The new wars against the Arab Spring revolutions, including Egypt's, share certain strategic aims: to destroy the bonds of mutual trust among fellow citizens, making it easier to sow civil strife, bloodshed and destruction; to erode public confidence in the value of their institutions of government so as to render the public indifferent as to whether those institutions survive or collapse; and to undermine trust in the national leadership so that people come to believe that one leadership is as good as any other, or as good as no leadership at all. What are the signs that such strategies are at work in Egypt? Supporters of this theory cite a whole train of issues that, they argue, are intended to shake the people's confidence in their government and leaders and, more importantly, to sap their sense of national pride. They point to the Tiran and Sanafir islands controversy that followed on the heels of the “Panama Papers”, which overshadowed the Regeni case that, in turn, overshadowed the dollar crisis. Before this was the Hisham Geneina controversy, which temporarily eclipsed the Renaissance Dam crisis which, in turn, eclipsed the “red carpet” controversy to which the public turned an angry eye after the Tawfiq Okasha case, etc. It is like an unending cycle that is constantly fed with new scandals, or regurgitates old ones with the purpose of distracting public attention from more important issues such as terrorism and development. Moreover, as the cycle continues, Egyptians grow more and more divided and fragmented, and they grow still more angry as they engage in increasingly heated bouts of mutual recrimination and mudslinging, with opposing camps hurling such epithets as “traitor”, “ignoramus”, “hypocrite”, and “coup-supporter”. Those who wage this type of war operate on the principle of sowing the seeds to make the supposed enemy destroy himself. “Why should we get our hands dirty when we can drive our enemy to suicide?” they think. “Why act in a way that would unify the enemy when the enemy's division works to our advantage? Why fire bullets or bombs when it is a hundred times cheaper to spread pernicious rumours in the media, which wreak a far more destructive effect?” This is the type of war that is in progress in Egypt and elsewhere in the region. Its aim is to do away with the legacy that was shaped by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its architects are driven by the idea that the countries of this region can not be allowed to continue in their current size and with their current demographics, and the solution is to plunge them into civil strife and domestic conflict in order to destroy social cohesion and undermine the perpetuation of the unified state. More specifically, three strategies are at work against Egypt today. The first is to destroy the current political process and drive us back into a state of anarchy for as long as possible. The tactic is hardly new. It will suffice for us to recall how in the 1980s the West sold weapons to Iraq and then leaked their specifications, quantities and whereabouts to Iran so that Iran could bomb them. The point, of course, was to perpetuate the Iraq-Iran war and drive the warring parties to wreak the greatest possible attrition on each other. This lasted until Khomeini realised the nature of the stratagem and decided to opt for the “bitter pill” of a settlement. The second is to spread permanent chaos in the country by wearing down both society and the state in domestic battles over various issues. This is not to deny that some of these issues may be just; however, they are framed in a way to provoke a challenge against the government and to deepen differences within society. The operative idea here is that the more we are at each others' throats the less attention we will pay to the major moral, economic, social and demographic disasters that will destroy us all in the long run. The third is to wage a perpetual campaign of psychological and propaganda warfare through foreign-based media with the purpose of disseminating ideas that are couched in ways that aim to divide our society further. Why, for example, does authoritarian Qatar and its Al-Jazeera broadcasting outlets care so much about democracy, human rights and legitimacy in Egypt? Why does it spend so lavishly on fuelling ideological and political strife in Egypt? Is Qatar playing the game with other neocons in the West, and with Israel's allies, of resuscitating the weaker party so as to prolong the conflict in order to debilitate the state and destroy social unity? The foregoing strategies have three targets in their crosshairs: - Society. The point is to drive such a deep wedge that portions of society view other portions as enemies. We have seen it happen between Fatah and Hamas in Palestine, between Sunni, Shia and Christians in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, and between some tribes and others in Somalia and Libya. Society in Egypt is currently the target so that it becomes too engrossed in internal disputes to wage the more crucial battles against ignorance, poverty, disease and injustice, or the battle abroad to rectify imbalances of power in the region. - The Egyptian army. What our enemies want most is to see our army meet the same fate as other national armies in the region, which have been eliminated from the equations of Arab power assets for various reasons. Foreign occupation, which was applied in Iraq, proved too costly for the West for this purpose. Therefore, internal divisions, strife, the proliferation of militias and civil warfare have become the preferred method, which has played out in Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere. - The structure of the Arab state. The core idea here is to split up existing Arab states into petty statelets no larger than Israel. A fast and furious drive is in progress to redraw the regional map accordingly, and every faction is doing its part to help it along: the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies who pretend that they are serving a national cause by delivering Egypt from President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and the “coup-makers”; the enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood who think only of ridding Egypt of that terrorist group; and the revolutionaries who subscribe to a state of “permanent revolution” and who believe that their right to demonstrate and stage sit-ins should be unlimited, without conditions and unregulated by any laws or rules until they bring an end to “military rule” and Interior Ministry hegemony. Moreover, the actions of some policemen and some decisions emanating from the top of the government hierarchy have fed fears and differences. It is as though we have decided to behave like the scions of a wealthy family who squander the vast estate their late father bequeathed them in their relentless battles to keep their nasty siblings from being better off than themselves. Fortifying Egypt and the Egyptian people against these strategies will take more than exhortations to unify ranks, or to “listen only to what I have to say”, or to “stop harping on that subject”. What is required is better awareness-raising, more active communications with the public, and a more astute management of people's expectations. Conspirators' schemes can only succeed when shortcomings and neglect have not been addressed.
