Mohammed Habib lives in a suburb of Cairo just beyond the ring of tenement housing that is closing in on the city like a noose. His flat is small but well kept, with great towers of stacked books erected from the floor and tables.

This has been Habib’s place of self-imposed exile since he and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood lost a struggle for control of the Islamist group eighteen months ago. It was generally assumed that Habib, as the then-deputy chairman, would be elected chairman when Mohammed Akef, who had held the post for six years, announced he was stepping down. When the vote was held in January 2010, however, Habib was upset by Mohammed Badie, a conservative and relatively obscure member of the Brotherhood’s governing council, known as the Guidance Bureau. Delivering his acceptance speech, according to Habib, Badie referred affectionately to Egypt’s then-dictator Hosni Mubarak as “the father of Egypt,” and he implied the Brotherhood would accept a dynastic transfer of power to Mubarak’s son Gamal. Not long after that, several Badie allies were released from prison after long periods of detention.

Badie’s remarks, to say nothing of the election results, were a surprise to pretty much everyone but Habib. “Four months before the election,” he told me, “I received information through leads within the group that Badie would be the next Supreme Guide. I believe there was an agreement between Badie and his supporters and the government. The rest of us were strongly opposed to Gamal Mubarak and his succession.”

Predictably, Brotherhood leaders deny such a deal was made, though talk of an agreement has circulated within the group. “It’s been mentioned,” said a rank-and-file member who requested anonymity so as to avoid reprimand. “An official on the Guidance Bureau told me. And while I’d rather not believe in such a thing, it may contain a bit of truth.”

I met with Habib in June. Until then, he had kept his account of the transition largely to himself. So much had happened since February, however, when Mubarak and his ruling circle were ousted in a popular revolt, that he decided to come forward in interviews and with writings of his own. National elections have been scheduled for November, and the Ikhwan, as the Muslim Brotherhood is known in Arabic, is expected to win a plurality of seats in Parliament. Almost overnight Egypt, once the wellspring of Arab politics and culture before it was rendered mute by a half-century of one-party rule, has been transformed into a fragile young democracy. At the center of this whirlwind is the Ikhwan, one of Egypt’s oldest political movements, one that has survived decades of persecution by resisting and accommodating sequential fashions of autocracy, from monarchy to secular dictatorship. Now freed along with the rest of the country, and seemingly within reach of unprecedented power, the Brotherhood faces the prospect of implosion. Though it can now openly organize and contest elections, that same process is deepening longstanding fault lines within the group that threaten its dissolution.

“The Ikhwan is behaving as if the entire political system is in its grip,” Habib said. “In fact, there are fissures, and they may be to the very core. There is concern among the younger members that the leadership does not understand what’s going on around it. But their opinions are being cast aside, just as they were under Mubarak.”

Fractures within the Brotherhood are nothing new. Since its founding in 1928 by revivalist Hassan al-Banna, the Ikhwan has been home to competing visions of Islam and the group’s role in Egyptian society. The impulse among some leaders to engage in politics and revolution, both peaceful and violent, rather than confine themselves to proselytizing and social work has at times threatened to destroy the group. A failed bid in October 1954 by a Brotherhood faction to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the fierce secularist who led Egypt throughout the 1950s and ’60s, ended with mass arrests of Ikhwanists and the torture of the plot’s alleged leaders, including radical author and Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb. (Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was a Qutb disciple.)

Schismatics aside, the Brotherhood has remained whole largely by entering into tactical ententes with the state and nurturing social networks that are the basis of its political muscle. If Banna was a rebel—he lashed out against what he regarded as Cairo’s corrupt political elites, neo-imperialism and Zionism, and the social salons that were Westernizing Egypt and Islam—he was conflicted about the use of violence even when deployed against the country’s British occupiers. “Revolution is not part of the Brotherhood’s ideology,” said Habib. “Even Hassan al-Banna never spoke of it. The objective has always been to reform the system from within, not to replace it with a new one.”

The Brotherhood allied with Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, in his battles with leftists, only to turn against him along with other Islamist groups once he recognized Israel in 1979. (Sadat’s assassination in 1981 was the work of a handful of rogue Ikhwan members and other radical Islamists, along with colluding military officers.) The Brotherhood’s relations with Mubarak were equally volatile; the two sides shared an uneasy truce during the 1990s, when the regime fought a low-level civil war with militant organizations like Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. In 2005, however, when Brotherhood candidates won the largest opposition bloc in parliamentary elections—they were allowed to campaign only as independents—Mubarak unleashed an extrajudicial assault on the group, detaining and torturing members under emergency security measures in place since Sadat’s assassination. In 2008 the government modified the Constitution to prohibit independent candidates from running for Parliament, a move clearly aimed at the Ikhwan. For good measure, it arrested thousands of its members, many of whom were tried in military courts.

It was largely in response to Mubarak’s iron hand, quietly abetted by the Bush administration and the US Congress, that the more conservative Ikhwan members became disillusioned with Akef and his policy of engaging non-Islamist dissidents in opposition to the regime. Younger members, however, pushed for more aggressive outreach to the secular world, not unlike the way Banna had challenged the religious hierarchy of his day. In a November 2008 interview, a 20-year-old Brotherhood member named Mohammed Adel told me of a growing restlessness among the youth cadres, some of whom were working with secular movements to unseat Mubarak through peaceful means. A website designer, Adel said he and a handful of young dissidents had launched an alternative to the Brotherhood’s official website, one that featured a page soliciting constructive criticism of the group. It was a hit among the Ikhwan’s youth, but the leadership ordered it removed.

