The New Egyptian Constitution

No one is paying very much attention to Egypt. That includes President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry. Now you know why Egypt’s situation is improving.

Happily for Egyptians, even Timesmen Friedman and Kristof have better ways to occupy their time. Again, less attention from those putative foreign policy wizards seems to be a goodthing.

You know and I know and everyone else should know that the liberal media and left leaning politicians are horrified at the fact that political and economic progress in Egypt should have come about as a result of a military coup.

Given a choice between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military, the Obama administration and its enablers have always preferred the ideologically fanatical Brothers to anything that resembles the martial culture of a military organization.

Every conservative’s favorite liberal, Kirsten Powers has the story. In her USA Today column she reports on recent events in Egypt:

Egypt made history over the weekend. For the first time, this ancient society has a constitution that protects the rights of women, bans religious discrimination and provides the framework for a government with more secular values. This stands in stark contrast to Egypt's previous constitutions.

The country's elections commission announced Saturday that the groundbreaking constitution was approved by 98.1% of voters. Presidential and parliamentary elections are slated to be held in the coming months. What should be a moment of celebration by Egypt's friends has instead invited withering criticism and calls to abandon this important U.S. ally at a critical moment in their history.

Obviously, the election results are a bit too good to be true. Powers adds, however, that the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters were boycotting the elections and that the turnout was comparable to that of the election that empowered Mohamed Morsi.

She notes:

The Washington Post editorial board recently blasted Egypt's "bogus democracy" for the constitution's alleged failure to sufficiently diminish the power of the military. They then demanded the U.S. cut off all aid. Secretary of State John Kerryinsinuated that the vote in favor of the constitution involved fraud, though none has been proven. His complaint ignores the Muslim Brotherhood's boycott of the referendum, which might explain the lack of opposition in the results as well as the lower-than-expected turnout. Thirty-nine percent of eligible voters came out; slightly more than the 33% who voted in the referendum for President Mohammed Morsi's 2012 constitution.

Amr Moussa, the president of the committee that drafted the new constitution, expressed frustration with how the historic nature of this referendum is being ignored in the West. He told me in an interview, "This is the first time that women have full political, social and economic rights and can hold all government positions. The right of belief is now absolute. The right to express yourself freely [is protected]. This is all new."

These rights are fundamental to democracy and were absent in the previous "democratic" Morsi constitution.

Dr. Mona Makram-Ebeid, a former member of Egypt's parliament and a professor at the American University in Cairo, told me, "Women are making history in Egypt. This referendum propelled women into the mainstream of political life. For the first time it says in the constitution there is equality between men and women. It condemns any violence against women, which includes domestic violence."

As always, it boggles the mind. Egypt affirms a constitution that gives women more rights than they ever had before. It votes for a constitution that guarantees the right to worship as you choose and to express yourself freely. And it votes for a constitution that takes steps to tamp down the epidemic of violence against women.

Left thinking politicians and media outlets are scandalized. They prefer an elected Mohamed Morsi, a candidate who would have done everything in his power to oppress free expression and women’s rights.

Yes, Powers continues, the new constitution gives more power to the military. And yet, as former Obama administration envoy Frank Wisner told Powers, the Egyptian people prefer order to chaos. They do not want to become like Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Obviously, the best way to accomplish these goals is to keep Secretary Kerry’s mind on other problems.

A Coup Is a Coup Is a Coup

This morning New Yorker editor David Remnick weighed in on the situation in Egypt. He declared, confidently:

There comes a point when a thing demands its proper name. A coup is a coup. A despot is a despot. And a massacre is a massacre. 

But, some things do not demand a proper name. Like, the Muslim Brotherhood. Remnick’s attitude toward the Brothers is mild when compared to his visceral hatred of the military.

The despots are conducting a massacre. The Brothers should be, in Remnick’s words, mistrusted:

You can mistrust the politics and the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood. You can point out that, during its year at the head of an elected government, it exploited its victory to embed its religious ideology and its goals as deeply as possible in the new constitution. Its views on women’s rights, its efforts to intimidate journalists, and attacks by its supporters on Coptic churches and Christian believers are just a few of its deplorable features. The history of the Brotherhood and of its impact in the Middle East inspires no admiration. But how does a military coup, along with the kidnapping of an elected President, and widespread, indiscriminate arrests, announce the resumption of democratic practice? Islamists make up roughly a third of the Egyptian population. The slaughter on the streets will surely radicalize many of them, and set back democratic development throughout the region.

