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Democracy in Egypt Can Wait: Charles A. Kupchan, New York Times, Aug. 16, 2013— The Egyptian military’s bloody crackdown on supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood is yet another sign of the dark side of the Arab awakening. Across the Middle East, glimmerings of democracy are being snuffed out by political turmoil and violence.
Experts: Israel Should Lobby for Sisi – But Quietly: Ariel Ben Solomon, Jerusalem Post, Aug 20, 2013– Israeli analyst says Israel should support new Egyptian gov’t behind the scenes because in the Middle East “whoever Israel supports loses legitimacy,” warns such support can also lead to terror attacks against Israel.
White House Losing its Grip on the Middle East?: Walter Russell Mead, American Interest, Aug. 2, 2013— Secretary of State John Kerry went uncomfortably off-message yesterday in Pakistan, voicing a surprising level of support for Egypt’s military to journalists in Islamabad:
Egypt is in Dangerous Territory, Facing Possible Long Bout of Violence: Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press, Aug. 15, 2013
His Options Few, Obama Rebukes Egypt’s Leaders: Mark Landler and Peter Baker, New York Times, Aug. 15, 2013
Let Our Client Go: Ross Douthat, New York Times, Aug. 18, 2013
Walking Egypt Back from the Brink of Anarchy: Ebrahim Rasool and Ebrahim Moosa, Washington Post, Aug 16, 2013
Reactions to Developments in Egypt from Around the World: Associated Press, Aug 16, 2013
Israel Escalating Efforts to Shape Allies’ Strategy: Jori Rudoren, New York Times, Aug 18, 2013
Charles A. Kupchan
New York Times, August 16, 2013
WASHINGTON — The Egyptian military’s bloody crackdown on supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood is yet another sign of the dark side of the Arab awakening. Across the Middle East, glimmerings of democracy are being snuffed out by political turmoil and violence.
That reality requires a sobering course correction in American policy. Rather than viewing the end of autocracy’s monopoly as a ripe moment to spread democracy in the region, Washington should downsize its ambition and work with transitional governments to establish the foundations of responsible, even if not democratic, rule.
Ever since the Egyptian military seized power last month, the United States government, backed by much of the country’s foreign policy elite, has demanded the restoration of democratic rule. President Obama instructed Egypt’s generals “to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government.” The Republican senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina visited Cairo to press the new government to restore democratic rule and have called for cutting off aid if it doesn’t.
But while Washington must unequivocally condemn the violence unleashed by the Egyptian military, clamoring for a rapid return to democracy is misguided.
To be sure, the American creed favors the promotion of democracy, and democracies do have a track record of better behavior than autocracies. But the penchant for rushing transitional states to the ballot box often does more harm than good, producing dysfunctional and illiberal regimes. Egypt’s recently deposed president, Mohamed Morsi, may have been fairly elected, but he presided over the near collapse of the Egyptian state and ran roughshod over his political opponents.
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.
More generally, Washington should back off from its zealous promotion of democracy in Egypt and the broader Middle East for three main reasons.
For starters, even if liberal democracies do tend to provide good governance at home and abroad, rapid transitions to democracy historically have had the opposite effect: disorder at home and instability beyond the countries’ borders. In nations that lack experience with constitutional constraints and democratic accountability, electoral victors usually embrace winner-take-all strategies; they shut out the opposition, govern as they see fit and unsettle their neighbors. In one case after another — Bosnia, Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Egypt — newly democratic governments have demonized opponents and ruled with an iron fist.
Incremental change produces more durable results; liberal democracies must be constructed from the ground up. Constitutional constraints, judicial reform, political parties, economic privatization — these building blocks of democratic societies need time to take root. The West’s own experience provides ample evidence. England became a constitutional monarchy after the Glorious Revolution in 1688, but did not mature into a liberal democracy until the 20th century.
Moreover, transitions to democracy in the Middle East will be more perilous than those elsewhere because of factors unique to the region: the power of political Islam and the entrenched nature of sectarian and tribal loyalties.
Islam and democracy are by no means incompatible. However, religion and politics are intimately interwoven throughout the Middle East. Islamic tradition makes no distinction between mosque and state, helping Islamists win elections throughout the region. One result is a debilitating struggle between empowered Islamists and fractured secularists that is playing out in Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and just about everywhere else.
