The Counter-Revolution Speaks

When I got home from the Institute of World Affairs forum at UW-Milwaukee last week, my wife asked me, “Was it good?”

I said, “I’m not sure. I’d have to know who pays his salary before I could tell whether he’s lying or not.” – the salary in question being that of Salah Brahimi, the featured speaker. He’d proven to be well-connected and well-informed, but glib and unprincipled.

Brahimi was billed as a guide to the second Obama administration on questions of policy towards the Arab Spring and the Islamic world in general. But his welter of facts didn’t lead to principles for policy or action. Instead the guidance was to consider fundamentalist elements in the revolutions “toxic” and therefore “fascist.”

Unfortunately, no political philosophy I am aware of defines fascism in terms of toxicity. Maybe the political scientists in the audience could say the same about their discipline. Yet Brahimi calls some of the Islamists fascists for about the same reason a teenager’s parents might be called fascists: he’s unhappy with them.

Equally unfortunately, those were the tactics Brahimi used all evening. Instead of principled, reasoned argument, we heard personal attacks, loaded words, conspiracy theories…

...and false dichotomies. It is not the case that a political system or party that is not recognizably bourgeois and democratic in the Western style must therefore be fascist. Like it or not, the Moslem Brotherhood have made a revolution successfully in Egypt. That they did it in their own behalf – by itself – no more makes them fascists that it makes Mohammed Morsi a candidate to be dictator-for-life. To show that some of their beliefs and policies are “toxic” from the standpoint of Western liberal democracy is not to show that they are putting the elements of a totalitarian state, or a cult of personality, into place. Neither does their failure so far to build a successful state, toxic as that might be, necessarily indicate they have a hidden agenda.

Actually, Brahimi pays his own salary as head of his own consulting firm. He earns it because, as I say, he’s well-connected and well-informed. He also has “friends” in Egypt. But now the question is, who are his clients? If you ask, who would like to discredit Morsi and the Brotherhood, you might get several different answers. But the liberal secular parties in Egypt can’t afford Brahimi’s salary. Mubarak’s old cronies, the ones who paid him for the privilege of looting the Egyptian people for 30 years, can.

The taxpayers of the state of Wisconsin, who fund the Institute, paid Brahimi an honorarium for his services. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is also a sponsor of the forum. Thanks for the coffee! But, or so it seems, he was already being well paid for what he did: tell lies for the counter-revolution in Egypt.