Dumb, Dumber, Dumberer in Washington

[Valin]

PJ Media:

David P. Goldman

7/26/13

 

Earlier today, Egypts military government arrested former prime minister Mohammed Mursi on charges of conspiring with the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhoods Palestinian affiliate. That is as good as it gets in this part of the world. Hamas has murdered 457 Israelis and wounded more than 3,000 since 2000, according to the Israeli government. It is an implacable enemy of the United States as well as the State of Israel. Since taking power, the Egyptian military has shut down illegal tunnel traffic with Gaza, Hamas stronghold, and strangled its economy.

 

Gen. Abdulfatah al-Sisi, the Egyptian military commander, is doing the dirty work of the West. Yet both the Obama administration and the Republican mainstream have denounced the military-led government and demanded the Muslim Brotherhoods return to power. Trying to break the neck of the Brotherhood is not going to be good for Egypt or for the region, a White House official told the New York Times on July 25th, explaining why Obama had canceled the delivery of four F-16s to Egypt. And some prominent neo-conservatives, including Max Boot and Reuel Marc Gerecht, are taking the side of the Brotherhood. It is the world turned upside down, foreign policy as Mel Brooks might have scripted it.

 

Obama and the Republican mainstream John McCain and the Weekly Standard united in their misplaced enthusiasm for the so-called Arab Spring in early 2011, as I reported in a Tablet magazine essay May 20 titled Dumb and Dumber. They have learned nothing from the collapse of the so-called Spring into civil war in Syria, Islamist terrorism in Tunisia, and state failure in Egypt. Such is the power of ideology. If the most practical man of business is the mental slave of a defunct economist, as Keynes said, the most practical politician may be the mental slave of a defunct political philosopher.

 

(Snip)