John McCain to the Rescue

President Obama’s Egypt policy is in shambles. Having supported Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood, Obama finds himself on the wrong side of history. He is seen in Egypt as the enemy of the people and the enemy of freedom.

Morsi did win an election—as did Adolph Hitler—but he governed as a despot.

Tim Sebastian explained it in The New York Times:

Morsi didn’t steal his election. Nor did the Muslim Brotherhood. They won each and every vote — both referendum and election — during the last two and a half years.

But to many Egyptians, none of those victories excuses the subsequent failures, excesses and abuses of power that came with the Morsi administration. Throughout his year-long rule Egyptians continued to be tortured in police cells. They saw their economy in free fall, the press under sustained attack and their society being re-engineered to an Islamic blueprint.

Hardly capital crimes, but reason enough in the eyes of the generals and many millions of Egyptians to bring a swift end to the country’s first free democratic experiment.

And the Morsi administration was systematically oppressing women. The Daily Mail tells the gruesome story:

Mervat El-Tallawy, a prominent Egyptian female politician, told The Mail on Sunday it was women who had suffered most under Morsi’s regime.

‘His party regard them as little more than chattel and sex slaves,’ says Ms El-Tallawy, chairwoman of the National Women’s Council.

She described the mob rapes as ‘sexual terrorism’ aimed at scaring women into a submissive role.

‘In February 2012, members of  the Shura Council, Egypt’s legislative body, blamed women for the increase in sexual assaults “because they put themselves in such circumstances’’,’ says Mrs El-Tallawy. ‘In doing so, they sent the signal that it is OK for a man to touch any woman in the street.

‘Morsi’s government moved to deny women the right to right to seek a divorce under Islam, supported female circumcision, sacked women in top government jobs and tried to lower the age of consent for girls to marry from 18 to nine.

‘His party is notoriously anti-women. Its members don’t see us as citizens, even though we make up nearly half the population. 

'They want to treat us like slaves whose role is to bear babies and serve the sexual needs of men. They have tried to take us from a modern, civilised and religiously tolerant country back into the dark ages.’

Why did the Obama administration support this regime? Why did American feminists not rise up to protest the Morsi regime?

It’s a dilemma for feminists? Which devil should they choose: the Muslim Brotherhood or the military?

Writing in The New Yorker, Amy Davidson excoriates David Brooks for saying that the Egyptian people might not be quite ready for democracy. And she warns against being seduced by military coups. She believes that when people are starving the problem  needs to be solved at the ballot box, Davidson can blithely gloss over the horrors that the Brothers are visiting on the Egyptian people. 

As always, American feminists and liberals save their fire for their real enemies, Republicans-- even faux Republicans like Brooks. When women are being brutally oppressed and when the only way to stop the repression is a military coup, they run screaming for the exits.

As has often been mentioned, here and elsewhere, the Morsi government brought misery and starvation to Egypt. Only the most ignorant humans believe that any people will console themselves by saying that, after all, an election is an election is an election.

Why does anyone believe that the Muslim Brothers will allow another election?

Now, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, the godfather of Islamic terrorist organizations like Hamas, is fighting back. It is murdering Christians and secular Muslims, sending squads around to rape women, and trying to incite a civil war.

Any fair appraisal would give the Obama foreign policy team failing grades.

And yet, who should come riding to the rescue, but Sen. John McCain. In 2008 McCain succeeded in making the junior senator from Illinois, one Barack Obama, look presidential. It was a difficult mission, but McCain was up to the task. He had already proved himself by ranking in the bottom 1% of his class at the Naval Academy.

As the Obama administration tries to reverse course and not look like it favors the Muslim Brothers over the Egyptian people, John McCain, after thinking “long and hard”—the notion of McCain thinking is risible—has come to the conclusion that a coup is a coup and that American policy should be to cease all aid to the Egyptian military.

The Hill reports:

"It was a coup and it was the second time in two and a half years that we have seen the military step in," McCain said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"Reluctantly I believe that we have to suspend aid until such time as there is a new constitution and a free and fair election,” McCain added.

The Arizona senator who has been a tough critic of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party, stressed that he was not excusing the deposed leader’s missteps in office.

“Morsi was a terrible president, their economy is in terrible shape thanks to their policies but the fact is the United States should not be supporting this coup. And it's a tough call," McCain added. 

Egypt is descending into civil war. The Obama administration is at a total loss. And what does John McCain do: he denounces the military effort as a coup and throws his moral support to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The dimwitted McCain believes that it will all be solved by a new constitution and free and fair elections. Does he not understand that Egypt got to where it is because it held free and fair elections? How many Egyptians need to starve or be imprisoned or have their lives ruined before McCain discovers that democracy is not a panacea.

The problem is Egypt is economic, not political. If McCain does not understand that, if he does not understand that the Morsi government would, given the chance, continue to starve people, and if he does not understand that winning an election does not give anyone the right to tyrannize his people—then John McCain should retire from the United States Senate. Enough is enough.

As long as the Republican Party keeps trotting out the superannuated John out McCain to speak on foreign policy, it will continue to be seen as the “stupid party.”