"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt

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Friday, July 5, 2013

Misunderstandings on the Failed State of Egypt and Obama's Lack of Care




Caroline Glick has a very interesting opinion piece over at CarolineGlick.com. I highly recommend reading the whole thing at the link below.

Among Glick's observations is the fact that the state of Egypt is failing to feed and house its people. While many in the West either puzzle as to why the Egyptians overthrew Morsi or believe it to be some occupy-ish popular movement similar to the so-called "Arab Spring", the fact is Egyptians are in middle of a food crisis and an economic meltdown. Of course Morsi is not solely to blame for this state. Yet, his presidency focused more on consolidating dictatorial power and turning the Egyptian military into an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than to address Egypt's pressing economic matters. Morsi's administration also seemed to be both completely clueless as to how to run an economy and wholly unfit for the job.

From Glick's opinion piece:

US reporters and commentators today portray this week's protests as the restoration of the Egyptian revolution [the "Arab Spring"]. That revolution, they remain convinced, was poised to replace long-time Egyptian leader and US-ally Hosni Mubarak with a liberal democratic government led by people who used Facebook and Twitter.
 
Subsequently, we were told, that revolution was hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood. But now that Morsi and his government have been overthrown, the Facebook revolution is back on track.
 
And again, they are wrong.
 
As was the case in 2011, the voices of liberal democracy in Egypt are so few and far between that they have no chance whatsoever of gaining power, today or for the foreseeable future. At this point it is hard to know what the balance of power is between the Islamists who won 74 percent of the vote in the 2011 parliamentary elections and their opponents. But it is clear that their opponents are not liberal democrats. They are a mix of neo-Nasserist fascists, communists and other not particularly palatable groups.
 
None of them share Western conceptions of freedom and limited government. None of them are particularly pro-American. None of them like Jews. And none of them support maintaining Egypt's cold peace with Israel.  
[...]  
There are only three things that are knowable about the future of Egypt. First it will be poor. Egypt is a failed state. It cannot feed its people. It has failed to educate its people. It has no private sector to speak of. It has no foreign investment.
 
Second, Egypt will be politically unstable.
 
Mubarak was able to maintain power for 29 years because he ran a police state that the people feared. That fear was dissipated in 2011. This absence of fear will bring Egyptians to the street to topple any government they feel is failing to deliver on its promises - as they did this week.
 
Given Egypt's dire economic plight, it is impossible to see how any government will be able to deliver on any promises - large or small - that its politicians will make during electoral campaigns.
 
And so government after government will share the fates of Mubarak and Morsi.

Beyond economic deprivation, today tens of millions of Egyptians feel they were unlawfully and unjustly ousted from power on Wednesday.
 
The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists won big in elections hailed as free by the West. They have millions of supporters who are just as fanatical today as they were last week. They will not go gently into that good night.
 
Finally, given the utter irrelevance of liberal democratic forces in Egypt today, it is clear enough that whoever is able to rise to power in the coming years will be anti-American, anti- Israel and anti-democratic, (in the liberal democratic sense of the word). They might be nicer to the Copts than the Muslim Brotherhood has been. But they won't be more pro-Western.
 
They may be more cautious in asserting or implementing their ideology in their foreign policy than the Muslim Brotherhood. But that won't necessarily make them more supportive of American interests or to the endurance of Egypt's formal treaty of peace with Israel.  
[...]  
Wednesday's overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government is a total repudiation of the US strategy of viewing the unrest in Egypt - and throughout the Arab world - as a struggle between the good guys and the bad guys.
 
Within a week of the start of the protests in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011, Americans from both sides of the political divide united around the call for Mubarak's swift overthrow.
 
A few days later, President Barack Obama joined the chorus of Democrats and Republicans, and called for Mubarak to leave office, immediately. Everyone from Sen. John McCain to Samantha Power was certain that despite the fact that Mubarak was a loyal ally of the US, America would be better served by supporting the rise of the Facebook revolutionaries who used Twitter and held placards depicting Mubarak as a Jew.
 
Everyone was certain that the Muslim Brotherhood would stay true to its word and keep out of politics.  
[...]  
Shortly after Mubarak was overthrown, the Obama administration began actively supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
 
The Muslim Brotherhood believed that the way to gain and then consolidate power was to hold elections as quickly as possible. Others wanted to wait until a constitutional convention convened and a new blueprint for Egyptian governance was written. But the Muslim Brotherhood would have none of it. And Obama supported it.

Five months after elections of questionable pedigree catapulted Morsi to power, Obama was silent when in December 2012 Morsi arrogated dictatorial powers and pushed through a Muslim Brotherhood constitution.

Obama ignored Congress three times and maintained full funding of Egypt despite the fact that the Morsi government had abandoned its democratic and pluralistic protestations.
 
He was silent over the past year as the demonstrators assembled to oppose Morsi's power grabs. He was unmoved as churches were torched and Christians were massacred. He was silent as Morsi courted Iran.
 
US Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson and Obama remained the Muslim Brotherhood's greatest champions as the forces began to gather ahead of this week's mass protests. Patterson met with the Coptic pope and told him to keep the Coptic Christians out of the protests.

Obama, so quick to call for Mubarak to step down, called for the protesters to exercise restraint this time around and then ignored them during his vacation in Africa.
 
The first time Obama threatened to curtail US funding of the Egyptian military was Wednesday night, after the military ignored American warnings and entreaties, and deposed Morsi and his government.
 
This week's events showed how the US's strategy in Egypt has harmed America.

In 2011, the military acted to force Mubarak from power only after Obama called for it to do so. This week, the military overthrew Morsi and began rounding up his supporters in defiance of the White House.
Personally, I hold out a bit more hope for Egyptians laying down a viable framework for a more stable government in the future. This hope is a bit baseless, I admit. Ideally the Egyptian military can provide enough food until a new system-- one hopefully with a constitution-- can be constructed-- something that learned from the Morsi debacle. That's a very optimistic view when taking into account the huge obstacles Egypt faces, I know.

The U.S. does still hold a fair amount of sway over Egypt in the form of massive amounts foreign aid, and if we had a president that was at all interested in stability in the Middle East there might be further cause for optimism. But Obama holds the American Leftist view of the world, a silly and ridiculously over-simplified viewpoint of victim and victimizer. Think of the ludicrous "A People's History of the United States" by Marxist historian Howard Zinn and you've got a pretty good grasp of Obama's beliefs.

So Obama's real position is to simply continue the policy of apologetic redemption seeking-- useless apologies for actions embarrassing mostly from an American point of view, and redemption only in the eyes of Leftist Americans. As is evidenced by Obama's actions in the near past (his consistent support for an, at best, incompetent Morsi, his silence at the Muslim Brotherhood's attacks upon the Copts,  Morsi's power grabs and moves for destabilizing the Mid-East, Obama's threat against the Egyptian military for Morsi's removal), his concern for the Egyptian people, the Israeli people, and indeed all the people of the Middle East is minimal.

It's pathetic and egotistical to the extreme, but Obama's first and foremost concern is to satisfy the American Left's pompous version of a "moral" America. Allies' and others' welfare is of little matter. As can be seen with Obama's brush-off of impoverished Africans' living conditions, Obama has little sympathy for the lives of others when they interfere with Leftist agendas designed to satisfy their own "moral" quest. So, if numerous lives of Egyptians, Israelis, and whomever else must be sacrificed for this self-indulgent, American apologist agenda/viewpoint, so be it says the Light-bringer.

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