Making the Muslim Brothers champions of “democratic development” takes more than your average, everyday blindness. Since the Brothers are sworn enemies of “democratic practice” one understands perfectly, even if Remnick does not, that suppressing them promotes democracy. Why should we worry about radicalizing the supporters of a radical terrorist organization?

We should try to undermine their support by suppressing them.

Note especially Remnick’s rhetoric. He talks about the Brotherhood “views” on women’s rights, as though all it had were opinions. What about the active abuse and harassment of women, what about the female genital mutilation, what about the wife beating that is countenanced by Sharia Law?

It’s not just about views.

Remnick finds the “attacks” by Brotherhood supporters on  Coptic Christians “deplorable,” but what about the murder of Coptic Christians.

Compare Remnick's milquetoast rhetoric with this article from the Huffington Post. It tells about recent Brotherhood attacks on Coptic Christians. We are not dealing with people who we might not trust; we are dealing with terrorist thugs committing pogroms. They were doing it more subtly before the coup; they are doing it more openly now.

This, from the Huffington Post:

After torching a Franciscan school, Islamists paraded three nuns on the streets like "prisoners of war" before a Muslim woman offered them refuge. Two other women working at the school were sexually harassed and abused as they fought their way through a mob.

In the four days since security forces cleared two sit-in camps by supporters of Egypt's ousted president, Islamists have attacked dozens of Coptic churches along with homes and businesses owned by the Christian minority. The campaign of intimidation appears to be a warning to Christians outside Cairo to stand down from political activism.

Christians have long suffered from discrimination and violence in Muslim majority Egypt, where they make up 10 percent of the population of 90 million. Attacks increased after the Islamists rose to power in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that drove Hosni Mubarak from power, emboldening extremists. But Christians have come further under fire since President Mohammed Morsi was ousted on July 3, sparking a wave of Islamist anger led by Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.

Nearly 40 churches have been looted and torched, while 23 others have been attacked and heavily damaged since Wednesday, when chaos erupted after Egypt's military-backed interim administration moved in to clear two camps packed with protesters calling for Morsi's reinstatement, killing scores of protesters and sparking deadly clashes nationwide.

What Now, Egypt?

Egypt’s problems are economic, not political.

That might explain why so much of the debate over the military takeover of the Egyptian government concerns the restoration of democracy. Given the opportunity to obscure the issues, politicians and pundits have risen to the occasion.

The Egyptian people have largely supported the military take-over of the government and apparently support the military’s suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. After all, they were starving. The country was running out of food. It was running out of energy. It was running out of currency reserves. It’s easy to stand on gauzy principles when you have enough to eat. When you don’t, your priorities change.

If you ask why the young men of Egypt and much of the Middle East are so willing to fight and die for a cause, the answer has more to do with the economy than politics.

David Goldman explains:

Today’s Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims have grim future prospects. The world economy has left them behind, and they cannot catch up. Egypt was at the threshold of starvation and economic collapse when the military intervened, bringing in subsidies from the Gulf monarchies. The young men of the Middle East have less to lose, perhaps, than any generation in any country in modern times. As we observe in Syria, large numbers of them will fight to the death.

While we applaud the Obama administration for not jumping on the bandwagon calling for the suspension of all aid to Egypt, the Middle East is still suffering from the administration’s general ineptitude. After all, our government has been trying to persuade the Egyptian generals to include the Brotherhood in a new government.

Evidently, it is not going to happen. More evidently, it is not desirable.

Goldman reports the bad news:

America’s credibility in the Middle East, thanks to the delusions of both parties, is broken, and it cannot be repaired within the time frame required to forestall the next stage of violence. Egypt’s military and its Saudi backers are aghast at American stupidity. Israel is frustrated by America’s inability to understand that Egypt’s military is committed to upholding the peace treaty with Israel while the Muslim Brotherhood wants war. Both Israel and the Gulf States observe the utter fecklessness of Washington’s efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Andrew McCarthy recommends, as he often has, that we cease trying to understand events in Egypt through our own values.

In his words:

But to break Spring Fever, we must finally stop projecting our values on other cultures as if they were “universal,” to borrow the U.N.’s supercilious claim. The Muslim Middle East is part of a different civilization and does not share our core beliefs. Adherent to supremacist Islam, it rejects equality under the law (the rights of non-Muslims are inferior to those of Muslims, and those of women to those of men). In Muslim countries, religious minorities are systematically oppressed and persecuted. The sovereign is deemed to be Allah, acting through the Muslim ruler or caliph. There are no “constituents” to “represent”; the people are subjects who owe the caliph obedience and whose only legitimate expectation of the caliph is his fidelity to sharia.

