The president didn’t need to say a word on the subject. Neither did Kerry, who came off more as a third-grader snarling, “Now stop that.” At least he didn’t stomp his foot and probably didn’t start MSNBC’s Chris Matthews’ leg tingling, either.
Senators McCain and Graham (who else) have already been to Egypt to assess if not referee the current dustup and announced that the U.S. should suspend all aid (about $1.5 billion per year, as per usual, notwithstanding the sequester), actually agreeing with Senator Paul of Tea Party fame. The cash from the U.S. goes to the Egyptian military in the form of fighting machinery, so that puts Obama on the side opposing the “democratically elected” government of Morsi.
But a great big WHOA is in order. The president and then-secretary Clinton had no problem messing in Egypt’s affairs during the glorious “Arab Spring” of 2011, telling then-president Mubarak to get his sizeable carcass out of his presidency and let the folks turn the country into a glorious democracy a la the U.S.
These two partners in international crime (translated, meddling in other countries’ civil wars) also told the head honchos of Libya, Yemen and Syria to take a hike and let their folks institute democracies. After all, isn’t nation-building in other countries a requirement of the U.S Constitution?
Well…no! All of those countries are now in the throes of chaotic bloodshed, meaning that Obama and his State Department were as ignorant of world affairs, especially relating to Muslim-controlled governments, as the average high-school freshman. George Bush, after saying U.S. policy was not nation-building, proceeded to try it anyway and Obama continued along that path. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan today and see the folly.
The media commentators yammer about Egypt being this country’s only Arab ally, thus obligating an Obama or Kerry to do or say something about everything that happens there—like the current widespread burning of Christian churches. Egypt-as-ally is actually Egypt-as-bought-off, the reason for the foreign aid. But the media-yammering has some significance, namely, that Obama has shot off his mouth all along and so has to continue that, not that it means anything.
What happened in Egypt was a military coup, though not officially recognized as such by the U.S. The law mandates the stopping of aid in that instance. Obama, however, has shown in an abundance of ways that neither the Constitution nor laws enacted by Congress mean much to him. He governs by executive order, so if he says a coup is not a coup and issues an executive order to that effect, he merely emulates his actions vis-à-vis the Defense of Marriage Act and his inexcusable and bloody attack on Libya in 2011—his hands-on approach to the glorious Arab Spring.
While he was at his Martha’s Vineyard gig in 2011 golfing and celebrating the dog-days of Arab Spring, the Libyan rebels he mistakenly thought were the good guys hounded Qadaffi out of Tripoli but couldn’t put him away until October—seven months after Obama said his little war would last days, not weeks. The death-count of that fiasco, described at the time by then-defense-secretary Gates as being done “on the fly,” has never been released.
Both Obama and Kerry would do well to just shut-up. Obama’s word (and Clinton’s at the time) hasn’t been worth warm spit in the Muslim world for years. Muslims settle their affairs in Muslim ways, and that usually does not mean democratically, at least not for very long at a time. Though it sounds sanguinary to say, it is nevertheless true that while Muslims are killing each other they are not killing Americans.
The governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates have given/pledged $8 billion to the new government backed by the military in Egypt, so the U.S. aid pales by comparison. Ousted president Morsi was turning the country over to the repressive Muslim Brotherhood, which would attempt to obliterate Israel and by extension all other non-Muslim/non-Sharia countries.
As Ecclesiastes 3:7 would have it, there is a time to “keep silence.”
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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