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1) Where did Hezbollah get American arms

Last month Lee Smith attempted to clarify if the administration had sent army to the Syrian rebels as it said it would, or not. All he (or anyone) got was studied ambiguity:

In fact, it’s still not clear what the White House is doing. In a June 13 conference call with reporters ostensibly rolling out the new policy, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes failed to provide any details. Reporters asked several times what kind of aid the administration had in mind, and whether Obama was actually going to arm the rebels. “We’re just not going to be able to lay out an inventory of what exactly falls under the scope of that assistance,” said Rhodes.

Last week, Obama himself addressed the Syria issue, without providing any more clarity than his point man for strategic communications. In an appearance on the Charlie Rose show, the commander in chief told his host, “I’ve said I’m ramping up support for both the political and military opposition. I’ve not specified exactly what we’re doing, and I won’t do so on this show.”

Maybe someone in the White House is advising Obama that obfuscation and ambiguity make a president look presidential. His administration is stealthy and indirect—instead of communicating with the public through press conferences, it prefers leaking to the media via unnamed officials. Accordingly, it was through several press reports that the “inventory,” as Rhodes repeatedly called it, was laid out. The White House will send the rebels small arms and ammunition—lethal aid, to be sure, but hardly game-changing, or even likely to tilt the balance of power on the ground in Syria.

Citing expert, Phillip Smyth, USA Today reported, though, that Hezbollah has been boasting of somehow acquiring American arms:

U.S. and Western weapons have been reaching Iranian-backed Shiite militias fighting to keep Bashar Assad’s forces in power in Syria.

Analysts say it’s unclear if the weapons were captured, stolen or bought on the black market in Syria, Turkey, Iraq or Libya. Propaganda photographs from Shiite militias posted on dozens of websites and Facebook pages show the weapons were acquired in new condition, said Phillip Smyth, an analyst for Jihadology.net, a site affiliated with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Many of the weapons are things the militias “shouldn’t really have their hands on,” Smyth said. Iranians love to show “they have weapons and systems that are very close to the Americans.”

The article cites Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who fears that in the future similar weapons were captured from rebels.

Does that mean that United States has been arming the Syrian rebels? Not necessarily. Another expert, Nic Jenzen-Jones, says that a likely source of these American weapons is Lebanon.

Given the degree to which Hezbollah has co-opted the Lebanese army this would not be a surprising result.

2) Who’s isolated now?

A few years ago a mantra among Israel’s critics was that Israeli by fighting terrorists on the Mavi Marmara and building apartments in Jerusalem had isolated itself internationally. Israel had needlessly alienated moderate Islamist Erdogan in Turkey and moderate autocrat Abbas in Ramallah. Worse Netanyahu had alienated Israel’s best friend, President Obama in Washington.

It’s useful to remember this background when reading Thomas Friedman’s Morsi’s Moment from last November.

It is impossible not to be tantalized by how much leverage Morsi could wield in the peace process, if he ever chose to engage Israel. Precisely because he represents the Muslim Brotherhood, the vanguard of Arab Islam, and precisely because he was democratically elected, if Morsi threw his weight behind an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, it would be so much more valuable to Israel than the cold peace that Sadat delivered and Hosni Mubarak maintained. Sadat offered Israelis peace with the Egyptian state. Morsi could offer Israel peace with the Egyptian people and, through them, with the Muslim world beyond.

Ironically, though, all of this would depend on Morsi not becoming a dictator like Mubarak, but on him remaining a legitimately elected president, truly representing the Egyptian people. That is now in doubt given Morsi’s very troubling power grab last week and the violent response from the Egyptian street. President Obama has to be careful not to sell out Egyptian democracy for quiet between Israel and Egypt and Hamas. We tried that under Mubarak. It didn’t end well. …

So, as you can see, the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Egyptian democracy and the U.S.-Israel-Arab struggle with Iran and Syria are now all intertwined. Smart, courageous leadership today could defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, advance Egyptian democracy and isolate the Iranian, Syrian and Hamas regimes. Weak or reckless leadership will empower all three. This is a big moment.

