by: Newt Gingrich
The gap between Egyptian realities and the opinions of American leaders of both parties is simply amazing.
The American leaders seem to live
in a fantasy world in which America is all powerful, our definition of
legitimacy is unchallengeable, and our right to take risks with the
lives of other people is unquestioned.
Both Democratic and Republican
leaders (and their allies in the news media) seem to have no sense of
the realities facing the Egyptian military.
Put yourselves in the shoes of the senior officers of the Egyptian military.
Two years ago they watched the
Obama Administration abandon President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak had been
President of Egypt for 30 years and throughout that time had supported
the United States -- through two wars in Iraq, the decade of war in
Afghanistan, and an amazing number of other contingencies. His reward
for being a faithful ally was abandonment and imprisonment.
The Obama desertion of Mubarak
almost certainly reminded the Egyptian military of President Jimmy
Carter's desertion of the Shah of Iran. In November of 1978 President
Carter toasted the Shah as a great ally. A few months later, the
Americans pressured him to give in to the "reformers." The Shah was
driven from his country and died overseas. His generals were imprisoned
and many executed. Their families fled Iran. Today, 34 years later, the
"reformers" have consolidated their dictatorship and are trying to build
a nuclear weapon.
The United States invaded Iraq and left behind a high level of violence.
The United States helped drive Qaddafi from power and has left Libya in shambles.
The United States has wrung its
hands and publicly dithered while Assad has worked with the Iranians and
the Russians to consolidate his control over Syria.
American senators and American
secretaries of state can fly to Cairo to offer advice and advocate
idealistic but impractical reforms. When they are done lecturing
Egyptians, they fly home to safety.
The senior officers of the
Egyptian military know that they will still be there when the Americans
leave. Indeed, many of them remember the Americans abandoning their
allies in South Vietnam.
Most senior American officials do not understand this and assume their prestige is unquestionable.
Cutting off American aid will
have no effect. (I favor cutting it off because it is no longer
furthering American interests.) The Saudis and their Persian Gulf allies
have already committed $10 in new aid for every dollar of American aid.
The senior officers of the
Egyptian military know that their lives and their families' lives depend
on defeating the Muslim Brotherhood.
They know that Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all followed hard line policies against the Muslim Brotherhood and it worked.
They know that the Algerian Army
rejected an Islamist election victory in 1991 and fought an eleven year
civil war to impose order on Algeria. More than 44,000 Algerians were
killed in the campaign to defeat Islamists. Westerners were horrified.
The Algerian Army won.
The hardest-line example of
survival through repression was Hafez Assad of Syria who survived in
power for 30 years (from 1970 to his death in 2000). Assad was
relentlessly tough in fighting the Muslim Brotherhood. When they tried
to assassinate him in 1980 he retaliated by executing over 600
prisoners. When the city of Hama sought to rebel he crushed it so
thoroughly that it became a model of horrifying repression. Tom Friedman
of the New York Times coined the term "Hama Rules". In Hama that meant
literally destroying entire neighborhoods to eliminate opposition. That
brutal operation cost 20,000 Syrians their lives but Assad stayed in
power.
The United States must rethink its entire policy in the Middle East.
We have to recognize that on a
bipartisan basis for the last 12 years we have tried to create and
impose an American fantasy in Middle Eastern realities.
Egypt is a good place to begin rethinking this policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment