Is Egypt Ungovernable? Essay for JINSA
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs kindly invited me to become a Visiting Fellow. Below is an excerpt of my first work product for JINSA.
The Obama administration is baffled by the Egyptian government’s response to the Sept. 11 attack on the American embassy in Cairo. It took President Mohamed Morsi two days to denounce the assault on the embassy, and even then he placed the blame on a hitherto unnoticed clip posted on YouTube rather than on the attackers. For two days after the flag-burning, Egyptian security was absent while demonstrators threatened the embassy. “A single security vehicle was imaged making an occasional and completely feckless foray through the gathering area, during the early morning of 13 September in Cairo. No Egyptian police or military or other security personnel were present,” the Nightwatch letter observed Sept. 13. The Muslim Brotherhood called for mass protests against the Youtube clip, albeit “peaceful” ones.
Morsi’s behavior raises questions about Egypt’s governability. On the face of it, his actions seem puzzling. Washington has done everything possible to reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood. It called loudly for Hosni Mubarak’s resignation when protests erupted in early 2011. It invited Brotherhood representatives to the White House last April, before Egypt’s presidential elections. It backed Morsi’s August 12 cold coup against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the firing of Gen. Tantawi and the old guard of the Egyptian military, and embraced Tantawi’s successor Gen. El-Sisi, a Brotherhood member.
The White House said nothing when Morsi traveled to Iran in late August, breaking Iran’s diplomatic isolation, believing (as the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook put it) that Morsi would be a “better interlocutor” between Washington and Tehran. And it offered $1 billion of American aid, in the form of loan forgiveness and new credits, as well as backing for a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. Secretary Clinton Sept. 13 bent over backwards to placate Islamist sentiment, calling the YouTube video “disgusting and reprehensible.”
Indeed, the Obama administration is so deeply invested in the notion that the Muslim Brotherhood embodies the future of Islamic democracy that the imagination strains to identify a circumstance that might persuade the White House to abandon its support for the new Egyptian regime. The loyalty that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton evince for the Muslim Brotherhood recalls the zinger that concludes “Some Like It Hot,” when Joe E. Brown tells a drag Jack Lemmon, “Nobody’s perfect.”
Why, then, would President Morsi bite the hand that is trying to feed it? His undisguised contempt for American perceptions and neglect of diplomats’ security are a profound embarrassment to the White House, and fodder for Obama’s opponent in the presidential election. Morsi has made it harder, if not outright impossible, for Obama to deliver the proffered aid package, which Egypt desperately requires.
The answer well may be that no one can govern Egypt. Even Islamists have to eat.
Read the whole essay here.
Thanks, Spengler. I guess the answer to your question is no. Neither can they govern Sinai, which probably means we will be seeing Israeli tanks back on the Suez Canal before too long.
Congratulations on the JINSA fellowship. A bit of excitement and “out of the box” thinking would be a nice addition there.
Shabbat Shalom and L’Shanah Tovah Tikatevu.
Thanks, Ellen and MarcH. Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tovah Umetukah.
Libya IS the perfect target for Morsi. For many reasons.
I wonder what the Obama would do if Egyptian tanks crossed into Libya?
Let’s play “Jeopardy.”
The answer is “A coup by the Egyptian military costs $5 billion in gold.”
Anyone know the question?
“… if Egyptian tanks crossed into Libya”
do they have enough diesel fuel to get to Libya? … they had enough to get to the Sinai but my hunch is that they are pretty much parked there … perhaps the reason the Israelis don’t seem real freaked about their being there…
just guessing
David – I read you essay in full (and let me echo MarcH on your becoming a Fellow at JINSA); and as I read it, I kept wondering how Morsi can expect to wage war when his resource base seems to be dwindling so rapidly, especially petroleum products. After all, tanks and planes and other things need petroleum products, and if Egypt doesn’t have them, nothing they have is going to move very far. (They should consult A. Hitler on what happens in war when there is a dearth of petroleum products.) I guess the one silver lining here is that Israel probably won’t have to worry about Egypt for a long time.
Shabbath Shalom and Shana Tovah U’Metukah to you and yours, and may God bless us all, Jew and Christian alike, with a new president and a year of peace and tranquility.
That is a good point.
One assumes that the security services and (loyal) military will be first in line at the pump. On the other hand, I would expect that US and Israeli military-intel analysts will be watching indicia such as the number of hours/mo Egyptian armor and IFVs spend on field exercises. I would also expect that they will watch for a rise in Egyptian internal affairs investigations and prosecutions of rings involved in theft and black market re-sale of PoL issued to military.
