by Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n
Frontpage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0headline on Secretary of State Clinton\u2019s visit to Egypt said it all: \u201cUS Is in a Quandary.\u201d That\u2019s putting it mildly. Better words for this administration\u2019s foreign policy are \u201cconfused,\u201d \u201ccontradictory,\u201d and \u201cdelusional.\u201d<\/p>\n Start with Clinton\u2019s meeting with newly elected Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi. Clinton suggested to the Muslim Brother that breaking the war of wills with the military leaders running the show for now requires \u201cdialogue and compromise, real politics.\u201d The US, she added, would strive to \u201csupport the democratically elected government and to help make it a success in delivering results for the people of Egypt.\u201d Morsi was happy to listen to Clinton chanting the \u201cdemocratically elected government mantra,\u201d given the $1.5 billion in aid given Egypt every year, and the promise of even more \u201ceconomic assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n The unexamined and delusional assumptions in the administration\u2019s approach to Egypt are legion. The first and most important is the magical thinking that a \u201cdemocratic election\u201d in a country lacking democratic traditions, principles and beliefs is anything more than machinery for redistributing power. This mistake, by the way, transcends political party. It compromised George Bush\u2019s foreign policy as well, which relied on simplistic notions of \u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201cfreedom\u201d for its policies across the region. Not even the disaster of \u201cfree elections\u201d empowering the terrorist outfit Hamas in Gaza could disabuse the administration of this article of faith.<\/p>\n The Obama administration continues to make the same mistake. It works off a simplistic calculus in which \u201cdictators\u201d are bad and \u201cdemocratically elected governments\u201d are good. The legitimate calculation, however, is which form of rule serves the security and national interests of the United States. If a country has beliefs and principles compatible with democratic government, then it is more likely to serve our interests, or at least not actively subvert them. If not, however, then promoting \u201cdemocratic elections\u201d will very likely unleash forces in a country damaging to those interests.<\/p>\n What the democracy peddlers forget is that in a true liberal democracy, elections are just the expression of political principles and ideals, the most important being the basic rights all humans possess by virtue of being human, such as freedom of speech and religion, which cannot be taken away by the government, nor limited because of race, sex, belief, or religious creed. Next, in a liberal democracy violence is proscribed as an instrument of politics, replaced by law and procedures subjected to statutory limits and accountability. These core beliefs naturally lead to the idea of tolerance for those holding different ideas or beliefs, with conflict decided through non-violent political processes that involve negotiation and compromise, with everybody respecting the outcome and working for change through the political process. All these principles must be second nature to citizens in true democracies.<\/p>\n These obvious truths from Political Science1 should have suggested to our political leaders that they exercise prudence in dealing with the recent revolutions in the Middle East, and put our own interests and security at the center of our policies. But addled with the heady wine of democracy promotion, Obama used American cruise missiles to remove Muammar Gadaffi, a murderous thug who nonetheless had been behaving himself as far as our interests were concerned. What we got in his place is congeries of militias and terrorist outfits like the al Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which includes veteran killers of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; and thousands of assault rifles, machine guns, mines, grenades, antitank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles capable of bringing down commercial airliners flooding the black markets throughout the Middle East. Meanwhile, the head of the Libyan National Transition Council has announced, \u201cThe constitution will be based on our Islamic religion,\u201d which means gender apartheid, the death penalty for \u201capostates,\u201d and virulent hatred of America and Israel.<\/p>\n Despite that debacle, Obama went ahead and abandoned Egypt\u2019s Hosni Mubarak, another murderous thug who nonetheless had maintained the cold peace with Israel and kept a lid on the Islamist Muslim Brothers. First, the Brothers were magically transformed, in the words of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, into \u201ca very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.\u201d This is the same organization whose Supreme Guide, Muhammad al-Badi\u2019, has preached that the \u201cimprovement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.\u201d After the Brothers and other Salafist parties took 70% of the vote in the first round of elections, other commentators counseled us not to worry, since the responsibility of governing would require pragmatism and compromise in order to deliver the social order and economic boons for which the Egyptian people were presumably pining. Sadly, we indulged this same delusion back in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, when the Islamist fundamentalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini was dismissed as mere rhetoric. Iran\u2019s continuing genocidal rhetoric, brutal suppression of dissent, and march to the possession of nuclear weapons should make the folly of that mistake obvious.<\/p>\n Apparently not, though, since we\u2019re repeating that same error in our handling of Egypt, where free elections have brought that country no nearer to true liberal democracy. What we have got instead is increasing persecution and murder of Coptic Christians, the facilitation of terrorist attacks on Israel, and violent attacks on protestors and dissidents. As for the nature of this new \u201cdemocracy,\u201d given that 60% of Egyptians in a Pew poll from last year say that laws should strictly follow the teachings of the Koran, we can bet that it won\u2019t look anything like what we imagine a true democracy to be. And we shouldn\u2019t be surprised, given the Muslim Brothers\u2019 draft platform of 2007, which proclaimed that \u201cIslam is the official state religion\u201d and \u201cthe Islamic sharia is the main source for legislation.\u201d Clearly a majority of Egyptians agree with the Muslim Brothers about the kind of political-social order they have voted for, and it\u2019s not a democratic one.<\/p>\n Hence the fatuity of Clinton\u2019s call for \u201cdialogue and compromise, real politics,\u201d or the administration\u2019s statement from last year accepting \u201cthe Brotherhood\u2019s repeated assurances that its lawmakers want to build a modern democracy that will respect individual freedoms, free markets and international commitments, including Egypt\u2019s treaty with Israel.