August 19, 2013 | Quote

For President Obama And Congress To Subsidize Egypt Today Is To Underwrite Murder

Dead protestors litter the streets of Cairo.  So much for Secretary of State John Kerry’s theory that Egypt’s military rulers “were restoring democracy.” Unfortunately, the dead will have trouble voting in the new and improved Egypt.

Instead of acting as the regime’s enabler, the Obama administration should “reset” relations with Cairo.  The U.S. should cut off all aid and withdraw America’s ambassador.  If Washington has any influence to exercise, it should do so quietly and informally.

U.S. policy toward Egypt has rarely taken the Egyptian people into account.  The $75 billion provided in “aid” over the years was mostly a payoff to successive dictators and their military praetorian guards.  All that Washington worried about was “stability.”

Fouad Ajami of the Hoover Institution noted that “The feloul, the remnants of the old regime, still had the commanding heights of the economy.” Anti-Morsi businessmen and officials may have helped manufacture debilitating electricity and gasoline shortages.  After pledging loyalty to Morsi, Gen. Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi worked with the Tamarod movement, which organized the massive demonstrations used to justify military rule.

It would have taken extraordinary skill, forbearance, and luck, none of which President Morsi possessed, to have succeeded.  Had the opposition simply waited Morsi would have discredited political Islam—democratically.  In this way, argued Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:  “The Egyptian military may have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Instead, Morsi’s disparate opponents backed SCAF in staging the July 3 coup:  the president removed, his top aides arrested, his movement’s media shuttered and journalists arrested, the president and others charged with fanciful offenses, and his supporters gunned down in the streets.

Certainly it was an odd way to go about “restoring democracy.”  David Kramer, Freedom House’s president, cited a “significant decline in most of the country’s democratic institutions” after Morsi’s ouster.

What the al-Sisi government actually restored was the old Mubarak structure.  The military, “long a cancer on Egyptian society,” in Gerecht’s words, regained its preeminent political role.  Gen. al-Sisi selected a Mubarak jurist as acting president.  The regime appointed 25 provincial governors, of whom 17 were military generals, two were police officials, and two were Mubarak judges.

The Interior Ministry reestablished its special departments devoted to monitoring political and religious “extremism.”  The discredited police, who fought for Mubarak until the end, returned to their posts.  Overall, reported the Washington Post:  “Egypt’s new power dynamic, following the July 3 coup that ousted Morsi, is eerily familiar.  Gone are the Islamist rulers from the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood.  Back are the faces of the old guard, many closely linked to Mubarak’s reign or to the all-powerful generals.”

In the near future the army has the advantage.  Civilian mobs have joined the police and army against protestors.  The Brotherhood’s resistance, demonized by a captive media largely supporting the coup, has won the group few friends.

However, the movement is well-organized nationwide.  It survived prior attempts suppression.  Pollster Shibley Telhami argued that President Morsi overestimated the Egyptian people’s Islamic identity, but “now, with their violent repression of the Brotherhood, the generals who ousted Morsi risk underestimating it.”  After all, the Brotherhood is closer to the average Egyptian than the liberals, secularists, and Christians backing the coup. Argued Gerecht:  “the Westernization of the Egyptian poor has been in retreat for more than 40 years.”

By suppressing the Brotherhood, killing demonstrators, and closing political space to Islamists the government is encouraging the rise of a more radical and violent leadership.  Angry younger members may now challenge more moderate leaders or join more combative splinter groups.  Financial Times columnist David Gardner warned:  “Driving the Brotherhood back underground, alongside harder-line Islamist activists still trying to outflank them, is an assured recipe for prolonged bloodshed.”  Indeed, the head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was radicalized when as a member of the Brotherhood he was imprisoned and tortured during a prior crackdown.

Cairo has announced that it is “reviewing” its strategic relationship with Western governments, including the U.S.  Washington could end up paying a price for doing the right thing, but here it has leverage.  The administration could respond to retaliation by ramping up its public condemnation, denying spare parts for existing U.S.-supplied military equipment, blocking loans from the multilateral development banks, hindering Egyptian imports, discouraging tourist travel to Egypt, encouraging allied action against Cairo, and suggesting international criminal charges against Egyptian leaders for their brutal conduct.  The generals would quickly find that they also have a stake in the bilateral relationship.

More than Egypt is at stake.  James Traub of the Center for International Cooperation noted that “silence has consequences too.”  Denying political Islam a place in democratic systems will not eliminate the movement, but instead force it to operate in violent ways.  Said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:  “al-Qaeda’s narrative is furthered, as Ayman al-Zawahiri’s dark predictions about Egyptian politics seem to be proven correct.”

Read the full article here.

Issues:

Egypt