The U.S. government has long been a hypocritical champion of
democratic governance, claiming to honor free elections but
historically attempting to subvert their outcomes when the
result is not to our liking. But the rank betrayals of our
commitment to the principles of representative democracy, from
Guatemala to Iran to South Vietnam, among the scores of nations
where we undermined duly elected leaders, reached a nadir with
the coup by a U.S.-financed military in Egypt against that
country's first democratically elected government.
Embarrassingly, our law professor president refuses to label the
arrest of Egypt's freely elected president by the military a
coup because that would trigger an end to the $1.5 billion in
U.S. aid as a matter of law. It remained for Sen. John McCain to
set the president straight. "Reluctantly, I believe that we have
to suspend aid until such time as there is a new constitution
and a free and fair election," McCain said Sunday on CBS' "Face
the Nation." Stating the obvious, he noted that "It was a coup
and it was the second time in two-and-a-half years that we have
seen the military step in. It is a strong indicator of a lack of
American leadership and influence."
The
Egyptian military would not have acted without at least the
tacit approval of the U.S. government, and evidence is mounting
that Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser
Susan E. Rice were in on the plotting before President Mohamed
Morsi was arrested. The bloodshed that has followed is on their
hands, and lots of luck ever convincing Islamists anywhere of
the value of free elections as opposed to violence as an enabler
of change.
The coup
restored the corrupt military/bureaucratic class that has denied
Egypt a modern government for half a century. It was accompanied
by the spectacle of Morsi's failed rivals in the last election
rushing to offer their services as "democratic" replacements.
They included the leaders of the Al Nour party, the one Islamic
group that sided with the coup and that makes the Muslim
Brotherhood seem quite moderate in comparison.
As for
Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei and the others who
claim to be human rights advocates, they stand condemned by
their silence in the face of the president's arrest, the
shutting down of an elected parliament, and the banning of media
that might be the slightest bit critical of the military's
seizure of power.
After the
bloody Monday morning massacre of civilians at prayer by the
heavily armed Egyptian military, interim Prime Minister
ElBaradei disgraced himself by equating the violence of the
armed with the resistance of the unarmed: "Violence begets
violence and should be strongly condemned," he tweeted.
"Independent investigation is a must." Not a word from this
celebrated liberal concerning the military's stifling control
over any avenue of investigation by the media or government.
The same
charade of objectivity was on display in the response of U.S.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who, like ElBaradei,
blithely equated the military's deadly excessive force with the
rocks that soldiers claimed some of the demonstrators were
throwing. "This is a situation where it's very volatile on the
ground," she told reporters at a briefing Monday. "There are
lots of parties contributing to that volatility."
The true
victors of the coup are Mideast zealots who shun the ballot box
as a rigged Western secular game, along with their sponsors in
the bizarre theocracy of Saudi Arabia, the first country to
welcome the downfall of Egypt's only serious attempt at
representative governance. For all of the fanatical blather
concerning Islam that has emanated from the oil floated
theocracy of Saudi Arabia, the spawning ground for Osama bin
Laden and 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, it is the peaceful
electoral campaigns of the populist-based Muslim Brotherhood
that the Saudi royalty finds most threatening.
Now it is
the turn of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of
which denied aid to Morsi's government, to reassert their
influence over Egypt by rallying around the country's military.
As the Wall Street Journal
reported Monday, "Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are signaling
they are prepared to start showering Egypt's new government with
significant funding as it transitions away from Mr. Morsi and
his Islamist movement."
So much
for the promise of the Arab Spring; it will now be marketed as a
franchise of the Saudi government. In the end, the argument was
not secular versus religious, but rather whether power would
reside in the ballot box or the barrel of the gun. The United
States, and too many of Egypt's self-proclaimed secular
democrats, ended up on the wrong side of that choice.
Robert Scheer: Editor,
Truthdig.com;
Author, 'The Great American Stickup'
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