TPM Reader OK follows up on my post about “The Weirdest Story in the History of the World” …
Thank you for posting about this. Although it pales in comparison to recent developments in Egypt (at least as of this hour), this “Obama supports the MB” meme is one that drives me especially batty.
You make a valid argument about the US reversion to the Mubarak-era approach of non-intervention, but this overlooks the sui generis nature of a lot of these types of accusations. Egypt has always been a hotbed of conspiracy theories and imagined threats from beyond; I speak with some authority on this being Egyptian-American myself and having to disabuse my relatives of several of them. Many who supported Mubarak in 2011 believed the “Arab Spring” (people in the region hate that term, btw) was a Western plot designed to punish Egypt for [ ]. Those brackets aren’t a typo; rarely do I find anyone who can offer an explanation.
You get the impression from Egypt of a Beltway Consensus uniquely fixated on Egypt, a country of highly special-purpose strategic importance whose relationship with Washington mostly boils down to a series of phone calls between the Pentagon and the Defence Ministry.
Over time, you learn to chalk this up to cultural eccentricity. But in moments of mass disjuncture and conflict such as what we’re experiencing now, you really start to see it for what it really is: the performance of a kind of wounded nationalist narcissism shouldered by a people whose government has given them no meaningful recourse to dissent for several generations now. This does not mean that the Egyptian people are atavistic and sheep-like in their understanding of global affairs, but that they have been treated with heavy-handed indifference by a government controlled, for all intents and purposes, by a military that receives the bulk of its funding from us.
It is a profoundly absurd and demeaning status quo and the Egyptian people are the ones stuck living with it; it is also incredibly dangerous, least of all because it lends itself to all sorts of rank xenophobia and demagoguery. It would be massively imprudent of this or any Administration to involve itself in Egyptian affairs at a level that most now protesting the US would probably find unacceptable; perhaps this approach might work in some gauzy, Sorkin-esque liberal fantasy but not in real life where we don’t even know who the prime minister is going to be on an hour-to-hour basis. A lot of protestors are now even calling for an end to the aid that is the only thing propping up the army – and their beloved, showboating Apaches – who facilitated the coup to begin with. It’s a line of argument that undermines its own premise and is counterproductive on its face.
I sincerely hope we’ve seen the worst of it.
