By Richard Fernandez
The overthrow of Morsi in Egypt is bad news for the Muslim
Brotherhood. But is it good news for anyone? Austin Bay notes
that the Egyptian military is now obviously on top. But he is unsure whether it
will revert to its old Nasserite ways or become more inclusive. David Goldman (Spengler)
endorses Austin’s view that the army is back in the cards and adds that some
Islamists will come up on top to displace the Muslim Brotherhood, whom
the Saudis despised.
The reason the Saudi-backed boys will get a seat at the table is
simple. Only the kingdom has the money to save Egypt from imminent starvation.
The Egyptian military can hardly turn to Obama. Spengler notes, “Obama is all
talk and no money … the administration cannot squeeze meaningful sums out of
Congress for Egyptian aid. The only prospective rescuer with deep enough
pockets to keep Egypt from disintegrating is Saudi Arabia.”
He’s all turban and no camels. Spengler writes of the military:
There is only one reason the military might do a better job than
the Muslim Brotherhood or the liberal opposition, and that is because Saudi
Arabia and other Gulf states (besides tiny Qatar) might decide to provide
funding for a military regime that suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood, which the
Saudi regime rightly fears as a competitor to its medieval form of monarchy.
That is why Saudi aid to Egypt has been insignificant, while tiny Qatar has committed
$5 billion–nearly a fifth of its total foreign exchange reserves–to keep Egypt
afloat during the past year.
Egypt needs about $20 billion a year in external subsidies; a
smaller amount would forestall the worst effects of the economic crisis. With
$630 billion in foreign exchange reserves, Saudi Arabia is the only Arab
country with the resources to give Egypt help on the scale it requires. But the
Saudis will not subsidize their own prospective executioners. The Muslim
Brotherhood is a modern totalitarian political party; next to the Saudi royal
family, it looks like a meritocracy. For ambitious Saudis not born into the
ruling family, it offers an attractive alternative.
Lee Smith of Tablet
magazine examines the chances that the new Egyptian leaders will try to divert
popular discontent by making war on Israel. But he rightly notes that the
Egyptian army knows it will get its ass kicked. Its chances at returning
to economic power after such a defeat are diminished, and therefore a
diversionary war with Israel, while possible, is probably irrational. The only
thing keeping such a lunatic option on the table is the situation itself is
irrational.
The big international losers in recent events are probably Qatar,
the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Obama administration. The big winners are the
Egyptian army, Saudi Arabia, and, possibly, al-Qaeda. In a much re-Tweeted
post, Kirsten Powers wrote, “Obama on the wrong side of history twice in
Egypt.” Kori Schake at Foreign Policy
writes, “U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has achieved the hat
trick of alienating all factions in Egypt.”
Perhaps the most scathing critique comes from Josh Rogin and Eli Lake at the
Daily Beast. “Obama Offers a Revisionist History of
His Administration’s Approach to Egypt.” In other words, having lost in
history’s accounting, Obama is now resorting to the pathetic exercise of trying
to rewrite it.
But the most cruel cut of all comes from the New York Times, which
notes that while Shi’a fought against Sunni, Syria exploded into flames, Egypt
was riven by discord, and Lebanon was wracked by near civil war, the
administration focused its efforts on things like stopping apartment
construction in Israel:
The new secretary of state’s exertions — reminiscent of predecessors
like Henry A. Kissinger and James A. Baker III — have been met with the usual
mix of hope and skepticism. But with so much of the Middle East still
convulsing from the effects of the Arab Spring, Mr. Kerry’s efforts raise
questions about the Obama administration’s priorities at a time of renewed
regional unrest.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, once a stark symbol and source
of grievance in the Arab world, is now almost a sideshow in a Middle East
consumed by sectarian strife, economic misery and, in Egypt, a democratically
elected leader fighting for legitimacy with many of his people.
“The moment for this kind of diplomacy has passed,” said Robert
Blecher, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program of the
International Crisis Group. “He’s working with actors who have acted in this
movie before, and the script is built around the same elements. But the theater
is new; the region is a completely different place today.”
Administration officials no longer argue, as they did early in President
Obama’s first term, that ending the Israeli occupation and creating a
Palestinian state is the key to improving the standing of the United States in
the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now just one headache
among a multitude.
In his obsession with trivia, as exemplified by the arrest of a
Los Angeles filmmaker in the aftermath of the attack in Benghazi or the focus
on gay marriage in a domestic political landscape littered with the ruins of
his healthcare and economic policies, President Obama resembles nothing so much
as the fictional Captain Queeg.