McCarthy is saying that as long as the Muslim Brotherhood is part of the political process there will be no democracy and no freedom. Surely, there will be no economic freedom.

Writing in The New York Times, Georgetown professor Charles Kupchan also recommends that our government change course on Egypt. He wants us to give up the notion that we should respect the results of the election that made Mohamed Morsi president. True stability is more important than empty democratic gestures:

Rather than cajoling Cairo to hold elections and threatening to suspend aid if it does not, Washington should press the current leadership to adhere to clear standards of responsible governance, including ending the violence and political repression, restoring the basic functions of the state, facilitating economic recovery, countering militant extremists and keeping the peace with Israel. At this fragile moment in Egypt’s political awakening, the performance of its government will be a more important determinant of its legitimacy and durability than whether it won an election.

Clearly, the key is economic recovery.

Can Egypt’s military rules engineer an economic recovery? Can they bring free enterprise to the country and provide a better future for the young people of Egypt.

One has good reason to be doubtful.

In many ways, the question involves Israel. It’s not about relations with Israel or respect for a peace treaty. The more important point is whether Egypt can initiate economic reforms that would in any way resemble the example that Israel has set.

For decades now Muslims throughout the Middle East have blamed their failures on Israel. This has required them to reject any and all reforms that would make their nations more like the Jewish state. The Muslim Brotherhood in particular would rather starve the Egyptian people than do business with Israel. Or worse, to become more like Israel.

While we see democracy as an ideal, Egyptians are more likely to see it as the Israeli way. While we see free enterprise as the road to prosperity, Egyptians are more likely to associate it with Israel.

For now, Egypt’s new military rulers have been working with Israel to tamp down the terrorist presence in Sinai.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Israel and Egypt are quietly cooperating to quell Islamist militants along their border, Western officials say, a sensitive relationship illuminated by a deadly Israeli drone strike late last week inside Egyptian territory.

Israel's intervention in the Sinai Peninsula—which Egyptian officials denied, and which Israeli officials neither confirmed nor denied—would be the clearest manifestation of the high-level interaction between Israeli and Egyptian military and intelligence chiefs, according to the Western officials. Such cooperation between the U.S. allies has increased since last month's ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, these officials say.

Perhaps it’s a marriage of convenience, a political arrangement, but surely it is better than the situation the prevailed before the “coup.”

Making Sense of Egypt

As Egypt descends into chaos Western governments have been toning down the rhetoric. They has left it to the media to open the war for international public opinion.

Many commentators, on the left and the right, have chosen to portray the Muslim Brothers as peaceful protesters who have suffered the heavy hand of military repression. From their perspective, within the mythos that they use to interpret history, right wing, fascistic military organizations are the enemy of people’s legitimate aspirations for democracy and freedom.

The New York Times editorialized this morning:

With yet another blood bath in the streets of Cairo on Wednesday, Egypt’s ruling generals have demonstrated beyond any lingering doubt that they have no aptitude for, and apparently little interest in, guiding their country back to democracy. On the contrary, the political obtuseness of Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt’s de facto leader, and the brutal repression he has unleashed now threaten to produce the worst of all possible outcomes to an already inflamed situation: a murderous civil war.

The Guardian compared the Muslim Brotherhood to the pro-democracy protesters who occupied Tienanmen Square two decades ago:

The bloodshed caused by interior ministry troops opening fire with shotguns, machine guns and rooftop snipers on largely peaceful sit-ins took its first major political casualty on Wednesday evening. The leading liberal who had supported the military coup, Mohamed El Baradei, resigned as acting vice-president. The streets around Rabaah al-Adawiya became Egypt's Tiananmen Square.

The view is not limited to those on the left. Writing in National Review Daveed Gartenstein-Ross sounds a similar tone:

The Egyptian military’s slaughter of hundreds of protesters on Wednesday leaves the United States with a single clear, albeit difficult, course of action: condition future aid to Egypt on a series of immediate reforms, and stop providing it if these conditions aren’t satisfied. …

Whatever one thinks of the Brotherhood — and I’m extremely critical of it — the status quo helps nobody. The dead protesters did not deserve to be killed. The moral costs for the U.S. are too high; and from a pragmatic perspective, the country’s image is further damaged in the region because it’s associated with the present atrocities. The mass killings are likely to radicalize the opposition, and predictions that the Brotherhood or significant factions therein could return to anti-government violence look more prescient each day. And al-Qaeda’s narrative is furthered, as Ayman al-Zawahiri’s dark predictions about Egyptian politics seem to be proven correct.

