British Funding of the Muslim Brotherhood

Back when Nasser was the reigning champ.

For Western governments, there is no worse scenario today than the possibility that one of their Mid-East authoritarian clients could be overthrown - through force or elections - by an Islamist political group.

16894 UF6aS 19672

Nearly all Western governments are hostile to any Islamic party in the Arab world not because they are offended by the draconian tyranny they would oppose since America et al have never shown concern for human rights in the region and they all support the Islamic fundamentalist regime of Saudi Arabia - a nation where adulterous are stoned - but simply since they view all of them as radicals who may interrupt the steady flow of oil and resist Western neo-imperialism in their nations. It is about subservience that the Islamist will not agree to.

This is why not a single Western power condemned the suspension of elections in Algeria in the early 1990s by the ruling military when it appeared that the 'Islamic Salvation Front' was about to win. Better the suspension of elections and the ensuing civil war than losing a client was the logic.

But while they fret about and seek to undermine Islamists today, during the Cold War the relationship was quite different. In the 1960s and '70s, the dominant ideology in the region was leftist Arab nationalism. And Arab nationalism, as most eloquently espoused by the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, was all about opposing Western intervention in the region and the Arabs charting their own independent course. Nasser was not anti-Western, on the contrary, he tilt was clearly pro-Western; but he was anti-imperialism. Nasser nationalized the then British-owned Suez Canal and he called for the overthrow of Western-installed monarchs (especially the Hashamites of Jordan). For Britain and France, then the imperial powers, this was not to be tolerated and they sought to (along with Israel) overthrow Nasser in the 1956 tripartite invasion of Egypt. They failed as U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower forced them to leave Egypt. But British efforts against Nasser were not confined to that moment:

British funding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt began in the 1940s; the following decade Britain was conniving with the organization to kill Nasser (and also to overthrow nationalist governments in Syria). The reason for supporting Islamist organizations in the early postwar period was to counter popular nationalism, and Whitehall regularly sided with the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East...

Britain was not alone in supporting fundamentalists in the region in order to counter the left-wing nationalism of the time. The new imperial power, the U.S. of course, also was a long and sordid history of supporting fundamentalist types.

U.S. logic went like this: left-wing groups are aligned with the Soviets and threaten to overthrow are clients and replace them with socialist governments which will welcome Soviet sponsorship and thus the world's #1 oil producer will fall under communist dominance to great determent to America's strategic standing and interest. Therefore we must take the other side. What's the other side of the secular left? Fundamentalist right-wingers. Under this pretext, the U.S. not only supported the Muslim Brothers, it also supported a whole host of fundamentalist groups whom shared the same interest of opposing atheistic communism. A network that may be dubbed Fundamentalist Inc. of which the Arab fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation are the most well-known.

It is this group that knows causes so much trouble. A monster that was created it has now become its own master spewing fundamentalist ideas and engaging in terrorism.

The Westerns powers who helped establish it have done so at their peril. The moral of the story: The consequences of foreign intervention in regional affairs may backfire and be counterproductive to one's gaols in unforeseeable ways. Therefore: Stop Meddling in the Middle East.