Stop Military Aid to Egypt, Says Me and the Neocons

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

18 August 13

merican aid makes the U.S. complicit in the Egyptian army's acts," read the headline in the Washington Post back on August 1. It appeared nearly a month after the U.S.-supported coup that dared not speak its name, but well before this week's horrific massacre of Muslim Brotherhood protestors. Surprising to many, including the generally anti-interventionist senator Ron Paul, the author was neocon guru Robert Kagan, a former member of Mitt Romney's foreign policy team and a gung-ho proponent of America's "benevolent global hegemony."

One of the prime organizers of the Project for a New American Century, the bright lights who used 9/11 to lure President George W. Bush into Iraq, Kagan is a founding director of the new neocon flagship, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), which is urging Obama to give greater aid to the Sunni rebels in Syria as a stepping stone - I would argue - to launching a military attack on Iran.

But, on Egypt, Kagan and his fellow neocons and liberal interventionist allies saw the reality of the military coup well before many of our own readers here at RSN. "The stage is set for a deadly government assault not only against the Muslim Brotherhood but also against the millions of Egyptians who voted for the Brotherhood in elections over the past two years," he predicted with a flawless eye. "Combined with the arrests on trumped-up charges of Morsi and others linked to the Brotherhood, the military appears intent on eradicating the organization from Egypt's politics, jailing its leaders and followers or driving them underground."

Kagan also foresaw that giving $1.3 to $1.5 billion in U.S. aid provided Washington absolutely no leverage. Why? Because the generals believed that the Obama administration would not withdraw the aid. Failed attempts to stop this week's massacre show how little influence Obama and his European allies exercised over the generals, and Obama has responded by cancelling the previously scheduled Bright Star military exercises with Egypt. Photographs of U.S. soldiers training shoulder-to-shoulder with their Egyptian counterparts would have been terribly embarrassing when juxtaposed against images of Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's troops massacring civilian protestors. Earlier, Obama halted the delivery of F-16 jets. The question now is whether he will suspend the military aid.

"Suspending aid now is not merely a matter of principle or even of abiding by our own laws - although that ought to count for something," Kagan argued. "As a practical security matter, we may pay a heavy price down the road for our complicity in the military's actions over the coming months."

The price will be "a whole new generation of Islamist fighters, some percentage of whom will turn to terrorism," he concluded. "If and when they do, the United States, as the Egyptian military's great and unwavering backer, will again become a target."

As early as July 8, only 5 days after the coup, Kagan and his Foreign Policy Initiative issued a statement from "The Working Group on Egypt," which Kagan co-chairs, clearly calling for suspending military and economic aid to Egypt. "The United States should acknowledge that Morsi failed utterly as Egypt's first freely elected president, and that many Egyptians strongly support the army's action," they wrote. "But the reliance on military intervention rather than a political process to resolve crises severely threatens Egypt's progression to a stable democracy."

If die-hard neocons and their liberal interventionist allies could so clearly see what was coming, why did Secretary of State John Kerry, a one-time antiwar hero, continue to proclaim that the Egyptian military "were restoring democracy" and not out "to run the country."

It's sad for old activists from the Vietnam War era to see Kerry become such a self-righteous manikin, and I feel even stranger finding myself in agreement with Kagan, whose imperial hubris and American exceptionalism generally give me apoplexy. But, before we get too cozy, Kagan's own role in the Egyptian fiasco deserves attention. He does not talk it about in his Post article, and the July 8 statement only hints at it with a reference to "democracy promotion work."

Kagan's Working Group on Egypt is made up of generally interventionist policy wonks from well-known U.S. think tanks and "democracy promotion" groups like the government funded National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, and Freedom House. In their first statement to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in April 2010, the group urged her "to promote democratic reform in Egypt in advance of the upcoming elections." The group went on to meet with members of President Obama's National Security Staff, including Dennis Ross and Samantha Power, and were seen as instrumental in a secret 18-page Presidential Study Directive that identified likely flashpoints in the Arab World.

"There's no questions Egypt was very much on the mind of the president," said a senior official who helped draft the report, and the emphasis on democracy promotion led to the kind of revolutionary training I described in "Did Google and the Nonviolent Serbs Help Stir up Obama's Coup in Egypt?" and "Inside Egypt's Killer Coup: The Inconvenient Evidence." That training helped Tamarod create "the managed crisis" that led to Gen. al-Sisi's military coup and subsequently to the massacre.

Much like the old Communist International, Kagan and the "democracy promoters" in Washington have created a Capitalist International that feels a responsibility to promote "revolutions" and otherwise meddle in other countries. We should by all means cut the military and economic aid to Egypt, as Kagan urges. But, at the same time, we should stop funding Washington's "democratic" meddling that Kagan and the neocons continue to support. The world has had enough of his "benevolent global hegemony," and so have the American people.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.