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.

Big News in the Fight Against HIV/AIDS

I am old enough to remember the days when contracting HIV meant a death sentence; the only question was how long the afflicted had to live. Thankfully, things are different now:

Two H.I.V.-infected patients in Boston who had bone-marrow transplants for blood cancers have apparently been virus-free for weeks since their antiretroviral drugs were stopped, researchers at an international AIDS conference announced Wednesday.

The patients’ success echoes that of Timothy Ray Brown, the famous “Berlin patient,” who has shown no signs of resurgent virus in the five years since he got a bone-marrow transplant from a donor with a rare mutation conferring resistance to H.I.V.

The Boston cases, like Mr. Brown’s, are of no practical use to the 34 million people in the world who have H.I.V. but neither blood cancer nor access to premier cancer-treatment hospitals.

But AIDS experts still find the Boston cases exciting because they are another step in the long and so-far-fruitless search for a cure. They offer encouragement to ambitious future projects to genetically re-engineer infected patients’ cells to be infection-resistant. At least two teams are already experimenting with variants on this idea, said Dr. Steven G. Deeks, an AIDS researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, a discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS and the president of the International AIDS Society, called the findings about the Boston patients “very interesting and very encouraging.” The announcement about the cases was made at the society’s annual conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
No, a cure is not right around the corner. But as the story indicates, we are learning more every day about how to fight HIV/AIDS, and the prospect of a cure is not nearly the fantasy that it used to be.

Quote of the Day

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

--William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust. Today, of course, is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

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.

 

Obamacare's Employer Mandate: Delayed

Avik Roy  has the scoop. The mandate was never popular, so one naturally senses politics being behind this decision. As Roy notes, the mandate might have driven up unemployment, so delaying it for a year might keep unemployment from becoming even more of an issue during the 2014 midterm election cycle. Additionally, as Roy points out, delaying the mandate will cause more people to want to enroll in the individual insurance exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act. The following from Roy's post is also notable:

The Affordable Care Act is quite clear as to the effective date of the employer mandate. “The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013,” concludes Section 1513.

The executive branch is charged with enforcing the law, and it can of course choose not to enforce the law if it wants. But people can sue the federal government, and a judge could theoretically force the administration to enforce the mandate.

So the question is: Would anyone sue the Obama administration over this? Employers, of course, will be thrilled to be spared the mandate for one more year. Democratic politicians, similarly, will be glad to have this not hanging over their heads for the 2014 mid-term election.

The wild-card is left-wing activists. Most, you’d think, would defer to the administration on questions of implementation. I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that all it would take is for one judge to issue an injunction, for an activist to require the administration to enforce the mandate.

Hypocrisy Watch (Complaining about Espionage Edition)

Following up on this post, it is worth noting this story:

If you buy the latest reporting out of Europe, France is outraged, simply outraged, at news that the National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on the European Union through its mission in New York and embassy in Washington. French political parties are now rumbling about offering asylum to Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor at the center of the leaks. The French government is demanding answers from the United States about its snooping. Monsieur Le Président himself, François Hollande, is calling for an end to the spying.

All of which is pretty hilarious, given France's penchant for stealing American defense technology, bugging American business executives and generally annoying U.S. counterintelligence officials. If you've been paying attention, you know that France is a proficient, notorious and unrepentant economic spy. "In economics, we are competitors, not allies," Pierre Marion, the former director of France's equivalent of the CIA, once said. "America has the most technical information of relevance. It is easily accessible. So naturally your country will receive the most attention from the intelligence services."

Anyone want to bet that France isn't alone among EU members in conducting espionage activities against a country it calls an ally?

UPDATE: The Germans and British spy on allies too. Who woulda thunk it?

The Benjamin Rush Society : Right-of-Center Health Care Policy :: The Federalist Society : Right-of-Center Lawyering and Legal Interpretation

Story here.  And here is a link to the society's homepage. I hope that the Benjamin Rush folks are able to exercise some influence; they have a chance to offer up a positive series of contributions to the health care debate.

We Passed the Health Care Bill, and We Are Finding Out What's In It

I just wish that we would find out about some good news. Alas, there is no good news today:

Healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage under the federal health law later this year, while the premiums paid by sicker people are set to become more affordable, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of coverage to be sold on the law's new exchanges.

