It’s worthless paper.” Badly jet-lagged, I testily replied that some humility might be in order since the American government, backer of the aforementioned “real money,” was at that very moment, technically insolvent. While I won the debate on points, those Egyptian pounds are still with me as rueful souvenirs of last week’s whirlwind fact-finding trip to Egypt.
Organized by the Westminster Institute, a McLean-based think tank, our small delegation of media and military analysts was given extraordinary access to Egypt’s top decision-makers, the first such private visit since last summer’s overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood. Our principal interlocutors included the minister of defense, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi; Theodoros II, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church; and Amr Moussa, drafter-in-chief of the new Egyptian Constitution. We also interviewed business leaders, journalists and student revolutionaries, street-wise veterans of the back-to-back uprisings that toppled the authoritarian regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Mohammed Morsi.
Bottom-line impression: While Egypt struggles valiantly, this key regional ally remains in serious trouble. With tourism down by 85 percent and the average Egyptian existing on $2 a day, foreign investment is a desperate, immediate need. Egyptian elites also worry that the strategic stakes (the largest Arab population and most powerful military) are being obscured by a Washington media muddle obsessed with Syria. From graduate students — many of them unemployed — to their executive-suite elders, the recurring nightmare is that the deposed Muslim Brotherhood will fight to regain control of Egypt, the capstone of the longed-for Islamist caliphate. Given the Brotherhood’s 80-year track record, such fears are not unreasonable.
This also explains why ordinary Egyptians reserve a special measure of loathing for Barack Obama, arguing passionately that he is the Muslim Brotherhood’s silent partner. Some of the most troubling comments:
• “Why does the American government under President Obama continue to back the terrorism of the Muslim Brotherhood — including the kind of terrorism that singles out women?”
• “Why does Washington keep demeaning our revolution by calling it a coup? With more than 20 million signatures on recall petitions and 30 million Egyptians in the streets, what else could the Egyptian army do but carry out the will of the people? Especially when the alternative was civil war?”
• “Egypt has been a loyal friend of the United States since Anwar Sadat and a military partner from Desert Storm to the War on Terrorism. So why are you criticizing your friends and seeing Egyptian problems only through American eyes?”
While no one was crude enough to mention Vladimir Putin as a substitute quarterback, the Egyptian military is palpably angry about the Obama administration’s slow-roll on modernization. Critical equipment, like the F-16 aircraft and the Apache AH-64 attack helicopter, is being delayed. The latter is an especially useful counterinsurgency weapon.
Gen. el-Sissi told us flatly that he would not allow the Muslim Brotherhood or anyone else to mount attacks on other countries from Egyptian soil. By that, he meant control over Gaza and the Sinai while continuing to protect the economic “lifeblood” of the Suez Canal. Known threats in those places now include a copious flow of weapons spawned by the fall of longtime Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi. Knowledgeable Egyptians charge that “the U.S. just walked away from Libya once it was over” — ensuring that future military disasters were not left to chance.
Some Egyptians drew larger and even more alarming conclusions about the Obama administration’s tilt toward an oddly Islamist agenda elsewhere in the Middle East: Libya, Lebanon, Syria and even Iran. They understood Mr. Obama’s vaunted Cairo speech in 2009 as de facto support for the Muslim Brotherhood, arguing that clumsy American diplomacy ever since has effectively played into the hands of fanatics. Like the liberal who became a conservative only after being mugged, recent experience with the Brotherhood suggests to Egyptians that this is a disease that easily metastasizes throughout a notoriously volatile region.
The good news brightening this otherwise grim picture is that Egypt, one of the world’s oldest civilizations, is in the grip of its first real experiment with democracy. It is even possible to wonder if new ground can be broken in the dialogue between Egypt’s religious communities. Pope Theodoros described his Islamic counterpart as a good friend, reacting to the widespread destruction of Coptic homes and churches by pointedly reminding his Western audience that “Love never fails.”
Indeed it does not, but presidents, legislators and most human institutions do — often repeatedly, and sometimes in spectacular ways. Maybe that’s why the humble man is the only endangered species that Washington customarily leaves unprotected.
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Col. Ken Allard, retired from the Army, is a military analyst and author on national security issues. The Washington Times