Absent the Western tradition of separating the sacred from the secular — which came about only after the bloody wars of the Protestant Reformation — pitched battles over the role of Islam in politics will bedevil aspiring Middle East democracies for generations to come.
So, too, will sectarian and tribal politics make successful democratic transitions in the Middle East especially elusive. A sense of national belonging is the twin sister of democracy; nationalism is the social glue that makes consensual politics work. Egypt, like Turkey and Iran, is fortunate to have a strong national identity dating back centuries. But Egypt is nonetheless stumbling as it tries to put down robust democratic roots.
Social cohesion will be even harder to come by in many of the region’s other states — like Iraq, Syria and Lebanon — which are contrived nations cobbled together by departing colonial powers. They risk being split asunder by sectarian, ethnic and tribal cleavages.
Finally, Washington’s determined promotion of democracy compromises its credibility because doing so is often at odds with its own policies. Its closest allies in the Arab world, the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, are the region’s least democratic states. When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, America promptly sought to undermine the new government.
These departures from democratic principles are, as they should be, guided by concrete national interests. But as the Arab awakening unfolds, Washington’s leverage will further diminish unless its rhetoric catches up with its actions.
The United States should do what it can to shepherd the arrival of liberal democracy in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. But the best way to do that is to go slow and help the region’s states build functioning and responsible governments. Democracy can wait.
EXPERTS: ISRAEL SHOULD LOBBY FOR SISI – BUT QUIETLY
Ariel Ben Solomon
Jerusalem Post, Aug 20, 2013
In light of recent reports that Israel is lobbying the US and Europe to support the military-backed government in Egypt, Israeli experts believe that this should be done behind the scenes and not be publicized.
The New York Times reported on Sunday, quoting an Israeli official, that Israel is aggressively lobbying for the Egyptian regime because it is the best option available at the moment. The Jerusalem Post also reported Sunday, quoting an official, that Israel is worried about Egypt falling into chaos.
Mordechai Kedar, director of the new Center for the Study of the Middle East and Islam and a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) at Bar-Ilan University, told the Post in an interview on Monday that Israel should indeed be lobbying for the international community to support Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, but that it must be done quietly.
Israel should help the new regime in any way it can behind the scenes – if the regime needs a loan, Israel should help it get one; if it needs help getting food aid, Israel should facilitate that. However, in the Middle East, he said, “whoever Israel supports loses legitimacy.”
“If we want to support side A, we should say we support B – that way B will lose legitimacy and A will come out better,” he said, adding, “Our kiss is the kiss of death.” In addition, Kedar said that publicizing this kind of diplomacy not only brings criticism from Islamists but also can lead to terror attacks and increase their motivation to act against us.
Chuck Freilich, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, told the Post that he thinks The New York Times is over-hyping the story, making the lobbying campaign seem like a huge operation, when this is what any country does when faced with a crisis. For Israel, he said, “this is a crucial issue,” and of course it must turn “to everyone who has influence on the issue.”
Freilich agrees with Kedar that Israel should act quietly and noted that the fact that it got into the press and is being amplified is because “everyone is looking for an Israeli angle, because that is what sells newspapers.”
“When Israel is invoked, it becomes toxic,” he said, adding, “Sisi doesn’t want this out that Israel is lobbying for him – the Muslim Brotherhood will leap on this.” Freilich went on to say that Israel does not want to see a cutoff in US aid to Egypt, which would also decrease whatever influence the US has on the regime. “The military is the only party keeping the country stable, pro-peace with Israel, and moderate,” he said. The US loves talking about a transition to democracy, but elections brought the Nazis to power in Germany and Hamas in Gaza, Freilich said.
“The Muslim Brotherhood is fundamentally an anti-democratic organization,” stated Freilich. The ousting of former president Mohamed Morsi is “really good news for Israel, the region, and the world,” he concluded.
Yoram Meital, chairman of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Post he thinks that the leak to The New York Times by an Israeli official is significant because it shows that “in back channels, there are likely a lot of talks,” adding that this is because the future of the Egyptian state is a “vital interest of the State of Israel.”