His policy prescription amounts to a call for the Obama administration to side with the Muslim Brotherhood:

Instead, the U.S. should offer a firm and concrete ultimatum that future aid is conditioned on Egypt’s undertaking a series of changes. For starters, the Egyptian regime should unequivocally apologize for the slaughter of protesters; the officers who ordered Wednesday’s massacre should be held to account and court-martialed; and there should be no further willful mass killings. If Egypt doesn’t comply, 100 percent of the U.S.’s military aid should be suspended.

Gartenstein-Ross failed to notice that administration sympathy for the Brotherhood contributed to the crisis.

National Journal’s Michael Hirsh adds what has become a standard talking point of those who prefer not to fight terrorists. In his view cracking down on terrorists only produces more terrorists:

As the Egyptian military consolidates control by murdering pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters and declaring a state of emergency, we may be witnessing the most dangerous potential for Arab radicalization since the two Palestinian intifadas.

Hirsh seems to believe that we have now  lost the moral high ground and that democracy has suffered a grievous defeat:

Suddenly, in one awful day, the exercise of the democratic rights and ideals that are so dear to America's self-image—and which have formed the heart of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War—were rendered all but irrelevant to many Arabs, especially because of Washington's mild response. Apart from a few dissenters such as ElBaradei, the once-inspiring secularists who massed in Tahrir Square to oust Hosni Mubarak have now repudiated those democratic rights and values by continuing to support the bloody crackdown. And while the Obama administration issued a rote condemnation, the lack of any more dramatic response continues to fritter away what little moral authority America has left.

By this reasoning, we need to assert our moral authority by throwing our moral support behind the murderous thugs of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ones who responded to the military assault by burning down Coptic Churches.

The myth of  rebellion against oppressive police force is so compelling that many thinkers have not considered that the Brotherhood wanted a violent confrontation in order to portray itself as an innocent victim, to better to gain moral support and financial aid from the West.

In The New Yorker Peter Hessler reports on conversations he had with Egyptians. He helps to put the situation into perspective:

On Tuesday, when I telephoned a good friend from Cairo, the situation was still peaceful, but he insisted that the military would act within the next two days. He had no inside information—just a sense from the mood on the street. “The Army feels pressure from the people,” he said. “People in Cairo want the Army to do something. They’re saying that the army seems weak if it can’t get rid of the sit-ins.” This morning, after the death toll rose into the hundreds, and the interim government declared a state of emergency, I called my friend again. “Now that we’re in a state of emergency, the police and the army can do whatever they want,” he said. He expected that the majority of Egyptians would approve of this course of action, and blame the Brotherhood for resisting security forces. “The Brotherhood are losing every bit of popular support they once had,” he said. “Nobody is happy with them. There isn’t the least bit of sympathy for them. It’s like dogs dying in the street. Nobody cares.”

Even though the Brotherhood had no idea of how to govern, Hessler says, it was adept at manipulating the foreign media:

Their approach to governance seemed abstract and theoretical—for a group with a reputation for grassroots organizing, the Brotherhood was surprisingly out of touch with what was actually happening in Egypt. This quality has only worsened since Morsi’s ouster. Over the past month and a half, the Brotherhood’s main strategy has been to appeal to the foreign press and diplomatic corps. In some ways, this has been effective—the organization clearly has the moral high ground, given that its elected government was removed in a military coup, and that its leader is being held incommunicado. But it has become dangerously isolated from the main currents of Egyptian society, and its tactic of disrupting Cairo traffic has created even more enemies in the capital.

Certainly, Hessler does not sympathize with the military. Yet, he closes his column with a very telling remark from an Egyptian engineer:

“We’re just like football fans here,” an engineer named Mohamed Latif told me, in a village called El-Araba. “When somebody scores, we cheer. But it doesn’t matter. Do you really think that anything we do here matters? Why do you want to talk to us? I voted for Morsi, and I prayed for him, but he failed. I’m against what happened. We should have kept him as an honorary figure. We could have given the power to the Army and others, but left Morsi as the President in name.”

I asked him if he believed that the coup had been a mistake. “No,” he said. “He failed. I won’t vote for them again. I don’t want democracy.” He continued, “Does China have democracy? How is its economy doing? I don’t care about democracy and freedom.”

People who feel that they cannot have both free enterprise and free elections, but who have to choose one, will invariably choose free enterprise. We like to think that the American way is a beacon to the world’s people, but increasingly the Chinese way is taking over that role. And it’s not because we have lost the moral high ground.

