">interview on CNN with Mona Eltahawy I stumbled across this informative take from Peter Bergen...
KAYE: And Peter, what is your take on the Muslim Brotherhood. If Mubarak does step down, if he does go away, what do you think the chances are that their role would be increased?
BERGEN: Well, that role is already pretty large. I mean they're in the interesting position Randi, where they are banned but tolerated. And so they do run candidates in elections, you know, as sort of independents. If there was a free and fair election in Egypt tomorrow, my guess is they would get about a third of the vote.
This is a responsible (ph) group, in my view. There are links to terrorism of decades in the past, they renounced violence, you know, in the '50s. And, you know, the kinds of people that it attracts -- and I have interviewed many of them -- are educated. They are doctors, they're lawyers. These are not, you know, kind of table- thumping revolutionaries. They could be part of -- they are obviously going to be part of Egypt's future because they are already part of the present.
KAYE: Are they truly pro democracy?
BERGEN: Yes, of course they are. I mean, in fact, they are much criticized by people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda, for taking parts in elections. I mean these groups exist all around the Middle East, of course, and they do participate in elections. Sometimes they become the government. We saw that with Hamas in Gaza.
MANN: Let me jump in on that note because you brought up al Qaeda. I do know Zawahiri is one of the Egyptian figures in al Qaeda. Do groups like al Qaeda see an opening in a situation like this in failed states obviously? We're nervous about terror groups moving in.
Egypt is hardly that, but is there an opening now for some of the West's worst enemies there?
BERGEN: Jonathan, I very much doubt it. I mean Egypt -- Egyptians saw what happened when the Islamists like al Qaeda launched a terror campaign in the early '90s that killed literally 1,200 people, many of them policemen, many kids, tourists, you remember the Luxor massacre in 1997 where 56 tourists were stabbed to death by an Egyptian terrorist group.
That signaled the end of this group -- any kind of popular support they might have had evaporated. The government launched a very severe crackdown. Ayman al-Zawahiri himself, of course, spent three years in an Egyptian prison after Anwar Sadat's assassination.
Al Qaeda will opportunistically try and take advantage of this and I'm sure we'll see statements from Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden sort of lauding aspects of this, but their involvement in Egyptian politics is zero and has been zero for a very, very long time.
MANN: CNN national security analyst, Peter Bergen. Thanks very much.
BERGEN: Thank you.
From:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1101/30/sm.03.html
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