Each year, the U.S. sends $1.5 Billion in foreign aid to Egypt. About $1.3 Billion of that goes straight to the military. Despite the fact that Mohamed Morsi was threatening Israel over the Gaza situation, the Obama administration had no qualms about sending this money while his radical Islamist government was in charge. However, the Egyptian people decided that allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to hijack their country was a bad idea, so the military rose up and deposed Mohamed Morsi. Once he was out of power, they began arresting his Brotherhood allies.
Now, suddenly, the White House is uncomfortable sending all that cash.
According to State Department spokesman Jen Psaki, “The arrests we’ve seen, of course, over the past several days targeting specific groups are not in line with the national reconciliation that the interim government and military say they are pursuing. If politicized arrests and detentions continue, it is hard to see how Egypt will move beyond this crisis.”
“We’re looking at what happened last week and how things are certainly handled moving forward,” she said. “Those are all factors in our decision-making around our policy as it relates to Egypt.”
Psaki also claims that Muslim Brotherhood arrests are being "considered" in regards to future aid decisions.
Translation: If Egypt wants our money, they'd better stop rounding up Muslim Brotherhood goons.
As Jay Carney put it, “The only way this is going to work successfully for the Egyptian people is if all parties are encouraged and allowed to participate and that’s why we’ve made clear that arbitrary arrests are not anything that we can support.”
One wonders what, exactly, Carney's boss finds "arbitrary" about the arrests. The Brotherhood ran roughshod over the Egyptian government, and the military is removing them. You can certainly argue about the propriety of that action, but to call it “arbitrary” is to suggest it's nothing more than the kind of baseless, random persecution regularly carried out by...say...the IRS.
All of this comes just days after the US Government claimed that it intended to carry on with plans to send a batch of F-16 fighter planes to the Egyptian military. This begs a question.
Is the Obama administration's Egypt policy just completely bi-polar, or are they honestly intending to reverse course out of some deep-seeded desire to shore up the Muslim Brotherhood’s power?
The American people are footing the bill. They deserve an answer.
