Egypt’s new leaders are lashing out at Israel
and the United States, prompting Washington politicians to ask just what their
$65 billion in aid has bought the United States. Since a 1979 peace treaty
between Egypt and Israel, Washington has given Cairo economic and military aid
that has exceeded $1.5 billion per year.
Congress believes that the funds
help keep Egypt afloat, and that they should buy Washington some goodwill and
gratitude. But the reality is that the military assistance is largely an
economic lifeline for America’s defense industry, which is the chief beneficiary
of the aid program. And in a country where many are too young to remember the
reasons behind the aid, generations have been reared to believe it is a
sacrosanct privilege. As a result, American threats to cut aid ring hollow and
attempts to link it to foreign policy objectives are futile.
Egypt is the
second-largest recipient of foreign aid, after Israel. Of the $1.56 billion in
aid the Obama administration asked Congress to approve for Egypt in 2012, only
$250 million was earmarked for economic assistance. The lion’s share of the
request - $1.31 billion – was for military and security purposes. Almost all of
that aid is allocated to Egyptian weapons purchases from American defense
contractors, such as General Dynamics and Honeywell.
“In America the aid
is seen as a gift to Egypt,” Sayf al-Yazl, a former general and director of the
Jumhuriyya Center for Strategic Studies told
The Media Line. “But Americans
always forget that it is American defense companies that are the chief
beneficiary of the aid. We only get to spend the money in your military
supermarkets.”
More than thirty years after Egypt signed a peace treaty
with America’s key ally, Israel, solidifying Washington’s role as the region’s
major power-broker, Egyptians feel under-appreciated. They have watched as
American aid has shrunk from $2.1 billion per year to less than $1.6 billion,
even as the cash transfers have been eroded by inflation. As the Egyptian
economy has grown by more than 300%, the added value of American assistance has
shriveled considerably. And when Washington and Jerusalem signed an agreement in
2007 to increase Israel’s aid by more than $600 million per year, Cairo was shut
out of the party. “The aid itself is of much less importance than when it
commenced in the wake of the Camp David Accords,” notes Professor Robert
Springborg of the Naval Postgraduate School.
At the same time, military
officials here have never been pleased that Israel receives more technologically
advanced weaponry than Egypt does. To entice Israel to sign a peace agreement,
Washington promised to ensure Jerusalem would have a qualitative edge over
Egypt. While Egypt’s air force is packed with F-16 fighter planes, Israel has
the more sophisticated F-15.
“The aid does not keep us on par with
Israel,” Karim Yahya, a journalist with Egypt’s largest newspaper,
Al-Ahram,
told
The Media Line. “Israel is the first priority for American policy, not
Egypt.”
Though Washington politicians perceive the assistance as a sign
of American benevolence that should buy it some foreign policy influence,
Egyptian leaders view it as an entitlement. “(Former) President (Hosni) Mubarak
and military leaders view our military assistance… as “untouchable compensation”
for making and maintaining peace with Israel,” American Ambassador to Egypt
Margaret Scobey wrote in a 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks. This
view is not confined to Egypt’s officer class. “Many Egyptians view American aid
as a right,” Bashir Abd al-Fatah, a researcher at the Al-Ahram Center for
Political and Strategic Studies told
The Media Line.Nevertheless, some
Egyptians would like to dispense with the aid all together, believing that only
a narrow clique of senior military officers benefit from it. These people point
to American-funded projects such as the International Medical Center hospital
facility as indicative of the corruption American aid has sown. Billed as an
in-patient complex to treat soldiers, the military transformed it into a
commercial enterprise that ministered to paying civilians. “Corrupt generals
benefit from these projects,” says Yahya. “The average Egyptian does not. There
is a whole industry in this country that uses the aid to enrich some people
while the population suffers.”
As a result, American talk of reducing aid
or even eliminating it does not scare Egyptians. “There is a big exaggeration
about need for this aid. Who benefits?” asks Yahya. According to Ambassador
Scobey’ cable, Washington is at the front of the line. “The US military enjoys
priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace” in exchange for
American assistance, she wrote. Others note how Cairo helps Washington in quiet
ways even as it overtly criticizes America’s regional initiatives. During the US
occupation of Iraq, which Mubarak opposed, Cairo allowed American jets returning
from Baghdad to refuel at Egyptian airbases.
In the wake of the Egyptian
revolution, which has increased anti-American sentiment, think tank analysts
such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Eric Trager and the
Brookings Institution’s Shadi Hamid have advocated eliminating the aid. But the
view from shiny Washington office suites and marble houses in Qatar looks very
different than from the squalid slums of Cairo. The principal loser of such a
gambit would be America and its Egyptian friends. Local analysts say Washington
would lose its remaining leverage with the new Egyptian government headed by
Mohammed Morsy.
That could jeopardize the fiscal viability of its defense
contractors who benefit from Cairo’s military purchases and transform the
US-Egyptian relationship into the litmus test by which post-Mubarak politicians
are judged.
“Egyptians are still feeling their way around the
revolution,” Saeed Okasha, a researcher at the al-Ahram Center for Political and
Strategic Studies told
The Media Line. “They still don’t know what their views
toward America are. They genuinely like (President Barack) Obama. But if America
starts to play with the aid, it will only backfire and place it on center
stage.” And with a new government beholden to its electorate rather than to
Washington, any move to tamper with the aid could irreparably damage bilateral
ties rather than coerce Egypt into line.
For more stories from The
Media Line go to www.medialine.org