And Kerry’s remarks must have had White House approval.
In full outrage mode, America’s most famous windsurfer castigated the Egyptian authorities, insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood had a right to “peaceful protests.” Apparently, “peaceful” means armed with Kalashnikovs, killing policemen, kidnapping and torturing opponents, turning mosques into prisons, attacking Christians and burning Coptic churches.
The Brotherhood protesters rejected all offers of compromise and all demands to disperse. The interim government’s response was heavy-handed, but the Muslim Brothers chose violent resistance — using women and children as shields (a tactic typical of Islamist terrorists).
Do we really need to have sympathy for the devil?
With its blundering, fickle, late-in-the-day support for whoever appeared to be gaining the upper hand, the Obama administration has managed the remarkable feat of alienating every faction in Egypt. And it’s a sorry day when an American administration abets religious totalitarianism, as this White House did when the “democratically elected” Morsi regime tried to Islamize Egypt’s government and society for keeps.
There was, indeed, a coup. But not all coups involve tanks. The real coup came after Egypt’s premature, badly flawed election, when Morsi and the Brotherhood excluded all non-Brothers from the political process; curtailed media freedoms and jailed journalists; attacked Christians; and rushed toward an Islamist state that the majority of Egyptians did not want.
Tens of millions of Muslims took to the streets to protest the Brotherhood’s plunge toward tyranny. Only after attempts to persuade an unrepentant Morsi to compromise failed, did the military move against the regime. The people cheered.
Yet our breathtakingly inept ambassador backed the Morsi regime right to the end. That isn’t diplomacy. It’s idiocy.
But all you have to do to create witless panic in Washington is cry “Military coup!” Well, sometimes — regrettably — a military is all that stands between a population and deadly (and anti-American) fanaticism. Despite yesterday’s bloodshed, would we really prefer a return to Brotherhood rule? Stuff the political correctness and get real.
Is the Egyptian military an ideal ally? Nope. But it’s a far better bet than Obama’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood turned out to be.
The danger now is that the administration and naïfs in Congress will cut aid to the Egyptian military and curl up into a snit. That would only make the Egyptians who want a reasonably free, generally tolerant and ultimately democratic Egypt even madder at us. And Egypt’s the most important Arab country.
Do we really need to make additional enemies in the region? Of moderates and secularists? In a quest to be “fair” to fanatics?
Official figures allow 275 dead in yesterday’s violence, while the Muslim Brotherhood claims more than 2,000. The latter number’s preposterous — you can’t hide that many corpses from prying journalists — but the reality is probably somewhere in between.
Regrettable? Yes. Inevitable? Also yes, thanks to the Brotherhood’s intolerance and intransigence.
It’s time to get over ourselves. Our narcissistic belief that we not only can, but must, decide the destinies of Middle Eastern populations is destructive. We can, at times, play constructively on the margins, but we’re not even good at that.
The Obama administration needs a new foreign-policy motto: “First, do no harm.”
And we need to base our policies on our long-term interests, not on here-and-gone headlines. The enemy of the Egyptian people and of the American people is the same: Islamist fanaticism. And defeating radical extremists isn’t a smiley-face business.
When someone insists that he knows what God demands everybody must do, you can either submit or resist. Egyptians chose to resist. And the Muslim Brotherhood, not the Egyptian military, chose blood.
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Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and Fox News’ strategic analyst. The New York Post