Friedman makes some assumptions here. He presumed that Morsi could be swayed to democracy and ignored the authoritarian nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. He presumed that the Palestinians want an agreement with Israel, which they don’t. And most of all he presumed that Israeli leader would act as he wanted them to act (“smart, courageous”).

In subsequent months, Iran and its proxies have continued to alienate themselves from the Sunni world. The Muslim Brotherhood, at least in Egypt, managed to do the same.

Erdogan after briefly flirting politically with Assad, then turned against him. And his much vaunted moderation was shown to be a sham once he turned his troops violently against protesters. Abbas can’t keep a functioning government together.

Smart Israeli leadership waited this events out and didn’t proceed recklessly as Friedman advised.

Barry Rubin provides an overview of recent events in the Middle East and how they enhanced Israel’s posture. A couple of them are:

Hamas: With Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood thrown out of office, Hamas poses much less of a threat. Instead of having Egypt as a patron, Egypt is now a greater enemy than it was under Mubarak. That then breaks up the issue of a Brotherhood Egypt, Hamas, and Syria.

Egypt: And speaking of Egypt, the transformation for Israel’s strategy almost approaches the victory of the 1967 war except this is not a victory over Egypt but a tremendous enhancement of cooperation. The threat of the dissolution of the peace treaty and a potential new war has been replaced by a prospect of deeper peace and more strategic help.

The draining of terrorist resources and energies. Syria is now a target, as well as Iraq, for Sunni terrorists; and now Egypt is, too.

Would Israel have been better off it had made deal that would have passed muster with the now deposed Morsi? (Assuming that one was possible.) Should Israel have given in to the extremist, Erdogan’s demands? Once again Israel is considering making a confidence building gesture to bring Mahmoud Abbas back to negotiations. Given Abbas’s record and rhetoric, it’s hard to believe that he will respond positively.

Friedman’s reading of the Middle East is seen solely through his rose colored glasses of Arab moderation. Events of the past months have proven him wrong.

3) Ozymandias in the Gulf?

Martin Kramer comments on Qatar’s latest grandiose plans:

Well, Deloitte reports that Qatar is spending $200bn—yes, that’s billion—for infrastructure to host the FIFA World Cup in 2022, including six stadiums (http://usat.ly/1atXzNV). In the distant (or not-so-distant) future, Doha will make a splendid ruin. It will draw tourists for millennia.

Who shot first?

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an editorial, Bloodshed in Egypt:

It has been all downhill for Egypt since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi last week. On Monday, according to reports in The Times, Egyptian soldiers fired on hundreds of Mr. Morsi’s supporters as they were praying outside the facility where he was believed to be detained. At least 51 civilians were killed and more than 300 were wounded. . The military claimed its soldiers fired in response to an attack by gunmen from an unnamed “terrorist group.” But other evidence — bullet casings with the army stamp, indications that the gunfire came from the top of a nearby building — suggest a military all too willing to use excessive force.

While it places political blame on ex-President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood for the events Monday, the violence is blamed on the army.

The editorial linked to the initial report on Monday’s violence as reported by the paper’s Cairo bureau chief, David Kirkpatrick, Army Kills 51, Deepening Crisis in Egypt:

It was by far the deadliest day of violence since the revolt that overthrew former President Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. Within a few hours around dawn, advancing soldiers and police officers killed at least 51 civilians and wounded more than 400, almost all hit by gunfire, health officials said.

Army and police spokesmen said that one soldier and two policemen had also been killed. But according to witnesses and video footage, one of the policemen appeared to have been shot by soldiers, and the military provided little evidence to back its claim that the fighting had been instigated by the Islamists.

Was there “little evidence” that the fighting had been instigated by the Islamists?

Here’s an eyewitness account reported by the New Yorker.

A doctor who said he preferred not to give his name lives in an apartment building that overlooks the Republican Guard barracks in Cairo. He told me he woke for the dawn prayer before 4 A.M. Shortly afterward, he heard gunfire and went onto his neighbor’s balcony for a better view.

