U.S. Actually Helps Pro-9/11 Forces in Egypt's Crisis

 

IBDEditorials.com

Egypt: As Cairo burns, the president of the United States putts. Instead of "leading from behind" the tee, Obama should be backing an interim government struggling to keep radical Islamists out of power.

Sorry for interrupting the president's Martha's Vineyard vacation, but when the most strategically significant country in the Mideast descends into a bloody chaos the leader of the free world belongs in the Situation Room, not the $7 million Schulte estate.

With more than 600 dead so far, Egypt threatens to become a disaster with global implications, and cries out for U.S. leadership. As Muslim Brotherhood mobs burn scores of Christian churches, the Brothers vow to "bring down" the interim military government, while Islamist mobs storm government buildings.

As the government authorizes lethal force, there is a great danger that external condemnation of Egyptian authorities' self-preservation tactics could lead to the Muslim Brotherhood returning to power — this time with no way to remove them.

President Obama condemns exactly the wrong people, Egypt's military, and cancels a scheduled joint military operation. The State Department wasted no time announcing the reassessment of the annual $1.5 billion in mostly military U.S. aid to Egypt.

As Charles Krauthammer notes, Egypt's armed forces are the country's "most stable and important institution ... Western-oriented" and "widely respected, carrying the prestige of the 1952 'Free Officers Movement' that overthrew the monarchy and the 1973 October War that restored Egyptian pride along with the Sinai."

But "we don't take sides with any particular party or political figure," Obama claims from the Vineyard, a statement he knows to be untrue.

The president put the U.S. squarely against now-deposed President Hosni Mubarak when he snubbed him in Cairo in 2009. Obama's speech there, attended by Brotherhood figures, marked a shift in U.S. Mideast policy. Later, Hillary Clinton flew to Cairo and put U.S. prestige behind the Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi, just two weeks after he was sworn in as president.

"I know it's tempting inside of Egypt to blame the United States or the West or some other outside actor for what's gone wrong," Obama added. It certainly is, because it's so obviously his fault.

Given its sympathies, the Obama administration gravitates naturally toward placing America on the side of Egypt's bad guys, the jihadists who hold common cause with those who attacked us on 9/11.

Meanwhile, the media "continue demonizing the Egyptian military's attempts to neutralize the Muslim Brotherhood terror bases — where people have been tortured, raped, and killed, all according to Islamist fatwas," notes Raymond Ibrahim in National Review.

This is Obama's Muslim "New Beginning." In a couple of years, who will be running the governments of post-U.S.-withdrawal Afghanistan, nuclear-armed Pakistan, and post-U.S. withdrawal Iraq (by which time Iran will be nuclear armed)?

The president told voters last year al-Qaida was "on its heels." In fact, it and its jihadist comrades are rising.