Last week the New York Times reported that the CIA was helping direct guns, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank weapons bought by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and smuggled into Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood. The article makes mention of keeping the weapons out of the hands of Al-Qaeda, but there is no mention of keeping it out of the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood.
There is every reason to think that the Obama Administration would not have any problem with arming the Muslim Brotherhood. Officials from the National Security Council have met with Muslim Brotherhood officials and the Syrian National Council, which has Washington’s blessing, is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood’s revolution in Egypt had a secular façade in the form of Mohammed El-Baradei, which it needed only long enough to gain Western support, before taking power directly. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which dominates the SNC more heavily than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood dominated the opposition to Mubarak, has its own “moderate” patsy in the form of Abdulbaset Sieda.
Burhan Ghalioun, the last SNC patsy, whose presence was supposed to demonstrate that the Syrian National Council was a moderate group, is gone. Abdulbaset Sieda’s role is to imply that the SNC has Kurdish backing, which it does not, because it is a creature of the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey, which is in the business of repressing Kurds. The Brotherhood even went so far as to block the election of a Christian SNC leader, because it was unwilling to allow a non-Muslim to rule over Muslims; even for the sake of its long term goals.
The weapons and intelligence pipeline being routed through the Brotherhood is only half the story. The other half involves the true purpose of those weapons. Officially the weapons are needed to fight Assad, unofficially they are meant to give the Brotherhood military parity with the Free Syrian Army, which has done the bulk of the fighting, and has remained outside the SNC.
There is a major gap between the Free Syrian Army, which conducts the actual rebellion, and the SNC, which claims to be the true provisional government of the rebel groups. The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t in this to overthrow Assad just to hand over power to a group of army officers. The Brotherhood’s chief foes have been Middle-Eastern regimes run by groups of army officers who took power. The Brotherhood and its backers in the Obama Administration are determined not to allow another secularist officer like Husni al-Za’im to undo all their plans for Syria.
While the administration and its media mouthpieces praise the “Brave Syrian people” fighting against Assad, they are determined not to allow the soldiers and officers doing the fighting to determine the post-Assad future of Syria. Instead the game plan calls for a provisional SNC government followed by another “Democratic election” that will allow the Brotherhood to reap all the benefits of the rebellion.