“I saw that the Army retreated about ten metres and began to fire tear-gas cannisters, about ten or fifteen of them,” he said. “I couldn’t see if the other side [the protesters] was shooting, but I heard people through megaphones encouraging jihad. Then I saw four to six motorcycles coming from the direction of the Rabaa intersection to the Republican Guard barracks. Some people were still praying, some were not, because the dawn prayer had finished by then. The men on the motorcycles were all masked, and it was hard to see them through the dark and the tear-gas smoke, but they seemed to be shooting, they were coming from behind the protesters, so they were shooting toward the protesters and the Army. Then the Army started firing. And the protestors were firing. I saw firing from both sides.” As for details, though—what they were firing, whether it was one or two protesters or something more organized—he said that it was dark and that he couldn’t exactly tell.

The Islamists remained adamant that the Army fired on peaceful demonstrators. The Army says that they were provoked. Although many eyewitnesses and video clips corroborate some details—tear gas was fired by the Army at the start; gunfire came from at least some people on both sides, even if the Army did most of the shooting—there’s no clear indication of what sparked the violence. It is clear, however, that the vast majority of fatal injuries were caused by live ammunition, and that most of the dead were protesters. (An Army officer, a policeman, and a soldier were also reported killed.) Over the past two and a half years in Egypt—melee and propaganda and obfuscation—it has always been nearly impossible to separate fact from conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. Crowds are routinely seeded with paid thugs and provocateurs, guns have become much more prevalent, tensions and emotions are raw and ragged.

Though the New Yorker doesn’t say it explicitly past experience shows that these thugs have been on the side of Muslim Brotherhood.

REWIND DEC 2012: Clashes in Cairo After Morsi Supporters Attack Palace Sit-In http://t.co/wqrf72t5TT #MB thugs waded into crowd

— Patrick Poole (@pspoole) July 8, 2013

Similarly, though he largely ignores the implication of this account Robert Mackey at the New York Times blog, the Lede, cited another eyewitness.

In her retrospective Facebook account, Ms. Helbawi wrote that she first became aware of trouble in the street below her home shortly after the end of dawn prayers, when the protesters began to loudly bang on the lamp posts and chant “God is great” to warn that the military was beginning to move in. Then, she said, officers fired large amounts of tear gas and many protesters fled while others stood their ground.

“The protesters responded at first with rocks and stones, and then suddenly I heard the sound of gunfire — I could not tell if it was birdshot or live ammunition — and the police and army retreated very quickly to past the gas station and it became clear that these bullets were from the protesters’ side,” Ms. Helbawi wrote. It was when the security forces returned, she said, that the officers began shooting as well.

Two eyewitnesses tell basically the same story, and Kirkpatrick (who tweeted links to both stories) claims that there’s “little evidence” to confirm the army’s account.

But there are more problems with Kirkpatrick’s reporting.

Some who vehemently denounced Mr. Mubarak’s use of brute force to silence critics were far more tepid about criticizing the killings of Mr. Morsi’s supporters, calling only for an inquiry to determine the root cause. The United States, which has conspicuously not condemned Mr. Morsi’s ouster, was also mild, calling on security forces to exercise restraint.

Perhaps the reason that the criticism of the army has been muted, is that Egyptians are well familiar with the Muslim Brotherhood’s tactics and understand that the army was reacting (or if you prefer, overreacting) to very real provocations. If you pay attention to Kirkpatrick’s timeline you’ll see that he frequently retweets Gehad El-Haddad and Shadi Hamid. The former is a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood; the latter is an apologist for the organization. This suggests that Kirkpatrick’s view of the Muslim Brotherhood is largely sympathetic.

Thus he demands proof of evidence against the Muslim Brotherhood, while accepting its version of events uncritically.

The police, who had never fully accepted Mr. Morsi’s authority, reveled in the day and sought to revise history: a spokesman contended that the Muslim Brotherhood — and not the police — had been responsible for killing protesters during the revolt against Mr. Mubarak. “Policemen never thought that history would speak so quickly to prove the complete innocence of the policemen in the events of the January 2011 revolution,” said the spokesman, Hany Abdel Lateef.

Some also suggested that Mr. Morsi’s supporters might be to blame for the fighting.

“We expect violent actions from the side of the Muslim Brotherhood, and we cannot accept that armed gatherings be labeled as peaceful protests or sit-ins,” Khalid Talima, a representative of the coalition formed around the anti-Morsi protests that preceded his ouster, said at a news conference under the banner “Muslim Brotherhood-American conspiracy against the revolution.”

