******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
(Important article about how Islamophobia influenced Obama
administration's support for Sisi's coup. Although it doesn't mention
Syria, it is obvious the same calculations governed Washington's
implicit support for Assad as a lesser evil.)
NY Times, July 28, 2018
The White House and the Strongman
How the Obama administration watched the demise of Arab democracy — and
paved the way for Trump’s embrace of dictators.
By David D. Kirkpatrick
Mr. Kirkpatrick is a former Cairo bureau chief for The Times and the
author of a new book about Egypt and the Middle East.
President Trump boasts that he has reversed American policies across the
Middle East. Where his predecessor hoped to win hearts and minds, Mr.
Trump champions the axiom that brute force is the only response to
extremism — whether in Iran, Syria, Yemen or the Palestinian
territories. He has embraced the hawks of the region, in Israel and the
Persian Gulf, as his chief guides and allies.
But in many ways, this hard-line approach began to take hold under
President Barack Obama, when those same regional allies backed the 2013
military ouster of Egypt’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the
Muslim Brotherhood.
That coup was a watershed moment for the region, snuffing out dreams of
democracy while emboldening both autocrats and jihadists. And American
policy pivoted, too, empowering those inside the administration “who say
you just have to crush these guys,” said Andrew Miller, who oversaw
Egypt for the National Security Council under Mr. Obama, and who is now
with the Project on Middle East Democracy. Some of the coup’s most vocal
American advocates went on to top roles in the Trump administration,
including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Michael Flynn, Mr.
Trump’s first national security adviser.
I was The New York Times Cairo bureau chief at the time of the coup, and
I returned to the events years later in part to better understand
Washington’s role. I learned that the Obama administration’s support for
the Arab Spring uprisings had been hobbled from the start by internal
disagreements over the same issues that now define Trump policy — about
the nature of the threat from political Islam, about fidelity to
autocratic allies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and
about the difficulty of achieving democratic change in Egypt and the region.
Mr. Obama and his closest advisers were often on one side of those
debates. They hoped to shift established American policy and forge a new
relationship with the Arab world in order to undermine the appeals of
anti-Western extremism. Even in the final days before the takeover, Mr.
Obama was urging respect for Egypt’s free elections. In an 11th--hour
phone call he implored Mr. Morsi to make “bold gestures” to hold onto
his office.
Most of his government, though, took the other side, reflecting
longstanding worries about the intrinsic danger of political Islam and
about the obstacles to Egyptian democracy.
In a White House meeting the day after Mr. Morsi’s ouster — two days
after that last phone call — Mr. Obama yielded to those views when he
accepted the military takeover. In doing so, he had taken a first step
toward the policies that have become the overriding principles of the
Trump administration.
‘He is the dumbest cluck I ever met.’
President Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, took office on June
30, 2012. He spent much of his energy struggling against resistance from
an entrenched establishment — the soldiers, spies, police, judges and
bureaucrats left in place from six decades of autocracy.
But he was an inept politician and he made his own mistakes, too. In
November 2012, as part of a battle with the judiciary to push through a
referendum on a new constitution, Mr. Morsi declared his own decrees
above judicial review until it had passed. Many Egyptians, especially in
Cairo, were angry at the new president for failing to fulfill the
promises of the Tahrir Square uprising.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose rulers feared elections
and dreaded them even more if they were presented as Islamic, lobbied
hard to convince Washington that Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood
were a threat to American interests. And American officials later
concluded that the United Arab Emirates were also providing covert
financial support for protests against Mr. Morsi.
The United States provides $1.3 billion a year in military aid to Egypt,
more than to any other country besides Israel, and after the uprising in
2011 the Pentagon boasted that its aid had helped convince the Egyptian
generals to accept a transition to democracy. But by the spring of 2013,
conversations between Egyptian military officers and their American
counterparts were becoming mutual “bitch sessions” about Mr. Morsi,
several of the Americans involved later told me.
Like others in the Pentagon, Mr. Mattis, then a Marine general in charge
of Central Command, often argued that the Muslim Brotherhood was just a
different shade of Al Qaeda — even though the Brotherhood had said for
decades that it opposed violence and favored elections while Al Qaeda,
in turn, denounced the Brothers as naïve patsies for the West. “They are
all swimming in the same sea,” General Mattis later said in a speech
looking back on the period. He blamed Mr. Morsi’s own “imperious
leadership” for his downfall.
General Flynn, who has since pleaded guilty to lying to federal
investigators under an agreement with the special prosecutor, headed the
Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. He visited Cairo in the months
before the coup to talk to the generals about Mr. Morsi. Whether the
Brotherhood or Al Qaeda, “It is all the same ideology,” he told me in 2016.
Civilians in government were skeptical, too. Secretary of State John
Kerry had grown close to many of the most fiercely anti-Islamist Persian
Gulf royals during his decades in the Senate, even sometimes yachting
with them. He had always distrusted the Brotherhood, he told me years
later. When he visited Cairo for the first time as secretary of state in
March 2013, he took an immediate dislike to Mr. Morsi.
“He is the dumbest cluck I ever met,” Mr. Kerry told his chief of staff
as they left the presidential palace. “This isn’t going to work. These
guys are wacko.”
Mr. Kerry got along better in his one-on-one meeting with Gen. Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi. A former military intelligence chief, General Sisi had
vaulted himself into the job of defense minister in a shake-up just a
few months before.
“I will not let my country go down the drain,” General Sisi told Mr.
Kerry, as he later recalled to me. He knew then that “Morsi was cooked.”
General Sisi was prepared to intervene. Mr. Kerry felt partly relieved,
he told me.
