Here’s where all that talk about President Obama being a secret Islamic Kenyan usurper becomes problematic. When he condemns the wanton slaughter of over 600 civilians in Egypt who support the Muslim Brotherhood, he is accused of siding with the Muslim Brotherhood and approving of their attacks on Coptic Christians. Naturally, because the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer has to politicize every single foreign policy difficulty, this is the kind of rhetoric we get. He goes from being merely illegitimate to actively anti-Christian. He’s pro-persecution of Christians. You can see how this meme is spreading in the comments of Jeffrey Goldberg’s article.
As for Goldberg’s argument, I am surprised to see how blithely he suggests that we have no good remaining reasons to continue supporting the Egyptian regime.
There is, at this point, no good reason to continue funding the Egyptian armed forces. The aid obviously hasn’t provided the White House with sufficient leverage, and it makes the U.S. complicit in what just happened and what will undoubtedly continue to happen. One argument for continued aid is that it encourages the military to maintain Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. But the military will do so whether or not the U.S. provides money and weapons, because it has decided that Islamist extremism, and not Israel, is Egypt’s main enemy. And it will be too busy persecuting Egyptians.
The argument against complicity is a very strong one, but it doesn’t stand by itself. Nor does the argument that Egypt-Israel relations are stable because all Egypt’s energy will be directed inwards. Goldberg makes an important point in this regard without following the implications:
There’s still a decent chance that the U.S. will suspend aid to the Egyptian military. But the generals understood that a suspension of aid might be possible in the aftermath of the sort of crackdown we’re seeing now. Which means that they have come to think that wiping out the Brotherhood is worth the risk. (They also know that there are plenty of wealthy sheiks in the Persian Gulf who viscerally oppose the Brotherhood and who would be happy to supplement Egypt’s defense budget.)
The implications here are that Egypt will go ahead and slaughter the Muslim Brotherhood, but they’ll do it with sheiks’ money. For Goldberg, this appears to be a satisfactory, or at least preferable, outcome. But what has the sheiks’ money done in Syria? Hasn’t it funded rival Islamist groups sympathetic to or allied with al-Qaeda? And, long-term, the sheiks can only provide the money to buy weapons, not the weapons themselves, which could easily begin flowing from Russia (again) or China.
The moral argument against slaughtering protesters is strong, but the moral case for the Muslim Brotherhood is weak. I don’t like to move out of the area of morality into the world of naked self-interest, but there are equities at stake here, too. Consider the side-effects of cutting off aid.
Since the early 1980s, the United States has granted Egypt an extraordinary ability to place orders with American defense contractors that are worth far more than Congress has appropriated for military aid, according to U.S. officials. Under the mechanism, called cash-flow financing, Egypt can submit large orders for equipment that takes years to produce and deliver, under the assumption that U.S. lawmakers will continue to allocate the same amount in military aid year after year.
Egypt — the only country besides Israel that is granted such a privilege by Washington — has effectively been given a credit card with a maximum limit in the billions of dollars, experts say.
The complex financing arrangement is making a tough policy debate over the future of military aid to Egypt far more complicated than is publicly acknowledged. Lawmakers reassessing Washington’s $1.3 billion in yearly military aid to Egypt in the aftermath of the country’s military coup have been stunned to learn just how difficult it would be to shut off the pipeline.
“It has gotten us into a situation where we are mortgaged years into the future for expensive equipment,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on the State Department, foreign operations and related programs. “It is not a sensible way to carry out U.S. policy toward a country of such importance, where circumstances have changed, our interests and needs change, our budget is under stress, and yet we’ve been stuck on autopilot for more than 25 years.”
During decades of autocratic rule in Egypt, the arrangement worked like a charm. The aid package delivered a windfall for U.S. defense contractors as Egypt-bound tanks, fighter planes and missiles rolled off assembly lines across the United States, gradually replacing Egypt’s aging Soviet hardware and deepening that nation’s reliance on U.S.-made gear. The Pentagon cashed in on the bounty, getting expedited access to the Suez Canal for Navy ships, overflight rights for military aircraft and plenty of face time with Egypt’s generals. Egypt, meanwhile, developed one of the region’s strongest militaries.
From 2008 to 2012, Washington signed off on more than $8.5 billion worth of military orders placed by the Egyptian government, even though Congress appropriated $6.3 billion for defense aid to Cairo in that period, according to the latest data published by the Pentagon. During those five years, Egypt received equipment worth $4.7 billion.
The $3.8 billion gap between contract cost estimates and deliveries is a revealing but incomplete measure of the vast pipeline of items earmarked for Egypt that would be thrown into limbo if Washington were to cut off aid to Cairo.
A rational Congress might agree to eat the difference, since we’re basically paying ourselves here, but the Tea Party faction in Congress is not rational. They’d probably stiff the defense industry for billions of undeliverables. This is an issue that does little to inform us about the correct moral course and works to constrict our freedom of action. Moreover, our access to the Suez Canal and tight relationship with the Egyptian military have concrete benefits, the loss of which would be painful.
It’s true that these arrangements have evidently failed to provide us the leverage we would like, but it’s not clear that we can simply walk away and expect a better result from a self-interested or humanitarian point of view.
Goldberg has not cracked the puzzle, and his assurances should not be relied upon. This problem is a doozy that defies easy, pat answers.
