Most articles about the Egyptian coup have focused on the
conflict between Islam and democracy. They have analyzed the events by saying that the military was
forced to overthrow the government of Mohamed Morsi because he had tried to
institute an Islamist power grab.
Those who believe that liberal democracy is a panacea have been disappointed with the
postscript to the Arab Spring.
Then again, as I have been saying and as Fraser Nelson
points out in the London Telegraph today, the Arab world needs capitalism far
more than it needs democracy. One thing is certain, the Islamist governments
that have popped up around the Middle East are not going to promote capitalism.
David Brooks said it well in his column today:
It has
become clear — in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere — that radical
Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. Many have absolutist,
apocalyptic mind-sets. They have a strange fascination with a culture of death.
“Dying for the sake of God is more sublime than anything,” declared one speaker at a pro-Morsi rally in
Cairo on Tuesday.
So, perhaps we should not feel overly chagrined at the premature ending of the Morsi presidency.
The fall of Mohamed Morsi also exposes the errors of
conventional American wisdom about foreign policy.
Caroline Glick has never been fooled by anyone’s
conventional wisdom. Yesterday, she wrote:
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.
For those who are still tempted to see the Egyptian coup in
terms of a yearning for liberal democracy, David Goldman has, as always, tried
to show us the reality on the ground. The Egyptian people turned against the
Muslim Brotherhood because… they were starving.
Goldman had noted it previously and I have reported it on
this blog.
Yesterday, Goldman said:
Starvation
is the unstated subject of this week’s military coup. For the past several
months, the bottom half of Egypt’s population has had little to eat besides
government-subsidized bread, and now the bread supply is threatened by
a shortage of imported wheat. Despite $8 billion of aid from Qatar and smidgens
from Libya, Turkey, and others, Egypt is struggling to meet a financing gap of
perhaps $20 billion a year, made worse by the collapse of its major cash earner
— the tourist industry. Malnutrition is epidemic in the form of extreme protein
deficiency in a country where 40% of the adult population is already “stunted”
by poor diet, according to the World
Food Program. It is not that hard to get 14 million people into the
streets if there is nothing to eat at home.
Nearly
half of Egyptians are illiterate. Seventy percent of them live on the land, yet
the country imports half its food. Its only cash-earning industry, namely
tourism, is in ruins. Sixty years of military dictatorship have left it with
college graduates unfit for the world market, and a few t-shirt factories
turning Asian polyester into cut-rate exports. It cannot feed itself and it
cannot earn enough to feed itself, as I have explained in a series of recent
articles. Someone has to subsidize them, or a lot of them will starve. Unlike
Mexico, Egypt can’t ship its rural poor to industrial nations in the north.
By Goldman’s analysis, the Egyptian people turned to the
military because they knew that the Saudis would offer financial aid. As the
old saying goes… beggars can’t be choosy.
Egypt’s
people embraced the military because they remember that the military used to
feed them. In fact, the military probably can alleviate the food crisis, because — unlike the Muslim
Brotherhood– Egypt’s generals should be able to count on the support of
Saudi Arabia. Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz congratulated Egypt’s
military-appointed interim president on Wednesday night, while the United Arab
Emirates expressed “satisfaction” at the course of events.
Like Glick, Goldman recommends that we get over our belief
that we must honor the outcomes of all elections. The willingness of America’s
foreign policy elite to endorse the Muslim Brotherhood was unseemly, to the
point of being delusional.
Goldman explained:
No one
should mourn the Brotherhood, a totalitarian organization with a Nazi past and
an extreme anti-Semitic ideology.
The
notion that this band of Jew-hating jihadi thugs might become the vehicle for a
transition to a functioning Muslim democracy was perhaps the stupidest notion
to circulate in Washington in living memory.
Obviously, the Obama administration foreign policy team is
completely out of its depth. For having backed Morsi, it has lost its credibility with the
Egyptian people. In the absence of effective American leadership, the Saudis,
especially former ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, are now in
charge:
In the
Beltway, to be sure, the same folk on left and right who thought the “Arab
Spring” would usher in a golden era of Muslim democracy are wringing their
hands over the tragic fate of Egypt’s first democratically elected government.
These include Republicans as well as Democrats, whom I qualified as “Dumb
and Dumber” in a May 20 essay forTablet.
The sequel — call it “Dumb and Dumberer” — is still playing on CNN and Fox
News. No matter: the important matters are now in the competent hands of Prince
Bandar, whose judgment I prefer to that of John Kerry or Susan Rice or John
McCain any day of the week. The best-case scenario would be for the grown-ups
in the region to ignore the blandishments of the Obama administration as well
as the advice of the Republican establishment, and to do what they have to do
regardless.