Queeg, clicking his ball-bearings while hunting
down crewmen with their shirttails out and looking for missing punnets of
strawberries while the ship narrowly escapes danger after danger and nearly
founders in a typhoon, has come to typify the leader who, the crew belatedly
realize, is out of his depth. The Egyptians came to the same conclusion
about Morsi. And the NYT is very near to reaching the same realization about
you know who. Indeed the main difference between Obama and Morsi may be that
Obama hasn’t run out of money yet.
One group of people who have probably run out of luck are the
Egyptian Copts. The start of their persecution in recent times dates from the
advent of Nasserism and increased with the accession of the Muslim Brotherhood
which Obama so heartily endorsed. Now, with the return of the army and the
increased influence of Saudi Arabia, Obama’s influence may have diminished but
the Copts can hardly hope for better. As Peter Day writes in his chapter in Free the Copts!,
the Copts actually had a “special place” in pre-Nasser Egypt. The advent of
Nasserism was marked by the same strident media fanfare and mass demonstrations
that we have become familiar with. But mass upheavals do not always bring good
news.
Harvard scholar Leila Ahmed remembers the drumbeat of the
government-controlled media — “We are Arabs! We are Arabs!”– in Nasser’s
day. She noted that the Copts were Copts “precisely because they had refused to
convert to the religion of the Arabs and had refused, unlike us Muslims, to
intermarry with the Arabs.” They were, if you like, the Native Americans of
Egypt. And at a stroke Nasser redefined the nation by their exclusion.
But as the New York Times belatedly realized, the real
story of the modern Middle East is exactly that: the tale of minorities
struggling against authoritarian majoritarianism,
a story in which the saga of the Jews plays only a small part. It is the Copts,
Kurds, Druze, Maronites, Allwaites, Sunni and Shi’a (and perhaps even the
secularitists) — all in their way struggling to survive against the tyranny of
the majority — who provide the majority of the dramatis personae.
Not that many in academia would notice. The obsession of
Western intellectuals with the outdated tropes of the 1960s, as faded and
curled at the edges as the halftone portraits of Yasser Arafat and Edward Said, speaks volumes about what Josh Kraushaar of the National
Journal called Obama’s Crisis of Competence. “The White
House seems more comfortable stage-managing the news than dealing with the
uncomfortable crises that inevitably crop up.” And since its only competence is
at making speeches on a stage, you may not notice that the speech is not only
out of date, but from the last century altogether:
President Obama returned last night from a weeklong trip to
Africa, seeking to position himself as part of ailing Nelson Mandela’s legacy
and generating strategic photo-ops. On the other side of the continent, Egypt
is awash in revolution, with hundreds of thousands of protesters in Tahrir
Square railing against the American-backed president, with some chanting
slogans against the American passivity in the face of crisis. The Washington
Post editorialized Tuesday: “For months, as the Morsi government has taken
steps to consolidate power, quash critics and marginalize independent civil
society groups, President Obama and his top aides have been largely silent in
public. No effort was made to use the leverage of U.S. aid to compel a change
of policy.”
I have an idea. Find another video on YouTube to blame.
_____________________________________________________________
Richard Fernandez was an early joiner of PJ Media, and he is a longstanding
PJ Columnist.
Richard has been a software developer
for nearly 15 years. Before that, he worked in forestry, assisted in the
negotiations between Muslim rebels in the southern Philippines and the Cabinet,
organized tribespeople in the Philippines and played a role in the anti-Marcos
movement.
On his PJM blog, titled Belmont Club, Richard provides a
discussion of history and history in the making:
I write about current events and look
back at their antecedents. This usually focuses on politics, security affairs,
science and technology, and some social commentary. Ideologies of all kinds,
including religion, are very often the subject of commentary.
In every post he publishes, Richard
aims to start a discussion around a defined set of issues that never have clear
answers: “The ideal piece will create a ground of agreement but also
substantial room for debate, so that about 80 percent of the commenters agree
on the premises and a significant percentage can differ on the conclusions.”
When he’s not engaging people in
discussion about important issues, Richard likes to take long walks, find
shortcuts and explore little-used byways: “One day I hope to do an extended
tour focusing on the history of a landscape. That is a dream that is very
unlikely to come true. But come to think of it, most everything that actually
did come true in my life was even more improbable.”
Richard’s blog is available at http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/.Take
a few minutes now to read his latest entry, and share it with your friends.
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