By Caroline B. Glick - http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0713/glick070513.php3#.Udb4-pDn99A
We are being told that with Morsi and his government overthrown, the Facebook revolution is back on track.
Again, the all-knowing are getting it all wrong
Wednesday
Egypt had its second revolution in so 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 their utter
cluelessness about the nature of Arab politics and society. Their
enthusiastic embrace of protesters who have now brought down President
Muhammad 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 as well 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 a half 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
Senator 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 Israeli
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 thirty 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 them.
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 threated 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 them 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.
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