Obama on Egypt: The Clueless Presidency
Contentions
There’s some soul searching going on in the Obama administration as it ponders how they got sidelined in Egypt as the situation there got out of control in a spiral of violence. As theNew York Times details in a post-mortem of U.S. policy, the administration went all out to persuade the military that had overthrown the Muslim Brotherhood to compromise and allow the Islamists to rejoin the government. Among other efforts to cajole them or to threaten aid cutoffs, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made 17 often-lengthy phone calls to Egyptian General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi trying to get him to make nice with the Brotherhood. They even sent two Republican senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—to continue the pressure in person in Cairo. And they’re baffled as to why they were ignored as Sisi ordered police and troops to clear out the Brotherhood’s armed camps in Cairo this week. (Read more…)
The Citizen of the World Presidency
By Elliott Abrams — COMMENTARY September 2013
In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected. Aside from making it clear he was not George W. Bush and would get out of Iraq, the rest read like liberal boilerplate: “We have seen the consequences of a foreign policy based on a flawed ideology….The conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002….This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place.” In 2008, he visited Berlin and told an enraptured crowd: “Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world…the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together.”
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Israel Becomes The Little Giant
August 19, 2013: Despite decades of Arab boycotts and pressure on countries to not deal with Israel, military exports from Israel continue to grow. In the last year Israeli firms sold $1.8 billion worth of weapons to the Americas (mostly the United States, but a third of that went to South America), $1.6 billion to European customers and $200 million to African nations. About half those sales are for anti-aircraft systems. Israel has a wide range of anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems, many of them using successful Israeli air-to-air missile designs for ground based systems.
Israeli air defense technology has proved itself in combat, is famous for its reliability and technical excellence and is priced to sell. Israel is also a major exporter of military space satellites, nigh vision and surveillance gear and all manner of military communications equipment. Israel is also second only to the U.S. as a UAV exporter and was first to develop a lot of key UAV technology that the U.S. built on. Israel has also pioneered the development of add-on armor for combat and non-combat vehicles. Israel is also one of the premier developers of electronic warfare equipment (for aircraft and ground vehicles). Israel also exports warships, warplane upgrades and all manner of technical service.
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UNSC Res 446 (1979) says settlements have “no legal validity”
I never heard of or read about this.
Wikipedia
United Nations Security Council resolution 446, adopted on 22 March 1979, concerned the issue of Israeli settlements in the “Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”.[1] This refers to the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip as well as the Syrian Golan Heights.In the Resolution, the Security Council determined: “that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East”
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Nidal Hasan and Militant Islamic Perfidy
by Bill Levinson
Dante’s Inferno assigns the worst parts of Hell to practitioners of perfidy: “fraudulent acts between individuals who share special bonds of love and trust.” Thousands of years of human history provide a good reason for this, because the safety of the human species depends on relationships of this nature.
We are, like any other animal, at our most vulnerable when we sleep. This, in turn, requires an extraordinary level of trust between guests and hosts. This is why of the most abhorrent acts possible, as reflected by Ptolomea in the Inferno, involves the murder of a guest by a host, or a host by a guest. This special relationship is why Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan is particularly horrific in Shakespeare’s play. The equally perfidious murder of a sleeping comrade is the crime for which the British Army executes a soldier in Kipling’s Danny Deever:
- They are hangin’ Danny Deever, you must mark ‘im to ‘is place,
For ‘e shot a comrade sleepin’ — you must look ‘im in the face;
Nine ‘undred of ‘is county an’ the regiment’s disgrace,
While they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.
The Curse of Sinai
Mursi Egypt accuses Hamas of responsibility for the terrorist chaos in Sinai, and not without good cause.
Egyptian security forces arrest suspected terrorist in the Sinai. The Sinai Peninsula is a huge area, approximately 61,000 square kilometers, which is almost three times the area of the State of Israel, and its population is approximately 550,000, less than one tenth of the population of Israel. The residents of Sinai, despite being Egyptian citizens for the most part, are not of Egyptian origin: their Arabic dialect is Saudi Arabian, their culture is different from Egyptian culture and they identify with the state of Egypt about as much as the Bedouins in the Negev identify with the state of Israel.
