Free Republic

The United States urged Arab ally Egypt to pull "back from the brink" after security forces killed dozens of supporters of deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi and opened a dangerous new phase in the army's confrontation with his Muslim Brotherhood... Washington, treading a fine line with an important Middle East ally and recipient of over $1 billion in military aid, urged the Egyptian security forces to respect the right to peaceful protest... U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to two senior members of Egypt's army-installed interim cabinet, expressing his "deep concern." "This is a pivotal moment for Egypt," he...

Foreign policy is hard. That's a lesson Barack Obama has been learning throughout his presidency. The world is not responding as he expected. It looks simpler from the outside. Promise to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, proclaim yourself the tribune of hope and change, receive the adulation of giant crowds in Europe and accept the Nobel Peace Prize.Obama entered office, as many presidents have, with the assumption that his predecessor's policies were wrongheaded and could readily be reversed. Because he didn't look like other presidents, in his phrase, he believed he could change the attitudes unfriendly leaders had towards...

Overseas the Arab Spring is turning into the Arab Nightmare that everyone but the Obama administration always saw coming. At home the Obama Crew is fighting to socialize all of America's health care system, strangling the energy industry with new emissions regulations, and being exposed for ordering federal employees to spy on each other. And what do our mainstream media think is the most important issue of the day? The minute-by-minute play-by-play of the Zimmerman trial. Yes sir, America. Don't worry your little heads about the coming chaos in the Middle East. Or how the Obama administration's neutral position in...

A letter by a top Libyan official blames the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens on Mohamed Morsi, the now deposed president of Egypt...

Who says President Obama isn't a unifier? Last week, Edmund Sanders of the Los Angeles Times reported from Cairo: "As rival camps of Egyptians protest for and against the toppling of President Mohamed Morsi, there is a rare point of agreement: America is to blame." Both the Muslim Brotherhood and the coalition arrayed against it believe that the United States is against them. And, amazingly, both sides have a point. Obama supported Hosni Mubarak, our geriatric dictator-client, right up until the moment Mubarak needed us most. But when events, or just the news cycle, made that support difficult, Obama abandoned...

The military coup that ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi marks another failure in U.S. foreign policy over several administrations, which have erroneously promoted the notion that American-style democracy in Islamic lands will produce a nation more like ours. The Founders wrote a Constitution. When properly read and obeyed, it guards against pure democracy and makes "we the people" subject to laws that cannot be abolished by popular vote. Benjamin Franklin properly called what the Founders wrought a "Republic." Representative government would guard against the passions of a majority. No such safeguards apply in Egypt, or for that matter throughout most...

CAIRO — As President Mohamed Morsi huddled in his guard’s quarters during his last hours as Egypt’s first elected leader, he received a call from an Arab foreign minister with a final offer to end a standoff with the country’s top generals, senior advisers with the president said. The foreign minister said he was acting as an emissary of Washington, the advisers said, and he asked if Mr. Morsi would accept the appointment of a new prime minister and cabinet, one that would take over all legislative powers and replace his chosen provincial governors....

The revolution that overthrew Egypt's last pharaoh and installed a new one in his place now has been overthrown itself -- by military decree. As fully expected. Chaos breeds a demand for order, for clear authority, and what could be more authoritarian than military rule? This familiar process isn't confined to our own time, or just the Middle East. It may be the natural course of modern revolutions, which still follow the pattern set by the French one, and that make the American Revolution the great exception to a dismal rule -- a revolution that somehow brought liberty and order,...

When Egypt's Arab Spring rebellion began in late January 2011, the most critical near-term uncertainty involved the Egyptian military. Just how would the military respond? How the military promoted, thwarted and/or helped mediate the inevitable redistribution of power among individuals and factions within the country would shape the next 50 years of Egyptian history. If the military acted with the long-term economic and political interests of the Egyptian people as its guide, the subsequent three or four decades of trial and error, adaptation and modernization -- scarred by occasional outbursts of violence and chaos -- would economically reward the Egyptian...

CAIRO — A battle over water has turned into a war of colorful rhetoric between Ethiopia and Egypt over the flow of the Nile, which begins in the African highlands but keeps Egypt from being swallowed entirely by desert. An ambitious Ethiopian dam project is diverting Nile waters that Cairo says will reduce the river's northward flow. The Egyptians have stumbled into crisis mode: At a meeting hosted by President Mohamed Morsi this week, several politicians, unaware TV cameras were rolling, suggested sabotaging or threatening to bomb the dam. Egypt can coordinate with Ethiopian rebels and "use them as a...

