No Time for Smelling Salts

Washington – This is no time for sissies – be they couch potatoes watching what’s going on in Egypt on TV or pyramids of power like President Barack Obama doing his best to give minimal attention to the hinges of history swinging.

At the beginning of July Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sisi , Egypt’s senior military commander, kicked Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s elected president, out of office and locked him up just to make sure. Lilly-livered liberals everywhere got the vapors and reached for smelling salts. Coup, horrible hideous coup, the death of democracy on the Nile they wailed and donned their mourning weeds. In Cairo, by contrast, the military commander and de facto ruler of the country probably took a swig of Scotch or spiked lemonade but certainly not any potion to sooth the emotions.

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He must have been cool and certainly was dead-serious when he decided to take on the Muslim Brotherhood. This is rough stuff and the enormous crows showing their muscle in Cairo Friday night held it up for the world to see. An Al-Jazeera reporter on the scene gave perhaps the most telling account of what was going on when he spoke of “thousands “ of supporters demanding the reinstatement of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s ousted president, and “hundreds of thousands” cheering on the military and its action against Islamist “terrorists.” Nobody in Washington can do anything about the July 26 – 27 night on the Nile or about the crackdown on Islamists likely to continue as long as the military controls the government. However, Barack Obama still has a chance to end his spectator status and restore a good measure of the influence he frittered away just when facts on the ground of the biggest Arab nation are being set for better or for worse. You can’t fertilize a 10-acre field with a broken wind – my euphemism – as Lyndon Johnson used to say while making decisions as Senate Leader and later president of the United States. And neither can you lead from behind as Obama famously said he would while dipping his toe in Libya then running away when the Arab Spring was young in early 2011. It was no different when Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt was on the ropes in February 2011. Obama did not know what to do. Washington signaled support, pulled back and finally let America’s old ally sink. Of course decisions which sway to jump are difficult when events race a clock no one can see. But indecision – dithering is the worst option and Barack Obama picks it every time. I don’t believe Obama is directed by hidden motives and agendas. What acts on him and comes out in the washing is his deficit of knowledge of global interactions. That is a problem. The worst of it is that he seems to have no clue how his – ok, caution – is seen and interpreted by the other side – whoever it is. “It is time for President Assad to step aside,” Obama said August 18, 2011 from the podium in the White House East Room. But to this day he has done nothing to help it happen. Does he bother to think what Assad makes of it? How the insurgents see it is easy to understand: They simply don’t believe him -- or the United States. Meanwhile Obama is busy preparing the political battlefields of next year’s congressional elections. There is worse to say about a president with his back to the world in turmoil because he judges that defusing as “phony scandals” abuses of power that might have led his predecessors to the impeachment dock. It is no “phony scandal” when the president’s operatives or the White House, as is alleged in Washington, set the dreaded Internal Revenue Service to hound political opponents. Or is it “phony” when the Justice Department charges the Washington Bureau chief of Fox News with criminal conduct as he peruses open sources of information? And in what way is it a “phony scandal” when the cover-up stays in place on exactly what happened in Benghazi last September 11. On the tenth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon al-Qaeda-connected terrorists in the west Libyan city stormed the American consulate in two waves of attack over a seven-hour time span. Obama did nothing to help the American diplomats under fire. Three of them were gunned down and his ambassador to Libya suffocated as the consulate burned. If these are “phony scandals” Obama just whitewashed deeds hereto considered abhorrent and arguably impeachable. So what? As has happened ever since he took office in January 2009, winning elections trumps all else. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, says in the Washington Post. “This is no time to turn our backs on Egypt.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, advises the president and Congress to ignore the critics and support the new military rule. Tom Friedman, the Big Foot New York Times columnist, says elections are the last thing Egypt needs right now. Funny, maybe he read a column on the Canada Free Press news site that ran on July 9. It said not all coups are bad. No bragging here, just a reminder that some things are obvious to conservative and liberal minds alike.