He noted that the Obama administration finds itself in the peculiar situation where its three major allies in the region – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel – all support the ousting of Morsi and back the new regime.
WHITE HOUSE LOSING ITS GRIP ON THE MIDDLE EAST?
Walter Russell Mead
American Interest, August 2, 2013
Secretary of State John Kerry went uncomfortably off-message yesterday in Pakistan, voicing a surprising level of support for Egypt’s military to journalists in Islamabad:
“In effect, they were restoring democracy,” Mr. Kerry said of Egypt’s military to Pakistan’s Geo News during a South Asia tour on Thursday. “The military did not take over, to the best of our judgment—so far, so far—to run the country. There’s a civilian government.”
Obama administration officials tried to walk back the remarks—”He didn’t stick to the script,” an unnamed source growled to the WSJ—but it was too late. The media pounced, the remarks were quickly torn apart on Twitter, and Team Obama is again struggling to regain its balance on Egypt, trying not to call what happened a coup while hoping that the military doesn’t get too much more blood on its hands in restoring order to Cairo and Alexandria.
Let’s get the obvious parts out of the way: No, the Egyptian military is not restoring democracy in Egypt. You can’t “restore” something that never existed, and it takes a lot more than a couple of elections to make a democracy. Democracy requires a host of institutions, tacit agreements, and social norms most of which don’t exist in Egypt. It also depends on a certain basic level of economic progress and prosperity, also not exactly likely to sprout up on the banks of the Nile anytime soon.
The army wasn’t trying to build democracy, either; it was restoring order and protecting the deep state, more or less in accordance with the will of a large number of middle class and urban Egyptians. That’s the beginning and end of it. Americans desperately want somebody to be the pro-democracy good guys. But right now at least, democracy doesn’t seem to be on the menu at the Egypt café.
We don’t want to be too hard on Secretary Kerry. Foreign policy is never easy to do in real time, and the world is in a good deal of disarray at this very moment. But his remarks do point to a deeper problem with the Obama administration’s foreign policy approach—a problem that’s finally starting to bite.
The Obama administration has made a fundamental strategic choice that hasn’t worked out well. Officials decided to support the Muslim Brotherhood in the hope of detoxifying US relations in the Middle East and promoting moderation among Islamists across the world. Between Prime Minister Erdogan’s surging authoritarianism in Turkey and the unmitigated Morsi disaster in Egypt, that policy is pretty much a smoking ruin these days, and a shell-shocked administration is stumbling back to the drawing board with, it appears, few ideas about what to try next.
Adding insult to injury, the Obama administration has conducted itself erratically enough to have lost everyone’s respect in the process. It hastily and indecorously ditched long time ally Mubarak and embraced the Muslim Brotherhood only to drop the Brothers when the going got tough. It’s hard to blame anyone in Egypt right now for thinking that the Americans are worthless friends whose assurances are hollow and who will abandon you the minute you get into trouble. At every point along the way, the administration made the choices it did out of good motives, but it would be difficult to design a line of policy more calculated to undermine American prestige and influence than the one we chose.
Rarely has an administration looked as inconsequential and trifling as the Obama administration did this week as it tried to square the circle. It isn’t using the c-word because it doesn’t want to offend the military, but it bleats ineffectually about human rights in hopes of retaining a few shreds of credibility among the supporters of the ousted President. The armed forces appear to be treating the United States with indifference; our support won’t help and our scolding won’t hurt.
It’s very hard to see how all this has won us friends or influenced people. The kerfuffle with Kerry’s remarks in Pakistan wouldn’t normally amount to much. Even Secretaries of State are human, it is hard to explain complicated ideas in short television interviews, and all of us get our feet in our mouths sometime. But as one more misstep in a long series, it has had more impact than usual.
We’ve said from the beginning that the Arab Spring was going to present the administration with some horrible headaches and impossible choices. George Washington was the first US President to learn just how much trouble a long and complicated revolutionary process in an allied nation could cause. The French revolution split his cabinet, caused him huge political and diplomatic headaches, and so embittered American politics that he felt and feared that he had failed. Those who criticize the President should never forget just how difficult these challenges really are. Flip and vain talking heads are always sure that there are simple, easy alternatives that would make everything work out okay. That is almost never the case, and it certainly isn’t now.
