Will the Moslem Brotherhood Sacrifice the Egyptian Army?

a version appeared in Internet Edition,
February 11, 2011

It is correct to stress the importance of the Egyptian Army's steady hand in protecting the peace treaty with Israel.  And yet, most commentators underestimate the threat of the radical Moslem Brotherhood, like other master jihadists in the region, should it be allowed into a coalition government. The totalitarian Brotherhood is deadly serious in its continuing anti-Israel incitement and rightly sees the Egyptian Army as the only block to its achieving total domination. Importantly, there is a key link in its antagonism to both.

The Brotherhood's thinking could well be in line with another totalitarian's historic prescription. When Czarist Russia entered the Great War in 1914, Vladimir Lenin declared that hope for his Communist revolution was born. He proved the case in 1917, when the war-ravaged Czarist Imperial Army could not withstand a social-democratic revolution subverted by Lenin's Bolsheviks.
 
Likewise today, the Moslem Brotherhood, through its distortion of Islam, could easily be plotting to come out on top of a pile of corpses through war with Israel, whether the Egyptian Army is victorious or not. In the first case, the Brotherhood will claim the glory of having championed a winning paradigm for the destruction of the Jewish State. In the latter case, a defeated Egyptian Army and demoralized population will likely see the only Answer to be in the Brotherhood, as the latter attacks the Army's failings.  The Brotherhood will then be able to reconstitute the Egyptian Army in its own warped image, under the oppressive thumb of its own future Revolutionary Guards.

Let Egypt, Israel and the West thus be clear that the Brotherhood, if accommodated, will likely resort to the most extreme subversive tactics to provoke such a confrontation with Israel.  It will hope thereby to gain total power for eventual world domination, and Egypt, for now, be damned. The Brotherhood must continue, therefore, to be isolated, like the devil itself, while the West and Moslem peoples worldwide advance a paradigm (thought pattern) for victory over Master Jihad.
 
Haroun Braunstein
Jerusalem

The writer is a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer who served five years in Egypt.