The exchanges, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's health-care law, look likely to offer few if any of the cut-rate policies that healthy people can now buy, according to the Journal's analysis. At the same time, the top prices look to be within reach for many people who previously faced sky-high premiums because of chronic illnesses or who couldn't buy insurance at all.

[. . .]

A review of rates proposed by carriers in eight states shows the likely boundaries for the least-expensive and most costly plans on the exchanges. The lower boundary is particularly important because the government wants to attract healthy people to the exchanges, and they may choose to pay a penalty and take the risk of going without coverage if they believe they can't get an acceptable deal.

For a 40-year-old single nonsmoker—in the middle of the age range eligible for exchanges—a "bronze" plan covering about 60% of medical costs will be available for about $200 a month in most places, the proposals show.

[. . .]

The challenge for the law is that healthy 40-year-olds can typically get coverage for less today, especially if they are willing to accept fewer benefits or take on more costs themselves. Supporters of the law say tighter regulation on insurance practices gives consumers more protection and is worth the extra cost, but they have to persuade people who don't have an immediate need for health care of that. If only sick people buy into the new insurance pools, prices could shoot up.

Get ready to pay more for health care in a day and age in which individuals and families have to cut costs as much as possible because of job insecurity, lessened work hours, and plain old unemployment. It's not going to be a fun time.

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. 

Paging Claude Rains*

I read stories like this one, discussing European Union outrage that the National Security Agency might have been spying on EU offices, and naturally, I think of this:

 

Honestly, the notion that EU members didn't think that friendly governments might be spying on them, or that spying never goes on between friends, is more than a little laughable. If EU members are actually just learning about this phenomenon . . . well . . . I guess I now understand why the EU might be in a lot of trouble; naïveté is just killing it.

Of course, I am sure that this is just faux-shock and outrage on the part of EU members, many of whom have to know that (a) even friendly governments spy on one another; and (b) the espionage services of individual EU members likely spy on the United States as well.

*Yes, Rains's iconic performance was as Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca.  But I have a soft spot in my heart for his portrayal of Mr. Dryden.

“They Can't Take Away . . . Our FREEDOM!”

Via Professor Bainbridge, I see that the perpetually silly Sarah Palin is making noises about joining the also-perpetually silly Mark Levin in forming a new party--the "Freedom Party." Of course, as Professor Bainbridge notes, the choice of name is, well, unfortunate. But there is good news associated with this development; if Palin and Levin make good on their threat to leave the Republican party, they will increase my chances of staying in the party.

Which would be nice of them. After all, having to go through the trouble of changing party identification can be somewhat annoying.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Apologist for Tyranny

Good Sartre jokes aside, his reputation deserves to take a serious hit:

. . . starting in the mid-1940s, and increasingly over the next 10 years, Sartre begins to worship at another altar: the altar of Communism. This is an ideology that has notoriously little use for individual freedom; instead of human beings freely making themselves, it sees them acting out the roles imposed on them by the class struggle. In the mission statement for Les Temps Modernes, the magazine he launched in 1945, Sartre seems to reject any notion of artistic independence. The writer, he now believes, is always already committed to history, and has no choice but to take part in the political battles of his day. “The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverberations. As does his silence,” Sartre warns.

In the pages that follow, we witness the strange and, eventually, repellent spectacle of this tribune of freedom becoming an apologist for the worst kinds of oppression, so long as it comes waving the banner of liberation. A key text here is “Portrait of the Adventurer,” published in 1950 as the introduction to a book about writers who were also men of action, like T.E. Lawrence and Andre Malraux. Subversively, Sartre turns his piece into a rejection of precisely that type of human being, in favor of what he calls “the militant”—that is, the militant Communist, the party member. When he writes, “Rather than taking your ego from you, the Party gives it to you,” he means this as high praise: the militant extinguishes his individual personality and becomes a pure function of the class struggle. “He is never alone because he discovers himself through the others. He possesses neither depth nor secrets.” At the end of this hymn to soullessness, even Sartre himself seems to recoil: “Yet a socialist society in which future Lawrences would be radically impossible would strike me as sterile,” he confesses.