“There are no dissenting ideas within the Ikhwan,” Adel told me in a coffee shop just off Tahrir Square, where thousands of demonstrators would later stage the peaceful rebellion that led to Mubarak’s eviction. “There are younger members who want to deviate from the old guard’s ways, to work with other political streams and to take action in the streets with the language of renewal, the language of the young. You also have young people who want representation in the leadership, but they have none.”

Adel, who was raised as an Ikhwanist in a family filled with them, said he participated in a day of peaceful protest launched by oppositionists in the spring of 2008. The April 6 Youth Movement, as it is known, was organized on Facebook and had particular appeal among Egypt’s angry and unemployed youth. Many young Brotherhood members joined in the demonstration in defiance of their elders’ objections. Three years later, they would do so again, with far more conclusive results.

The Ikhwan leadership was famously slow to involve itself in the anti-Mubarak rebellion that began in Tahrir Square on January 25. Even as their young brethren, in tandem with secularists and Coptic Christians, manned the barricades that kept regime thugs from clearing the area, senior Brotherhood members were loath to join a movement that was antithetical to the Ikhwan’s near-sacred embrace of gradualism. Only when it was clear Mubarak was on his way out, say dissident Ikhwanists, did Badie and other group elders officially endorse the movement. Even worse, critics say, it broke ranks with a coalition of opposition leaders by negotiating with Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s intelligence chief and unofficial chamberlain, who briefly became Egypt’s de facto head of state after the president stepped down.

When the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) established a transitional government in response to popular demands for order in the chaotic aftermath of Mubarak’s departure, it entered into a tacit partnership with senior Brotherhood leaders to restore order. At the time, military leaders told reporters that it was only natural that it would leverage the group’s sizable network to clear the streets. That has not stopped a drumbeat of speculation that the two sides had cut a less prosaic deal: in exchange for the release from prison of Ikhwan members, it was argued, the leadership would keep silent about the military’s preponderant and profoundly undemocratic role in Egyptian industry, from textile milling to the tourism trade, just as it had agreed to support a dynastic transfer of presidential power eighteen months earlier. “They brokered a deal,” said an industrialist with close ties to the military who spoke on the strictest condition of anonymity. “The army said we’ll get your guys out of jail so long as you don’t challenge the new regime at a time of great instability.”

Elijah Zarwan, the Egyptian representative of the International Crisis Group, said the evidence of Ikhwan–military complicity is empirical. “It’s no great secret,” he said. “Just look at the facts. From the military’s side, they got the Muslim Brotherhood’s vast network to take people off the streets when there was no alternative. It was a way to end the bloodshed. So what did the Brotherhood get? They got their members out of prison, a political party that is allowed to campaign in the open and direct involvement in the drafting of the post-Mubarak Constitution.” Whether the agreement extends to the military’s economic interests remains to be seen, however. (Interestingly, one of the Ikhwanists released from prison after serving just more than half of a seven-year sentence was Khairet al-Shater, one of the Brotherhood’s most influential members and, according to a member of the youth league, the most forceful voice in opposition to its demands for a greater say in the group’s internal affairs.)

The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party is by far the most capable political machine in Egypt’s young democracy, given the estimated 600,000 Ikhwanists at its disposal, though it has gradually estranged itself from the very movement that made this possible. It has boycotted several demonstrations and revolutionary councils, including the May 7 National Conference, in which more than 1,000 delegates from parties and movements called for more aggressive democratic reform. It has opposed calls for a constitution to be written ahead of the fall elections, on the grounds that this clashes with the results of a March referendum, in which 77 percent of voters preferred that balloting be held as soon as possible. Such an outcome was welcomed by the Brotherhood, which is far better organized than its secular rivals.

Not long after Mubarak’s overthrow, the Ikhwan demanded that Coptic Christians, who constitute about 10 percent of Egypt’s population, and women be prohibited from running for president, and it has condemned as “sinners” those who have demonstrated against the SCAF. It has also entered into an alliance with a proliferation of Salafi (fundamentalist Islamist) groups, including at least one Salafi political party, which would all but guarantee an Islamist majority in Parliament should its compact prevail in the upcoming ballot. In July tens of thousands of largely Salafi activists jammed Tahrir Square in a compelling show of force, effectively Islamizing a parcel of Cairo known to the world as an idyll of ecumenicalism. Mocking the secularist chants of “Christian, Muslim, we’re all Egyptians” that had echoed throughout the square during the rebellion, these protesters bellowed “Islamic, Islamic, neither secular nor liberal.” The secular demonstrations, which had been promoted as a display of national unity, were overwhelmed by Islamist voices, particularly Salafi demands for strict adherence to Sharia law.

Under Mubarak, Salafis worshiped largely underground, and their growing clout has caught many observers by surprise. Now in a spoiler role in the upcoming elections, they could undermine as well as enhance the Ikhwan’s prospects. Just as liberal splittists may peel away votes from the Brotherhood’s left, Salafis may cherry-pick them from its right. “We got rid of Mubarak,” Sheik Mohammed Farahat, a leading Salafi sheik, told me over dinner in a Cairo cafe that, interestingly, served beer and wine. “Now anyone who fights us will lose. There has been no compromise with my Coptic friends, but there is no problem so long as they don’t cross the constants of Sharia.” It was a remark both disingenuous and chilling, implying as it did that Islamists, and not secularists, did the heavy lifting that deposed Mubarak, and that the only good Coptic is a supine one.