Note the contrast. The police were revising history – no qualifications – but, on the other side, some “suggested” that the Muslim Brotherhood could be a violent organization.

Seeking to capitalize on the killing to rally supporters, the Muslim Brotherhood claimed that the soldiers had killed women and children. But hospitals and morgues reported no such casualties.

Actually it was worse than that.

Army spokesman: Pictures of dead children, were posted in March on a Syrian website. #Egypt

— Egyptocracy (@Egyptocracy) July 8, 2013

It wasn’t just that the Muslim Brotherhood made uncorroborated claims, but that the claims were shown to be false. But Kirkpatrick didn’t report the more damaging version of the claim.

If there was one positive aspect to Kirkpatrick’s reporting it is at the end when he writes of Egyptian anger at Al Jazeera.

Mr. Ali, the military spokesman, raised alarms about the Arab Spring itself — heresy here just a few months ago.

He called Islamist charges the military had massacred demonstrators a new kind of “information warfare” that “runs through the Middle East region and we see since the breaking of the Arab Spring revolutions.”

“They’re all wars against the state by its own citizens,” he said, “and the main weapon in these wars is the circulation of strife, rumors and lies.”

It’s clear that Kirkpatrick is skeptical, but it’s important that he wrote this. Maybe the police and army overreacted. I wasn’t there. But based on history, it’s reasonably clear the the Muslim Brotherhood provoked or instigated the violence on Monday.

Well no, it’s not just history, it’s Twitter too.

Correspondent of German TV: MB told us there will be a slaughter at dawn & asked us to be there to cover it, via @basemkamel.

— Karim Maher Abadir (@kmabadir) July 8, 2013

That’s one more data point that Kirkpatrick omitted.

He also didn’t mention Muslim Brotherhood violence elsewhere in Egypt.

For those who asked: Link to full interview with father of 19-yr-old victim who was thrown off roof, killed in Alex http://t.co/gQMRKtarKG

— Deena Adel (@deena_adel) July 7, 2013

Pro-Morsi mob #Egypt burns St. George #Catholic church. Kills priests. http://t.co/o7UDlwn9tk #Morsi

— The ACRU (@The_ACRU) July 10, 2013

Postscript: The Tweets included in this post all came from Patrick Poole’s Twitter timeline. If you compare Poole’s timeline with Kirkpatrick’s it’s hard to believe that they are writing about the same events. That is not a compliment to Kirkpatrick.

1. The Misadventures of Morsi

Commenting on Reuel Marc Gerecht’s thesis that having Islamists take power was probably a necessary step for political liberalization in the Arab world, Ross Douthat writes:

As I said two years ago, I have serious doubts about whether Gerecht’s thesis — which sees Islamist rule in Middle Eastern countries as a necessary-if-fraught step on the way to any kind of liberal democracy in the region — can serve as a guide for responsible U.S. policymaking. But it has always offered the most plausible script for how the Islamic world might eventually escape from its current cycle of repression feeding extremism feeding repression and so on.

The question is whether this week’s events in Egypt are following the Gerecht script or not. Is the failure of the Morsi government an example of how “time moves quickly now,” with the Egyptian public swiftly seeing Islamist rule for what it is and rejecting it decisively, opening the door for more liberal alternatives? Or is this a case where the process Gerecht hopes for hasn’t even had time to get off the ground, and the military’s intervention will just return us to the same old cycle of secular dictatorships pre-empting democracy in order to keep the lid on fundamentalists, whose popular appeal endures and eventually prompts another upheaval down the road? The Morsi government was in power long enough to produce a mass protest movement against the Muslim Brotherhood, but was it in power long enough to actually discredit the Brotherhood (at least in its current form) as the most plausible alternative to military rule? If the military actually holds new elections now, will they produce anything like a viable third way between Islamism and dictatorship, Morsi and Mubarak, the minaret and the tank?

If Douthat’s first possibility is correct, the swift failure of the Muslim Brotherhood was largely Morsi’s.

