The War in Egypt comes to Washignton - Peter Beinart, Newsweek - 10 July 2013.pdf

7/27/2019 The War in Egypt comes to Washignton - Peter Beinart, Newsweek - 10 July 2013.pdf

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THW R IN EGYPT COMES

T W SHINGTONThe left right ideological battle is b ckwith ali or nothing dogmas th t would doom Obama.

By Peter Beinart

EI Tantawy VII Mentor


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year ago, Egyptians elected Mohamed Morsi o theIslamist Muslim Brotherhood to be their president.Last week, after mass anti-Morsi protests, the armydeposed him and began shooting his supporters inthe streets. In response, two rival cliques o Washington commentators have championed broad,

all-encompassing, and mutually contradictory principles to guidethe Obama administration's response. Either one, i applied with unswerving conviction, would likely produce disaster.

It's a good moment to recall the advice George Kennan gave American foreign-policy makers in 1954: Be gardeners and not mechanics. Wise foreign policy requires mucking around in a country's soil,feeling around for what is rising up from the ground. The world is toomessy to conform to abstract principles and rigid rules.

The first principle being articulated in Beltway circles s that theUnited States should never tolerate coups. There is no ambigu-ity about what happened in Egypt on Wednesday, editorialized eWashington Post after Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the head o themilitary, announced Morsi's overthrow, a military coup against ademocratically elected government. Actually, there was a fair bit oambiguity: the coup was prompted by the largest popular uprisings inEgypt's history, and during his announcement Sisi surrounded himselfwith the country's top Muslim and Christian clerics and key secularand Islamist political leaders, thus displaying the very political inclusivity that Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood had spumed.

Still, the ost was right. The answer to Morsi 's perversion oEgyptian democracy should have been more democracy. Instead ocalling for a military takeover, the protesters should have focused onchecking the Muslim Brotherhood via legislative elections due thisyear or next. And while some Egyptian liberals worried that Morsi smanipulation o state power was making electoral remedies impossible, a military takeover is no remedy at all. First, because havingbeen licensed to seize power, there is little reason to believe the military will easily give it up . Second, because the many Egyptians whostill support the Muslim Brotherhood will now likely feel that i they


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Abdallah Dalsh Reuterst least 5 people have reportedly been killed in clashes some by police some by soldiers

by others.

want power, they too will have it to take it by force.But it is one thing to oppose Egypt's coup. It's quite another to

say that because as a matter of principle America opposes coups,it must always react the same way. There should be no ques-tion that under a law passed by Congress, explained the PostU.S. aid to Egypt-including the $1.3 billion annual grant to themilitary-must be suspended. It should be restored, the Post explains, only if a genuinely democratic transit ion is pursued in the

coming months. That means tolerance for all peaceful politicalforces, including the Muslim Brotherhood-whose leaders, including Mr. Morsi, should be immediately released. It means acceptance of free assembly and free media, including the Islamistbroadcasters that have been shut down. Any changes to the Constitution should be the result of a consensus among all political


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forces, without diktats by the military. And there must be a f i rmand short-timetable for new parliamentary and presidential elec-tions." The Obama administration must "insist."

Insist Why didn t Obama think of that? And what if Egypt snew rulers refuse? International relations can be inconvenient thatway. In 1979 the Carter administration stopped aiding anotherMuslim frenemy, Pakistan, because Congress had passed a lawrequiring the U.S. to withhold assistance from countries buildingnuclear weapons. Pakistan continued building, and in the 1980s,

when America needed Islamabad'shelp to resist the Soviet invasion ofAfghanistan, we restored aid. Then,in 1991, after the Soviets withdrew,American policymakers rememberedPakistan's nuclear transgressions andcut off aid again. Pakistan went righton building until 1998, when it testeda nuclear bomb. Then, three years lat-er, 9/11 hit, America needed Pakistanagain and began sending more aid.

Egypt is country wherespurning Americanultimatums boostspolitician s approval ratings. Pakistan, like Egypt, is a countrywhere spuming American ultima-

tums boosts a politician's approvalratings. A Gallup poll last year found that Egyptians were twiceas likely to oppose closer relations with the United States as tosupport them. Last July, when Hillary Clinton went to reopen theU.S. consulate in Alexandria, demonstrators pelted her motorcadewith tomatoes and shoes. And if the U.S. did suspend aid, Egyptcould probably find other suitors. When Morsi took his first tripoutside the Middle East last year, he journeyed not to America butto China, whose trade with Egypt now exceeds our own. The Sau-dis, who love the idea of a return to military rule, have reportedlypromised to replace any cash the U.S. withholds .

Besides, America s aid to Egypt isn t philanthropy. t buys theU.S. military priority access to the strategically important SuezCanal. t buys U.S. access to Egyptian airspace. And it preserves


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n. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will e a critical actor in the coming weeks.

Egypt s peace treaty with Israel. o understand how importantthat is, remember that Egypt was crucial to ending last fall s warbetween Israel and Hamas.