What of the Ikhwan? “We all follow the same principles, only we follow the texts literally,” said Farahat. “The Ikhwan tends to maneuver politically; it is very Machiavellian. Either way, the past era of secular liberalism is over.”

In an interview, Ikwhan spokesman Mohamed Saad el-Katatni dismissed talk of secret deals and accommodation between the group and the state, either under the SCAF or the ancien régime. The Brotherhood, he said, had always been opposed to the dynastic elevation of Gamal Mubarak as president. While he was unaware of any remarks by Badie that characterized Hosni Mubarak as a national patriarch, he said, “They may have been made in the spirit of our culture of respect for elder leaders, devoid of political content.” Far from negotiating with Omar Suleiman unilaterally, he said, the Ikhwan did so in a public meeting “on terms that included all political forces.” The National Conference, said Katatni, was an attempt to undermine the results of the March referendum. “Our policy is the will of the people, even if it is contrary to our own preference,” he said. “We have no plans to dominate Parliament.”

The day before my interview with Katatni, the Ikhwan expelled Dr. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, one of the Brotherhood’s most respected members, for refusing to relinquish his independent presidential campaign. The leadership had declared the presidency off-limits to its members to ease public anxiety about its ambitions, and Fotouh’s renegade bid had revealed a deep split within the Ikhwan at its most senior levels. According to Katatni, the last time such a high-ranking member had been dismissed from the Brotherhood was in 1954, in the aftermath of the attempt on Nasser’s life.

Fotouh, who also served as the general secretary of the Arab Medical Association, has been a stalwart and pioneering proponent of ecumenicalism, liberal governance and a progressive Muslim Brotherhood. In a June interview with the New York Times, he declared that “people must have a free will.” He expressed support for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, and he insisted there was nothing incompatible between Western values and his interpretation of Islam. When I met Fotouh several years ago, he presciently implied that the weight of democracy would splinter Ikhwan solidarity. “The Muslim Brotherhood has a vision to interact with society, but you also have people who are narrow-minded,” he said. “There is greater awareness among the young, and they can make a difference in free elections. Otherwise, there will be an explosion.”

Many among the Brotherhood’s youth regard Fotouh as a mentor, and his banishment only hardened their resentment of the old guard. As news of Fotouh’s dismissal broke, Islam Lotfy, a 33-year-old lawyer, and a circle of fellow Ikhwanists were preparing to launch their own party in response to the Brotherhood’s refusal to consider their demands for more activist and inclusive expression. On a humid night in June, Lotfy told me the decision to break with the Ikhwan was taken only after attempts at negotiation had failed. “Our vision was heard but ignored,” he told me. “People were helping us project our beliefs, not only in Cairo but [Brotherhood] leaders in London, Kuwait and Palestine. But the leadership is undemocratic, and it will not allow us to reach out to other groups, period.”

The new party, which will contest the fall elections under the name Egyptian Current, was unveiled a few days later. Among its 5,000 members are some 200 dissident Brotherhood adherents, according to Lotfy. He described Egyptian Current not as secular—the word has been demagogued in post-Mubarak Egypt, just as it has in some right-wing quarters in the United States—but “pragmatic and nonideological.” He would just as much take advice from a Marxist as he would from a capitalist, he said, if it was found to be the most practical.

Lotfy said he expected to share Fotouh’s fate as a defector, and within days of our meeting he and four other Egyptian Current leaders were indeed expelled from the Brotherhood. The old guard, he told me, “cannot comprehend that we need to reach the people. In the Ikhwan literature there is no space for revolution in Islam. It is not in their culture, and now they’re in a dilemma. This is a revolution, and they don’t know how to interact with it.”

The only sustainable role for the Brotherhood in a democracy, according to Lotfy and his comrades among the Ikhwan youth, is its traditional mission as a social network and charitable movement of a moderate religious character. In that sense, he suggested, the ejection of liberal-minded members like him and Fotouh is part of an organic return by the group to its roots. “It is of important value,” Lotfy told me, “but when it comes to politics, they should stop or reform themselves completely.” Another frustrated young Ikhwanist and Lotfy ally, Mohammed al-Gebba, put it this way: “The Brotherhood must either return to religious outreach and social work, with its members campaigning as members of other parties, or it will bring itself down within the next few years. Politics and outreach are not reconcilable. One compromises the other.”

Recently, a senior Brotherhood official announced that any Egyptian citizen should be eligible to run for president, an apparent easing of its earlier proscription against Copts and women, and it has entered into an alliance with its old rival, the secular Al Wafd Party. While such gestures could be interpreted as a nod to the center after months of overreaching, it is not at all certain the Ikhwan can sustain itself in a democracy as it struggles to prevail against the fissionable agents of election fever. Throughout the century-long history of the modern Middle East, no political movement has proved itself so resilient as the Muslim Brotherhood. The tools of governance are different from the tools of survival, however, and the Ikhwan’s inelastic old guard has already seriously damaged itself trying to wield both at the same time.

Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, now known as Type Investigations.

The post Fault Lines in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood appeared first on Type Investigations.

Sheik Mohammed Farahat was waiting patiently for me when we met for dinner recently in downtown Cairo. He is a prominent Salafi cleric, which means he and his followers interpret Islam with a rather antique set of reference points. Specifically, they live and worship as they believe the Prophet Mohammed and his followers did during the formative years of Islam. The consequences of this are mixed: while the Muslim world during the Middle Ages was commendably tolerant and the epicenter of global commerce, it was also a brutal place with violent punishment for less than capital crimes such as adultery and theft.

