Caroline Glick
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.
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