It s not as if the Post, and John McCain, who has also called forsuspending aid, are Ron Paul-esque isolationists happy to jeopardize America s imperial reach in order to avoid collusion with undemocratic regimes. o the contrary, they are hawks who demandthat America maintain, if not extend, its Middle Eastern hegemony.And yet they never publicly contemplate the possibility that, in aregion where American power is going down, not up, there mightbe a trade-off between preserving that hegemony and remainingmorally pure. It would be one thing if McCain and the Post s editors specified which tangible U.S. interests they would imperil so


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Khaled AFP Getty Imagessupporters facing increasing casualties will not be helped by imperial American thinking.

the U.S. can stand, consistently, against coups. Instead, in theirfealty to an abstract principle, they pretend it can be easily harmonized with the messy, unsatisfying world that actually exists.THE SAME day that the ost was demanding Obama base his Egyptpolicy on intolerance of coups, David Brooks in The New YorkTimes was arguing that Obama base his Egypt policy on intolerance of Islamists (or radical Islamists or political Is lam Brooks uses the terms interchangeably). t has become clear,Brooks writes, in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere-thatradical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government.Many have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets ... they lack the mental equipment to govern.

t would be hard to find a better example of the sweeping, decontextualized, 10,000-foot analysis that drove Kennan to distrac-


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tion. Brooks wants America to oppose Islamist rule, but he never bothers to define the term except in a circular way. (Islamistsare people who lack the mental equipment to govern. ) In truth,if Islamism connotes a desire to base one's political views on Islam, it comes in different, and sometimes mutually hostile, varieties. In Egypt, as Harvard Law School's Noah Feldman has pointedout, Morsi did not compromise with liberals who feared Egypt'snew Constitution was too theocratic. In Tunisia, by contrast, another Islamist leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, agreed with secular-

ists that the new Constitution shouldmake no mention of Sharia. Iran'sthuggish supreme leader, AyatollahAli Khamenei, is an Islamist-but so

We should admit that weare competitor in worldaffairs not the umpire.

is Mohammad Khatami, the reformistex-Iranian president who argued thatpolitical sovereignty should rest withthe people, not God's self-appointedemissaries on earth.

If Islamists aren't as monolithic asBrooks suggests, neither are they asdistinct from the more secular leaderswith whom they compete for power.Turkey's Islamist leader, Recep Tayy-

ip Erdogan, is clearly authoritarian. But to suggest that authoritarianism is something Islamists foisted on Turkey's political scenerequires ignoring the even more illiberal policies of the secular,military-dominated governments that preceded him. In the GazaStrip, Hamas is deeply repressive. But the secular, pro-WesternMahmoud Abbas doesn't tolerate crit icism well either. (Nor doesthe Israeli government, when it comes to Palestinian protest in theWest Bank.) And if Morsi s authoritarianism shows that Islamistslack the mental equipment to govern, many of his Egyptian crit

ics would say the same about the secular Hosni Mubarak, the manthey claim Morsi began to resemble. As one academic expert onEgypt puts it, Morsi is ruling through Mubarak's state, and adjusting it to size.


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EI Tantawy VII Mentordid ot compromise with liberals who feared Egypt s new Constitution was too theocratic

Brooks uses Islamist the way many hawks used communistand socialist during the Cold War: as a shorthand to determinewho is on America's side and who isn't without needing to knowmuch about the particulars of the country in question. t was ex-actly that mechanistic thinking that convinced American policy-makers that if Hanoi defeated Saigon, Vietnam would become anagent of Moscow and Beijing-despite the fact that communist ornot, the Vietnamese loathed Chinese domination, and that by the1960s China and the U.S.S.R. were on the brink of war.

Kennan, by contrast, believed that terms like communism andsocialism were often vessels into which national regimes and

movements poured their own particular interests and traditions. He


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Abdallah Dalsh Reutersdislike ofU S Ambassador to EgyptAnne Patterson belies Americas decline in influence

favored the Marshall Plan, which over conservative objections fun-neled money to European socialists-who often turned out to be themost effective opponents of Soviet power. And he pushed success-fully for the Truman administration to send economic, and then mil-itary, aid to Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, an avowed communist whowas resisting Soviet domination ofEastern Europe. America, Ken-nan argued, should not necessarily always [be] against the expan-sion of communism, and certainly not always against it to the samedegree in every area. t all depends on the circumstances. That 'swhat he meant by gardening. And it's the right way for Americanpolicymakers to think about Islamism too.s WHAT should America do in Egypt? First-and this was an ob-session of Cold War realists like Kennan, Walter Lippmann, andReinhold Niebuhr-we should admit that we are a competitor in


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Khaled AFP Getty ImagesJslamist as a shorthand to determine who is on America's side.

world affairs, not the umpire. That means acknowledging, contraGeorge W Bush, that our interests and our ideals do not entirelyalign. In a country as anti-Zionist, and even anti-Semitic, as Egypt,the more democratic foreign policy becomes, the less well Egypt speace treaty with Israel will fare . The U.S. must husband its limited political capital to ensure that Israeli-Egyptian peace endures.When it comes to Egyptian domestic affairs, we should support themost inclusive, competent, and tolerant government possible, recognizing that for the foreseeable future , Egypt s political transitionwill probably look more like post Cold War Russia than post ColdWar Poland. To that end, we should advise, cajole, even publiclyrebuke. But absent something truly horrifying like ethnic cleansingor genocide, we shouldn t issue ultimatums certainly not unilat-


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El Ghany Reutersis one thing to oppose Egypt s coup. t is quite another to say the U S should oppose all coups.

eral ones- unless we re prepared to rupture relations with a government that we need as much as it needs us.

And one more thing: we should work on our own democraticexample, as it s probably the most important thing we can offerthe brave, long-suffering Egyptians who keep crowding the streetsin pursuit of decent government. The United States is becominga broken society. The public has contempt for the political class,wrote none other than David Brooks a few years back. If we renot careful, people might start suggesting that our political elites

lack the mental equipment to govern, too. PETER BEIN RT is the editor of OpenZion.com and writes aboutdomestic politics and foreign policy atThe Daily Beast. He isalso an associate professor of journalism and political scienceat CUNY and author of The Crisis of Zionism.

The War in Egypt comes to Washignton - Peter Beinart, Newsweek - 10 July 2013.pdf

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