A Coup, or Not a Coup?

The Obama administration's position regarding the ouster of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt now appears to be that Morsi's removal kinda, sorta constituted a coup. If this is indeed official American policy, it means that we will continue to anger both sides of the conflict in Egypt--a neat trick, that. Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood allies will be outraged by the fact that the administration does not consider Morsi's ouster a full-fledged coup. Meanwhile, the Egyptian military will lose its fertilizer over the administration's seeming finding that the ouster looks like, walks like and quacks like a coup. The end result, as I have discussed before, is that the United States will be left with no friends in Egypt.

Remember that the Obama administration was supposed to put a halt to the supposed Bushian tendency to anger and alienate friends and allies. So much for that promise.

Say Goodbye to Democracy in Egypt

As I have mentioned before, I am neither a fan of Mohammed Morsi, nor one of the Muslim Brotherhood in general. I think they are generally a totalitarian lot and Egypt would be better off without them. But as Morsi and the Brotherhood won legitimate elections in Egypt, the way to get rid of them is through subsequent elections.

Instead, we had a coup, even though the Obama administration refrains from calling it a coup. And now, the powers-that-be in Egypt are considering disbanding the Muslim Brotherhood altogether. Because, of course, that won't drive religious sentiment underground, making it even more fanatical in the process.

I am sure that there are people in the Egyptian government who have good ideas about how best to go forward. Too bad that no one is giving them the microphone at all.

Bungling in Egypt

I was assured--both in 2008 and 2012--that if Barack Obama were elected and re-elected president, we would have a mature, capable, intelligent, savvy foreign policy team that would undo the supposed congenital Bush administration tendency of losing friends and influencing nobody. Heck, I recall being assured in 2004 that if John Kerry were elected president, we would have a mature, capable, intelligent, savvy foreign policy team that would undo the supposed congenital Bush administration tendency of losing friends and influencing nobody.

Now we have Barack Obama elected and re-elected president. And while we don't have John Kerry as president and likely never will (watch these words come back to bite me someday. But until then . . .), we do have him as secretary of state; a job he wanted almost as badly as he wanted the presidency. And the result of all of this in the Egyptian context is that we are losing Egypt:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry backed away Friday from his candid comments that seemed to signal American support for the Egyptian military coup and the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi.

The U.S. has tried hard not to appear as if it is taking sides in the crisis. But when Kerry said Thursday in Pakistan that the Egyptian military was ‘‘'restoring democracy’’ in leading the July 3 coup, it left the impression that the U.S. backed the military action. Kerry moved quickly to defuse the flap, saying on Friday that all parties — the military as well as pro-Morsi demonstrators — needed to work toward a peaceful and ‘‘'inclusive’’ political resolution of the crisis.

His backpedaling came after his comments were denounced by Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, which insists that the democratically elected Morsi is the legitimate leader of Egypt.

‘‘Does Secretary Kerry accept Defense Secretary (Chuck) Hagel to step in and remove (U.S. President Barack) Obama if large protests take place in America?’’ a spokesman of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Gehad el-Haddad, asked.

The flap over Kerry’s remarks came at a bad time. Just as Kerry was in London trying to clarify his statement from the day before, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns was landing in Cairo to urge Egyptian leaders to avoid violence and help facilitate a political exit strategy to end the stalemate that has paralyzed Egypt and deeply divided the country.

I think it is safe to say that we have enraged both sides of the Egyptian equation. We have enraged the pro-Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood side by claiming that Morsi's ouster was absolutely, positively, totally, completely and entirely not a coup, which is now about as silly as claiming that Anthony Weiner did not engage in sexting. I am no fan of Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood, and I have a hard time getting worked up about the fact that they in particular have been ousted. But let's face it; Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood did get elected. And when they get removed from power by the military, it's kind of hard to claim that the process that removed them wasn't a coup. The Obama administration likes to claim that because the military hasn't taken over in the aftermath of the Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood ouster, there was no coup. To which my reply would be the following: If the United States military ousted President Obama from power and, say, eliminated Democratic control of the United States Senate, installed Mitt Romney in the White House, made Mitch McConnell the Senate majority leader, and then retreated back to the position it currently occupies in our non-hypothetical, entirely real world, would any of us refrain from calling this a coup?

