“Embrace the Muslim Brotherhood” was the essence of a mild-mannered exchange issuing from the establishmentarian Council on Foreign Relations media call this afternoon.
Value voters of the Nile
While CFR is known around the Interwebs for its ruthless and conspiratorial power plays in service of U.S. foreign policy (some of which actually occurred), the organization has a more pacific aspect in today’s Washington. For the working journalist, it serves a reliable quote factory and de facto barometer of what well-connected people are thinking. Often–but not always– CFR-talk bears some resemblance to what U.S. policymakers are thinking behind closed doors as they grapple with a seismic political event.
So the positive spin on the Muslim Brotherhood from CFR talking head Ed Husain seems noteworthy. In response to questions about the Brotherhood as a variant on Hezbollah and Hamas, an allegedly dangerous factor in the current situation,
Husain noted that the Brotherhood (unlike Hezbollah and Hamas) has not been not an armed movement since the 1960s. Obama poliycmakers may know this but they think like Yossi Klein Halevy, and the editors of the New York Times, that Brotherhood equals Hezbollah equals Hamas.
The group cannot and has not claimed leadership of the demonstrations, Husain noted. Indeed the Islamist movement has accepted former U.N. official Muhamed ElBaradei as their negotiator. El Baradei, secular bureaucrat in a leather jacket is hardly a card carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood. So they have taken an accomodationist stance.
Husain, who once worked for a radical Islamist organization, estimated the Brotherhood would win about 30 percent of the vote in free parliamentary elections, which they have been barred by the Mubarak dictatorship. The group, he said,
should be welcomed rather than stigmatized on the grounds they respect the constitution. They’ve proven that. They talk about human rights, about women’s rights, about a pluralistic society. They have shown that they are willing to sign up for what we all expect in a democratic society.
Fellow pundit Isobel Coleman, author of a book about how women are transforming the Middle East, gently differed. She noted that the Brotherhood had not signed up for everything democratic public might expect.. In 2005, she said the Brotherhood had debated–but not ultimately changed–a party platform provisions holding that neither non-Muslims or women could ever serve as the president of Egypt. That’s a problem but not an insurmountable one.
Husain and Coleman both agreed that the group represents the less-educated, more religious sector of Egypt, the “value voters” of the Nile. Husain certainly sees the group as part of Egypt’s solution. The question is whether Obama administration policymakers are prepared or preparing to accept that reality.
