What did Obama know and when did he know it?
Niall Ferguson's view that the Obama administration
reacted badly to the crisis in Egypt seems to be widespread, at least in what I've been reading online. But the problem goes beyond what happened in the last month.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Egypt Group (which I discussed
here) warned of trouble ahead in Egypt more than a year ago. According to another source, the administration may even have known two years ago.
But first,
the Journal's report.
Early last year, a group of U.S.-based human-rights activists, neoconservative policy makers and Mideast experts told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that what passed for calm in Egypt was an illusion.
"If the opportunity to reform is missed, prospects for stability and prosperity in Egypt will be in doubt," read their April 2010 letter.
The correspondence was part of a string of warnings passed to the Obama administration arguing that Egypt, heading toward crisis, required a vigorous U.S. response. Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's 82-year-old dictator, was moving to rig a string of elections, they said. Egypt's young population was growing more agitated.
The bipartisan body that wrote to Mrs. Clinton, the Egypt Working Group, argued that the administration wasn't fully appraising the warning signs in Egypt. Its members came together in early 2010, concerned that the Arab world's biggest country was headed for transition but that the U.S. and others weren't preparing for a post-Mubarak era.
But in an email I received today, Professor Barry Rubin discloses that the warnings about Egypt go back two years - to the beginning of the Obama administration. And that they came from inside sources and not just from the Egypt Group.
[F]or more than two years a high-ranking Egyptian official has been warning about this (though he predicted more of an elite revolt against Mubarak than a popular one). We expected generally that Mubarak would die or be disabled, pass the presidency on to his son, and then the elite would revolt and throw out the Mubaraks. The popular revolt gave them an opportunity to do this earlier (and also because Mubarak literally lived too long.) That is the hidden story here. I don't know if Ferguson knows about this but what he said was not far off the mark.
So why didn't Obama listen? I would argue that this passage from the Journal article explains why.
The Obama administration reaped strategic gains from this outreach. Cairo embraced Mr. Obama's initiative to accelerate Arab-Israeli peace talks, hosting meetings between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators and attempting to broker a unity government between feuding Palestinian factions.
That's it folks. Once again, it's Obama's obsession with Israel and with bringing about the creation of a 'Palestinian state' that caused him to miss the entire Egyptian revolution. He's so obsessed with the 'Palestinians' that he ignores everything else that goes on in this region. And he continues this behavior even though - as Wikileaks made clear - the creation of a 'Palestinian state' is
an obsession of the radical Left in the West, and not an obsession of the Arabs.
What else is the Obama administration missing through its obsession with the 'Palestinians' and what costs will it hold for the United States and the West?
Labels: Barack Obama, Barry Rubin, Egypt Working Group, Obama's obsession with Palestinians, radical Left
White House has no Egyptian strategy
Laura Rozen reports on Monday's advisory session with the bipartisan
Egypt working group. Could the White House be any more clueless than this?
It was a good, serious meeting, an attendee said afterwards.
They rolled key ideas around and know there is no quick reform package that really works with Mubarak, he summarized.
While the administration is considering various options -- including the possibility of at some point telling Mubarak privately it's time to leave -- "I don't think they are there yet," he assessed.
"They know there has to be a transition, but what is striking to me is how little beyond that" they've decided on, another analyst said of the current administration Egypt debate. "What are the next steps."
"Basically, they are hoping the Egyptian people solve the problem for them," he added.
Caroline Glick
adds:
What has most confounded Israeli officials and commentators alike has not been the strength of the anti-regime protests, but the American response to them. Outside the far Left, commentators from all major newspapers, radio and television stations have variously characterized the US response to events in Egypt as irrational, irresponsible, catastrophic, stupid, blind, treacherous, and terrifying.
They have pointed out that the Obama administration’s behavior – as well as that of many of its prominent conservative critics – is liable to have disastrous consequences for the US’s other authoritarian Arab allies, for Israel and for the US itself.
The question most Israelis are asking is why are the Americans behaving so destructively? Why are President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charting a course that will necessarily lead to the transformation of Egypt into the first Salafist Islamic theocracy? And why are conservative commentators and Republican politicians urging them to be even more outspoken in their support for the rioters in the streets?
Does the US not understand what will happen in the region as a result of its actions? Does the US really fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood either forms the next regime or is the power behind the throne of the next regime in Cairo?
Distressingly, the answer is that indeed, the US has no idea what it is doing. The reason the world’s only (quickly declining) superpower is riding blind is because its leaders are trapped between two irrational, narcissistic policy paradigms and they can’t see their way past them.
The first paradigm is former president George W. Bush’s democracy agenda and its concomitant support for open elections.
Bush supporters and former administration officials have spent the last month since the riots began in Tunisia crowing that events prove Bush’s push for democratization in the Arab world is the correct approach.
The problem is that while Bush’s diagnosis of the dangers of the democracy deficit in the Arab world was correct, his antidote for solving this problem was completely wrong.
...
Frustratingly, Bush’s push for elections was rarely criticized on its merits. Under the spell of the other policy paradigm captivating American foreign policy elites – anti-colonialism – Bush’s leftist opponents never argued that the problem with his policy is that it falsely assumes that Western values are universal values. Blinded by their anti-Western dogma, they claimed that his bid for freedom was nothing more than a modern-day version of Christian missionary imperialism.
It is this anti-colonialist paradigm, with its foundational assumption that that the US has no right to criticize non-Westerners that has informed the Obama administration’s foreign policy. It was the anti-colonialist paradigm that caused Obama not to support the pro-Western protesters seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime in the wake of the stolen 2009 presidential elections.
As Obama put it at the time, “It’s not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the US president meddling in the Iranian elections.”
And it is this anti-colonialist paradigm that has guided Obama’s courtship of the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian regimes and his unwillingness to lift a hand to help the March 14 movement in Lebanon.
Read the whole thing.
What the US ought to be doing is backing pro-democracy, anti-Islamist (or at least) non-Islamist forces. To the extent that those don't exist, it should stay out of the battle and not undermine Mubarak.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Egypt Working Group, Egyptian regime change, Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Islamist, Politics, World Politics
Niall Ferguson's view that the Obama administration reacted badly to the crisis in Egypt seems to be widespread, at least in what I've been reading online. But the problem goes beyond what happened in the last month.
