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US foreign policy implodes
An awful lot of good commentary is emerging over the turmoil in Egypt.

First Wretchard:

What could be a more blatant attempt than that? If true then Putin’s openly trying to grab Egypt. Breitbart reports Egypt is sending a diplomatic mission to Russia. “Sadat threw Russia out of Egypt,” the source told Breitbart News. “Peace came from that. If Russia reenters Egypt, they reenter the world.” Are the reports true? But things may have reached a crisis. The Egyptian military is planning to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood.

That would put Obama’s hand squarely in a vise. He may be forced to do what he loathes most: to take a definite, public stand that must alienate part of his international coalition. He has thrived so far by selling the same real estate to all comers; by being the blank slate who is each and every supplicant’s friend.

But now he must anger somebody. Now somebody’s asking for a refund. The web is rife with rumor that one side or the other is holding a scandal over the administration’s head. There is no proof that any such scandal exists. But given the parade of scandals already too numerous to mention it cannot wholly be discounted that some such exists.

So Obama remains hunkered down in Martha’s Vineyard, emerging periodically from his vacation home, like a cuckoo from a clock, to make a statement no one appears to hear, playing for time. No one in the Beltway seems to know what line to take. Shall they restore democracy in Egypt by supporting the Muslims Bros, knowing they too will take their revenge on the generals and the Copts? Suspend aid to the Egyptian military and open the door to Russia, who might do a hat trick and scoop up Saudi Arabia into the bargain?

And Mark Steyn:

As a result, the factions in Egypt are united only in their contempt for Washington. Obama is despised by Sisi and the generals for being fundamentally unserious; by the Brotherhood for stringing along with the coup; by the Copts for standing by as the Brothers take it out on them; and by the small number of genuine democrats in Egypt for his witless promotion of Morsi’s thugs as the dawning of democracy. Any “national-unity government” of the kind the usual deluded twits are urging on Egypt would be united only in its unanimous loathing of Obama, his secretaries of state, and his inept ambassador.

Meanwhile, out on the streets, Washington is reviled both for standing by Mubarak too long and for pushing him out too soon (eighty per cent of Egyptians say things are worse than under the old man). And, with the 2011 “Facebook Revolution” all out of “Likes”, the King of Jordan and the Gulf emirs understand the meaning of the ailing, abandoned strongman in his military prison cell in purely geopolitical terms – that (as Bernard Lewis once warned) America is harmless as an enemy but treacherous as a friend.

Whatever regime emerges in Cairo, it will be post-American.

A year before the fall of Mubarak, David Pryce-Jones, in a conversational aside, quoted to me Lord Lloyd, British High Commissioner to the old Kingdom of Egypt in the Twenties: “Ah, the jacarandas are in bloom. We shall soon be sending for the gunboats.” There’s more wisdom about Arab springs in that line than in all the blather of Obama, Clinton, Kerry and Anne Patterson combined.
Posted by: badanov 2013-08-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=374153