forbidden.

The movement, an anti-establishment subculture borne of religiously conservative communities, is the subject of two new films and a hot topic on social-networking sites.

Police find man passed out in car at Tennessee gas station, meth lab cooking in back seat

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. _ Police say a driver passed out in his car at a Tennessee gas station while a batch of methamphetamine was cooking in the back seat.

An employee at the gas station in Murfreesboro, about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, called police because the car was sitting at the pump for about an hour on New Year’s Day.

Police say a chemical process to make the drug was in progress. Some meth-making ingredients can be explosive.

Murfreesboro Assistant Fire Chief Allen Swader told The Daily News Journal that gas pumps were shut off as a precaution.

Thirty-one-year-old Nathan E. Beasley is being held on a $15,000 bond on charges of driving under the influence, driving on a suspended license, reckless endangerment and manufacturing meth. No attorney was listed in police records.

NBA coach calls locker-room gun case involving Wizards’ Gilbert Arenas a ‘scary thing’

WASHINGTON _ Amid conflicting reports on what happened in the Washington Wizards locker room, the matter clearly goes beyond the team’s original statement about Gilbert Arenas storing unloaded guns in his locker.

What began with the NBA looking into a possible violation of its own rules has turned into an investigation involving the U.S. Attorney’s Office and District of Columbia police. The implications are serious, with the legal system, the league and the Wizards in line to take possible action if the allegations prove true.

We’re all watching this very closely to see how the story develops right now,” Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said Saturday. “It’s so early in the story and there’s so much speculation, it’s hard to figure out what’s fact and what’s fiction, but it is a scary thing for the NBA and we all want to see what happens.”

The Wizards said on Christmas Eve that Arenas stored unloaded firearms in a locked container in his locker, with no ammunition. Arenas said he wanted them out of the house after the birth of his latest child.

An official within the league told The Associated Press on Saturday that he was briefed before Dec. 24 by officials reviewing the incident. He said the review included a dispute over card-playing, gambling debts and a heated discussion between Arenas and another player. He said the review did not refer to Arenas and Javaris Crittenton drawing guns on each other _ as the New York Post has reported _ although he said that doesn’t preclude that it might have happened.