Muslim Brotherhood candidate wins Egyptian Presidency

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http://news.yahoo.com/islamist-morsi-wi ... 50771.html

It would have worked out so much better and cheaper in the long term if we bought off most of the dictators in the middle east with the carrot and stick/ silver or lead method and kept them in power on our terms.

What hypocrisy! What if foreign countries decided to try that with our government? Of course the constitution doesn't allow a dictator, but do you think foreigners should decide who gets elected as president just by paying off the candidates? That's pure corruption. If you believe in Americanism, you support the Egyptians electing their own officials.

Americans don't need foreign countries for that. Their own corporations are perfectly capable of doing that.



Did the United States become a beacon of democracy while I blinked? Didn't the United States spend most of the past century funding convenient coups and having heads of state killed?

Point being, people on the far right complain about this sort of thing and then they want to go have the same thing in other countries. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Who cares about the people that live in those countries so long as Jeb can keep driving a hummer and going to Church

Some places it's necessary to mitigate the risk of terrorism just like it was sometimes necessary to maintain the balance of power in the cold war. For example, do you really think that in the long term Egyptians will enjoy more freedom, buying power, or peace with Israel with the Muslim brotherhood in power? How about women and religious minorities in particular? Was it not obvious that with the dictators in the region gone, that the people would turn to militant mullahs and clerics for leadership?

I'm not saying to do this with every dictator, but there are some in places where the culture is inherently unstable. Iraq was too volatile to keep the region stable and needed to be addressed. The one thing I must say though is that both of those dictatorships (and also the Shah) really understood what it takes to keep order in those particular societies. Most other countries, including in the Islamic crescent, do not have that problem.

I highly doubt you even have anything to worry about.

The military are not going to hand over proper power and authority to the Brotherhood if they can help it, they have made that abundantly clear, regardless if they were elected democratically or not. They may hand over power "on paper" but I seriously doubt they will remove themselves from the true position of power and just go back to their barracks.

The uprising may have removed Mubarak, but many of the military members like the defense minister who have been in power for the last 20 or more years are still in power there. They got rid of the puppet, but not those who pull the strings.

I think I fell for Poe's Inverse Law here, a sufficiently extreme belief can be mistaken as a parody. Are you being serious there?

He lives by Gérson's Law.

Is the new explanation sufficient for you?

As scary as the newly elected Egyptian president might seem, it must be remembered, he hasn't done anything yet. And as I recall, he has said it is very likely that his vice president will be either a woman, a Coptic Christian, or one of the young protesters.
The election is done, and the Egyptian people have spoken. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that the new government there are our enemies, we need to consider establishing a working relationship.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The irony here is right wingers who want to take over America are as extreme, in their own way, as the Muslim Brotherhood so why do they complain? They want to impose their extreme views on America just like this Brotherhood wants to impose their extreme Islamic views on all of Egypt. Extreme right wingers in America should understand this fully and sympathize. It's not about compromise.

So about that Arab Spring...

Does anybody still believe that social media is some glorious force for all that is good and righteous?

Social media has demonstrated itself to be eminently successful at facilitating the mob, and an utter failure at creating the conditions for democratic, accountable government.

Hardly, they won an election. Probably the last election Egypt will have for a while...

Given the choice of secular democracy or sharia muslims will always go for sharia because Islam is a political ideology, to try and separate the religion from the politics is impossible and criticising Islam is punishable by death under sharia so there will never be a 'liberal movement' from the inside of an Islamic state that will adequately wrest power from the mullahs who dictate the interpretations of sharia, the hardliners will always kill them as soon as they pose a threat and justify it using sharia law.

The Egyptian people voted for this, both the Iranians and the Israelis knew exactly what the outcome of elections would be in Egypt as soon as Mubarak fell while the West was too busy high fiving over 'democracy' and twitter.


Egypt's Islamist president-elect, Mohamed Morsi, wants to "reconsider" the peace deal with Israel and build ties with Iran to "create a strategic balance" in the Middle East
Source:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... cd927a.181

Meanwhile Hamas has been celebrating by firing hundreds of rockets and mortar shells into Israel.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... srael.html

I feel sorry for the children born there named "Facebook" of which there are apparently a few

Given the choice that Egyptian voters had in the runoff - between Islamists untested in governance & a return to ancien-regime authoritarianism amid the power-grab by the SCAF - this may be the least bad outcome.

For my part, I think the fears of the Egyptian Islamists expressed by pundits in the West are greatly overblown. (The fears expressed by Egyptian liberals & the Copts with regard to domestic policies are another matter.) Even if the Islamists are allowed to exercise their newly won political power - which is by no means assured - Egypt isn't about to turn into another Iran, or even necessarily to become overly friendly toward Iran. In the end, it's the Sunni-Shia divide that really matters in the Middle East, more so than Islamist-secularist or democracy-authoritarianism. The Brotherhood appears to have embraced neo-liberal, investor-friendly economic policy & isn't likely to rock the boat too much when it comes to relations with Israel, the U.S. & the West. While an Islamist-led Egypt may become less pliant toward the U.S. & Israel, it will likely become a bastion of Sunni conservatism rather than a militant state devoted to exporting revolution.