Shabbat Shalom
“They should consult A. Hitler on what happens in war when there is a dearth of petroleum products.”@Jack in Silver Spring
Hitler had plenty of “oil” to win WWII. Read R.A. Stolfi’s “Hitler’s Panzers East”. The Germans had the war won by the end of July 1941 but Hitler diverted the attack from the planned drive through Moscow to the Ukraine ( He also stopped the attack in the North prematurely and never allowed the planned attack in the South. These two mistakes were not fatal flaws. ) The failure to not drive through Moscow and establish a Reverse Front War was a LOST VICTORY EVENT.
Read the book.
Dan Kurt
Dan – At the beginning of the war that was true. Towards the middle of the war and at the end the Germans supplies of petroleum products became increasingly short. Thus, one of their aims in the Battle of the Bulge was to get to American petroleum supplies being stored near the battlefront. The Germans never got there, and the German offensive ran out of gas because it literally ran out of gas.
German press roundup of editorials — consensus is Obama Mideast policy/Arab Spring have failed: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/germany-opines-obamas-middle-east-policy-ruins
The sad truth is the Obama Administration is baffled when the sun rises.
Why, then, would President Morsi bite the hand that is trying to feed it?
Because the Muslim Brotherhood views the US as the enemy. If the enemy is trying to feed the Muslim Brotherhood, so much the better. Does a cobra consider its keeper its friend, because the keeper feeds it mice?
The ultimate weapon weapon Morsi has is People Power. The threat of thirty million starving Egyptians on Europe’s shores will be sufficient blackmail for the West to fund Egypt.
I agree that millions of destitute Egyptians all blaming the West for their troubles and clamoring for violent revenge for those alleged offenses will bring the weak-minded leadership of the liberal Democracies to fund the Muslim Brotherhood controlled Egyptian state. To do otherwise wil be portrayed as inviting a human catastrophe: “if human beings are starving, and we have the means, then we must feed them.” No matter that the starvation and destitution of the people is the direct result of their elected government. As long as Morsi and the MB can focus the blame for all of Egypt’s problems on the West, he has the West by its own humanitarian diplomatic principles.
It’s important to acknowledge that Morsi knows the West far better than the West knows the Muskim Brotherhood. Although he was not the first choice of the MB for the Egyptian presidency, he is probably the better man to effect the changes in Egyptian society, manipulate the West, and lead the MB to its ultimate goals. What are those goals? Well, Spengler has spelled this out rather cogently both here and at the Asian Times: to establish a totalitarian Islamic state in Egypt parallel to the one in Iran. Only the Egyptian version would be run on Sunni+MB principles, instead of Shiite+Khomeini-ist principles.
So would reducing the Egyptian people to destitution and near starvation help to bring this to pass? Actually, yes. As Spengler points out, rationing is a supremely effective way of manipulating a population. And if Morsi can keep the blame for the pain focused on the West, he can bring the West into line, and even get them to fund the distribution of fuel and food in Egypt.
This is really simply classical developing-country totalitarianism. Like Pol Pot or Kim Jong-Il, Morsi and the MB will forge a fanatically supportive populace by grinding it on the stones of starvation and persecution. There is only one very dangerous twist in this case and that is the use of Islam as the ideological basis for building such a state. Call it Islamic supremacism or Islamofascism, it is bad news for the peoples of the western democracies who believe in freedom.
The entire region is unmanageable! Islam is unmanageable!
The worst mistake the west ever mwde in the 20th Century was to give control of those oil fields to the natives. It wasn’t their technology and they built nothing. If they were leasing the land they should uave forced those people to honor it. If force was utilized they (the west) should have destroyed the technology.
Congratzatov! Looks like a step up from Gatestone.
“Morsi may attempt to justify an Egyptian annexation of oil-rich Libya, and might fight Sudan for control of the Nile’s limited water supply.”
This had to have been in the works for the entire time. Their “rebellion” looks more like an Egyptian invasion now, because the wealth gap grew too great. Libya, due to its underground river, also has a great deal of water; Sudan probably doesn’t come into play at all.
So I guess his game is extortion then. A pretty large number of young men willing to crack some skulls (but with limited means to do real damage) seems to be his biggest asset.
I read somewhere that the Brotherhood and Al Quaida are having a go at it with each other. This is the factional fighting that Arabs are notorious for. If true, Egypt is definitely ungovernable at this time.
Hopefully , short term profits do nor win out and the script is not the same
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmIkpRkgaZk
An attempted “annexation” of the Libyan oil fields must be awfully tempting to Morsi’s government right now. The problem is that Libyan insurgents would probably destroy or attempt to destroy as much as the infrastructure as they can (as Saddam did in Kuwait in 1991), thus preventing the Egyptians from realizing much income from those oil fields.
Little girl Mary’s song before she fled into Egypt
“Luke 1:52-53
New International Version (NIV)
52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
53 He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
Serious, I can’t believe that the Egyptian military is totally under the control of the MB. It seems a reasonable option to find and fund a coup from within the military.
Other than our will to do so, why not?