BJ Schaum had a good comment on The "Esquire 100" October issue is out, with my "No. 042: The Country to Watch":
Dr Barnett,Tom's reply:
I agree with the general thrust of your latest article in Esquire. Africa is clearly the next battle ground of the Long War and corrupt dictatorships like Egypt are at risk of being overwhelmed by Islamic extremists if they continue neglect their people. However, I have to disagree with your characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Another political force is connecting to the restive Egyptian people, and it's the Muslim Brotherhood, otherwise known as Al Qaeda 1.0.”
The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt is certainly the source code for radical Islam. The writings of Sayyid Qutb are the ideological foundation for most radical Sunni and even some Shi’a extremists. However, the Muslim Brotherhood no longer advocates the violent overthrow of regimes like Mubarak’s Egypt. They refused to condone the assassination of Sadat (although most members probably approved). This is the reason that Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad broke away.
I know this is semantics but I believe a more accurate metaphor for the Brotherhood is that they are the MSDOS to al Qaeda’s Windows XP. One is the antecedent of the other but they are no longer compatible.
This is important because I believe we run the risk of repeating one of the major mistakes of the Cold War in this Long War. In the Cold War we regarded any Populist or advocate of land reform as a Communist. Our antagonism often drove them into the Soviet camp. This oversimplification led to some disastrous decisions (such as the CIA directed coup which toppled Iran’s democratically elected populist government and installed the Shah in 1953).
Just as you so rightly differentiate between authoritarian regimes which can be “killed” with connectivity and totalitarian regimes which simply need to die, I think it is critical that we not paint all Islamists with the same brush. I believe there are “green” Islamists (like the AKP government in Turkey) who desire a society and a government that reflects Muslim values but seek connectivity with the rest of the world (globalization on their terms) and “red” Islamists who seek to cleave the Islamic world from the global community by any means necessary. An MB led Egypt would be initially anti-American and would certainly be anti-Israeli but, like Hamas (which is currently forming a unity government with Abu Mazen who continues to advocate a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli issue), they will still be required to govern and meet the needs of their people. For that, they will continue to need FDI and support from the Core. I do not believe they will openly support al Qaeda but instead seek accommodation.
IMHO the best way to shrink the Gap in the Islamic world is to connect the “green” Islamists (even the anti-American ones) before rage drives them to become “red” Islamists.
Agree with this analysis, and in 1600-word version, I would have offered such finer distinctions (but remember this short piece sets up larger Africa piece I hope to pen for early 2007 issue).
Mark Warren and I went over this phrase at length (go with 1.0 to signal common past ancestors or 2.0 to signal next Darwinian iteration--possibly a more mature political movement as the commenter hypothesizes?). Personally, I pushed Mark to 1.0, feeling that was less speculative and easier concept to convey in such quarters.
That's the usual reach-richness trade-off, as Art Cebrowski liked to say. As with Art, my biggest problem is not what people read in my articles but what they read into them.
I agree with thrust of comment and hope to explore it in that planned ext piece. We either learn to separate the nationalists from the true transnational jihadists or we miss the chance to co-opt the next Ho Chi Minh.
But to add some pessimism on MB: one fears they won't signal enough in advance that they're further along the nationalist learning curve than either Hamas or Hezbollah to avoid a military conflict they can't win (though one suspects they could likewise"not lose" just enough to survive it).
But that's what I want this next piece to be all about: how we guide and shape the disintegration/re-integration process we'll witness time and time again as globalization reaches deeper inside the Gap.
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