Egypt – Getting in Front of the Story

Morsi gets ‘hung up’ by the opposition and the army

Will Morsi Get the Mubarak Treatment?

 
[Editors Note: I slipped up not reposting this sooner, but trying to keep up with the evolving Egypt story was a chore having to sift through all the breaking news to separate the wheat from the chaff. I am going posting this July 3rd piece now as an example of how you can sometimes get in front of a big story and predict closely what is going to happen.
We rarely do that here at VT as trying to figure out WHAT has happened can be a tricky enough piece of business in itself. But I went with my instincts to take a gamble on what was going to go down the next day so I would have a jump on the others…beating them by 12 hours which is a lot in the breaking news biz.
We had good sources here at VT, some having worked in the region for decades, including people even during the Gladio period, where U.S. resources were actually based out of Gaddafi’s Libya, the last place anyone would be looking for them.
Many so called analysts forget that a lot of the region’s Cold War period people are still around, the ‘been there and done that’ folks, and they are a treasure trove of framing and background info that you really need to have to begin see the sins of the father visited upon the sin. The answer to that riddle is in between the lines below.]

____________________________________

… by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor       … with Press TV

–  First published on Wednesday, July 3rd, 0213  –

 
When the Army delivered its 48 hour ultimatum that is what we call in Intel analysis “a strong hint.” It appears that Morsi did not get it.
That Egyptians in the terrible financial and political situation they find themselves could have the courage and fortitude to force a change in government as an act of national survival sets an example that Western publics seem helpless to do. Maybe they can teach us when it is over.
I have watched as the long suffering Muslim Brotherhood evolved from a terrorist opposition force into a political one. Such transitions are rare, and never easy. But they used what became a tried and true method.
They renounced the corruption and greed of the Mubarak era thieves, and the financial cost of their armed resistance, to put all their resources into serving the neglected Egyptian people.
Providing local medical and other social support which was a very low priority with the Mubarak thugs was a guaranteed method of building their political support, albeit a slow one. The wisdom of patience is most often found in the East versus the West these days.

But the last few days in Egypt show signs not only of some spontaneity but also well prepared plans to help stem the path of Egypt the Titanic into the iceberg dead ahead. It seems that the Army does not want to delay any longer and run the risk that a course change made too late will still see the ship of state’s hull crushed by the hard ice and go down.

It has been a busy morning evaluating the key factors in this complex evolving drama. Morsi has all along seemed to have acted like he had Egypt tied to the mast of the good ship Muslim Brotherhood as they had won the elections.
But he forgot one thing. Mubarak had won his last election, also, and he was overthrown from the bottom up. Everybody knows why.
The army walked a delicate line in the Mubarak downfall, keeping a lid on uncontrolled violence, and then going over to the people when Mubarak and his security minister unleashed the police and rent-a-thugs to crush the protestors. The Army went over to the people at that point. We all remember the camel cavalry charge on Tahrir Square.

Because the Muslim Brotherhood had had years of organizing experience plus established funding sources including some Persian Gulf State ones, despite their entering the Mubarak overthrow in the last days they ended up carjacking a revolution which was really started by the young people, including young women. I remember their faces like it was yesterday.

Those same young people see their future doomed as Morsi has focused primarily on maintaining Muslim Brotherhood control versus the overall interests of the country. Those interests are now primarily financial survival where Egypt will not become a debt slave to the Western banking system.

The IMF loans will only sink the country lower if the economy is turned around, which Morsi and the MB seem clueless as to how to do. With their being in power and foreseeing that continuing indefinitely, they personally did not view economic problems as their problems.
They threw away whatever bond of trust they had built with the many Egyptian people. Trading Mubarak autocracy for Muslim Brotherhood autocracy was not something they were willing to swallow.
It was time for Morsi to get the Mubarak treatment, from those now experienced at doing it.
The Army had more complex motivations.Yes, they did not want to see the violence descend into a worst case scenario where troops would be killing fellow Egyptians. But they also saw that their futures were fatally wounded by Egypt remaining an isolated country.
They did not want to remain on life support from international bankers and [Persian] Gulf State deep pockets who have been having a big case of the ‘War Lord disease’ recently, evidenced with their funding and arms support of the terrorists attacking Syria.

In the past month, Morsi began making some strange moves. He called for Egyptians to assist in the Syrian bloodbath to help take down Assad who now has a comfortable majority of support. This is why he wants to stand for election in 2014. He is going to win by a comfortable margin if he is still around. That of course, is why the West and the FSA want him gone.

Morsi has also overseen the closing down of the Gazan tunnels, coordinated with the Israelis to keep the strangle hold on those impoverished people living in their outdoor prison camp and deemed a mortal threat to Israel when it is really the other way around.
That had us scratching our heads here, wondering what the heck Morsi was doing, and why now. He seemed to be shooting his feet off.

We saw the hand of the Persian Gulf State funders having Morsi on a financial lifeline string to maintain a MB dominated Egypt regardless to opposition opinion.
What we are seeing now is that the Army began to realize that once Syria was successfully Balkanized, which Henry Kissinger spilled the beans on being the real plan for Syria, that Egypt would be next in line to be neutralized forever with a similar treatment.
Morsi’s response to the Blue Nile controversy, the ‘Dam Scam’, was perplexing at first as it never had any intention of cutting off Egypt’s water.
Morsi’s over response was a calculated one, purely as a diversion for his own sliding approval and storm clouds gathering over his first anniversary. He was setting Ethiopia up for later blaming them for Egypt’s continuing financial decline, which showed a drowning man flailing about.
The army certainly took notice that he used them as a threat to Ethiopia over a nonexistent problem.
Morsi had tied Egypt’s ship to Turkey and Erdogan, where Erdogan had turned into a multiple personality risk with his geopolitical flip flops between pro-Islamic and then pro-Israeli. Then later he was a Western independent and then a tool of the West when he became the main logistical support for the Syrian revolution which could never have been planned without prior approval of Erdogan support.
Yes, the al-Nusra terrorists are the number one bad guys there now, but they took advantage of the miscalculation facilitated by Turkey, Israel, the West and the Gulf States.

The Egyptian Army has a heritage with Syria going back to the United Arab Republic of the Cold War years. They know that the West and Persian Gulf states taking Syria out of the game now are all part of a continued isolation game on Iran who is the major evolving power of the region. The West is playing a losing hand here.

Iran not only has natural resource wealth in abundance, but also, which the sanctions period has shown, tremendous people: natural resources that have pulled together in this time of need. They have domestically produced the key sanction items that they needed to defeat the West’s economic strangulation.
And mind you this was a country that was no demonstrated security threat to the West whatsoever.

The Egyptian army is moving now to reverse a deal they feel the Muslim Brotherhood has made with you know who.
With their slight popular vote majority and endless Persian Gulf State funding, the generals saw their country being ruled by outside proxy rulers for of course outside interests, and not Egypt’s.
I picked up on this, as often happens, on just a few key pieces of the puzzle. The army leaked their road map plan to the international press.
The suspension of the constitution and dissolving of the MB dominated parliament was expected, as was having a new presidential election.
But they made a key issue of delaying parliamentary elections “until strict conditions for selecting candidates were in force.”

The Egyptian Army doesn’t want to be a pawn of the West, or its Persian Gulf proxies either. But worst of all it doesn’t want to be isolated because Egypt will economically suffer the fate of the Titanic for sure, where there are not enough boats for everyone.

____________________________________