By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, March 07, 2013
Sequestration is not the best time to be doling out
foreign aid, surely the most unpopular item in the federal budget. Especially
when the recipient is President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt.
Morsi is intent on getting the release of Omar
Abdel-Rahman (the “blind sheik”), who is serving a life sentence for
masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center attack that killed six and wounded
more than a thousand. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is openly anti-Christian,
anti-Semitic, and otherwise prolifically intolerant. Just three years ago,
Morsi called on Egyptians to nurse their children and grandchildren on hatred
for Jews, whom he has called “the descendants of apes and pigs.”
Not exactly Albert Schweitzer. Or even Anwar Sadat. Which
is why it left a bad taste when Secretary of State John Kerry, traveling to
Cairo, handed Morsi a cool $250 million (a tenth of which would cover about 25
years of White House tours, no longer affordable under sequestration, according
to the administration).
Nonetheless, we should not cut off aid to Egypt. It’s not
that we must blindly support unfriendly regimes. It is perfectly reasonable to
cut off aid to governments that are intrinsically hostile and beyond our
influence. Subsidizing enemies is merely stupid.
But Egypt is not an enemy, certainly not yet. It may no
longer be our strongest Arab ally, but it is still in play. The Brotherhood
aims to establish an Islamist dictatorship. Yet it remains a considerable
distance from having done so, and this is precisely why we should remain
engaged. And engagement means using our economic leverage.
Morsi has significant opposition. Six weeks ago, powerful
anti-Brotherhood demonstrations broke out in major cities, and they have
continued sporadically ever since. The presidential election that Morsi won was
decided quite narrowly — by three points, despite the Brotherhood’s advantage
of superior organization and a history of social service.
Moreover, having forever been in opposition, the
Islamists escaped any blame for the state of the country on Election Day. Now
in power, they begin to bear responsibility for Egypt’s miserable conditions —
a collapsing economy, rising crime, social instability. Their aura is already
dissipating.
There is nothing inevitable about Brotherhood rule. The
problem is that the secular democratic parties are fractured, disorganized, and
lacking in leadership. And they are repressed by the increasingly authoritarian
Morsi.
His partisans have attacked demonstrators in Cairo. His
security forces killed more than 40 in Port Said. He’s been harassing
journalists, suppressing freedom of speech, infiltrating the military, and
trying to subjugate the courts. He’s already rammed through an Islamist
constitution. He is now trying to tilt, even rig, parliamentary elections to
the point that the opposition called for a boycott and an administrative court
has just declared a suspension of the vote.
Any foreign aid we give Egypt should be contingent upon a
reversal of this repression and a granting of space to secular, democratic,
pro-Western elements.
That’s where Kerry committed his mistake: Not in trying
to use dollar diplomacy to leverage Egyptian behavior, but by exercising that
leverage almost exclusively for economic, rather than political, reform.
Kerry’s major objective was getting Morsi to apply for a
$4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. Considering that some
of this $4.8 billion ultimately comes from us, there’s a certain comic
circularity to this demand. What kind of concession is it when a foreign
government is coerced into . . . taking yet more of our money?
We have no particular stake in Egypt’s economy. Our stake
is in its politics. Yes, we would like to see a strong economy. But in a
country ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood?
Our interest is in a non-Islamist, nonrepressive,
nonsectarian Egypt, ruled as democratically as possible. Why should we want a
vibrant economy that maintains the Brotherhood in power? Our concern is Egypt’s
policies, foreign and domestic.
If we’re going to give foreign aid, it should be for
political concessions — on unfettered speech, on an opposition free of
repression, on alterations to the Islamist constitution, on open and fair
elections.
We give foreign aid for two reasons: (a) to support
allies who share our values and our interests, and (b) to extract from
less-than-friendly regimes concessions that either bring their policies more in
line with ours or strengthen competing actors more favorably inclined toward
American objectives.
That’s the point of foreign aid. It’s particularly
important in countries like Egypt whose fate is in the balance. But it will
only work if we remain clear-eyed about why we give all that money in the first
place.
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