Is Obama Trying to Take Back His Coup in Egypt?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

28 July 13

oor Obama. Everyone pins the blame on him.

The Muslim Brotherhood condemns Obama for the military coup that ousted Mohamed Mursi, Egypt's first elected president. Many followers of Tamarod, whose leaders the U.S. covertly trained to create popular backing for the military to step in, blame Obama for still being too soft on the Muslim Brotherhood. And now the Egyptian military, our go-to allies in Egypt whose coup Obama helped organize, are miffed that he has stopped delivery of four F-16 fighter jets and that his top officials are publicly telling the military to cut back their campaign to decimate their historic enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood.

"This is a pivotal moment for Egypt," declared Secretary of State John Kerry. "The United States ... calls on all of Egypt's leaders across the political spectrum to act immediately to help their country take a step back from the brink."

Don't think it's easy to meddle so deeply in the affairs of another country, as Kerry claims to have learned from Vietnam and Obama from our past failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. But meddling is doubly hard when the leader of the free world tries to do the whole thing off stage, using the shadowy agencies of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA.

He is seen to do nothing, to be following from behind. Yet, off-stage, he is doing far too much, and a large part of it simply cannot be done.

Using Tamarod to build a campaign to encourage the military to intervene was the easy part. Once the Egyptian military took back the reins of power, and Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi began to get a taste of what it might feel like to become a new Nasser or Mubarak with his face on posters throughout Cairo, not even the Pentagon had the leverage that Obama might have expected.

Yes, the U.S. provides $1.5 billion a year in military assistance, but the Saudis and their Gulf State allies are now providing far more, and they like the idea of smashing the Muslim Brotherhood. They have their own brand of Salafi Islamists they would rather see supported.

In the end, I fully expect Obama and al-Sisi to patch up their differences. Both Egypt and the United States have put far too much into their long-standing military alliance to let the crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood get in the way. And, when push comes to shove, Washington is not going to get too carried away by its democratic rhetoric, especially if the Egyptians continue to promote ultra-free-market, neo-liberal economics in the tradition of the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet.

But there is a democratic lesson to be learned, and Americans need to learn it. Ever since "Our Greatest Generation" created the covert action arm of the Central Intelligence Agency after World War II, presidents of both parties have found it too convenient to conduct too much of their foreign policy in the shadows. Today, that could be under the cover of the State Department's "Democracy Bureaucracy," USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, Optor/CANVAS, Google, or a raft of specialized private companies.

Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower, has made us conscious of the mammoth role electronic intelligence now plays in the secret game of nations, while ex-CIA officer Sabrina de Sousa has just blown the whistle on some hitherto unknown details of the kidnapping - sorry, extraordinary rendition - of the Muslim cleric Abu Omar from the streets of Milan, Italy, in 2003. The CIA shipped him to Egypt, where he was reportedly tortured - a timely reminder to Snowden not to put to put too much faith in Attorney General Eric Holder's assurance to the Russians that the United States does not engage in such dastardly behavior.

More than most presidents, Obama has quietly made his mark on the shady side, whether in bringing the military back to power in Egypt, using the CIA to help Saudi Arabia and Qatar to arm the Sunni rebels in Syria, or waging cyberwar against the Iranian nuclear program with what became known as the Stuxnet worm. New York Times journalist David E. Sanger shows us this side of the president in "Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power," which is at the center of the leaking investigation against  4-star Marine General James E. "Hoss" Cartwright. How silly can we get?

I suspect that future historians will play up Obama's interventionist side, but most journalists and politicos today seem content to blast this very activist president as "following from behind" and only a handful see his considerable hand in the Egyptian coup. This makes it impossible for Americans to have a democratic debate on foreign policies no one is supposed to see, and criminalizing leakers and whistleblowers like Cartwright, Manning, and Snowden will only leave the public even more in the dark.