Until my dinner with Farahat, I'd never come across a Salafi in a dozen years of reporting from Egypt. Egypt has no shortage of religious fundamentalists, including an architect or two of what would become Al Qaeda. But the Salafis are a different species entirely, more doctrinaire when it comes to social mores than the bourgeois Muslim Brotherhood, and emphatically opposed to the terrorism embraced by Al Qaeda and other radical groups. Their jihad, it seems, is to restore in their minds and communities what they believe is the purity and sanctity of Islam during its seventh-century genesis.

Since the eviction of dictator Hosni Mubarak in a non-violent coup seven months ago, Egypt's Salafis have enjoyed a spiritual as well as political revival. This was one of the more surprising byproducts of the uprising, as in principle Salafis confine themselves to religious study and generally eschew temporal affairs of state. Since the rebellion, however, several Salafi political parties have emerged and they are expected to field candidates in national elections in the fall. In late June, a demonstration promoted as a national unity rally was quickly overrun by tens of thousands of well-organized Salafis activists. Not only were secular protestors stunned by their numbers and discipline, they scandalized members of the entrenched Muslim Brotherhood, which is expected to garner a plurality of parliamentary seats in the upcoming elections. The comparably mainstream group had hoped to appeal to conservative voters by associating with Salafi leaders, only to alienate the vast Egyptian middle with the specter of bearded zealots in Tahrir Square, waving copies of the Koran and agitating for sharia law.

Until now a loose coalition of various congregations, political Salafism in Egypt is slowly cohering around clerics such as Magdi Hussein. In 2008, Hussein was arrested by Egyptian security forces for preaching in Israeli-blockaded Gaza after the crossing that links the Palestinian enclave and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula was briefly opened. Released after Mubarak's removal, he is now the leader of El Amal, the Islamic Labor Party.

Farahat himself is a Hussein acolyte. With Mubarak gone, he briefly considered launching his own party but instead joined El Amal. A well-known television personality, Farahat discusses religious affairs on two satellite channels financed by Saudi investors and he is frequently recognized on Cairo's busy streets. On his recommendation, we met on a temperate Friday evening in June at Felfela, a popular restaurant near Tahrir Square.

Farahat has the expansive charm typical of televangelists of all faiths and sects. With his long and thickly hennaed beard, intricately embroidered skullcap, and crisply starched and presseddishdasha, he cut an elegant but conspicuous profile among Felfela's largely secular clientele. He took my hand and shook it vigorously, clearly relishing the chance to explain his faith to an infidel — and an American one at that.

“Islam is the only truly international religion,” he began. “It is embraced by all the world and by all its minorities. Christianity espouses the killing of Jews, socialist ideology celebrates the group over the individual and capitalism does the opposite. Islam is equal across the board.”

Fair enough, given Islam's Medieval ecumenicalism relative to Europe's. Advantage, Salafi.

Farahat then told me about the time he spent in Tahrir Square with thousands of fellow dissidents in defiance of Mubarak and his regime. He attended the protests daily throughout the eighteen-day siege, he said, sharing meals and stories of Mubarak's treachery with every spectrum of Egyptian humanity: Christians and atheists, rich and poor, young and old. “I was taken completely by surprise by this headless movement,” he said. “Those who had been silent had risen together and when it was over it was a miracle.”

But the revolution has given way to an increasingly opaque future. Political parties who lack the Islamists' social networks, a potent and highly deployable asset, are calling for postponement of the fall elections. The Salafis themselves have assumed a spoiler role; they may partner up with the Muslim Brotherhood — though the June demonstration clearly strained relations between the two groups — or they may remain independent and cherry-pick support from the Brotherhood's right flank.

“We all follow the same principles,” Farahat said of the Salafis and the Ikhwan, as the Muslim Brotherhood is known in Arabic. “But whereas we follow the texts literally, the Ikhwan tends to maneuver politically. They are very Machiavellian, while we Salafis have not been smart about how we express our vision because we have been isolated.”

Was isolation really the problem, I asked, or was it Salafism's seventh-century answers for twenty-first century questions?

Salafis, Farahat assured me, were very much both in and of the post-modern world. He himself is a successful speculator in real estate and his daughter is an upwardly mobile executive in the information technology sector.

But what of the Salafis' extreme punishment for petty thievery, fraternizing among the sexes, and the drinking of alcohol? Would a Salafi Republic of Egypt render itself dry, thus all but bankrupting the tourism trade? (I had, by the way, checked my impulse to order a glass of Chablis with dinner. Wittingly or not, Farahat had chosen a restaurant that serves beer and wine.)

Farahat shook his head and smiled wryly. “There are things that are hadud or beyond debate,” he said. “There is punishment for the sake of protecting the mind, such as the banning of alcohol, as well as constant things like family and honor. In this all religions agree. But you don't even begin to cut people's hands off for stealing until after a full inquiry into the felon's employment and financial situation can be held. If, for example, it can be proven that he could not find work and had no money and was forced to steal, his hand is spared. In the first 400 years of Islam, there were only ten such cases of hand chopping.”

What of the ban on liquor? Why would westerners come to Egypt if they were forbidden to have a cocktail in their hotel bar and women were forced to cover themselves?

Again, the wry smile, uncluttered by doubt. “Islam is not against tourism,” he said. “The foreigners who come here would be respected so long as they keep their alcohol concealed in their luggage and confine their drinking to their rooms. Otherwise, it's eighty lashes.”

