"Al Qaeda leader's 'I told you so' on Egypt"

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Al Qaeda leader's 'I told you so' on Egypt

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/15/opinion/bergen-zawahiri-egypt/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

"SNIP.................................


(CNN) -- Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian-born leader of al Qaeda, has seen this movie before: An Islamist party does well at the polling booth only to be overthrown by a military coup that then plunges the country into chaos.

This is what happened in Algeria in 1991. Tens of thousands died in the subsequent Algerian civil war that ripped the nation apart during the 1990s.
Bergen

The lesson that Zawahiri drew from the Algerian war was that participating in democratic elections was strictly for suckers; far better to seize power through violence and then impose Taliban-style sharia law because "the crusaders" and their allies in the Arab world would never allow the emergence of a true Islamist state.

In 1991, the same year that the Algerian civil war began, Zawahiri released his first book, "The Bitter Harvest." The book was a vicious diatribe against the Muslim Brotherhood and other similar Islamist parties for participating in "democracies, elections and parliaments."



................................SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. It is hard enough starting a democracy and having people learn how it works without

having this monster out there appealing to the worst in people. Can someone please shut him up?