West fears Islamic rise and hijacking of Arab Spring benefits

Washington, Oct.29 (ANI): There is a fear in Western capitals that radical Islamists might rise up and try to hijack the so-called Arab Spring.any analysts say that fear has been realized.

According to Fox News, in Tunisia, where the epic season of unrest began, last Sunday's historic elections appear to have resulted in an Islamist group winning a governing majority.

In Libya, an ex-terrorist once jailed by the Central Intelligence Agency, now runs the country's foremost military organization, while its new political leaders speak openly of enacting Sharia, the ultra-harsh code of Islamic law.

In Egypt, rioters recently forced the evacuation of the Israeli embassy and waged vicious attacks on Coptic Christians.

There are also concerns over whether the White House has done all it could to steer the Arab Spring in the right direction.

At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Thursday, Representative Dan Burton (Republican representing Indiana), told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Mideast "really worries me," and asked what the Obama administration "plans to do to make sure that we don't have a radical government taking over those places."

Clinton replied: "Revolutions are unpredictable phenomena. I think a lot of the leaders are saying the right things and some are saying things that do give pause to us....We're going to do all that we can within our power to basically try to influence outcomes. But, you know, the historic wind sweeping the Middle East and North Africa were not of our making."

Jamie Smith, a former CIA officer who has made three fact-finding trips to Libya this year, warns that the sense of unity that bound the country's disparate rebel groups during their eight-month revolt has evaporated since Muammar Qaddafi fell from power.

In the dictator's place, Smith says, the oil-rich but woefully mismanaged North African state is relying on the Transitional National Council, made up of inexperienced ex-rebels, and the Tripoli Military Council, headed by Abdel Hakim Belhaj.

The latter was once head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which the U.S. State Department classifies as a foreign terrorist organization.

Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy draws encouragement from the fact that the region's revolutions, by and large, have not been marked by strong expressions of anti-Western or anti-Israel sentiment.

He suggested that Washington can work reasonably well with governments whose legal codes do not mirror our own.

Some conservatives, however, are inclined to blame the Obama administration for mishandling the Mideast upheaval.

Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan-era Defense Department official, has said that the Obama administration has been fairly cautious response to Arab Uprising, and appears to be doing the bidding of the Islamists.

The analysts say that U.S. officials are now bracing for a strong showing by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that boasts a long history of organized opposition to the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and whose foreign offshoots include Hamas. (ANI)