And the veil?

“Women must only reveal their faces and hands in order not to incite our shabab, or restless young men. Needless to say, there must be no public displays of affection either.”

When you find yourself in a hole, so goes the old saying, stop digging. But deeper Farahat dug. Once in control of government, he said, Islamists would close down the international schools popular with Cairo's expatriate community and its well-to-do Egyptian families. “These schools have done nothing for us,” he said. “Young people are being pulled into a culture that is not their own.” Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, the country's foundation of economic stability for more than three decades, would be scrapped and a two-state solution to the Palestine question would be possible only if they were allowed an army of their own. “Otherwise, I will field an army of Mujaheddin,” he said. “The solution will be imposed by force with five million volunteers.” Egyptian Copts, the country's ancient Christian sect that accounts for ten percent of the population, would be allowed to co-exist with their Muslim compatriots “as long as they don't violate the constants of sharia law.”

I asked for the bill. While we waited I asked Farahat to handicap the likely results of the upcoming election. In gathering his thoughts, he inhaled deeply and then exhaled, as if in preparation for a long-distance swim.

“In the end our government will be Islamist,” he said finally. “The past era was one of secular liberalism and it was filled with nothing but crises.”

Farahat may represent an important constituency in the nebulae of political persuasions now rotating around free Egypt, but I doubt it will prevail. For one thing, Salafi parochialism is very much at odds with Medieval Islam, which borrowed heavily from the Jews and Christians for its scripture, the Greeks for its philosophy, the Romans for its infrastructure, and the Persians and Chinese for its art and literature. To imply, as Farahat did, that the only good Christian is a prostrate one and to shut down centers of learning for their foreign provenance is profoundly un-Islamic, at least as Islam was practiced from the eighth century to the post-Ottoman era.

Some years ago, while eating breakfast at a hostel in Damascus, I watched on satellite television a retrospective of performances by Oum Kalthoum, the great Egyptian songstress who galvanized audiences worldwide throughout the mid-twentieth century. What struck me most about the broadcast, aside from Kalthoum herself, was the audience as it was occasionally panned by the camera. Of the thousands of attendees seated in what I assumed was the Cairo Opera House, not a single women was covered. Indeed, everyone was dressed in what seemed to be the latest fashions from Europe. Here was forensic proof of Egypt's native secularism, a tradition that predates the Islamist revival rooted in the Anglo-French partition of the Arab world after World War I. Free to express themselves in post-Mubarak Egypt, Farahat and his Salafi brethren would expel curiosity, empathy, irony, and aestheticism from the arsenal of human emotions that is the very foundation of Egyptian identity. And that is a lousy platform to run on.

The post Dining with a Sheik appeared first on Type Investigations.

A masterful account of how sixty years of American militarism created the Cold War, fanned decades of unnecessary conflict, helped to fuel Islamist terror, and threatens to bankrupt the country.

For most of the twentieth century, the sword has led before the olive branch in American foreign policy. In eye-opening fashion, State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empireshows how America truly operates as a superpower and explores the constant tension between the diplomats at State and the warriors at Defense.

State vs. Defense characterizes all the great figures who crafted American foreign policy, from George Marshall to Robert McNamara to Henry Kissinger to Don Rumsfeld with this underlying theme: America has become increasingly imperial and militaristic.

Take, for example, the Pentagon, which as of 2010, acknowledged the concentration of 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees inside 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories. The price of America's military-base network overseas, along with the expense of its national security state at home, is enormous. The bill comes in at well over $1 trillion. That is equal to nearly 8 percent of GDP and more than 20 percent of the federal budget. (By comparison, China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea, the five countries Pentagon planners routinely trot out as conventional threats to the national well-being, have a cumulative security budget of just over $200 billion.) Quietly, gradually — and inevitably, given the weight of its colossal budget and imperial writ — the Pentagon has all but eclipsed the State Department at the center of US foreign policy.

In the tradition of classics such as The Wise Men, The Best and the Brightest, and Legacy of Ashes, State vs. Defense explores how and why American leaders succumbed to the sirens of militarism, how the republic has been lost to an empire, and how “the military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower so famously forewarned has set us on a stark path of financial peril.

Reporting for this book was supported in part by The Investigative Fund.

The post State vs. Defense appeared first on Type Investigations.

News travels fast across the red desert bush of remote Djibouti. Even as US military reservists erect a field hospital around a cluster of tents and blockhouses near a desolate watering hole, dozens of tribespeople are waiting for treatment in orderly rows. They arrive with maladies of every sort: bad teeth, diarrhea, fevers, colds, arthritis. At the triage center, an elderly tribesman has had a thorn removed from his foot, a wound that had been infected for months. At the dental surgery station, Navy Lt. Bill Anderson, an orthodontist from Northfield, New Jersey, will over the next few hours extract a dozen rotting or impacted teeth using instruments that sparkle in the late-morning sun.

The reservists are attached to a Djibouti-based task force of some 1,800 soldiers, marines, sailors and Air Force personnel. Embedded with them is an aid specialist from the Agency for International Development, which provides guidance for the operation. She is reticent and refers questions to the agency's country leader, Stephanie Funk. The next day, Funk acknowledges that USAID's solitary representation on the triage mission is symptomatic of a new age in US foreign policy — one in which America, in peacetime as much as in war, is personified abroad more by soldiers than by civilians. “If we had the numbers and the money to do fieldwork, we would, but our budgets have been declining for years,” Funk said in her office on the US Embassy compound in Djibouti City. “The Pentagon has got both numbers and money. For every fifty of them, there's only one of me.”