Why is this so? The reason is that the Bedouin will never identify with a state, since the state symbolizes order and the rule of law, whereas the desert is spontaneous and the law that rules within it is the law of the tribes. Only when the Bedouin is part of the governmental system and enjoys its benefits does he identify with the state, for example in Jordan, and even there it is not always guaranteed. The Sinai Peninsula was never an integral part of Egypt; it was annexed only in the beginning of the twentieth century, when Britain – which ruled Egypt at the time – wanted to keep some distance between the Ottoman Empire and the Suez Canal.
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‘Morsi didn’t win the elections’
An Egyptian official told me in person that the army rigged the presidential elections in June 2012, fearing widespread riots should the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, lose the race.
According to my source, who asked to remain anonymous, Ahmed Shafik, the former air force commander and former president Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, actually won the race by a narrow margin. But the army generals — wanting to ensure that law and order would be upheld following the elections — feared that if Morsi was defeated, the Muslim Brotherhood would refuse to recognize the results and would end up conducting themselves just as they are now.
The official results, 51.73 percent for Morsi and 48.27% for Shafik, were almost the exact reversal of what actually happened at the polls. After the results were published, we barely heard any calls for protest or opposition among the secular-liberals, while on the religious side — loyal either to the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafi parties — voters were happy with their achievement.
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Egyptian Democratic Coalition Responds to Obama
The National Salvation Front, a coalition of pro-democratic and secular parties in Egypt, set out its objections to remarks made by President Barack Obama Thursday on the escalating violence in Egypt.
Led by Ahmed Said of the Free Egyptians Party, the group issued the following letter:
- “Like most Egyptians, we listened with attention to your statement on Egypt’s latest developments. As representatives of the non-Islamic political forces in Egypt, we believe in the same fundamental values on which the U.S. was founded. Be we also have 7,000 years of civilization and history that give us a special identity that we are fighting to keep since the Muslim Brotherhood came to power.
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The Coup is Egypt’s One Chance for Democracy
Only capable armed forces can check the violent proclivities of Islamic supremacism.
As Egypt began to implode, yet again, John Kerry inadvertently stumbled into something a lot closer to the truth than the delusional “Arab Spring” narrative that has guided Obama-administration policy. The secretary of state, tied in knots by congressional foolishness that mandates terminating U.S. aid when a foreign government is ousted by a coup d’état, rationalized that, quite contrary to a coup, the Egyptian military’s ejection of President Mohamed Morsi was an exercise in “restoring democracy.”
None of this was quite right, although that is to be expected. After all, the C-word on Kerry’s mind was not “coherence”; he was struggling to avoid saying “coup.” But let’s face it: Morsi was forcibly removed from power, and he is being detained, along with other major Muslim Brotherhood figures. That is a coup to most sensible people — people who are not paid to fret over the statutory ramifications of admitting reality, and who have no patience for fastidious distinctions like whether the generals have actually taken over the government or are “merely” backing the civilian technocrats they’ve put in place. (Read more…)
NY TIMES BLAMES ISRAEL AND AIPAC FOR PROLONGING EGYPT’S AGONY
And if the allegation is true that Israel is standing by Sisi, what’s wrong with that? What happens in Egypt is of immediate concern to Israel and it is only natural that she calls them the way she sees them. The US and the EU are wrong on the peace process and wrong in their embrace of the MB. Why should we support wrong policies? Ted Belman
From: Leo Rennert, AMERICAN THINKER
It’s the lead story on the Sunday front page of the New York Times—a lengthy piece on how frantic, behind-the-scenes efforts by U.S. and European diplomats supposedly came close to building a path toward ending the bloody conflict in Egypt between the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed interim government.
In the end, as we all know, external prodding failed. But in allotting blame for why diplomacy didn’t succeed, the Times gratuitously points an accusing finger at Israel and AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, for allegedly siding with the Egyptian military and undermining U.S. diplomacy (“How a U.S. Push to Defuse Egypt Ended in Failure –Barrage of Diplomacy—Despite 17 Calls from Hagel, Cairo Chose Confrontation” by David Kirkpatrick, Peter Baker and Michael Gordon).
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Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel
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