COMMENT: In the wake of the Egypt­ian upris­ing, the rise of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in Egypt is more or less inevitable. It remains unclear just what role they will play, but they  will cer­tain­ly be among the major play­ers in that coun­try, and pos­si­bly else­where through­out the Arab world.

The U.S. has a long his­to­ry of dal­liance with the Broth­er­hood, all of it coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.

Read the fol­low­ing arti­cle care­ful­ly and con­sid­er the impli­ca­tions:

“Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Press­es Gov­ern­ment for Nuclear Weapons”; WMD Insights; Novem­ber 2006.

EXCERPT: In the sum­mer of 2006, after press­ing the Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment for more than a year to restart the country’s nuclear pow­er pro­gram, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, Egypt’s fore­most polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion force, esca­lat­ed its nuclear goals and open­ly called for Egypt to devel­op nuclear weapons as a counter to Israel’s nuclear capa­bil­i­ties. Against this back­ground, the group react­ed with lit­tle enthu­si­asm to the mid-sep­tem­ber announce­ment by Jamal Mubarak, son of Egypt­ian Pres­i­dent Hos­ni Mubarak, that Egypt would revive its peace­ful nuclear pow­er – with­out declar­ing that Egypt would build a nuclear deter­rent. (See “Renewed Egypt­ian Ambi­tions for a Peace­ful Nuclear Pro­gram” in this issue of WMD Insights.)

In 2005, revival of the Egypt­ian nuclear pow­er pro­gram had been a ral­ly­ing cry for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. In its 2005 par­lia­men­tary elec­tion plat­form, for exam­ple, it had declared that under its lead­er­ship, Egypt would devel­op “spe­cial nation­al pro­grams, such as the nuclear pro­gram, the space and avi­a­tion pro­gram, arma­ments pro­gram, and the bio-tech­nol­o­gy pro­gram.” [1] The par­ty, which cur­rent­ly holds rough­ly one fifth of the seats in the Egypt­ian Nation­al Assem­bly (the low­er house of the Egypt­ian par­lia­ment), used the nuclear issue to chal­lenge the cur­rent Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment, which had shown lit­tle inter­est in nuclear ener­gy, unlike a num­ber of states in the region, includ­ing Iran and Turkey.

By May 17, 2006, Broth­er­hood deputies were open­ly attack­ing the Mubarak gov­ern­ment for not pur­su­ing an active nuclear pro­gram. Ikhwanon­line, the offi­cial web­site of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, stat­ed that Broth­er­hood “deputies accuse the gov­ern­ment of aban­don­ing the nuclear pro­gram and [being con­tent with not] build­ing atom­ic pow­er plants for peace­ful pur­pos­es and elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion at the same time many oth­er coun­tries such as India advanced in this field.” [2] (India has not only devel­oped nuclear pow­er for elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion, but used its peace­ful nuclear pro­gram as a step­ping stone to devel­op nuclear weapons.) . . .