“It was reassuring that Egypt would not fall into a civil war or a
complete massacre of the public or an implosion,” Mr. Kerry said,
although he added, “I did not sit back and think, ‘Great, our problems
are going to be solved.’”
Senior American diplomats in Cairo had told me that March that a
military intervention was “extraordinarily unlikely.” But by the next
month, Ambassador Anne Patterson was picking up other signals from the
top generals. In an encrypted email, she warned at least some in the
White House that “if not imminent, a coup was a high likelihood within a
few months,” one official told me. She predicted that any military
intervention would surely be brutal.
The White House was sending Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel talking
points intended to warn General Sisi that Washington would punish a
coup. Among other things, United States law mandated a cutoff of aid to
any military that overturned an elected leader.
But the message Mr. Hagel delivered “was totally, totally different,” a
senior official on the National Security Council who read transcripts of
the calls later told me. “The White House wanted the message to be
‘Democracy is important,’ and Hagel wanted it to be ‘We want to have a
good relationship.’ We never could get him to deliver stern talking points.”
In an interview in early 2016, Mr. Hagel told me that he had been
besieged by complaints about Mr. Morsi from Israel, Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates. Mr. Hagel said that Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Zayed al-Nahyan, the emirates’ de facto ruler and military chief, had
called the Muslim Brotherhood “the most dangerous element afoot in the
Middle East today.”
Israeli leaders had said they were counting on General Sisi because they
worried that — despite Mr. Morsi’s repeated pledges — the Muslim
Brotherhood might threaten the border or help Hamas. And General Sisi
himself had told Mr. Hagel that “there are some very evil, very bad
forces afoot — you cannot understand it like we can understand it here.”
Mr. Hagel said he had agreed with them all and sought to reassure them:
The Muslim Brotherhood “is dangerous — we recognize that,” Mr. Hagel
said he told the Emiratis. “I don’t live in Cairo, you do,” Mr. Hagel
said he had told General Sisi. “You do have to protect your security,
protect your country.”
‘On an island in our own government’
On June 30, millions of protesters took the streets across Egypt to
demand Mr. Morsi’s ouster. The next day, Egyptian Air Force F‑16s with
colored contrails painted hearts in the sky over downtown Cairo. The
generals were openly backing the protests.
President Obama was traveling in Africa, and on July 1, he spoke for the
last time with President Morsi. The Egyptian military was not “taking
direction” from the United States, Mr. Obama warned, according to a
White House aide’s detailed record of the conversation. But he mainly
urged Mr. Morsi to strike a compromise with his civilian opponents so
that his presidency became “almost a unity government.”
Follow Nelson Mandela, Mr. Obama said. He had just visited Mr. Mandela’s
sickbed and recalled his post-apartheid government in South Africa. “He
even put his former prison guard — the man who had been the warden at
the prison where he had been held — and he put him in charge of the
security services. It was because of those gestures that he showed he
was about bringing the country together,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Morsi. “Be
bold,” he added. “History is waiting for you.”
“Very good advice, from a sincere friend,” Mr. Morsi answered. But it
was too late. The military’s presidential guard had moved Mr. Morsi into
its own base, ostensibly for his safety. Two days later, on July 3,
2013, General Sisi announced Mr. Morsi’s removal.
Mr. Kerry told me he had argued at the White House that Mr. Morsi’s
removal was not, in fact, a coup. General Sisi had merely bowed to the
public will in order to save Egypt, Mr. Kerry said, noting that the
general had announced a plan for new elections. (Mr. Sisi was elected
president the next year and again in 2018, each time with more than 95
percent of the vote.)
“In Egypt, what was the alternative? It wasn’t Jeffersonian democracy,”
Mr. Kerry told me. “Over whatever number of years we have put about $80
billion into Egypt. Most of the time, this is the kind of government
they had — almost all of the time. And the reality is, no matter how
much I wish it was different, it ain’t going to be different tomorrow.”
The United States needed the Saudis, Emiratis and Israelis for other
priorities, Mr. Kerry said, and he did not want to “get into a fight
with them over something as historically clear as how Egypt works.”
President Obama decided not to make any determination about whether Mr.
Morsi’s ouster was or was not a coup, effectively accepting it.
“The people who wanted to have a different kind of relationship with the
Egyptian people, including the president, were on an island in our own
government,” Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser,
later told me. “There was a sense of inevitability about the military
resuming control.”
The Egyptian military crushed the opponents of the takeover with a
series of mass shootings, culminating on Aug. 14, 2013, in the killing
of as many as 1,000. Human Rights Watch concluded that it was the
biggest single-day massacre in recent history, surpassing the Tiananmen
Square massacre in 1989. Egypt’s police soon widened the crackdown to
suppress independent liberal, leftist, feminist and Christian organizers
as well. And a backlash against the takeover ignited an extremist
insurgency centered on the North Sinai that continues today.
President Trump and his advisers have hailed Mr. Sisi as a model Arab
leader. “A fantastic guy” who “took control of Egypt, and he really took
control of it,” Mr. Trump said when he first met Mr. Sisi.
Mr. Mattis no longer contends that “imperious leadership” is a problem
in Egypt. In a public talk before he became Mr. Trump’s secretary of
defense, he celebrated Mr. Sisi for trying “to reduce the amount of
negatives about the Muslim religion,” concluding that “it’s time for us
to support him and take our own side in this.”
“The only way to support Egypt’s maturation as a country with civil
society, with democracy,” he argued, “is to support President el‑Sisi.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter
(@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
David D. Kirkpatrick is an international correspondent based in the
London bureau of The New York Times. @ddknyt
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com