Eventually, Sartre wised up . . . kinda:

By 1968, the Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovakia left Sartre with no choice but to abandon his illusions about the U.S.S.R. “The Socialism That Came In From the Cold,” his essay on Czech culture under communism, is as clear-eyed an analysis as any dissident could offer. Yet even then, he condemns this socialism in the name of a potentially better one. By then, he has transferred his illusions about liberation to the Third World. In his famous introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he writes with unconcealed glee about the prospect of Algerians killing their former masters, which happen to be the French. At the bottom of much of Sartre’s politics, in fact, there lies a frank enjoyment of hatred, which also expresses itself in some of his polemics against enemies and former friends. That is why We Have Only this Life to Live ends up seeming less like an inspiration than an existential warning: a great intellect alone, it shows, does not make a great man.

 

A New Low in Police Overreaction

A University of Virginia student bought "bottled water, cookie dough and ice cream," and got approached by state Alcoholic Beverage Control in plainclothes, who thought that she was purchasing beer--apparently, the agents thought that the student was underage. One apparently pulled a gun and the student, unaware of who they were, tried to flee. They even went so far as to try to break the windows of her car when she tried to get away (wouldn't you have tried to get away if you didn't know who these people were?).

After finding out who the agents were, the student apologized, but that wasn't good enough and she was charged with three felonies and spent time in jail. Ironically enough, she apparently got arrested after calling 911 in order to report her encounter with the people who turned out to be Alcoholic Beverage Control agents. 

Here's what I'm wondering: Why were the agents in plainclothes? Why not wear uniforms to (a) identify oneself; and (b) deter underaged people who see the uniformed agents from buying beer? Here's something else I'm wondering: Will the agents be fired? I am betting the answer to that is "no," which of course would make this shocking story even more appalling.

A Much Needed History Lesson on DOMA

Many of the Democrats celebrating the Supreme Court's decision on DOMA would have you believe that they opposed the law from the outset. Zenon Evans performs a mitzvah by reminding all and sundry of what those Democrats desperately want all and sundry to forget:

. . . In response to the ruling, Bill Clinton tweeted that he is “grateful to all who fought tirelessly for this day.” He also released an official statement condemning the discriminatory nature of DOMA. What Clinton failed to mention was that he signed the act into law.

He wasn't alone in his silence. Other leading Democrats who supported it include Vice President Joe Biden, who voted for DOMA as a senator. Sen. Harry Reid (Nev.), who said, “The idea that allowing two loving, committed people to marry would have a negative impact on anyone else, or on our nation as a whole, has always struck me as absurd,” also forgot to note that he voted for DOMA. Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) released a statement praising the forward thinking of the Supreme Court. “The march towards equality... moved forward again today... The Supreme Court did the right thing here and helps us understand that the march to equality in America is unstoppable.” He made no mention of the fact that he, too, voted for the act and against "the march to equality." Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.) patted himself on the back: “As a member of Congress who signed the amicus brief urging this decision [to repeal DOMA], I am thrilled that the Supreme Court took a strong stand for marriage equality." Menendez saw no need to clarify that this was only after he voted for DOMA in the first place. Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) voiced his support yesterday saying, "I am glad that the court recognized that all American families deserve the same legal protections," but made no mention of why his point of view flipped.

As in so many such cases, it is as though some people believe that their past positions cannot be accurately Googled by others.

Remember Kelo v. City of New London?

If not, read Wikipedia, or better yet, read the actual decision.

Done? Lovely. Now read this. The barbs and sarcasm contained in the following excerpt are, of course, entirely justified:

Eventually, something will probably get built on the site. But in the meantime, it will have lain empty for many years, probably at least a decade in all. In addition to the financial and emotional costs imposed on the people who lost their homes, this hiatus ensures that the takings will be a net loss when it comes to promoting development for the city as well. It is actually quite common for economic development takings to end up destroying more development than they create.

Fortunately, the eight year wait was not a total loss. Feral cats have been making use of the land where Susette Kelo’s house once stood. But I suspect that the city could have built an even better home for the feral cats for a lot less than $80 million, and without condemning any private property.