By Ben Barrack

While it’s accurate to say that the Barack Obama administration has been overplaying the ‘Blame Bush’ card for years now, there’s something Bush didn’t do that has allowed members of the legislative branch to get in bed with America’s enemies. After 9/11, Bush committed a grave sin of omission. He failed to identify any and all Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) groups as enemies of the United States and got in bed with them.

George W. Bush at Islamic Center on 9/17/01 with Nihad Awad, leader of Muslim Brotherhood group

Subsequently, many congressmen and senators have been sleeping with those enemies as well.

After 9/11, the Muslim Brotherhood moniker should have carried the same stigma that al-Qaeda did (and does to this day). Instead, Bush didn’t just refuse to go there; he embraced the Ikhwan’s American front groups.

This gross miscalculation has helped to give the United States a president who has been allowed to act in the best interest of those enemies, with impunity. The Arab Spring is Obama’s baby and once again, with Syria, support for the Brotherhood is not only unmistakable but appears to be based on a chemical blood libel. The support for action against Assad in Syria by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) is extremely questionable.

Back in January, we co-signed a letter to McCaul, asking that his committee hold hearings into the sale of Al Gore’s CURRENT TV to Al-Jazeera, which launched its Al-Jazeera America channel earlier this month. As Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival has chronicled, McCaul’s office expressed no interest in doing this. Al-Jazeera is the Muslim Brotherhood network and is based out of Doha, Qatar.

In March of this year, evidence surfaced that one of the reasons McCaul expressed no interest in investigating the deal may have been the result of a significant lobbying effort. Earlier this month, Kincaid identified the influence of powerful K Street lobbyist Tom Korologos as being the likely reason for McCaul’s blind eye.

Ironically, during his August 25th appearance on Face the Nation, when asked about using cruise missiles in Syria and whether he would support a decision to do so, McCaul said he wants to “pick the American side” while operating from the premise that Assad has already used chemical weapons. When pressed, McCaul ultimately said he would agree with missile strikes if they would destroy the “chemical weapons stockpiles”.

While McCaul’s rationale sounds reasonable, doing as he suggests would benefit the Muslim Brotherhood’s rebels:

Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is also operating from the premise that Assad has used chemical weapons and missile strikes should be launched. During his August 25th appearance on Fox News Sunday, Corker sounded more reckless than McCaul. He actually called for using the strikes to “tilt the balance” in favor of the Syrian opposition; that would be the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is a shameful position from Corker:

A day later, during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Corker echoed similar sentiment:

One week earlier, on August 18th, Rep. Mike Rogers appeared on ABC This Week and said the evidence Assad used chemical weapons was conclusive enough to warrant taking military action. Notice how he says “classified” evidence he’s looked at convinces him as well. This is supposed to put him in the know and us citizens in the dark. Unfortunately for Mr. Rogers, there’s plenty of unclassified (video) evidence that implicates the rebels:

Curiously, Rogers and his Republican counterparts seem ignorant of evidence like this, which catches rebel hands in the chemical cookie jar:

Another common argument we hear from members of Congress who support the rebels is that we should have acted sooner and more forcefully so that moderate rebels could fill the vacuum left by an ousted Assad. This argument is belied by both facts and recent history in practically every Arab Spring uprising. In Egypt, the Brotherhood hijacked the revolution. Then, after one year of absolute persecution under Sharia law, the Brotherhood was removed and two Republican Senators – John McCain and Lindsey Graham – went to Egypt to demand the release of its leaders.

In the days after the Benghazi attack on 9/11/12, John McCain appeared very defensive on Hannity’s television show and thumped his chest over Libya’s election of “moderates”. Nearly one year later, at worst, the Ikhwan is calling the shots there. At best, it’s responsible for plunging that country deeper into chaos.

Here is McCain on 9/13/12, cheering on Libya’s (ahem) successes:

As for lobbying, let’s look at another case in point. If McCaul turned a blind eye to Al-Jazeera because of DLA Piper and Tom Korologos, is it that far of a leap to infer that McCain’s pro-Muslim Brotherhood stance has a similar source? As the Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein reported some time ago, the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) has a representative named Mouaz Moustafa working one block away from the White House. According to Weinstein, Moustafa and SETF are “working to persuade” (lobby) Congress to back the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.

Incidentally, Moustafa was listed as a participant at the very pro-Muslim Brotherhood U.S.-Islamic World Forum (USIWF), held in Qatar this past June. Shockingly, Benghazi’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) chairman Thomas Pickering was as well.

Then of course, how about all of the Republicans who defended Huma Abedin? They were John McCain, Mike Rogers, Scott Brown, Marco Rubio, John Boehner, Jim Sensenbrenner, Mike Simpson, and Richard Hanna. The vast majority of remaining Republicans refused to stand with Bachmann. Had America identified its true enemies, Abedin never would have sniffed a security clearance because of her Brotherhood ties.

Let’s get back to George W. Bush. Instead of declaring a war on terror that identified a mere tentacle of the Muslim Brotherhood as the face of it, without a congressional declaration no less, Bush should have identified the entire Muslim Brotherhood umbrella as the enemy.

Had he done so, perhaps the group would carry the same stigma that Al-Qaeda does today, which would be a good thing.

Hindsight? Perhaps, but we are still suffering the effects of this gross miscalculation. Many of those effects are the egregious positions and behaviors of elected Republicans who are either ignorant or corrupt.