I thought not.

So the pro-Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood side--which again, won an election and has a lot of support amongst the Egyptians whose hearts and minds we would ideally like to make our own--really doesn't like us right about now. As for the military, they now probably don't like us because our secretary of state signaled support for their actions, and then went back on his comments as fast as humanly possible, which along with other bureaucratic blunders mentioned in the article, makes one wonder who exactly is in charge in Foggy Bottom, and in other buildings where American foreign policy is crafted and implemented.

And this is the crowd that was supposed to restore America's standing in the world?

Is Egypt Really “Transition[ing] to Democracy”?

Walter Russell Mead notes President Obama's statement on the coup in Egypt, and the following passage from that statement in particular:

No transition to democracy comes without difficulty, but in the end it must stay true to the will of the people. An honest, capable and representative government is what ordinary Egyptians seek and what they deserve. The longstanding partnership between the United States and Egypt is based on shared interests and values, and we will continue to work with the Egyptian people to ensure that Egypt’s transition to democracy succeeds.

Quite properly, Mead pounces:

One hopes the President understands what drivel this is. It is not at all clear that Egypt is in the midst of a transition to democracy. It is in the midst of a crisis of authority and has been wallowing for some time in a damaging crisis of governance, but is Egypt really in a transition to democracy? And is democracy really what “ordinary” Egyptians want?

Right now one suspects that most Egyptians fear that the country could be in a transition to anarchy, and that what ordinary Egyptians (who are extremely poor by US standards and earn their bread by the sweat of their brow with very little cushion against illness or a bad day at the market) want most of all right now is security. They aren’t fretting so much about when they will have a government more like Norway’s as they are terrified that their country is sliding in the direction of Libya, Syria or Iraq.

As is often the case, Washington policymakers seem to be paying too much attention to the glibbest of political scientists and the vaporings of the Davoisie. Egypt has none of the signs that would lead historians to think democracy is just around the corner. Mubarak was not Franco, and Egypt is not Spain. What’s happening in Egypt isn’t the robust flowering of a civil society so dynamic and so democratic that it can no longer be held back by dictatorial power.

Virtually every policeman and government official in the country takes bribes. Most journalists have lied for pay or worked comfortably within the confines of a heavily censored press all their careers. The Interior Ministry has files, often stuffed with incriminating or humiliating information about most of the political class. The legal system bowed like a reed before the wind of the Mubarak government’s will, and nothing about the character of its members has changed. The business class serves the political powers; the Copts by and large will bow to the will of any authority willing to protect them.

And Americans should not deceive themselves. While some of Morsi’s failure was the result of overreaching and dumb choices on his part, he faced a capital strike and an intense campaign of passive resistance by a government and business establishment backed by an army in bed with both groups. Their strategy was to bring Morsi down by sabotaging the economy, frustrating his policies and isolating his appointees. Although Egypt’s liberals supported the effort out of fear of the Islamists, the strategy had nothing to do with a transition to democracy, and it worked.

This is not to say that Morsi or his movement had a viable alternative policy or governance model for Egypt. They didn’t. The Muslim Brotherhood had no clue how Egypt could be governed, and a combination of incompetence, corruption, factionalism and religious dogmatism began to wreck Morsi’s government from Day One.

If American policy toward Egypt is based on the assumption that Egypt is having a “messy transition” to democracy and that we must shepherd the poor dears to the broad sunny uplands, encouraging when they do well, chiding when they misstep, Washington will keep looking foolish and our influence will continue to fade. If that is the approach our foolishness compels us to take, look for more cases in which American good intentions just make us more hated—not because we are wicked, but because we are clueless.

Morsi Ousted

The Egyptian army has had about enough: 

Egypt’s military on Wednesday ousted Mohamed Morsi, the nation’s first freely elected president, suspending the Constitution, installing an interim government and insisting it was responding to the millions of Egyptians who had opposed the Islamist agenda of Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood.

The military intervention, which Mr. Morsi rejected as a “complete military coup,” marked a tumultuous new phase in the politics of modern Egypt, where Mr. Morsi’s autocratic predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, was overthrown in a 2011 revolution.

