Posted on 08/18/2013 10:37:52 AM PDT by greyfoxx39
There’s some soul searching going on in the Obama administration as it ponders how they got sidelined in Egypt as the situation there got out of control in a spiral of violence. As the New York Times details in a post-mortem of U.S. policy, the administration went all out to persuade the military that had overthrown the Muslim Brotherhood to compromise and allow the Islamists to rejoin the government. Among other efforts to cajole them or to threaten aid cutoffs, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made 17 often-lengthy phone calls to Egyptian General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi trying to get him to make nice with the Brotherhood. They even sent two Republican senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—to continue the pressure in person in Cairo. And they’re baffled as to why they were ignored as Sisi ordered police and troops to clear out the Brotherhood’s armed camps in Cairo this week.
The easy answer to their questions is that unlike Sisi and the military, President Obama and his foreign policy-team continue to fail to understand that the conflict in Egypt is a zero-sum game. The choice there is between the military and the Brotherhood and the transformation of a key Arab country into an Islamist stronghold. This failure to comprehend the nature of the conflict has led inevitably to paralysis. This spectacle of American impotence is worrisome no matter what you think the U.S. should do about Egypt. But it’s not unrelated to the administration’s other foreign-policy failures that are piling up in the Middle East. Having failed to act decisively to try to avoid a far bigger bloodbath in Syria, and content to waste years on futile diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear threat while devoting disproportionate effort on reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks that have little chance to succeed, it’s obvious that Egypt isn’t the only venue where Obama has demonstrated his cluelessness. As Sisi prepares to decide whether to enact a ban on the Brotherhood that might bring the confrontation in Egypt to a head, it’s important to understand that Obama’s failure in Egypt is not unrelated to his problems elsewhere. The common thread is a refusal to abandon its preconceptions and to look at facts rather than fiction inspired by ideology.
In Egypt, Obama’s main problem is his lack of understanding of the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood poses to both the non-Islamist majority in that country as well as to the region. Having bought into the myth that the Brotherhood’s rise in the aftermath of the fall of the Mubarak regime was an expression of democratic sentiment, it refused to see that if it was allowed to take power it would quickly move to destroy any opposition. The U.S. pressured the military to let Mohamed Morsi take office and then continued to urge them to stand aside as he proceeded to demonstrate that the Brotherhood had little interest in democracy. Even as 14 million people took to the streets to demand that Morsi step down, the president continued to preach restraint and then stood by in puzzlement when the military realized that this was probably their last chance to save their country. Even now, the administration seems stuck in the same mythical “Arab Spring” mindset that is predicated on the idea that a totalitarian movement like the Brotherhood is compatible with liberal democracy. Since they don’t understand what led to the events of the last week, how can we expect the Obama team to put forward a coherent position on what happened and what may unfold in the days to come?
This is a familiar pattern.
Obama came into office thinking that he could charm the Iranians into giving up their nuclear ambitions and that American pressure on Israel could magically create peace with the Palestinians. If problems arose elsewhere in the Middle East, he thought they would be easily resolved with bad guys like Bashar Assad conveniently leaving the stage because President Obama said he “must go.” So as we now peruse the Middle East, we see an Iran that thinks it can go on fooling the West with a diplomatic process intended to stall talks until they can build a nuke while the United States invests precious time and energy on muscling Israel into making concessions to a Palestinian Authority that has no interest in ever signing a peace agreement. And Bashar Assad, with the help of his Iranian and Hezbollah allies, remains in power while winning a civil war that Obama could have spiked two years ago with a timely push.
While critics from both the left and right assail Obama’s indecision that–as I noted on Friday–protects neither American interests nor values in Egypt, this is yet another symptom of an administration that remains besotted with the same preconceptions that it brought to Washington in 2009. While he laments his lack of good choices and the fact that America’s ability to influence events is limited, it is the president’s refusal to face facts about the Brotherhood and some of his other blind spots that is most to blame for the fact that he has left American foreign policy hanging in the wind at a decisive moment in history.
Losing the undivided approval of Jonathon Tobin is a water shed moment for the Annointed Political Messiah!
Obama knows...
Having bought into the myth that the Brotherhood’s rise in the aftermath of the fall of the Mubarak regime was an expression of democratic sentiment,
Obama knows it wasn't...
refused to see that if it was allowed to take power it would quickly move to destroy any opposition.
Obama knows...
The U.S. pressured the military to let Mohamed Morsi take office and then continued to urge them to stand aside as he proceeded to demonstrate that the Brotherhood had little interest in democracy.
Guess Obama thought General Sisi is an idiot
Hah...Tobin's a real genius...Not..
That bubble these guy live in most be thick as a brick..
If an average Joe like myself saw all this coming certainly Obama must have...
All this pike cares about is his own political fortunes. If a million Egyptians slaughtered in the streets helped him move his domestic agenda, he would secretly cheer their death.
But this is the Bammy thugocracy strategery. Of course he understood it. It was supposed to happen 'cept the Egyprian peeps objected
When your very existence is on the line, idiots who come along to try to persuade you to commit suicide are likely to be ignored.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Anyone care to hear my dogs comment on Egypt? Couldn't be much worse than our elected officials, and I will continue to support them.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
..................
Anyone care to hear my dogs comment on Egypt? Couldn't be much worse than our elected officials, and I will continue to support them.
Blame the LameStreamMedia for the glitzy blitz that shooed him into the White House. All you can do at this point is to tell ALL the media that you are no longer interested in the brand of brain-washing that they offer.
If you don’t tell them, they will continue to spew to leftist agenda.
If all else fails, GIVE UP YOUR TV!!!
“the muslim prayer rooms established in the wh,”
Miss that. Do we really have Muslim pray rooms in the White House?
Damn.
this was claimed by radical muslims, that prayers were being offered from the WH
and dayum to say, I believe them! there are muslim advisors and plants working there, it is almost certain they have demanded acccomodation for their daily prayers
This nonsense of muslim prayer gatherings in our govt properties started at least as early as Bush43 in the aftermath of 9-11
there is a “prayer room” in the pentagon- of all places
Clueless; is hardly the truth of the matter; and pity the NYT’s readers who are it’s ‘Believer Class’.
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