“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Al-Sisi’s Hammer, Obama’s Nine-Iron?
What happened in Egypt yesterday and is continuing to happen today is sad, disheartening and about as completely unsurprising as any such event can be. . . . al-Sisi and associates believe in the “strong horse” theory of political legitimacy, and they are now in the process of applying that theory to Egyptian realities. Might doesn’t necessarily make right—that’s not at all how Islamic jurisprudence on such matters reads—but it’s good enough for government work failing other, gentler institutional alternatives. The Middle East lacks the warm, fuzzy affection for the underdog that many Americans take to be second nature. The dominant view of what is still a patriarchal, hierarchical and still clingingly pre-modern set of Muslim Middle Eastern societies is that the weak deserve whatever depredations they suffer. It’s a kind of ur-Social Darwinism that has been at work for many centuries before Darwin himself ever saw light of day.
As I also said before, I think Egypt’s military leaders are right about this. And I suspect they recognized that the longer they waited to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood encampments the better prepared the MB would be to resist. And they have resisted, and are still doing so. Several score policemen are dead among the many hundreds of MB protestors in Cairo and around the country. So are hundreds of mostly innocent Copts, who have no recourse but to be on the wrong side of the Brotherhood’s murderous intolerance. Indeed, spending energy and resources to kill Coptic civilians and burn down their churches while Muslim police are bearing down on you with shotguns furnishes about the best example there can be of how MB fanaticism completely swamps its capacity for rational planning of any kind.
Read the whole thing. And note this: “I don’t trivialize the President’s priorities. His legacy, in his own words, is to win the House for the Democrats in the coming mid-term election. That’s what he cares about. He’s told us as much, and by now we had best be believing it. You may like it or not, but at least the man can do something about achieving that goal. There is very little he can do about the present state of political play in Egypt—very little indeed.”
It’s vitally important to the GOP that they frustrate him in this goal. Are they as focused at that as he is at achieving it? Or are they also spending “energy and resources” on unproductive fights?