If President Barack Obama’s ill-conceived policy of “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P, sold to him by George Soros’s groupies Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and other advisers with their feet not completely planted on terra firma, was intended to bring stability to the Middle East, it has had the opposite effect. The recent military crackdown in Egypt by that nation’s military-led government is a case in point . . .
The Egyptian military government’s use of force to oust Muslim Brotherhood cadres, including armed militiamen, from the area around Rabaa Al-Adawyia Mosque in Cairo resulted in deaths on both sides. The Obama administration’s constantly sent diplomatic signals of support to the elected government of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi. This support was mostly channeled through the U.S. ambassador in Cairo, Anne Patterson.
Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, supported by reformist protesters, ousted Morsi on July 3, amid celebrations in Tahrir Square. The secularist protesters despised Patterson who continually backed the Morsi government against liberal and secular protesters. Anti-Islamist protesters called Patterson the “ambassador from hell” and demanded her recall by Washington.
The Obama administration quickly reversed itself on support for Morsi and refused to declare his ouster a coup d’état, which under U.S. law would have required a cut-off in massive amounts of U.S. military aid to Egypt.
When Egyptians joined the so-called “Arab Spring” uprising on January 25, 2011, an uprising that ended the 30-year secular rule of President Hosni Mubarak, all the resources of Soros’s “themed revolution” were brought together on the streets of Egypt and within the various “civil society” sectors. The chief recipient of Soros largesse was the student-led April 6 Movement.
When the Muslim Brotherhood and its political party front, the Justice and Freedom Party, won the election, with the support of America’s friends, Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Qatari government-owned Al Jazeera, Morsi and his advisers and Cabinet began implementing changes to the Egyptian Constitution.
Egyptian secularists charged that Morsi and his government were turning Egypt into an Islamic state, although the new governing authorities in Cairo were careful to maintain Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, thus being assured of continuing support from Washington and the uber-powerful Israel Lobby that governs all aspects of U.S. Middle East policy. Patterson and other State Department officials were lulled into a belief that Morsi favored democratic reform but the Brotherhood’s Al Nahda (Renaissance) Project turned out to be merely a propaganda exercise in order to placate the United States and European Union.
Morsi and his government began to incur the wrath of Soros and his non-governmental organization (NGO) global network when Egyptian authorities convicted 43 NGO workers, including 19 Americans, 16 Egyptians, and a handful of Europeans, Palestinians, and Jordanians, of various anti-government crimes and sentenced those found guilty to prison sentences ranging from one to five years. Even before Morsi took over power, the interim military-led government, in December 2011, raided the Cairo offices of the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (both linked to the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA-funded U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)), Freedom House, and other organizations with ties to Soros and USAID.
Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, ignored the anti-democratic excesses of the Muslim Brotherhood government and declared Egypt not to be in contravention of U.S. law that would have stopped U.S. military aid to Egypt. After General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ousted Morsi, Kerry insisted that Egypt continued to comply with U.S. law and that there was no anti-democratic coup in the country. Both Clinton and Kerry put U.S. national security interests ahead of U.S. human rights concerns and granted the Morsi and el-Sisi exemptions.
What has occurred in Egypt is tied to events in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. It was when Morsi and his government broke ties with the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad and announced Cairo’s support for Syrian Islamist rebels, including Egyptian radical Islamist volunteers, to fight in Syria, that Egypt’s military acted swiftly.
When El-Sisi announced the ouster of Morsi and his government, he was joined not only by Coptic Christian leaders and Sunni clerics from Al Azhar University in Cairo but by leaders of the pro-Saudi Salafist Nour Party. The Saudis decided that Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood were gaining too much influence in both Egypt and Syria at the expense of the Saudis, so Riyadh ordered its Nour Salafist allies in Egypt to back the ouster of Morsi. Eventually, the Saudis would succeed in forcing the Qatari Emir, Hamad, to step down in favor of his son, Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who moved to recognize Saudi leadership of the Gulf region and curtail Qatari aid to the Muslim Brotherhood in both Egypt and Syria.
El-Sisi’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood street protesters in Cairo did not cost him much in the way of political support. Only interim Vice President Mohammed ElBaradei, the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, resigned in a letter to interim figurehead Adly Mansour, saying he did not agree with the government’s decision to bloodily crack down on Morsi supporters.
The Obama administration remained supportive of El-Sisi only issuing vague condemnations against violence by both sides but not calling for a return to the status quo ante prior to Morsi’s ouster by the military. The Egyptian interim military government continued to enjoy U.S. military and economic assistance, as well as support from Saudi Arabia and a Qatar that no longer automatically gave support to the Muslim Brotherhood. Although Al Jazeera continued its non-stop coverage of Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) protests in Egypt, some Islamists in Egypt charged that the West, in concert with Israel, Turkey, Qatar, the Saudis, Morsi, and El-Sisi, planned the entire series of crises in Egypt—the anti-Morsi coup, the Egyptian military crackdown, and a culture of violence—in order to turn Egyptian against Egyptian and Arab against Arab, as had been done in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
Whether by design or not, the Obama administration’s Middle East policy of outreach to Arabs and Muslims, heralded by his famous, some now call it his “infamous,” Cairo speech of June 4, 2009, lies in shambles with no clear direction or firm foundation. Obama has provided Syrian Islamist rebels, including members of Al Qaeda, with sophisticated weapons, including shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles from both U.S. caches and those captured from the ousted Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi. The Obama administration has also launched a bloody drone campaign against the people of Yemen, including those opposed to the U.S. puppet president Abdo Rabu Mansour Hadi. The U.S. has attacked Shi’a Zaidi rebels in north Yemen and the South Yemeni independence restoration Harak movement, claiming they represent the U.S. intelligence contrivance “Al Qaeda.”
With the meddlesome Power at the UN, the undiplomatic and curt Rice as Obama’s National Security Adviser, and Kerry more concerned about form over substance and his hair style over policy firmness, there is no foreseeable end to Obama’s clumsy and destabilizing R2P policies. For the Middle East, Obama’s ill-conceived plans for the Middle East spell more bloodshed and inconsistency from Washington.
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