All that said, it’s unlikely that the President and his team can be anything but unhappy with the view as they look across the Atlantic: Edward Snowden is sitting pretty in Moscow with Putin humiliating the administration (once again) by failing to give it advance notice of the decision, Assad is still holding court in Damascus and even predicting victory, there appear no easy outs in Afghanistan, Iran is surging in Iraq, and the promise of the Arab Spring has mostly evaporated. The recent jailbreaks in Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan, along with Thursday’s announcement that the US would be temporarily closing its embassies across the Middle East due to an unspecified terrorist threat, suggest al-Qaeda and other fanatical terror organizations are on a roll. Meanwhile, the US is farther than ever from the kind of partnership with relatively liberal and democratic Muslim parties and movements that the Obama administration sees as the best way to tame terror and build a better future. Success in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks would have a large impact, but that prospect, sadly, still seems unlikely.
Fortunately for the administration, the public seems to want to think about the Middle East as little as possible. Yet the President’s poll numbers on foreign policy continue to decline, and much of the foreign policy establishment seems to be tip toeing away from the administration as quickly as it can.
Failure in the Middle East has the potential to wreck the President’s foreign policy world wide. The “pivot to Asia” was predicated on a shift of American attention and resources away from the Middle East. That seems less likely now; many in Asia are wondering what happens to the pivot when the Secretary of State has clearly put the peace process at the center of his priorities. It is not easy to discern a commitment to humanitarian values or human rights in an administration that has passively watched the Syrian bloodbath metastasize and that has put together global surveillance programs that have angered many human rights groups as well as some allied powers.
President Obama still has more than three years left in the White House, but many of the policies that he brought with him or developed early in his tenure have now passed their sell-by dates. Abandoning Iraq, the surge in Afghanistan, intensification of the drone war in Pakistan, alliances with moderate Islamists, and a democracy agenda in the Middle East: sadly, those dogs won’t hunt anymore.
Many in the State Department and the broader foreign policy establishment believe that the relatively small group of trusted aides with whom the President has worked most closely don’t have the depth or experience to manage the country’s international portfolio well. We aren’t going to arbitrate that issue here; such criticisms are often self-serving. But whether he relies on the same aides or reaches out to more and different advisers, the President is going to have to change his approach to the Middle East and, one suspects, to Russia.
Egypt is in Dangerous Territory, Facing Possible Long Bout of Violence: Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press, Aug. 15, 2013– With astonishing speed, Egypt has moved from a nation in crisis to a nation in real danger of slipping into a prolonged bout of violence or even civil war.
His Options Few, Obama Rebukes Egypt’s Leaders: Mark Landler and Peter Baker, New York Times, Aug. 15, 2013– President Obama announced Thursday that the United States had canceled longstanding joint military exercises with the Egyptian Army set for next month, using one of his few obvious forms of leverage to rebuke Egypt’s military-backed government for its brutal crackdown on supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi.
Let Our Client Go: Ross Douthat, New York Times, Aug. 18, 2013– In a simpler, more reasonable world, the government of the United States would have enough leverage in Cairo to put an end to the Egyptian military’s brutal crackdown on its Muslim Brotherhood opponents. We are, after all, the longstanding patron of Egypt’s generals; they are among our best-financed clients. We are the world’s sole superpower; their country is a needy basket case. We’re supplying them with $1.5 billion in aid this year; they can certainly use the money.
Walking Egypt Back from the Brink of Anarchy: Ebrahim Rasool and Ebrahim Moosa, Washington Post, Aug 16, 2013– Egypt’s winners in the restored military rule are the poor, the young women, and those who fear Islamic rule would end prospects for democracy.
Reactions to Developments in Egypt from Around the World: Associated Press, Aug. 16, 2013–Reactions on Friday around the world to developments in Egypt following clashes in which hundreds of people were killed and thousands injured.
Israel Escalating Efforts to Shape Allies’ Strategy: Jori Rudoren, New York Times, Aug. 18, 2013– Israel plans this week to intensify its diplomatic campaign urging Europe and the United States to support the military-backed government in Egypt despite its deadly crackdown on Islamist protesters, according to a senior Israeli official involved in the effort.
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