Quietly, gradually — and inevitably, given the weight of its colossal budget and imperial writ — the Pentagon has all but eclipsed the State Department at the center of US foreign policy-making. The process began with the dawn of America's post-World War II global empire and deepened in the mid-1980s, with the expansion of worldwide combatant commands. It matured during the Clinton years, with the military's migration into humanitarian aid and disaster relief work, and accelerated rapidly with George W. Bush's declaration of endless conflict in the “global war on terror” and a near-doubling of military spending.

In addition to new weapons and war fighters, the Pentagon's budget now underwrites a cluster of special funds from which it can train and equip foreign armies — often in the service of repressive regimes — as well as engage in aid development projects in pursuit of its own tactical ends. Although these programs must be conducted with State Department approval and are subject to Congressional review, legislative oversight and interagency coordination is spotty at best. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is pushing for full discretionary control over these funds — a move that would render meaningless the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which concentrated responsibility for civilian and military aid programs within the State Department.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has lamented the resource gap between civilian and military agencies, most pointedly in a July 2008 speech, when he warned of the “creeping militarization” of foreign policy. He has wryly pointed out how, given the Defense Department's $664 billion budget compared with the State Department's $52 billion annual outlay, Washington employs more military band members than it does foreign service officers. No one at the Pentagon, however, is calling for the restoration of State Department primacy over foreign affairs and a proper budget to finance it. Rather, Defense officials speak of a civilian-military “partnership” in which, some fear, an underfunded State Department would be reduced to a mere subcontractor for Pentagon initiatives.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has suggested she will re-establish the State Department as the fountainhead of foreign policy. But she has said little about the Pentagon's expanded funding authority, and her embrace of what she calls “the three Ds” of her mission — defense, diplomacy and development — implies DoD's preoccupations are in concert with her own. Nor has she suggested she might allow greater autonomy for USAID, where officials grumble about how their work is as routinely politicized by the State Department as it is by the Pentagon. Indeed, Clinton has yet to name a new permanent director.

Though Clinton has presided over a marked increase in USAID's budget, diplomats and politicians say an overhaul is way overdue. “Without a more robust aid agency,” Richard Lugar, the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in the August 9Washington Post, “President Obama's pledge to double foreign assistance would be like adding a third story to a house that had a crumbling foundation.” Lugar, along with Senator John Kerry, is promoting a bill that would give USAID the lead role in coordinating foreign assistance.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is flexing its own policy-making muscle. As Bush's wars grew in scope, so too did the military's aid budget and its focus on nonlethal activities — what DoD once referred to as “military operations other than war.” Now known by the conveniently vague and expansive handle of “stability operations,” and funded by a war chest passed into law three years ago, these missions are often deeply at odds with the goals of diplomats and civilian aid workers. Perversely, the Pentagon is militarizing foreign policy even as it “civilianizes” the character of its activities abroad.

Civilians figure at least as heavily as generals and admirals in the pantheon of American militarism. It was George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld — with the collusion of Condoleezza Rice — who expanded and entrenched the Pentagon's franchise over foreign policy. Rumsfeld's contempt for civilian authority was demonstrated most clearly, and with devastating results, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Aside from bulldozing the constitutional prerogatives of Secretary of State Colin Powell, he vigorously, if stealthily, subverted the nation's civilian leaders abroad. Before the US invasion, for example, he dispatched a three-man team to gather intelligence in several Middle Eastern states without informing the ambassadors of their activities, according to a source with intimate knowledge of the episode. The secret deployment has been widely interpreted as a direct violation of the executive Letter of Instruction to Chiefs of Mission, first signed by President Kennedy, which gave the US ambassador in his host country “full responsibility for the direction, coordination, and supervision of all Department of Defense personnel on official duty.”

Rumsfeld also blocked NGOs from any substantial role in postwar Iraq, soft-stalling their efforts to obtain licenses to enter pre-invasion Iraq and stonewalling their requests for information on procedures once Saddam Hussein's regime had been destroyed. “The plans were classified,” Sandra Mitchell, then a vice president for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), said in an interview at the time. “We would get answers like, 'We're working on it. Don't worry. We'll be handling this.'”

The results were calamitous, and since then the Defense Department has aggressively sought the support and expertise of civilian aid groups — so much so that InterAction, a coalition of American NGOs, was compelled to issue a code of conduct to its members to lessen the chances for blowback, which often comes from working with the military. “To the extent that we become identified with the US military, we become compromised,” says George Rupp, president and CEO of the IRC. “We're trying to keep it from changing the way we do business, but things may be changing whether we like it or not.”

Despite the Foreign Assistance Act's stipulation of State Department authority, the Pentagon accounts for nearly a quarter of America's budget for overseas direct assistance — up from near zero a decade ago — while USAID's share has declined to 40 percent from 65 percent during the same period. Moreover, as the Pentagon's funding capacity has expanded, so has its foray into humanitarian aid and social development. Directive 3000.5, a November 2005 Pentagon mission statement, defines stability operations as “a core U.S. military mission” to be conducted “across the spectrum from peace to conflict, to establish or maintain order in States and regions.” It tasks US forces to develop, among other things, “a viable market economy, rule of law, democratic institutions, and a robust civil society,” including “various types of security forces, correctional facilities, and judicial systems.”