The intervention raised questions about whether that revolution would fulfill its promise to build a new democracy at the heart of the Arab world. The defiance of Mr. Morsi and his Brotherhood allies also raised the specter of the bloody years of the 1990s, when fringe Islamist groups used violence in an effort to overthrow the military government.

In an announcement read on state television, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian defense minister, said the military had taken the extraordinary steps not to seize power for itself but to ensure that “confidence and stability are secured for the people.”

Morsi is attempting to resist the coup and is continuing to claim that he is the president of Egypt, but one wonders how successful such a public stance will be, especially given the lack of popular support for his government. As the story notes, however, as welcome as Morsi's removal from power may be, the chief casualty in Egypt may be democracy itself. To be sure, Morsi was no democrat, but he was elected; many of his supporters--never having been fans of democracy in the first place--are now claiming that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever left to support democratic values in the future, as long as the army can step in at any time it wants in order to remove the government and install another one of its own liking.

Meanwhile, it is worth noting the Obama administration's reaction to all of this. The president and his team have maintained that they have sought to promote human rights in Egypt. As this story points out, however, that is just not true:

In nearly every confrontation with Congress since the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the White House has fought restrictions proposed by legislators on the nearly $1.6 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt. Twice in two years, the White House and the State Department fought hard against the very sorts of conditions for aid that Obama claimed credit for this week. When President Mohamed Morsi used the power of his presidency to target his political opponents, senior administration officials declined to criticize him in public. Many close Egypt observers argue that the Obama administration’s treatment of Morsi has been in line with the longstanding U.S. policy of turning a blind eye to the human-rights abuses of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.

[. . .]

In March 2012, Clinton waived restrictions passed by Congress on aid to Egypt “on the basis of America’s national-security interests.” That decision came in the midst of the Egyptian government’s crackdown on foreign NGOs, which included the raiding of the offices of several American organizations, including the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and Freedom House.

In April of this year, Kerry again waived all congressional restrictions on aid to Egypt, but did so secretly and without any explanation. The State Department later explained that aid to Egypt’s military was necessary because of U.S.-Egyptian cooperation on things like counterterrorism.

Five senators in March proposed changes to the way the U.S. gives aid to Egypt in the hopes of using the aid to pressure Morsi to improve his record on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. But the Obama administration, led by Kerry and U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson, fought those changes, and none was ever passed into law.

That same month Kerry delivered to Morsi an additional $190 million of U.S. aid based on Morsi’s pledge to implement economic reforms, part of a $1 billion debt-relief package Obama pledged to Morsi.

Realpolitik may have demanded that the administration do what it did. But that doesn't change the fact that the administration should stop claiming that it was a friend to democracy in Egypt.

More Revolution in Egypt

The post-Mubarak Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi has failed to capture the hearts and affections of the Egyptian people, thanks to its willingness to substitute one form of dictatorship for another. It should therefore come as no surprise whatsoever that the Egyptian people are determined to throw out Morsi, just as they were willing to throw out Mubarak. And now, the armed forces are stepping in as well:

Egypt's armed forces sent a stiff message to the country's embattled president and his political opponents and allies: the current governing crisis must be resolved in 48 hours or it will embark on a road map designed to restore order.

Egyptians who helped overthrow a 29-year dictatorship in a widely hailed revolution have now given the country's first democratically elected president one day to step down from office.

In a statement posted Monday on its official Facebook page, Tamarod (the "rebel" campaign") demanded that if President Mohamed Morsy doesn't leave office by Tuesday, the group will begin a civil disobedience movement, call for nationwide protests and march on the presidential palace, where Morsy's administration is running affairs.

If the last few days have been any indication, Tamarod's deadline will most likely be ignored.

Developing. On the one hand, this is a clear indication of maturity on the part of the Egyptian people; they are simply no longer willing to accept or put up with dictatorial acts from their leaders. On the other, one naturally fears that the situation could turn terribly violent. If it does, any revolt against dictatorship could be threatened and undermined, and of course, the number of people who could be killed or wounded might reach terribly distressing levels.

In any event, this situation deserves a lot of attention from the American media. Here's hoping that news organizations are up to the task.