On Wednesday, Egypt had its second revolution in as many years. And there is no
telling how many more revolutions it will have in the coming months, or years.
This is the case not only in Egypt, but throughout the Islamic world.
The
American foreign policy establishment’s rush to romanticize as the Arab Spring
the political instability that engulfed the Arab world following the
self-immolation of a Tunisian peddler in December 2010 was perhaps the greatest
demonstration ever given of the members of that establishment’s utter
cluelessness about the nature of Arab politics and society. Their enthusiastic
embrace of protesters who have now brought down President Mohamed Morsi and his
Muslim Brotherhood regime indicates that it takes more than a complete
repudiation of their core assumptions to convince them to abandon
them.
US reporters and commentators today portray this week’s protests as
the restoration of the Egyptian revolution. 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.
Egypt’s greatest modern
leader was Gamal Abdel Nasser. By many accounts the most common political view
of the anti-Muslim Brotherhood protesters is neo-Nasserist
fascism.
Nasser was an enemy of the West. He led Egypt into the Soviet
camp in the 1950s. As the co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, he also led
much of the Third World into the Soviet camp. Nasser did no less damage to the
US in his time than al-Qaida and its allies have done in recent
years.
Certainly, from Israel’s perspective, Nasser was no better than
Hamas or al-Qaida or their parent Muslim Brotherhood movement. Like the Islamic
fanatics, Nasser sought the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the
Jews.
Whether the fascists will take charge or not is impossible to know.
So, too, the role of the Egyptian military in the future of Egypt is unknowable.
The same military that overthrew Morsi on Wednesday stood by as he earlier
sought to strip its powers, sacked its leaders and took steps to transform it
into a subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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.
And this is not the case only in Egypt. It is the case
in every Arab state that is now or will soon be suffering from instability that
has caused coups, Islamic takeovers, civil wars, mass protests and political
insecurity in country after country. Not all of them are broke. But then again,
none of them have the same strong sense of national identity that Egyptians
share.
Now that we understand what we are likely to see in the coming
months and years, and what we are seeing today, we must consider how the West
should respond to these events. To do so, we need to consider how various
parties responded to the events of the past two-and-ahalf
years.
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.
Two days after Mubarak was forced
from office, Peter Beinart wrote a column titled “America’s Proud Egypt Moment,”
where he congratulated the neo-conservatives and the liberals and Obama for
scorning American interests and siding with the protesters who opposed all of
Mubarak’s pro-American policies.
Beinart wrote exultantly, “Hosni
Mubarak’s regime was the foundation stone – along with Israel and Saudi Arabia –
of American power in the Middle East. It tortured suspected al- Qaida terrorists
for us, pressured the Palestinians for us, and did its best to contain
Iran.
And it sat atop a population eager – secular and Islamist alike –
not only to reverse those policies, but to rid the Middle East of American
power. And yet we cast our lot with that population, not their
ruler.”
Beinart also congratulated the neo-conservatives for parting ways
with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who counseled caution, and so proved they
do not suffer from dual loyalty.
That hated, reviled Israeli strategy,
(which was not Netanyahu’s alone, but shared by Israelis from across the
political spectrum in a rare demonstration of unanimity), was proven correct by
events of the past week and indeed by events of the past two-and-a-half
years.
Israelis watched in shock and horror as their American friends
followed the Pied Piper of the phony Arab Spring over the policy cliff. Mubarak
was a dictator. But his opponents were no Alexander Dubceks. There was no reason
to throw away 30 years of stability before figuring out a way to ride the tiger
that would follow it.
Certainly there was no reason to actively support
Mubarak’s overthrow.
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.
Secretary of State John Kerry was the personification of the
incredible shrinkage of America this week as he maintained his obsessive focus
on getting Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.
In a Middle
East engulfed by civil war, revolution and chronic instability, Israel is the
only country at peace. The image of Kerry extolling his success in “narrowing
the gaps” between Israel and the Palestinians before he boarded his airplane at
Ben-Gurion Airport, as millions assembled to bring down the government of Egypt,
is the image of a small, irrelevant America.
And as the anti-American
posters in Tahrir Square this week showed, America’s self-induced smallness is a
tragedy that will harm the region and endanger the US.
As far as Israel
is concerned, all we can do is continue what we have been doing, and hope that
at some point, the Americans will embrace our sound
strategy.
caroline@carolineglick.com
|