Any mission conducted “from peace to conflict...in States and regions” is by definition everlasting and all-encompassing, and Directive 3000.5 chills the foreign aid and diplomatic community. The document concedes that humanitarian and development work is often best performed by civilian experts, and it encourages their input. But it also makes clear that “US military forces shall be prepared to perform all tasks necessary to establish or maintain order when civilians cannot do so.”

The Pentagon says it needs its own aid budget because assistance programs run by the State Department are overly bureaucratic. It argues that aid developed and administered directly by the Defense Department, such as the Pentagon's recent appeal for $400 million in emergency funding to train and equip the Pakistani army, will be more responsive and yield faster results. Critics respond that such a narrow focus on military concerns will crowd out other foreign policy priorities like the promotion of human rights, education and healthcare. “If DoD is concerned that civilian-led processes are too slow, then let's talk about how we fix those processes,” says Gregory Elias Adams of Oxfam America. “Let's have a conversation about how the interagency process is broken and needs to be fixed. If civilian agencies do not have capacity to contribute to the mission, it will be military imperatives that carry the day.”

In the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs, former ambassador J. Anthony Holmes noted how in June 2008 the State Department had only 10 percent more diplomats and support staff than it had a quarter-century ago, when there were twenty-four fewer countries in the world and US interests were concentrated in Europe and Northeast Asia. Unlike the military, which bases a fifth of its 1.6 million active-duty servicepeople overseas, the diplomatic corps posts nearly three-quarters of its people abroad. As a result, Holmes argues, the State Department lacks “surge capacity,” the ability to train and retrain personnel or rotate them to hot spots without having to leave their posts empty in the interim.

Absent a far more aggressive restructuring of civilian aid and diplomatic agencies, their dependence on the military will only intensify. In April the White House backed away from a pledge to staff hundreds of posts in Afghanistan with civilians for lack of funding and said it would instead turn to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, efforts to set up an expeditionary corps of some 2,500 civilians under State Department leadership have snagged on interagency snits, Congressional lethargy and funding constraints.

The Obama administration has acknowledged the problem. In its budget for 2010, it calls for 1,300 new foreign service officers, and it is planning a near doubling of the State Department's foreign aid budget from 2008 levels — a step in the right direction, say aid workers and diplomats, but not nearly enough to meet the department's commitments. “I have never seen a better opportunity to rebalance the tool kit,” says Gordon Adams, a Clinton administration national security expert and now a professor at the American University's School of International Service. “But there remains a serious discontinuity between the structure of Defense and the structure at State. One of the many questions [Secretary of State] Clinton will have to answer is how to deal with the military on a regional basis overseas.”

It is overseas, after all, where US foreign policy is implemented, and it is there that the State Department's authority is so plainly obscured by the Pentagon's shadow. As part of a broader effort to reform the Defense Department's chain of command, the world was divided into operational zones in 1986. The centrality of these regional commands and the men who lead them — the best-known is Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, or Centcom, which is responsible for US security efforts from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia — has increased as the Pentagon endows them with ever larger missions and budgets. In particular, the combatant commander has the authority to fund military cooperation agreements with governments in his area of responsibility, a mandate that was once concentrated within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. That prerogative alone gives the commanders enormous prestige with host governments at a time when their civilian counterparts, from ambassadors on down, have been pauperized by spending cuts that date back to Senator Jesse Helms's war on foreign aid in the 1990s.

In general, ambassadors and combatant commanders find common ground on many issues. But tensions, particularly in time of war, are inevitable. In 2003 then-Centcom commander Gen. John Abizaid wanted to build a $99 million counterterrorism facility in Jordan at the request of Jordanian King Abdullah II. The project was opposed as a needless extravagance by Edward Gnehm, US Ambassador to Jordan at the time. So Abizaid went around Gnehm by funding the training facility from his own budget, according to a source with intimate knowledge of the matter. (An e-mailed request to Abizaid's office for comment was not returned.) The New York Times reported on March 8, 2006, that for about two years the Pentagon had been dispatching Military Liaison Elements — special operations teams tasked with gathering intelligence on suspected terrorists and ways to destroy them — to various countries without the US ambassadors' knowledge. In Niger two years ago, the US chief of mission cut back the number of entry visas for US military personnel because of the country's political fragility and because the embassy lacked the resources to accommodate them, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

If Command Strategy 2016 is anything to go by, however, the Pentagon has no intention of waiting around. Issued in March 2007, it describes Southern Command, or Southcom, which has responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean, as a Joint Interagency Security Command that would “provide enabling capabilities to focus and integrate interagency-wide efforts to address the full range of regional capabilities.” As Adm. James Stavridis, then-leader of Southcom, elaborated at the time, “We want to be like a big Velcro cube that these other agencies can hook to so we can collectively do what needs to be done in this region.”

Needless to say, many of those “other agencies” are reluctant to go along for the ride, particularly given the US military's checkered history in Latin America, where the Pentagon first began working independently with foreign governments. In 1988 lawmakers passed a bill ordering the military to arrest the flow of narcotics into the United States from Mexico, intensifying the failed “war on drugs” and lending thrust to the Pentagon's neo-imperialist lunge into Latin America. “Southern Command should not be the coordinating agency, because then they become the face of US assistance in foreign regions,” says George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. “The agency that coordinates controls the agenda.”

When he was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lugar dispatched aides around the world to quantify the effects of DoD's expanded presence overseas and its growing dominance of US security policy. The result was two reports — committee “prints,” in Capitol Hill parlance — that provide an alarming account of how much of foreign policy has been ingested by the military. “As a result of inadequate funding for civilian programs,” concludes the first of the two prints, released in December 2006, “US defense agencies are increasingly being granted authority and funding to fill perceived gaps. Such bleeding of civilian responsibilities overseas from civilian to military agencies risks weakening the Secretary of State's primacy in setting the agenda for US relations.”

