June 22, 2007

June 21, 2007

Talks with the Muslim Brotherhood?

By Patrick Poole
If certain advocates get their way, the United States will engage in talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, more than any other group, the source of modern Islamic terrorism. It matters whose voices are being heard. On Wednesday, Nixon Center scholar Robert Leiken was scheduled to meet with State Department officials to advocate an American dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood. But a review of his wildly divergent opinions on Nicaragua back in the 1980s raises an important question: Is Robert Leiken a trustworthy source?

News of Leiken's visit to Foggy Bottom this week was reported by Eli Lake of the New York Sun, "Bush Weighs Reaching Out to ‘Brothers'"  . According to Lake, earlier this year Leiken prepared a classified briefing paper on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood for the National Intelligence Council. This was followed by the publication of his joint article with Stephen Brooke in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood, where they argued that the Brotherhood had "rejected jihad" and "embraced democracy" - a thesis I noted elsewhere was contrary to reality and virtually all available facts ("Mainstreaming the Muslim Brotherhood").

At various points in his career and intellectual life, Robert Leiken has occupied seemingly ever single point on the political spectrum. He was first a Stalinist, then a Maoist, and now he is the chief apologist of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Western World. As the Grateful Dead once observed, what a long, strange trip it has been.

Understanding the route by which Robert Leiken has arrived at his apology for the Muslim Brotherhood might give us some insight into where he intends to take us.

Leiken's expertise is in Latin America, and he came to national prominence for his work in Nicaragua in the 1980s (a fact he never fails to point out). He began as a full-throated cheerleader of the Marxist Sandinistas, stating in a New York Times op-ed:

To oppose growing Soviet penetration in Latin America, the United States should befriend not the "authoritarianism" of the oligarchs and generals but rather the nationalism of the people...Among Salvadoran guerrillas there is mounting mistrust of Moscow. These pressures recently obligated Cuban leaders publicly to criticize Soviet positions on Afghanistan and Poland.... When allowed to choose between nonalignment and Soviet influence, Latin Americans will decide against Moscow. Let them have that choice. (Robert Leiken, "Reagan Ought to Befriend Latin Americans' Nationalism", New York Times [July 1, 1982])

At that time, he was saying that engaging the Marxist Sandinistas was a way to fight against Soviet influence in Latin America (much as he says today that the Muslim Brotherhood "rejects jihad" and "embraces democracy"). The Sandinistas mistrusted Moscow (like the Muslim Brotherhood "opposes" al-Qaeda). They were a group we can deal with to oppose the great Soviet threat. (Doe any of this sound familiar?)

A year later, he was still singing the praises of the Marxist Sandinistas, likening them to George Washington and the Continental Army. But noticing the continued Soviet assistance of the Sandinistas, he assured Washington DC policymakers that the Sandinistas were quickly growing tired of Moscow:

Although assisted by Moscow, the guerrillas are not aligned with it. Four of the five guerrilla groups broke bitterly with the pro-Soviet Salvadoran Communist Party in the early 1970's. At most, only two of the five groups could be considered Soviet-oriented today...While condemning United States actions against Nicaragua, some Salvadoran guerrilla leaders also criticized the conspicuous Sovietbloc presence there. They said that they would not want to see ''so many Cuban doctors, teachers and advisers in El Salvador.'' Sandinista harassment of former non-Communist allies within Nicaragua has embarrassed the Salvadoran guerrillas' efforts to build a coalition with non-Marxists in their country...The Administration opposes unconditional negotiations with the guerrillas because they would ''shoot their way into power.'' Yet Washington applauds rebels in Afghanistan and Cambodia (not to mention those at arms in Nicaragua). George Washington shot his way into power. Denying the right to resistance denies our own history. (Robert Leiken, "Yes, Talk with Salvador Guerillas," New York Times [June 26, 1983])

Leiken claimed a special ability to read the Nicaraguan tea-leaves to divine the movement against Moscow within the Sandinista "liberation" movement despite all the evidence to the contrary. Seven months later in an Associated Press article ("Kissinger Warnings are Faulted," [January 31, 1984]), Leiken was still selling the same line - that the Salvadorans were suspicious of the Soviets, and that the Soviet's "are not pulling the strings" in Nicaragua.

These reassurances were stated in a book edited by Leiken, Central America: Anatomy of Conflict, which came out in early 1984 from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Leiken was senior associate at the time. One editorialist described Leiken's position:
He acknowledged "the pro-Soviet bias of much of the Sandinista leadership, and of some of the Salvadoran left." But, nevertheless, Leiken affirmed that "from the point of view of short-term U.S. security interests, the United States can and should coexist peaceably with Sandinista Nicaragua." (William Giandoni, "Reagan critics agree on Soviet Latin threat," San Diego Union [February 5, 1984])

Notably, the book condemned the anti-Salvadoran Contra movement and the support the Reagan Administration was providing to the Contras.

