Andrew McCarthy is claiming that the news that the Obama administration is establishing contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood as proof that he is secretly a part of their plan to establish a global caliphate (a plan in which killing Osama bin Laden is a key step!) While Karl Rove, while not ready to declare Obama an honorary Muslim Brother, nevertheless claims that engagement makes the U.S. "look weak," a description that presumably does not apply to Rove's former boss when he also communicated with the Brotherhood.
Matt Duss points out the obvious--while they're hardly a liberalizing force in Egypt, as long as they play a part in Egypt's emerging democracy there really aren't any other options:
It's quite true that Islamist parties base much of their appeal on hostility to the United States. But it's worth considering that decades of refusing to recognize them have not weakened Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia and have instead left them as the best-organized political organizations in their respective countries. Indeed, refusing to recognize these parties may in fact have enabled them to capitalize on the perception of U.S. hostility and assisted them in presenting themselves as the legitimate resistance to Western-backed authoritarianism.
Increasing engagement with Islamist political actors is clearly the right move for the administration. It recognizes a simple fact of political life in the Middle East—that Islamic political parties speak for a genuine constituency—and it fulfills a promise President Barack Obama made in his historic Cairo speech in June 2009.
Of course in his long screed McCarthy doesn't acknowledge that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a member of a party whose origins involve the Muslim Brotherhood, because that might undermine his point that any engagement with Islamist parties is a divergence with the prior administration and part of Obama's plan to establish Taliban style sharia law in the United States.
Duss' first point is especially important. There's no way to get Islam out of politics in the Middle East any more than you could get Christianity out of politics in the United States--and no way for the U.S. to force the outcome it wants. The Muslim Brotherhood's credibility in Egypt comes largely from its opposition to the former regime. Following Hosni Mubarak's lead by demonizing them would strengthen them by ensuring they retain that credibility. Engagement, on the other hand, makes it more difficult for them to do that--and it ensures that when their worldview fails in the marketplace of ideas, they won't have a foreign enemy to rally a failed ideology to their side.