The report disparages the 12-to-1 spending ratio between the Pentagon and the State Department, which it says “risks the further encroachment of the military, by default, into areas where civilian leadership is more appropriate because it does not create resistance overseas and is more experienced.” Left unchecked, it warns, the increase in the number of military personnel and Pentagon activities abroad could lead to “blurred lines of authority between the State Department and the Defense Department [and] interagency turf wars that undermine the effectiveness of the overall US effort against terrorism.”

The report contains many examples of the need for civilian authority “to temper Defense Department enthusiasm.” It cites an unnamed African country — “unstable, desperately poor, and run by a repressive government” — that appealed to the US military for help in fighting an insurgency. The Pentagon agreed and soon afterward hailed the nation as a “model country for security assistance.” Civilian embassy officials, however, expressed concern at the proliferation of US military personnel there. “It would be a major setback,” the print notes, “if the United States were to be implicated in support of operations shoring up the repressive regime, regardless of the stated intent of such training.”

The wellspring for such operations is Section 1206 of the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act, which allocated the Pentagon $200 million to spend on lethal and nonlethal equipment, supplies and training to foreign militaries. Section 1206 remains a limited authority, though last year legislators extended its budgeting cycle to three years, added maritime security to its list of activities and topped up its allocation to $350 million. A key condition Congress laid down for 1206 approval — that the Pentagon submit its programs list to the State Department for “concurrence” or “dual-key” approval — remains. Despite this, 1206 funds have been invested in countries with highly autocratic governments.

The US government has a long history of bankrolling dictators in pursuit of strategic ends. But there is a difference between declaring such support as official policy — as is the case with Egypt, for example — and the Pentagon's dole, which Congress allots with only a perfunctory understanding of how the money will be spent. In August 2008 Senator Russell Feingold responded to the Pentagon's request for additional 1206 funding with a report that $6 million from the program had been given to the government of Chad, which according to the State Department is “engaging in extra-judicial killing, arbitrary detention and torture.” Other recipients of 1206 funding are Algeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Tunisia, all of which have abysmal human rights records.

Conspicuously absent from the debate over Section 1206 was Condoleezza Rice. At the time, Senator Patrick Leahy wrote Rice several letters imploring her not to cede unprecedented power to the Pentagon. According to Paul Clayman, an attorney who has worked for the State Department as well as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and others who were closely involved in the debate, the staff on Lugar's committee were staggered by Rice's passivity.

In April 2008 Rice and Gates testified jointly before the House Armed Services Committee. In addition to their mutual desire for augmentation of the Pentagon's Section 1206 channel, Rice also endorsed a new Pentagon-controlled allocation under Section 1207 of the defense bill that could fund State Department projects contingent on the defense secretary's approval. At one point, Rice was asked by Congressman Vic Snyder whether she still believed ambassadors should be the most senior representatives of US missions overseas. Naturally, Rice answered in the affirmative. What was striking was the fact that the question had to be asked in the first place.

Congress is now pushing back — sort of. In its version of the Pentagon's most recent supplemental budget, lawmakers stipulated that authority over the Pakistan counterinsurgency fund should reside with the State Department at the end of fiscal 2010. The House version of the bill called for State to assume immediate control of the fund, but the Senate prevailed in delaying the transfer, noting the department's “lack of capacity.”

On the other hand, the House also appears to be leaning toward DoD in the 1206 debate. In a June report on the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2010, the House Armed Services Committee soft-pedaled its earlier position that 1206 programs should be transferred to State. Instead, it committed itself to the existing “dual key” framework and averred that “whatever the final, permanent form these authorities take, the Secretary of Defense must play a primary role in generating requirements.” The report also asserts that “the Department of State still lacks the capacity to execute these authorities.”

The Pentagon shows little inclination to relinquish its authority. An internal DoD memo issued last November characterized civilian agencies as too weak to help in counterinsurgency operations and declared that the Pentagon should be ready to lead such missions absent a “whole-of-government” approach. The document, leaked in January, warned that it would take civilian agencies at least a decade to develop the capacity to work effectively alongside the military. In February an unnamed “senior Pentagon official” told Inside the Pentagon, a weekly newsletter, that the military needed “a great deal of budgetary flexibility” in order to “proactively get ahead of problems before they become disasters.” In May, Michael Vickers, soon to become assistant secretary of defense for special operations, told Congress it should increase spending “several fold” for funding under Section 1208, a budget mandate exclusive to the Pentagon in support of “foreign forces, irregular forces, [and] groups or individuals” engaged in combating terrorism. The oversight mechanism for 1208 programs is considerably less rigorous than those associated with 1206.

Civilian Washington, in other words, has reaped its own whirlwind. It was not a military cabal but a civilian cadre — Clinton in the 1990s, followed by Bush and his neoconservative courtiers — who expanded the reach and lethality of the military, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the executioner of foreign policy, so much of which is now imposed from the business end of a Predator drone, why shouldn't the Pentagon serve also as its judge and jury? The answer, of course, is that America is a republic, a nation not of men but of laws, and the laws say foreign policy must be charted by civilians. Complacent politicians have neglected this trust, however, and the military now defines US interests abroad as much as it defends them. That is the bill for a leviathan. It is the wages of empire.

Research support was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

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