What The Media Won't Tell You About What's Really Going On In Egypt

I wrote yesterday that after doing a great deal to destabilize Egypt, President Obama appeared to finally be doing something right for a change...keeping his mouth shut (at least publicly)and concentrating on his golf game.

I should have known better.

Our Dear Leader took some time off from the links to run his mouth, condemning Egypt's declaring a state of emergency, saying what he termed 'traditional cooperation' could not continue, and announcing the cancellation of planned joint exercises between our military and Egypt's.

He also got busy behind the scenes to protect his Muslim Brotherhood pals. President Obama reportedly put in a direct call to Egypt's Defense Minister Gen. Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi, the military leader behind the ousting of Mahmoud Morsi and the Brotherhood.

He undoubtedly planned to threaten him again with losing the $1.5 billion in aid we give Egypt and to demand again that he free Morsi and the other Brotherhood leaders now in custody. Perhaps our Islamist friendly president is worried that a trial of Morsi and the Brotherhood's Number 2 Khairat el Shater is likely to result in this embarrassing item coming to light.

Al-Sissi refused to take the call.Instead, the president was told politely that the right person for him to speak to was Egypt’s interim president Adly Mansour. Obama recognized the insult when he heard it and decided not to bother talking to Mansour.

There's a great deal of verbiage in the legacy media calling al-Sissi a 'Nasser-type figure'. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of being a quasi-Marxist, loud mouth Arab fantasist like the Rais, al-Sissi is a quasi-Islamist, pragmatic, career military general who was smart enough to attend war colleges in both the UK and America and has relationships with army figures in both countries.

Having seen what President Obama is like and whom Obama's in bed with, al-Sissi simply doesn't trust him. Nor does he perceive any need to.

What's going on in Egypt is not some kind of Tien-an-min Square but the creation of another front in Islam's civil war, and it has a direct link to what's going on right now in Syria.

The Saudis, the Emirates and the other GCE countries wrote off our president a long time ago as a clueless, arrogant and deceptive loser. They realize he's incapable of dealing with the threat from Shi'ite Iran, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, which in Egypt particularly had been cozying up to the Ayatollahs. In spite of their theological differences, the Brotherhood and the Iranians agree on the hatred of the west and the Islamist concept of theocracy, the vilayat e fiqh.

In Syria, the faceoff is the proxy war between Shi'ite/Alawite Basher Assad and the Sunni rebels, whom the Saudis and Qatar have been bankrolling and arming. And in Syria, the Saudis, led now guided by Prince Bandar, the new chief of Saudi Intelligence, have a double problem. They want very much to oust Assad, gain control of Syria and keep the Iranians out, but they also have justified concerns that the al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood Sunni jihadis in Syria might eventually become a problem for them, which is exactly what happened with bin-Laden after the Saudi bankrolling of the muhadajeen in the 1980's Afghan war.

So Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been fighting for influence among Syria’s Sunni rebels, and they see destroying the Brotherhood in Egypt as a way of helping those efforts along in Syria, as well as bringing Egypt, a large Sunni country with a decent military into the war on their side.

The Obama Administration's fecklessness and Morsi's increasingly warm relations with Iran were what broke the devil's bargain between the Saudis and the Brotherhood.

That's what was behind the new Emir of Qatar stripping Sheik Qaradawi, the Brotherhood's spiritual leader of his citizenship, closing down all Brotherhood offices and expelling Qaradawi and Hamas leader Khalid Mesha'al from the country right after Morsi and the Brotherhood were deposed in Egypt.

The Saudis and GCE countries are backing al-Sissi and the new Egyptian government with billions in aid. According to one of my sources, al-Sissi was in contact with the Saudis and got assurances they would back him before overthrowing Morsi. And now that the Brotherhood has elected to inaugurate a civil war, look for that aid to continue.

There was and is never going to be a democracy in Egypt, in terms we understand it. The country's institutions simply aren't geared that way, as in most Muslim countries. The Brotherhood is a fascist organization who was never going to share power, so the war is simply going to be a zero sum game, because that's what they've decided they want. They will be crushed now that they decided to take on the army, a highly beneficial state of affairs not only for Egypt but for the West. But because life is cheap to them, look for the Brotherhood to continue to provoke confrontations in order to try and get Obama to do a Libya on their behalf.

Based on the nonsense being spouted by the legacy media and Islamist appeasers like our president, the UN and various EU functionaries, they have had some success, but I'd be very surprised if the Brotherhood ended up with anything more concrete than words. Bleeders,terrorism, attacks on Egypt's Christian Copts and photo-ops are about all they have left and that isn't going to be enough to defeat the Egyptian Army, or make a dent in its popular support with the Egyptian people.

For that matter, if Obama keeps threatening al-Sissi, look for the Egyptian military to find a new best friend in the Kremlin.

Russia's Putin will sell them arms in a heartbeat.As a matter of fact, on July 31, Prince Bandar the head of Saudi Intelligence arrived in Moscow for a conference with Vladimir Putin for a conversation that lasted four hours. Rest assured that Bander had talked to al-Sissi and discussed that with the Russians.

Or to put it another way, thanks to President Obama's clueless antics (with an assist from certain elements of the GOP establishment) and his fervid embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, our influence in the Middle East is pretty much non-existent right now.