Given the importance of the crisis in Egypt, President Obama
convened his National Security Council yesterday. Conspicuous by his absence
was Secretary of State John Kerry.
Caroline Glick emphasizes that while Egypt was burning John Kerry was indulging in yet another fruitless
effort to reconcile the Israelis and the Palestinians:
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.
It needs to be noted that while the Obama foreign policy
team was working on the Egypt crisis, Secretary of State John Kerry was not
there. He was in Nantucket on one of his yachts.
The Boston Herald reported a sighting:
Secretary
of State John Kerry is spending a sun-splashed Fourth of July on Nantucket,
even as a chaotic overthrow of the government rocks Egypt and continues to test
diplomatic relations in Washington.
Kerry,
who has a house and a yacht on the ritzy island getaway, was seen strolling
down Federal Street away from July Fourth festivities on Main Street, a source
told the Herald.
Some will say, with some justice, that it is better for John
Kerry to be on vacation. He can do far less damage on his yacht than he can in
the corridors of power.
Thanks to Barack Obama American influence in he world has
diminished. Like a ship without a captain, a world without a leader is heading
for trouble.
7 comments:
"Thanks to Barack Obama American influence in he world has diminished. Like a ship without a captain, a world without a leader is heading for trouble."
World leadership of the West by the current World Leader is generally in decline at this point after a major Global War/Macrodecision point.
It's pretty normal.
We should expect continuing American decline going forward, at least through Hillary's upcoming two terms as president.
In the current geopolitical constellations of Great Powers, we need to be focused primarily on economic development in China and watch what is happening there.
If they do not develop a significant model for internal development, then they will not be in a position to challenge the United States.
Stuart, we need analysis on the current Friedman article ASAP!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/opinion/friedman-egypts-revolution-part-ii.html?src=me&ref=general
JP, I see that article and where he says Morsi, substitute Obama--comes out much the same...
Ah, yes, democracy, the rallying cry of the feel-good people. Democracy... that neat, tidy enterprise. Democracy, that inconvenience to Obama and Supreme Court justices who can't wait out its messy machinations, preferring regulatory despotism and penumbras to following our national charter. Ahhhh... democracy!
Putting democracy in the Middle East is like giving roller skates to a toddler who just learned to walk. The spectacle of learning is not elegant, and sets the youngster up for failure. Brooks got it right... they're not ready, and we're fools for telling them they are, and that the recipe is a piece of cake.
No free markets, no middle class. No middle class, no stability. No stability, anarchy. The Middle East looks like anarchy. Do the math. A decadent ruling elite engorging itself with trillions in cash for natural resources (read: oil) will not be a breeding ground for classical liberalism.
Tip
I just read the Friedman article.... He neglects to point out that he was cheering on the Revolution in Tahrir Square a couple of years ago. And surely he is doing his best to exculpate the Obama administration... which had actively supported the Morsi administration. In some ways, it still does.
Friedman does mention that Egyptians are starving and are suffering regular blackouts. The economic situation has deteriorated to a point that is beyond human endurance... the reason is that the country is being run by an Islamist death cult.
Naturally, Friedman does not make note of the nature of the Brotherhood... he only points out that they were underground for so long that they did not know how to govern.
One of the problem with being an "anti" is that one almost never learns all of the things it takes to be a leader with the capability and capacity to govern. It should not surprise anyone that people like Obama, the Palestinians, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sandinistas, Hugo Chavez, et al would have trouble providing the leadership necessary to make a nation work efficiently for all of its citizens.
They almost never make the leap from being an "anti" because that is what got them there in the first place.
One sees the same thing in a large numbers of endeavors. It is almost never the person with the ideas, talent, et al that make these ideas successful.
@Dennis:
"One of the problem with being an "anti" is that one almost never learns all of the things it takes to be a leader with the capability and capacity to govern. It should not surprise anyone that people like Obama, the Palestinians, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sandinistas, Hugo Chavez, et al would have trouble providing the leadership necessary to make a nation work efficiently for all of its citizens.
They almost never make the leap from being an "anti" because that is what got them there in the first place.
One sees the same thing in a large numbers of endeavors. It is almost never the person with the ideas, talent, et al that make these ideas successful"
Yes, this tends to be a feature of opposition groups.
When you are formed around an opposition to something, you are basically defining yourself by that something in the first place.
It's kind of a standard trope of human nature.
Best to create your own group with the structure-values you want and simply ignore what you are opposing.
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