\u201d Such ideals we take for granted require a deep soil of principles and beliefs that in the West took centuries to develop. Nor is there anything in Muslim history, theology, or jurisprudence to indicate compatibility between these liberal democratic ideals and Islam.<\/p>\n On the contrary, Western ideals like the separation of church and state, with its attendant principle of tolerance and equal rights for those of different faiths, are anathema to traditional Islam. If, as the Koran teaches, Muslims are the \u201cbest of nations\u201d and their faith the expression of a perfect social-political-economic order revealed by Allah himself and evident in the life and sayings of his prophet Mohammed, why should any true Muslim \u201ctolerate\u201d infidels? As for human rights, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam makes it clear that the only Islamic \u201chuman right\u201d is the right to live as a devout Muslim in harmony with Sharia law, or to hear the \u201ccall\u201d to Islamic conversion without interference or temptation from decadent Western cultures. This sort of triumphalist chauvinism makes \u201cpolitics\u201d as we understand it \u2014 non-violent \u201cdialogue,\u201d compromise with those who believe differently, and acceptance of their success \u2014 nothing but irreligious folly.<\/p>\n Obama\u2019s Middle East policy has been an abject failure. His \u201coutreach\u201d to the Muslim world, replete with groveling flattery of Islam, has created nothing but contempt for his weakness. His assault on our key ally Israel, the only true liberal democracy in the region, has earned no credit with the states that still refuse to accept Israel\u2019s existence. His chummy relationship with Turkey\u2019s Tayyip Erdogan ignores that country\u2019s increasing Islamization and hostility to Israel. Meanwhile, Iran continues down the road to nuclear weapons, and Bashar al Assad keeps slaughtering his citizens. And through it all, the United States has little or no influence on events.<\/p>\n Rather than chanting the mantra of \u201cdemocracy,\u201d our foreign policy establishment needs to deal with reality rather than wishes, and predicate policy on one core principle: what serves the national interests and security of our country?<\/p>\n \u00a92012 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0headline on Secretary of State Clinton\u2019s visit to Egypt said it all: \u201cUS Is in a Quandary.\u201d That\u2019s putting it mildly. Better words for this administration\u2019s foreign policy are \u201cconfused,\u201d \u201ccontradictory,\u201d and \u201cdelusional.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[28,22,271],"tags":[161,12,192,1034,1035,1053,1017,186,139,1043,1060],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-ae","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":176,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/democracy-promotion-or-islamist-promotion\/","url_meta":{"origin":634,"position":0},"title":"Democracy Promotion or Islamist Promotion?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thronton Frontpage Magazine The hope that democracy would bloom in Egypt following our collusion in removing Hosni Mubarak looks more and more delusional every day. Even our foreign policy wishful thinkers are no longer peddling the canard that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood is \u201csecular\u201d and \u201cmoderate,\u201d thus proving\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":309,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ghosts-of-1938-still-haunt-our-foreign-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":634,"position":1},"title":"The Ghosts of 1938 Still Haunt Our Foreign Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thronton Frontpage Magazine In a story describing President Obama\u2019s six conversations with Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi that led to the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0summarized Obama\u2019s estimation of Morsi. Obama told his aides \u201che was impressed with the Egyptian leader\u2019s pragmatic confidence. He sensed an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6341,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/egyptians-enraged-by-u-s-outreach-to-muslim-brotherhood\/","url_meta":{"origin":634,"position":2},"title":"Egyptians Enraged by U.S. Outreach to Muslim Brotherhood","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0PJ Media In the eyes of tens of millions of Egyptians, Senators John McCain\u2019s and Lindsey Graham\u2019s recent words and deeds in Egypt\u2014which have the \u201cblessing\u201d of President Obama\u2014have unequivocally proven that U.S. leadership is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian media is awash with stories of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Muslim Brotherhood"","block_context":{"text":"Muslim Brotherhood","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/muslim-brotherhood\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6321,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-return-of-al-qaeda-and-jihad\/","url_meta":{"origin":634,"position":3},"title":"The Return of Al Qaeda and Jihad","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 9, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine With the ousting of Muhammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, al-Qaeda has been vindicated and the terror-jihad exonerated, in the opinion of many Islamists, that is. According to the\u00a0Associated Press, in a new video, al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri \u201csaid the military coup that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Muslim Brotherhood"","block_context":{"text":"Muslim Brotherhood","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/muslim-brotherhood\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":476,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-humpty-dumpty-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":634,"position":4},"title":"The Humpty-Dumpty Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 4, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The United States is backing off from the Middle East \u2014 and the Middle East from the United States. America is in the midst of the greatest domestic gas and oil revolution since the early 20th century. If even guarded predictions about new\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6374,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/democracys-dog-days\/","url_meta":{"origin":634,"position":5},"title":"Democracy’s Dog Days","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media We all want democracy to thrive and flourish, but can it? The Obama administration was quite pleased that the anti-democratic Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood had come to power through a single plebiscite. That confidence required a great deal of moral blindness, both\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Democracy"","block_context":{"text":"Democracy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/democracy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":636,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions\/636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}