Jeffrey Goldberg recalls:

A few months ago, King Abdullah II of Jordan told me about his meetings with Mohamed Mursi, the now-deposed president of Egypt. The king wasn’t fond of Mursi, both because the Egyptian was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and because Abdullah found Mursi exceedingly stupid.

“I see a Muslim Brotherhood crescent developing in Egypt and Turkey,” the king said. He despises the movement, partly because it is revanchist, fundamentalist and totalitarian, and partly because in Jordan it seeks his overthrow. “The Arab Spring highlighted a new crescent in the process of development.”

The saving grace in Egypt, he said, was that Mursi seemed too unsophisticated to successfully pull off his vision. “There’s no depth to the guy,” he said of Mursi. The king compared him unfavorably to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist prime minister of Turkey. Like Mursi, the king asserted, Erdogan was also a false democrat, but one with patience. “Erdogan once said that democracy for him is a bus ride,” Abdullah said. “Once I get to my stop, I’m getting off.”

(Goldberg notes that Erdogan’s style has now lost some of its luster.)

Eric Trager describes how Morsi became president. He had no charisma and didn’t win based on his charm but on the effective organization of the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus:

Morsi thus won the presidency without having to be liked – thereby making it easy for people to start hating him as soon as his many flaws became apparent.

Morsi’s total reliance on the Brotherhood for his political success had another damaging effect: it made pleasing his Brotherhood colleagues a top priority, even though he campaigned promising to govern inclusively.

Morsi thus continually expanded the number of Brotherhood ministers and governors with each round of appointments, further alienating non-Islamists.

Trager then goes on to recount how Morsi sought to seize power for himself last November. Though this is slightly off topic, it’s important for another reason.

David Kirkpatrick is the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times, an thus one of the more influential reporters in the region. He sees no threat from the Muslim Brotherhood as a political party. The other day he tweeted:

@ramielobeidi @sultanalqassemi Morsi was jailed in 2011 for being MB,before that for supporting judicial independence. There are many crimes

— David D. Kirkpatrick (@kirkpatricknyt) July 3, 2013

Morsi’s power grab last year was an attempt to bring the judiciary under his control but the reporter for the New York Times didn’t bring it up. (The context of the tweet is important too. Someone had argued that there was no justification for arresting Morsi.) Instead he tweeted that Morsi had been arrested unjustly before.

It’s important to remember that the New York Times’ lead reporter from Egypt is an apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood generally, and Morsi, in particular.

2. The Brotherhood’s Coup

While violence in Egypt has been increasing, it’s important to remember that there was a coup in Egypt prior to the June 30th protests. That coup occurred November 22, 2012. That’s when President Morsi attempted to seize power for himself by fiat.

Here’s how Eric Trager later characterized the events:

The Brotherhood’s most blatantly undemocratic act, however, was Morsy’s Nov. 22 “constitutional declaration,” through which he placed his presidential edicts above judicial scrutiny and asserted the far-reaching power to “take the necessary actions and measures to protect the country and the goals of the revolution.” When this power grab catalyzed mass protests, Morsy responded by ramming a new constitution through the Islamist-dominated Constituent Assembly, and the Brotherhood later mobilized its cadres to attack the anti-Morsy protesters, and subsequently extract confessions from their captured fellow citizens. So much for promises of “consultation.”

At the time Matt Bradley and Charles Levinson of the Wall Street Journal reported Egypt Sees Largest Clash Since Revolution:

Egypt’s opposition was galvanized last month when Mr. Morsi issued a decree granting him nearly unrestricted powers and placing him above the judiciary. The decree paved the way for hurried approval of a constitution that was drafted by an Islamist-dominated body that the opposition says was working illegitimately and produced a charter weighted with Islamic law. The government has set a referendum on the draft for Dec. 15.

Anti-Morsi Egyptians took to the streets. On Tuesday, they marched on the presidential palace to denounce Mr. Morsi, the first time in recent memory that protesters made it to the palace walls. On Wednesday, Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam El-Eryan, speaking on al-Jazeera, called on millions of Egyptians to go to the presidential palace to “defend the state and its legitimacy.”