Jonathan Tobin offers a more realistic perspective on the situation on the Commentary Contentions blog:

But the notion that the Brotherhood is the innocent victim of a nasty junta seeking to bring back Mubarak-era authoritarianism is only half right. Though the military government is an unsavory partner for the United States, no one should be under any illusions about the Brotherhood or why the majority of Egyptians (who went to the streets in their millions to support a coup) probably approve of the military’s actions.

Proof of the true nature of the Brotherhood was available for those who read accounts in the last weeks of life at their Cairo encampments that were policed by Islamist thugs with clubs and other weapons. Brotherhood gunmen fought the police in pitched battles. Non-violent civil disobedience isn’t in the Brotherhood playbook. Even more damning was the Brotherhood response elsewhere in Egypt. As the International Business Times reports:

Supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi have attacked churches in Dilga, Menya and Sohag after government security forces backed by armored cars and bulldozers stormed protest camps outside Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque.

The Churches of Abraham and the Virgin Mary in Menya were burning after Morsi supporters set fire to the outside of the building exteriors and smashed through doors. … Muslim Brotherhood members also threw firebombs at Mar Gergiss church in Sohag, a city with a large community of Coptic Christians who represents up to 10 percent of Egypt’s 84 million people, causing it to burn down, the official MENA news agency said. Protesters threw Molotov cocktails at the Bon Pasteur Catholic Church and Monastery in Suez, setting it ablaze and breaking windows.

Tobin concludes:

If the U.S. seeks to cripple the military, they won’t be helping the cause of democracy. The Brotherhood may have used a seemingly democratic process to take power in 2012, but they would never have peacefully relinquished it or allowed their opponents to stop them from imposing their will on every aspect of Egyptian society. As difficult as it may be for some high-minded Americans to understand, in this case it is the military and not the protesters in Cairo who are seeking to stop tyranny. Though the military is an unattractive ally, anyone seeking to cut off vital U.S. aid to Egypt should remember that the only alternative to it is the party that is currently burning churches.

And David Goldman offers this analogy:

Suppose the German military had overthrown the democratically-elected leader of Germany and massacred his loyal followers, say, in 1936? The world, presumably, would have condemned the blatant use of force against an elected leader even if, hypothetically, a third of the German population already had taken to the streets to demand Hitler’s ouster.  The Muslim Brothers are Nazis bearing a crescent rather than a swastika.

Goldman is being slightly naïve here. If it had happened that the German military had overthrown the elected leader of Germany in 1936, most of the news media would, in the name of liberty and democracy, have supported them. On the grounds that we had to occupy the moral high ground.

They would have argued that we need to respect the outcome of a democratic process and that, aside from a few restrictions on Jewish rights and an occasional pogrom, the National Socialists were not such a bad bunch.

Egypt Explodes

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen offered the best comment on today’s events in Egypt. As you know, the military has launched a violent crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood protesters.

To which Cohen tweeted:

The Obama Administration's #Egypt policy has been a complete shambles. Will be a case study in diplomatic ineptitude.

Few will notice it, so it needs to be said repeatedly, but the Obama administration decision to favor the Muslim Brotherhood has directly led to this catastrophe. I am sure that the scenes of today's violence will look good on Hillary Clinton’s resume.

To be fair and balanced, shame on John McCain and Lindsey Graham for doing the Obama administration’s diplomatic dirty work in Cairo. How did that one work out, guys?

The Economist reports on the events:

IT IS hard to imagine a more catastrophic outcome to the six-week stand-off that has pitted supporters of the ousted Islamist president, Muhammad Morsi, against the government installed by an army-led coup. At 7am on August 14th, Egyptian security forces took action to break up two large sit-ins in the capital, Cairo. One of the protests, near Cairo University, was quickly dispersed, but the larger one, around the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in the district of Nasr City, remained under siege at midday, with thousands of Mr Morsi’s backers trapped inside, amid scenes of mayhem and a mounting toll of casualties. 

  

Serious unrest has spread to other parts of Cairo and further afield, with pro-Morsi mobs mounting revenge attacks against police stations, government buildings, churches and Christian-owned property. Train services have been suspended nationwide, and main roads cut. Cairo’s stock market has closed early after clocking losses equivalent to $4.6 billion.

And also,

In the event, however, the security forces appear to have used a full panoply of force, launching surprise assaults on both protests with tear gas fired from helicopters, buckshot, sniper fire and automatic weapons. Dispersed protesters from Cairo University, and thousands of Brotherhood supporters who attempted to join the besieged Nasr City camp, clashed with police throughout the day. The damage elsewhere in Egypt included the torching of at least six churches south of Cairo, and prominent government buildings in Alexandria, Suez and Port Said.