The Muslim Brotherhood of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has greeted a UN proposal designed to reduce violence against women with unabashed horror.

Deep Thoughts by Thomas Friedman But don’t worry, the term “admits” is a bit strong. It’s more like the weatherman who predicted there wouldn’t be a flood for a month straight clinging to an antenna on the roof of his house and trying to find reasons why he was right all along even while the sharks are circling his chimney. The standard fallback position for Tahrir’s international cheerleaders is to argue that we were expecting positive results too quickly. The term “Arab Spring” has to be retired. There is nothing springlike going on,” Friedman says. “It’s best we now speak...

(Reuters) - Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi threatened on Sunday to take unspecified steps to "protect this nation" after violent demonstrations against his Muslim Brotherhood, using vague but severe language that the opposition said heralded a crackdown. In remarks following clashes outside the Brotherhood's Cairo headquarters on Friday, Mursi warned that "necessary measures" would be taken against any politicians shown to be involved in what he described as violence and rioting. "If I am forced to do what is required to protect this nation, then I will do it. And I fear that I might be on the verge of doing...

Not only is The New York Times editorial page known for often being thin on facts, it is known for its cheerleading of the Obama administration—especially the administration’s shortsightedness regarding the Middle East. To prove that point, they recently published their March 4 editorial: Egypt Needs to Act. In the course of attempting to make their argument, the Times not only butchered the facts, they praised the terrible decision by the Obama administration to hand Egypt wads of US money. Go figure. They hailed Obama’s decision to send $250 million of hard-earned, taxpayer money to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt...

Hundreds of Egyptians demonstrated in Cairo on Friday to press for the army to assume power in a country plagued by unrest and instability two years after a revolution which toppled president Hosni Mubarak. The protest was held in eastern Cairo in response to a call by retired army officers and groups opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood, the party of President Mohamed Morsi. "The army must return" to power and "Down with the power of the guide," they chanted, referring to the Brotherhood's spiritual guide Mohamed Badie, as they waved portraits of General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the armed forces chief....

Last Friday, the sitting president of Egypt – the world’s 15th most populous nation — was exposed for calling Jews “apes and pigs.” And he did it in a TV interview (in Arabic) in 2010, less than two years before he took office. Needless to say, this was HUGE NEWS for American mass media! Only it wasn’t. (Knock, knock, New York Times? Anybody home?) In fact, to be fair to the paper of record, not a single major outlet has covered it. Not AP or Reuters. Not CBS News or CNN. Not Time magazine or U.S. News & World Report....

An Egyptian appeals court on Sunday overturned the life sentence of former President Hosni Mubarak for directing the killing of protesters, a ruling that could prolong a politically fraught legal battle over the fate of Egypt’s deposed autocrat two years after he was ousted. The court is said to have ordered a new trial. Although expected, the decision may also put the issue of retribution for Mr. Mubarak and his inner circle back in the news just as a campaign begins for new parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for April. The decision may also bolster the prospects of the Islamist...

The year 2012 saw the triumph of cold reality over pie-in-the-sky fantasies. Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change amid hopes that the first black president would mark a redemptive moment in American history. Four years later, the fantasies are gone. In continuing dismal economic times, Obama ran for reelection neither on his first-term achievements — Obamacare, bailouts, financial stimuli, and Keynesian mega-deficits — nor on more utopian promises. Instead, Obama’s campaign systematically reduced his rival, Wall Street financier Mitt Romney, to a conniving, felonious financial pirate who did dastardly things, from letting the...

Thanks to Barack Hussein Obama’s Arab Spring scheme of turning the Egypt of Hosni Mubarek into a “representative democracy,” the US is now reduced to watching as a former friend and ally morphs into an America-hating, Sharia-based theocracy. Six months after promising to build a government based on “freedom and social justice,” Egypt’s newly elected president Mohamed Morsi authored a decree granting himself a level of dictatorial authority which even Mubarek did not enjoy. As a result, demonstrations began throughout the nation culminating last week in Morsi fleeing the presidential palace in Cairo. (1) Though he has since rescinded most...