Mohamed ElBaradei, one of the leaders of the opposition, countered on Wednesday that Mr. Morsi had lost all legitimacy. The president, he said, bears full responsibility for the current violence and is in danger of drawing Egypt into “something worse.”

Jeffrey Fleishman of the Los Angeles Times reported Islamists clash with rivals in Egypt:

Pro-Morsi factions overran about 200 protesters camped outside the presidential palace in north Cairo. The clashes came after the Muslim Brotherhood-allied Freedom and Justice Party called thousands of its members into the streets in a counter-demonstration to drive opposition movements from the presidential palace. …

More than 200 people were injured across a cityscape that had the charged air of a fluorescent-lighted battlefield with competing banners, bandaged men and dinner trays used as shields to block barrages of rocks.

Egyptian news reports said clashes spread to other cities, including attacks on several Muslim Brotherhood offices. There were unconfirmed reports of at least three deaths.

And as protests continued, a few days later, Stephanie McCrummen of the Washington Post reported In Egypt, a show of force from Morsi supporters:

As opponents of President Mohamed Morsi again marched to the presidential palace Tuesday night, his Islamist supporters packed a square about two miles away – near enough, several said, to take action to protect the building and their president if necessary.

“Of course, we will protect the palace,” said Mohamed Abdelsalam, 59, a government worker who was at Rabaa al-Addaweya Square with thousands of other Morsi supporters waving the green flags of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s dominant political Islamist organization. “We will not allow anyone to go inside there.” …

In recent days, opposition protesters have described having their wrists bound, being brutally beaten and interrogated by Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood supporters during 15 hours of violent street clashes outside the presidential palace last week, during which both sides hurled rocks and wielded clubs. Protesters said their Islamist captors called them “infidels” and forced them to “confess” to being paid to stoke violence, an interpretation of events that a spokesman for the Brotherhood’s political party denied.

David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times reported further Morsi’s Allies Beat Protesters Outside Palace:

Khaled el-Qazzaz, a spokesman for Mr. Morsi, said Monday that he had ordered an investigation into the reported abuses and asked the prosecutor to bring charges against any involved. He said that Mr. Morsi was referring only to confessions obtained by the police, not by his supporters.

But human rights lawyers involved in the cases of the roughly 130 people who ended up in police custody Wednesday night, all or most of them delivered by the Islamists, say the police obtained no confessions. “His statement was completely bogus,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher on policing at Egyptian Initiative on Personal Rights, whose lawyers were on hand about an hour after the speech when prosecutors released all the detainees without charges. “There were no confessions; they were all just simply beaten up,” he said. “There was no case at all, and they were released the next day.”

Officials of the Muslim Brotherhood said the group opposed such vigilante justice and did not organize the detentions. And in at least one case one victim said a senior figure of the group rescued her from captivity. But the officials also acknowledged that some of their senior leadership was on the scene at the time. They said some of their members took part in the detentions, along with more hard-line Islamists.

Reading these articles makes clear that the dissatisfaction with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood is not new. In fact it makes the events of the past week even less surprising, if not predictable.

But something else needs to be said. When the New York Times argues that the recent coup, was a “rejection of democracy,” it proceeds from an assumption that democracy equates with a free election. But a free election a necessary but insufficient condition for democracy. The winner of a free election needs to understand that he is limited by the will of the people who elected him for an election to be sufficient. Morsi (and the Muslim Brotherhood) never accepted any such limit. They saw an election as a license to rule according to their ideology and seize more power.

After Morsi’s power grab in November a New York Times editorial exhorted the administration “… to speak out when [Morsi] tramples on democratic principles at home.” But the premise of the editorial was that Morsi’s power grab was an aberration, not his expected behavior.

With the Muslim Brotherhood, an attempt to seize power once it achieves political power is a feature of its ideology, not a bug.

What Morsi did in November was, effectively, a coup. That he backed down when enough pressure was brought to bear, didn’t mean that he thought he was wrong. Subsequently, he and the Muslim Brotherhood intimidated opponents, attempted to impose their standards on the Egyptian artistic community and appointed allies to political positions. Maybe last week’s news was a coup, but it wasn’t the first. Maybe it wasn’t democratic, but it was no less democratic than the power it replaced.