As the clashes continue and spread, it seems likely that the government will be obliged to impose martial law, and perhaps a curfew on Cairo’s 18m people. The country remains starkly polarised. A likely majority of ordinary Egyptians support the army-backed regime, and were in favour of breaking up the Brotherhood’s protests. But the scale of unrest and the depth of the country’s wounds are a grim omen for the future.

The New York Times also has a good report here.

For what it’s worth, and with deep humility, I recall a prediction that I made on this blog in February, 2011… that is, at the onset of the Arab Spring.

You may recall that pundits and prognosticators were looking for the right historical analogy for what a future Egypt might look like. I summarized some of them in the linked post.

To my knowledge, I was alone in predicting that the situation in Egypt had the most in common with what happened in Algeria in the early 1990s.

To burnish my reputation as a prophet, I quote my remarks from that time:

I am thinking of Algeria in 1991. You may recall that Algeria held elections in 1991. After the first round of voting it appeared that the Islamic Salvation Front-- (DNI James Clapper notwithstanding, the ISF is no more secular and peaceable than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood)-- would attain a sufficient majority in the second round of voting to proclaim Algeria an Islamic state.

This caused the Algerian military to cancel the elections, declare a state of emergency, and take power in a coup. This led to a civil war that has raged in Algeria for the past twenty years. Apparently, military authorities have just lifted the state of emergency that they had imposed in 1991.

Managing the Chaos in Egypt and Syria

From the beginning of the Arab Spring I have relied on David Goldman to provide background analysis. Had we not been reading his columns we might have been fooled into thinking that it was all a struggle between political freedom and tyranny.

Or we might have imagined that it would all be solved if the Israelis and the Palestinians signed a peace treaty.

Goldman has kept us grounded in the economic basis for the rebellion in Egypt and the ongoing civil war in Syria.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he is anything but optimistic:

Half a century of socialist mismanagement has left the two Arab states unable to meet the basic needs of their people, with economies so damaged that they may be past the point of recovery in our lifetimes.

On Egypt, he writes:

Of Egypt's 90 million people, 70% live on the land. Yet the country produces barely half of Egyptians' total caloric consumption. The poorer half of the population survives on subsidized food imports that stretch a budget deficit close to a sixth of the country's GDP, about double the ratio in Greece. With the global rise in food prices, Egypt's trade deficit careened out of control to $25 billion in 2010, up from $10 billion in 2006, well before the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

The future does not look very bright either:

Egyptians are ill-prepared for the modern world economy. Forty-five percent are illiterate. Nearly all married Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation. One-third of marriages are between cousins, a hallmark of tribal society. Only half of the 51 million Egyptians between the ages of 15 and 64 are counted in the government's measure of the labor force. If Egypt counted its people the way the U.S. does, its unemployment rate would be well over 40% instead of the official 13% rate. Nearly one-third of college-age Egyptians register for university but only half graduate, and few who do are qualified for employment in the 21st century.

That is the tragic outcome of 60 years of economic policies designed for political control rather than productivity.

Similarly, Goldman explains, economic mismanagement laid the groundwork for the current civil war in Syria:

In Syria, the government's incompetent water management—exacerbated by drought beginning in 2006—ruined millions of farmers before the May 2011 rebellion. The collapse of Syrian agriculture didn't create the country's ethnic and religious fault lines, but it did leave millions landless, many of them available and ready to fight.

In particular:

Since 1988, Bashar Assad's regime misdirected Syria's scarce water resources toward wheat and cotton irrigation in pursuit of socialist self-sufficiency. It didn't pan out—and when drought hit seven years ago, the country began to run out of water. Illegal wells have depleted the underground water table. Three million Syrian farmers (out of a total 20 million population) were pauperized, and hundreds of thousands left their farms for tent camps on the outskirts of Syrian cities.

Unfortunately, Goldman does not see an easy or quick way out for either nation. What then can America do? Very little, but not nothing:

It may not be within America's power to reverse their free falls; the best scenario for the U.S. is to manage the chaos as best it can.

Tom Friedman, Still Wrong About Egypt

In the 1970s Tom Friedman attended the American University in Cairo. Apparently, he did not learn very much when he was there, because he continues to misunderstand what is going on in Egypt.

By now, everyone, including The New York Times reporters understands how a failed economy created the conditions that led to the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood. Friedman, however, continues to read the events in terms of his own democracy narrative.