But less than eight months later, Leiken had made a complete reversal in his assessment of the Sandinistas. In an article in The New Republic, "Nicaragua's Untold Stories" (October 8, 1984), he charged the Sandinistas with engaging in political oppression, corruption, and taking orders from Moscow. He entrenched this anti-Sandinista position with two subsequent articles in the New York Review of Books. In short order, Leiken was parading around Capitol Hill with Arturo Cruz, the de facto bagman for the Contras - the very same group he had assailed as murderous thugs in his book earlier that year!

In a 1986 Time Magazine article chronicling Leiken's Contra conversion, he admits to being deceived in his early assessment of both the Sandinistas and the Contras:

On the Sandinistas. "It is now clear to me that from the beginning the overwhelming majority of this group was not just Marxist-Leninist but strongly pro-Soviet and particularly pro-Cuban. In the contra camps we visited, they used the term engano, which means ''we were tricked, we were hoaxed.'' The Sandinistas have not only lost popular support, I think they are detested by the population."

On contra support within Nicaragua. "I have gone to a number of towns in Nicaragua where I have found that the youth are simply not there. I ask their parents where they've gone, and they say they've gone off to join the contras. We stopped at a breadline in Managua. There were about 250 people. We asked them how long they had been there. About three hours. Had they had breadlines like this before the Sandinistas? No, just in the past two years. We asked who was responsible, and finally one woman said, ''Come on, tell the truth: the Sandinistas are responsible.'' And everyone said, ''That's right.'' It is very, very clear there is deep, deep opposition to the Sandinistas." (Jill Smolowe, "Conversion of a Timely Mind," Time Magazine [April 21, 1986])

In two short years, Robert Leiken had whip lashed his loyalties in Nicaragua: in 1982, the Sandinistas were nationalists who represented the voice of the people, and the Contras were nothing short of raping and murdering right-wing death squads; in 1983, Leiken hailed the Sandinistas as freedom fighters in the same league as George Washington; in early 1984, he continued to assure that the Sandinistas were not taking orders from Moscow, and that the Contras were still nothing but thugs and marauders; by the end of 1984, he admitted that the Sandinistas were repressive Soviet puppets, and the Contras were now the liberators of the oppressed Nicaraguan people.

Everyone is prone to make mistakes, and it is a credit to him that Leiken eventually abandoned the Sandinistas, unlike many of his Leftist colleagues. He made the change that he needed to make, but he was not among the first to realize what was going on in Nicaragua, but among the last. It was only after the evidence was so overwhelming that it couldn't be ignored (or more importantly, the evidence was overwhelming to his congressional patron, Rep. Les Aspin) that he changed his mind. His conversion wasn't out of conscience, but credibility; for him to continue to back the Sandinistas would have excluded him from the debates on US foreign policy in Latin America, and policymakers needed his continued special insight. So without batting an eye, he made a complete reversal without the slightest bit of shame, remorse, or apology.

Much of what Robert Leiken said in the early 1980s regarding the Sandinistas is eerily similar to the statements he makes today on the Muslim Brotherhood - the organization that has given birth to every Islamic terrorist organization in the world. And once again, he and his Nixon Center colleagues have staked out a position in contravention of the established facts on the Brotherhood and their direct support of terrorism, including their financing the HAMAS takeover in Gaza last week. (And it should be noted, their current position is directly contrary to what was being published by the Nixon Center two years ago; see Tarek Heggy, "The Intelligent American's Guide to Islamism", In The National Interest [June 2005]) 

Is this really the man that President Bush, Secretary of State Rice, and the foreign policy decision-makers inside the Beltway really need to be listening to on the Muslim Brotherhood? What assurances, if any, do we have that two years down the road, Leiken won't be saying, "It is clear to me now that the Muslim Brotherhood was more directly connected to al-Qaeda than we first thought. We were tricked by all those Brotherhood officials we visited all over the Middle East."

Leiken I'm sure will reply (as he has on one occasion already) that an "armchair Internet intellectual" like me is just too stupid and uniformed to grasp the complexities and nuances of Latin American politics back then, and that his support of the Sandinistas was understandable in its own context, which all may be well and true. But if past history is any indication, his gross lapse of judgment in the 1980s is more than sufficient to ignore his Muslim Brotherhood mythology today. The US government and the people of the world cannot risk another foreign policy Damascus Road experience by Robert Leiken.

Patrick Poole is an occasional contributor to American Thinker. He maintains a blog, Existential Space.