Mucking up Egypt

Democracy in Egypt is dying before it was ever really born. The Arab Spring, which took off in Cairo, may be stifled there as well. While the world remains preoccupied with the gratuitous violence in Syria and the specter of a nuclear Iran, the Arab world's most populous country has gone through turmoil and upheaval that threatens to snuff the flame of democracy.

America's foreign policy hasn't helped at all. We seem to have completely forgotten that Egypt exists, and for all of the woe, angst, and failure of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, we never even tried to capitalize on fostering democracy in a nation that gave it a shot without the presence of US soldiers. Of course, who needs US troops to protect democracy when there are Egyptian troops to squelch it. When the Egyptian revolution took off, I initially praised the army for remaining largely out of the fray and helping to support the fledgling democracy that emerged after Hosni Mubarak was toppled.

Of course those days are long gone. Mr. Mubarak's legitimately elected successor, Mohammed Morsi, was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that apparently didn't sit well with that military which deposed Mr. Morsi in a coup last year, ending any semblance of legitimate self-representative government, and ushering in a military regime that has (again) outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood.

It seemed that Mr. Moris was inept, and certainly the election of a member of the Muslim Brotherhood didn't sit well with some foreign governments, but Egypt held an election without outside pressure or interference, and the man was elected. Our silence during and after his coup is tacit endorsement of the tactics of the military and the illegitimate government they have created. The US showed through our silence that we support democracy elsewhere only when that democracy serves what we believe to be in our best interest.

This isn't only hypocritical, it's wrong. What percentage of Americans are disappointed or worse after any given election? How many of our countrymen would have loved a President Romney? Do we revolt when our candidate loses? Of course not. After all, we recognize that democracy is messy and doesn't always yield the outcomes we desire, but we believe in the system, and we make a grand show of pushing for democracy elsewhere.

But we don't put our money where our mouth is, and Egypt is the most recent and glaring example of how America's misplaced sense of self-interest is actually working against us. We allied ourselves with Hosni Mubarak for the same reasons we ally ourselves with the Saudi Regime. They provide stability and a counterweight to terrorism. This is in our best interest, right? It would seem so until we realize that all of the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt (not Iran, not Syria, not Afghanistan, not the Palestinian territories). We ask ourselves how this could have happened, and we realize that our hypocrisy is actually working against us, not for us. What message does it send to the world when President Obama, on the heels of his first inauguration, travels to Cairo and delivers a wonderful speech about reversing our relationship with the Arab Muslim world and fostering a sense of unity and togetherness, only to then see him sit by silently while the very democratic process he feigned to support was undermined by tanks and bombs? If that is leadership, I think we can do better.

I have repeatedly made the case for intervention in Syria because it is in America's best interest to promote human rights and democracy everywhere, even when we aren't enamored with the leaders that others choose for themselves. Believing in democracy means we accept that the person we support doesn't always win. That's what happened in Egypt, but rather than working with Mr. Morsi or denouncing the military coup, we watched idly as democracy took one on the chin. I wonder what that does to our reputation as a world leader and what kind of leverage it gives us to stop the much bloodier uprising in Syria.

President Obama's foreign policy certainly has not been a disaster. He can count some serious achievements among his endeavors abroad, but his handling of the Arab Spring has gotten progressively worse, and the region is teetering on the verge of an all out collapse. Perhaps this was unavoidable, perhaps this still is unavoidable, but it is going to require some difficult decisions and a legitimate support for human rights and democracy that seems largely absent from the Obama foreign policy playbook.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and the Obama administration is fiddling while the Middle East collapses. In Egypt we had a real chance to show the world that democracy does not need to come at the barrel of an American rifle, it can be brought about by the will of the people (ironic much?). But we mucked up Egypt, just as we are mucking up Syria, just as we have mucked up the aftermath of deft maneuvering in Libya. This isn't new of course, since WWII American foreign policy has been largely a misguided affair in which successive presidents get sucked into the idea that we have to go to war against ideas: communism in Vietnam and terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we aren't waging wars against ideas, we are undermining democracy in South America and the Middle East, and with the exception of President Clinton's courageous foray into the Balkans, we've done almost nothing to stop the suffering of people in Africa, Asia, and South America when they are being slaughtered in horrific numbers. Somehow or another, we've managed to do this for decades without ever asking ourselves how it really connects to our national defense or self-interests. Perhaps we haven't asked that question because we know the answer would undermine most of our post-war(II) foreign policy.

The situation in Egypt is just the latest example of Obama's foreign policy failures, and Obama is just the latest US president to blunder his way through foreign policy guided by some inexplicable sense of American interest that supposedly justifies most of our actions, but has in fact left us weaker than we would be otherwise.

America foreign policy is in need of a serious reboot. I suggest the president start by formally condemning the coup against a democratically elected president. It might be too late to stop Egypt's descent into chaos, but if we are going to turn around decades worth of bad decisions we have to start somewhere.