When the Mubarak regime fell Friedman was camped out in Tahrir Square breathing the fresh air of a new democracy. For all his vaunted wisdom he did not see that Egypt was about to become a theocratic hellhole, ruled by a fascist political party whose goal was to impose itself on all Egyptians.

Like many left-thinking people, Friedman is unhappy with the military coup. He does not seem to know that the overthrow of the Morsi regime brought a quick end to Egypt’s misery. Instead, he makes this jaw-dropping remark:

But in the Arab world’s long transition to democracy, something valuable was lost when the military ousted Morsi’s government and did not wait for the Egyptian people to do it in October’s parliamentary elections or the presidential elections three years down the road. It gives the Muslim Brothers a perfect excuse not to reflect on their mistakes and change, which is an essential ingredient for Egypt to build a stable political center.

This is ignorant, even by Friedman standards. Why did he not notice that something valuable was gained—like food and fuel?

But, wherever did Friedman get the idea that theocratic fanatics like the Muslim Brothers have any interest in engaging in pragmatic reasoning? Their reason for being is precisely the rejection of all compromise with a profane world. He must be the only living soul who believes that Morsi would have reflected on his failure and moved toward more liberal democratic and capitalist values.

And where did Friedman ever get the idea that the Brothers could be part of the political center? Fascist political movements do not move naturally toward the political center.

Why does Friedman imagine that future elections would have been fair? Doesn’t he know that the Islamic Republic of Iran has had many “free” elections, but that these elections have not made a dent in the power of the mullahs?

Now, Friedman is calling for national reconciliation and hopes that the month of Ramadan will inspire everyone in Egypt to embrace it.

In his words:

 The Muslim holy month of Ramadan starts this week, and it can’t come too soon. One can only hope that the traditional time for getting family and friends together will provide a moment for all the actors in Egypt to reflect on how badly they’ve behaved — all sides — and opt for the only sensible pathway forward: national reconciliation.

Note how Friedman draws a moral equivalence between the Muslim Brothers, the military that overthrew them and the democratic activists who opposed both. Given his puerile sensibility, Friedman can do no better than to tax all Egyptians with bad behavior. It sounds like he is talking about unruly children and believes that Ramadan will give them all a needed time out.

By failing to see the Brothers for what they are Friedman conjures an image where the practice of Islam is going to promote reconciliation between the warring camps.

Yet, a religion that demands submission and that extends its grasp through holy war can hardly be expected to provide the groundwork for reconciliation. When exactly did radical Islamists start believing in the virtue of reconciling with, say, Christians?

It is sad to reflect that in serious intellectual circles this passes for intelligent foreign policy analysis.

Happily, a day after Friedman phoned in his latest piece of sloppy thinking, the New York Times laid out the real issues in Egypt. Obviously, much of the information contained therein has been available to those who cared to pay attention.

Most importantly, the Times reported that today, after the overthrow of the Morsi regime, everyday life was returning to normal for the average Egyptian.

Where Friedman sees hatred, the Times sees progress:

The streets seethe with protests and government ministers are on the run or in jail, but since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi, life has somehow gotten better for many people across Egypt: Gas lines have disappeared, power cuts have stopped and the police have returned to the street.

As for the interpretation, the Times offers that institutions loyal to Mubarak and Egyptian financial interests rejected the Morsi administration and refused to do their jobs. This silent rebellion prepared the coup:

Working behind the scenes, members of the old establishment, some of them close to Mr. Mubarak and the country’s top generals, also helped finance, advise and organize those determined to topple the Islamist leadership, including Naguib Sawiris, a billionaire and an outspoken foe of the Brotherhood; Tahani El-Gebali, a former judge on the Supreme Constitutional Court who is close to the ruling generals; and Shawki al-Sayed, a legal adviser to Ahmed Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, who lost the presidential race to Mr. Morsi.

But it is the police returning to the streets that offers the most blatant sign that the institutions once loyal to Mr. Mubarak held back while Mr. Morsi was in power. Throughout his one-year tenure, Mr. Morsi struggled to appease the police, even alienating his own supporters rather than trying to overhaul the Interior Ministry. But as crime increased and traffic clogged roads — undermining not only the quality of life, but the economy — the police refused to deploy fully.

Until now.

White-clad officers have returned to Cairo’s streets, and security forces — widely despised before and after the revolution — intervened with tear gas and shotguns against Islamists during widespread street clashes last week, leading anti-Morsi rioters to laud them as heroes. Posters have gone up around town showing a police officer surrounded by smiling children over the words “Your security is our mission, your safety our goal.”

