And yet, after the bloody events in Egypt last week, it strains decency to ask historical patience of the bereaved. Nearly seven hundred people were killed and four thousand wounded—a slaughter initiated by the military commander, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a man no longer willing to countenance protests against the coup that brought him to power. The spectacle of defiance—of thousands of supporters of the deposed President, Mohamed Morsi, staging sit-ins in Cairo, Giza, and elsewhere—had to end, General Sisi declared. Municipal traffic could no longer be rerouted. “We bent over backwards to bring in the Brotherhood,” an official in Cairo airily informed the Wall Street Journal. “No responsible government could take any more of this.”
So it began. On August 14th, Sisi and his allies, claiming unconvincingly that the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators were “terrorists” responsible for hoarding huge quantities of arms, acted as a junta is apt to. The Interior Ministry promised that security forces would clear the streets with the gentleness of lambs, in order “not to shed any Egyptian blood.” Instead, they set out, at around 7 A.M., armed with tear gas and bulldozers, and moved quickly to live fire. They aimed, according to witnesses, at the head, neck, and chest.
You can mistrust the politics and the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood. You can point out that, during its year at the head of an elected government, it exploited its victory to embed its religious ideology and its goals as deeply as possible in the new constitution. Its views on women’s rights, its efforts to intimidate journalists, and attacks by its supporters on Coptic churches and Christian believers are just a few of its deplorable features. The history of the Brotherhood and of its impact in the Middle East inspires no admiration. But how does a military coup, along with the kidnapping of an elected President, and widespread, indiscriminate arrests, announce the resumption of democratic practice? Islamists make up roughly a third of the Egyptian population. The slaughter on the streets will surely radicalize many of them, and set back democratic development throughout the region.
In fact, the temptation is to declare the Arab Spring over—for now, at least. Leaders of the secular opposition have been gunned down in Tunisia. Libya, dominated by rival militias, flounders in a state of chaos. Thanks largely to the ministrations of Iran and Hezbollah, the Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad is regaining authority in his shattered country with victories over the divided, and increasingly jihadist, rebels. The monarchs of Jordan and Morocco can reassure themselves that the spectacles of blood and disorder elsewhere in the Middle East will help forestall any uprisings and safeguard their thrones.
Leaders and diplomats in the West, meanwhile, have run up against the limits of their influence. The task of statesmen is, often enough, to utter the indefensible and the insupportable in the greater interest of their nation. The Obama Administration has carefully avoided using the word “coup”—a linguistic trip wire that would trigger the automatic withdrawal of the $1.3 billion in aid that Washington annually remits to Egypt. On August 1st, a month after the coup, Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the Army was “restoring democracy.” In his parsing of events, “The military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of people. . . . The military did not take over, to the best of our judgment—so far.” The same day, Sisi, talking to the Washington Post, showed his gratitude to the friendly obfuscations of the Administration by saying, “You turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that.”
Sisi, who studied at the U.S. Army War College—where he wrote a paper called “Democracy in the Middle East”—told the Post that he did not “aspire for authority,” as other Egyptian military men had in the past, but he couldn’t restrain himself from preening in such a way that suggested his greater sense of destiny. “The most important achievement in my life is to overcome this circumstance,” he said, to insure “that we live peacefully, to go on with our road map and to be able to conduct the coming elections without shedding one drop of Egyptian blood.” He added, “When the people love you, this is the most important thing for me.”
In recent weeks, the leadership of the E.U. and members of Obama’s Cabinet were in regular contact with Sisi, imploring him not to use violence. He took a casual attitude toward these admonishments. Already, in July, the security forces had killed more than a hundred demonstrators, and the sole U.S. sanction had been to delay the delivery of four F-16 fighter jets. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates were, meanwhile, propping up Sisi with many billions more than the Americans have ever offered. And, when last week’s slaughter came, Kerry swallowed the bile of outrage and insisted that the United States could still make inroads with the Egyptians if given a chance. “From my many phone calls with many Egyptians, I believe they know full well what a constructive process would look like,” he told reporters. “I am convinced that that path is, in fact, still open.” The next day, President Obama emerged from a vacation rental on Martha’s Vineyard to rap the General’s knuckles, if lightly. He cancelled a biennial joint military exercise with the Egyptians. This was a baby step forward, but he again avoided using the word “coup” to describe the coup. He called it “the military’s intervention.”
When White House advisers formulate a position that they believe is correct but which manages to repel everyone, they say that they have “hit the sweet spot.” In Egypt, they have struck it with regularity. Obama has succeeded in angering Egypt’s Islamists, its military, and what few liberals remain on the scene—this is the price we pay, above all, for decades of fealty to Hosni Mubarak. But the Administration also insists on the need to stay engaged, even with a military leadership as heedless and as brutal as Sisi’s. After all, it says, if the U.S. withholds its relatively modest contribution, Russia, among others, will surely rush in to make up the shortfall and gain the kind of foothold it has not had in Egypt since it was kicked out by Anwar Sadat, in the early nineteen-seventies.
The Administration prides itself on taking the long view in foreign policy, forgoing the morally satisfying gesture in pursuit of a cooler calculation of outcomes. Yet gestures and words matter, too. There comes a point when a thing demands its proper name. A coup is a coup. A despot is a despot. And a massacre is a massacre.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: David Remnick
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