Of course, there are other cogent interpretations. Many Egyptians believed that Morsi was, besides being a tyrant, fundamentally incompetent and was responsible for his own problems. And, as soon as the military took over, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sent massive amounts of money to Egypt

The Times offers us the alternate point of view:

…  supporters of the interim government said the improvements in recent days were a reflection of Mr. Morsi’s incompetence, not a conspiracy. State news media said energy shortages occurred because consumers bought extra fuel out of fear, which appeared to evaporate after Mr. Morsi’s fall. On Wednesday, Al Ahram, the flagship newspaper, said the energy grid had had a surplus in the past week for the first time in months, thanks to “energy-saving measures by the public.”

“I feel like Egypt is back,” Ayman Abdel-Hakam, a criminal court judge from a Cairo suburb, said after waiting only a few minutes to fill up his car at a downtown gas station. He accused Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood of trying to seize all state power and accused them of creating the fuel crisis by exporting gasoline to Hamas, the militant Islamic group in the Gaza Strip.

“We had a disease, and we got rid of it,” Mr. Abdel-Hakam said.

One is not surprised that supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood would believe that irredentist elements of the Mubarak regime would have sabotaged its best efforts.  One might look at the situation and say that these elements understood what the Muslim Brotherhood was about and chose to engage a silent rebellion against tyranny.

Why is it that a rebellion against Mubarak was a blow for liberty while a rebellion against Mohamed Morsi is seen as an unjust blow against democracy?

As Egypt Burns ...

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.

Winners and Losers in Egypt

It’s too soon to say who won the latest showdown between the Egyptian people and Islamic fundamentalism, but we know who lost.

We do not know whether Egypt’s new rulers will put it on the road to liberal democracy, or better, whether they will promote free enterprise, but we do know that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE are cheering the military coup in Egypt. They, as opposed to the Obama administration, know what the Muslim Brotherhood is really about.

Today, as the new rulers of Egypt round up leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Obama administration has again been shown to be inept and incompetent.

Jonathan Tobin offered a concise analysis on the Commentary Contentions blog:

The end of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt is a blow to the cause of radical Islam. The rise of the Brotherhood and the now deposed President Mohamed Morsi was a disaster for Egypt as well as for the West. Had Morsi and his party been left in place to continue their drive to impose their Islamist vision on the world’s most populous Arab country it might have been impossible to depose them, thus locking Egypt into the same nightmare scenario of theocratic tyranny that we have seen unfold in Iran in the last generation.

Tobin explainedthat the Obama administration, having pinned its hopes and illusions on the Muslim Brotherhood, had told the Egyptian Army not to intervene. Happily for Egypt, the Army ignored the earnest entreaties of our incompetent president.

Tobin wrote:

The even better news is that the Egyptian Army didn’t listen to the Obama administration when it asked them not to launch what is, for all intents and purposes, a military coup that toppled a democratically elected government. The embrace of Morsi and the Brotherhood by President Obama and his foreign policy over the last year has further poisoned Egyptian public opinion against the United States as well as strengthened the confidence of Islamists that America will not oppose their efforts to transform the region. After having been intimidated by U.S. pressure aimed at ensuring that the military would not prevent Morsi’s election, the military ran the risk that this time Obama meant what he said about using the billions in aid Egypt gets from the United States to prevent them from stopping the Brotherhood’s push for power. The willingness of the Egyptian army to step in and stop the confrontation in the streets not only avoided clashes that might have produced unimaginable casualties but also kept open the possibility that a new government could emerge in Cairo without having to fight a civil war in order to survive.

Since the Obama administration wanted Egypt to be transformed into another Turkey, the popular uprising and the military coup was not at all to its liking. One suspects that it did not like being revealed as incompetent and that it did not want the world to see how widely it was reviled in Egypt.

After the administration offered its first comment on the events in Cairo, Tobin commented:

… you don’t have to read too closely between the lines to understand that Obama is angrier about regime change in Cairo than he ever was about the Islamist attempt to remake Egypt in their own image.

President Obama stood by passively for a year as Morsi and the Brotherhood began to seize total power, repress critics and pave the way for a complete transformation of Egypt into an Islamist state without threatening a cutoff of U.S. aid. Now Obama has finally found the guts to use America’s leverage over the country but only to register his protest against the downfall of the Brotherhood.

Tobin said that Obama is doubling down on failure. One would not be surprised. Yet, there might be another piece of good news in the debacle of the Obama administration foreign policy. Perhaps another reputation has been damaged: