Whistle Down the Wind

July 9, 2013

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.
- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.

Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.

What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.

Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)

So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup--either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.

True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.

Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.

So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.

* * *

I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.

The Middle East and Beyond

Adam Garfinkle's Blog

July 9, 2013

Whistle Down the Wind

Adam Garfinkle

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

The Middle East and Beyond

Adam Garfinkle's Blog

July 9, 2013

Whistle Down the Wind

Adam Garfinkle

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

The Middle East and Beyond

Adam Garfinkle's Blog

July 9, 2013

Whistle Down the Wind

Adam Garfinkle

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.
- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.
- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it. - See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it. - See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it. - See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.
- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.
- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one,
- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one,
- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.KFET3ds4.dpuf

July 9, 2013

Whistle Down the Wind

Adam Garfinkle

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.TgHHDx9O.dpuf

July 9, 2013

Whistle Down the Wind

Adam Garfinkle

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.TgHHDx9O.dpuf

July 9, 2013

Whistle Down the Wind

Adam Garfinkle

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking aim at David Brooks’s New York Times column of July 4 in which he quoted from my blog post of July 1. But Akyol associates me with Brooks’s argument, and this is where things get a little convoluted.  So let me try to unpack what was said and meant, and what has been said that is not exactly accurate about it.
Aykol has me saying, in effect, that mainstream Muslim theology denies causality as we ordinarily understand it, and when attached to the rest of Brooks’s argument this is made to mean, sarcastically of course, that Muslim minds have thus been “crippled.”  That is Akyol’s word, not mine or Brooks’s.
I said no such thing, and anyone can look it up. What I said was that radical unitarian Muslims (tawhidis) like to make this point, not that it is necessarily part of mainstream Islamic theology. But so what if it is? The argument that a notion of causality which puts logical blue sky between first and consequent causes diminishes God’s omnipotence is not unique to Islam. Jewish liturgy contains the same kind of statement; the traditional prayer book says (I wish it were easier to plunk down different alphabets here, so I’ll just offer a naked translation), in the morning prayer for every day of the year, that God “in his goodness every day forever renews the work of Creation.” This is an esoteric concept familiar to educated Muslims and Jews alike now for many, many centuries that doesn’t necessarily cripple anyone’s mind.
What I argued, and which gets a little de-nuanced or even lost in the Brooks column, is that Egypt has suffered over the past year a massive administrative/bureaucratic meltdown because a lot of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood Islamists are not facile with abstractions, or with a range of modern attitudes having to do with agency, time and coordinated organizational behavior. Such people cannot be expected to efficiently run a highly centralized modern state.  I said that “not all MB members, and certainly not all Egyptians” fit this description, but that enough in Egypt’s state administration do fit it to have made for some real problems. I stand by that assessment.
Just by the way, not being able to run a modern, centralized state and not being able to govern democratically are, of course, two different things. Here I agree with two judgments rendered by my friend Dov Zakheim in a recent short essay. First, as I also argued in my July 1 post, the democratic credentials of the June 2012 Morsi election are questionable. If that election was a baseball statistic there would have to be an asterisk next to it. Second, while there is nothing oxymoronic about Islamic democracy, there is something oxymoronic about Islamist democracy. The Turkish ruling party, which Mr. Akyol supports, is an example (still) of the former; the Morsi government of the latter. (Obviously, dear reader, to understand the two prior sentences you must be able to distinguish the meaning of the adjective “Islamic” from the adjective “Islamist”, and I know from experience that many non-expert readers very understandably cannot so distinguish. If that includes you, you’ll need to look this up, please.)
So, as Akyol indirectly implies, did I thereby justify the coup–either before it had happened when I wrote for July 1, or when I wrote after it on July 4?  No.
True, I’m not sorry to see Mohammed Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood lock on Egypt’s government go, but I believe that, like the Obama Administration (as best as I can make out), it would have been better had they been dispatched by Egypt’s voters next time around. The coup—and I have not hesitated to call it that, but much appreciate the reasons for the President’s decision not to—does indeed cause all sorts of problems, to be sure.
Now, perhaps, as some have argued, three more years of MB maneuvering would have ensured that no opposition force in Egypt could have won an election, or even that a free and fair election would ever have taken place. That’s possible. But it’s not my business to tell other people how to run their country. When I make a judgment about whether a foreign actor behaved shrewdly or foolishly—as I think Morsi did in rejecting the military’s initial proposal that he construct a new cabinet—I do it in the context of an analysis of U.S. interests and options.
So I was not happy about the coup. But Egypt did not, and still does not, have a lot of great options. A continuation of the Morsi presidency would have been bad; the coup is bad; and a forced government reconstruction just short of a coup, while better that either of these alternatives, would not have been so pretty either. That was the burden of the analysis in my July 1 post, as those who read and remember it will know.
* * *
I will have lots more to say in my next post about U.S. policy and U.S. attitudes toward this coup in Egypt and similar dilemmas. The basic position I will take, just so you can prepare yourself for it, is one that is radically pro-Egyptian. I will argue that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans (including the Obama Administration) think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I will argue that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and that its use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians.  You won’t want to miss that one, folks.

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.TgHHDx9O.dpuf

Egypt Continued, or Interrupted (Depending on Your Point of View)

July 4, 2013

Political upheavals are reckoned by the currency of accelerated experience. Human beings perceive time in many ways (more on time in a future post), but three fill out the spectrum. There is geological time, measured in hundreds of thousands and millions of years. There is personal time, measured by the sentient moments afforded by our circadian rhythms. And then there is political time, which is pretty much everything in between. Political time, in turn, breaks down into the quotidian, those long skeins of years and decades in which nothing much seems to be changing even when it is, and the revolutionary, those impossibly concentrated hours and days in which everything seems to be changing even when it isn’t. Which brings us (back) to Egypt.

A lot has happened since I posted “Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—Memorize That Name” on July 1. The scenario I posited has worked out so far in every respect save one, but it is an important one because it informs the not-at-all-trivial semantic argument over whether what has happened is or is not a coup.

I assumed that the military would invite the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Freedom and Justice Party, into its planned transitional government arrangement. It did. But the MB, led in this case, I assume, by a decision taken together by Mohammed Morsi, Khaitar al-Shatar and Mohammed Badie, vehemently rejected that invitation and engaged instead in what one organizer of the Tamarod movement has termed “incitement to civil war.” Morsi’s 11^thhour change of heart, where he seemed to offer a dollop of conciliation, struck al-Sisi as not just too little too late, but as the act of a desperate man—which, of course, is what it was, since by then Morsi’s entire cabinet had resigned and repudiated his rambling fulmination of the previous evening.

The MB’s rejection of the Army’s invitation was both unnecessary and very stupid, but Leninist-organized religious fanatics enthralled by conspiracy theories are prone to stupidity. It is, nevertheless, poetic justice of a sort that Morsi has behaved in a politically incompetent way that has objectively aided the Army, since he was the benefactor of a prior year-long episode of incompetence perpetrated by Field Marshall Mohammed Hussein Tantawi that aided the Brotherhood.

So is this a coup? Well, if Morsi had decided to “come along quietly” and participate in an Army-directed recalibration of Egyptian politics on behalf of the MB, then no, it would not have so readily been called a coup—especially if Morsi had officially remained President for a little while in the transition to a transition. (Yes, in Egypt there are such things.) But the way things turned out, it’s hard to call what has happened anything other than a coup, and this is unfortunate for two reasons.

It is unfortunate, first, because it forces Congress’ and the Administration’s hand to suspend aid to Egypt, and doing that right now, either to the military ($3.1 billion) or the paltry sum we give to the rest of the Egyptian government ($250 million), is a bad idea. The President has wisely avoided using the word “coup” is his very scanty public remarks, and so retains some flexibility to declare a national security exception to the law if he chooses to do so. He should, and aside from the obvious benefit of not forfeiting what little leverage we have left in Egypt, here is why.

It is unfortunate, second, because the language is so loaded as to obscure important distinctions. There are coups and there are coups, just as there are democracies and there are democracies. With any luck at all, and especially if the United States maintains and wisely uses its leverage (of which more below), what General al-Sisi has set in motion could in time be seen as a “corrective movement”, a very popular locution in Arab politics, instead of a coup. But for that to happen Egypt may need to be a Praetorian Democracy for a while—in other words, an under-institutionalized democracy whose incubation period is protected by the military. This is hardly a rare circumstance. It defines the relationship between the military and the political culture at large in Turkey for many years, in South Korea and Indonesia in different ways, and to a less successful extent in Pakistan, among many cases.

Could the Egyptian military play such a role in future, despite having never been so inclined in the past? It could, because, as I mentioned last time, there have been significant social changes in Egypt over the past generation or two that conduce to the birth of attitudes supporting genuine political pluralism. And while the Army has parochial interests aplenty, it also genuinely thinks of itself as a patriotic national institution that takes the best interests of the Egyptian people to heart. If the Egyptian people are developing a more sophisticated sense of their own public square, there is reason to believe that the Army will acknowledge and support that development in due course.

I realize that there are people out there who will immediate pronounce the concept of a Praetorian Democracy to be an oxymoron, but these are people who fail to appreciate the outsized role of irony in political life—God bless their pointy little heads. Like Walt Whitman, politics contains multitudes that are prone to mix and match in improbable ways.

That isn’t all that some people fail to appreciate. The American mainstream press over the past few days has come up with the usual multitude of predictable boners—misleading and sometimes flatly wrong statements about what is and has been going on in Egypt. These screw-ups have followed faithfully from the errors made originally, back in March 2011—which I detailed at the time in this blog—of which three were key: (1) the ouster of Hosni Mubarak itself was not a revolution and it did not signify a regime change—it was an internal putsch within the military than ended a dynasty rather than a regime; because (2) Mubarak was not really a civilian President and the Army was not just one of an array of political actors—just because he wore no military uniform most of the time did not mean he wasn’t always and ever an Air Force general; and (3) the opposition at the time out in the street was demanding the fall of the dictator, which was the only thing it could agree on—it was not in the main a “pro-democracy movement” as we understand the term.

My favorite recent MSM screw-up so far—but there are so many!!—follows directly from these old misunderstandings. It is David D. Kirkpatrick and Ben Hubbard’s front-page piece from yesterday’s New York Times. Three sentences in a row qualify for a version of Higher Disney political fiction.

First we have this whopper: “The standoff threatened to roll back the clock to the day two years ago when the generals first seized power from Hosni Mubarak. . .” As if Mubarak was not also a general?! How could the military “seize power” from itself? You see the problem here. Yes, of course, there has been a civilian façade around military rule in Egypt going back nearly all the way to July 1952—first for Nasser, then Sadat and then Mubarak. But only the terminally naïve ever mistook appearances for reality, and that includes the American MSM until recently. As James Thurber wrote obliquely back in 1927 about a certain children’s tale, “A wolf doesn’t look anymore like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge.” Good grief.

Then, second: “The military’s vow to intervene raised questions about whether Egypt’s revolution would fulfill its promise to build a new democracy at the heart of the Arab world.” This is wild. The revolution—which became real, as actual regime change, only when, thanks to Field Marshal Tantawi’s ineptitude, the Muslim Brotherhood seized control of the government—never had any democratic promise. That became unmistakably clear when, last November, Morsi declared himself above the courts and rammed through a constitutional order on the narrowest of political grounds. The MB’s mistake was to rush much too fast to consolidate its authoritarian, if not totalitarian, schemes. Since Morsi became President in June 2012 by having won office with an onion-skin thin margin, and that in an election marred by so many pre-polling irregularities that it could only be considered free and fair by very forgiving standards, what has been going on is the undermining of any chance for genuine democracy to form.

And finally for Kirkpatrick and Hubbard, “And the defiance of Mr. Morsi and his Brotherhood allies raised the specter of the bloody years of the 1990s when fringe Islamist groups used violence in an effort to overthrow the military government.” If you did not know better, you would take from this statement an equilibration of the Muslim Brotherhood with the Islamist terrorists of an earlier era. This, too, is completely wild.

The Muslim Brotherhood is at the same time a radical group but not a revolutionary one. One has to be very careful with how one uses English words when talking about Egypt, because its political and social physiognomy is not the same as ours. As I explained at some length in one of my 2011 posts, the Army and the Brotherhood were long-time political contestants, so long that both sides grew to guardedly respect each other in the midst of their tussles so long as certain red lines were respected on both sides. The MB was technically illegal but tolerated so long as it foreswore violence, and the Army let the MB proselytize and provide some social services the regular bureaucracy could not ever seem to manage. That arrangement was encouraged by the fact that, by Sadat’s time, both the Army and the Brotherhood had common enemies: unreconstructed Nassarite leftists and Communists to the one side, and truly revolutionary salafi Islamists to the other. In this light, then, conflating the MB with a group like al-Gamaa al-Islamiya is deeply, profoundly ignorant.

Of course, that established equipoise, which had to have been a major factor leading Tantawi to think he could control Morsi, has now gone by boards. But anyone who imagines that the Egyptian MB can turn itself into a revolutionary insurgent force that stands any chance against the Army just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One fellow I know on the scene saw from his apartment window a bunch of MB types running “training” laps around a city square while chanting some lamely dramatic slogan, with some clutching tree branches for would-be weapons. If there’s anything funny about what’s going on in Egypt right now, this has to be it. Senior MB leaders are not going to start a civil war. They may be stupid, but they are not suicidal.

At the same time, it is true that if the Army tries to completely exclude the MB from the nation’s future political configuration, it is bound to sire a new generation of Islamist terrorists. Nothing about General al-Sisi suggests he is that foolish, however. So in a sense the limits of action within the ambit of Army-MB relations remain intact, at least in some form. But who knows? Making big mistakes is the one hallmark that, whatever their other differences, unifies recent Egyptian leaders.

Speaking of mistakes, let me conclude for now with a word about U.S. policy. One reader took exception to my contention last time that, in fact, the U.S. Government did not sin by betraying an ally—arguing that we should have waited seven months for the election Mubarak has called, and that would have prevented the Brotherhood from taking power. I took exception to his taking exception. The original instinct was indeed to stick by Mubarak, and when special emissary Frank Wisner boarded his plane to Cairo his instructions mirrored that instinct. By the time he had landed, however, the sense was that seven months had come to look like seven years—things could not hold for that long. The problem was not shoving Mubarak aside for Omar Suleiman, or, as it turned out, for Field Marshall Tantawi—that would have worked to preserve U.S. interests and maybe to have satisfied the crowds with Mubarak’s “sacrifice.” The problem was that Tantawi then proceeded to screw the pooch, opening the tent flap for Morsi, and we did nothing to stop him.

The Obama Administration never had the kind of leverage in Egypt that could have propped Mubarak up for another seven months, and it never had the ability to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from outmaneuvering the aging, doddering post-Mubarak generals. The claim that President Obama actually wanted the Brotherhood to come to power—because, you know, he’s really a secret Muslim and he wasn’t born in the United States and is thus an illegitimate, lying President and all the rest of it—represents the American version of a crazy conspiracy theory, so the Egyptians (and Iranians, and Pakistanis, etc., etc.,) are not entirely alone in playing this desultory sport. The worst that can be said about the President’s conduct in this case is that he hasn’t been paying any attention to Egypt for the past two years, because there’s no domestic political payoff in it.

As for what’s been said over the past few days, well, it could have been worse. As already noted, the President has avoided the “c” word. His admonition to Morsi not to get violent was embarrassingly behind the curve, since by then Morsi had no guns to aim toward the seething street. But the defense of the democratic process stuff we’ve heard in recent days is standard issue; that’s what all U.S. administrations say at times like these. The fact that the fact of the matter concerning Egypt’s putative democratic processes is rather complex does not change the perceived need to say such things. It’s our secular religion in this nation with the soul of a church (said Chesterton); it’s just what we do, whether it makes case-specific analytical sense or not.

Anyway, it’s what we’re saying to al-Sisi and his associates in private that matters, and I’m not privy to those communications. I know what we should be saying and doing, however. We should be thanking them for their restraint, and praising their professional competence. (It has been impressive.) We should be assuring them that we’re trying to put together an economic bailout to feed the people and help them put folks back to work. We should be urging them to build a big tent for the process of political reconstruction, but we should not be trying to use our aid money to twist their arms. That would be counterproductive. And we should smile a lot, because these are the guys we now have to work with.

Which brings me to Anne Patterson. Ambassador Patterson maybe said a few things in public lately that she should not have said. Averring  that she was “deeply skeptical” that street protests could produce better outcomes than elections was speech language better left on the cutting-room floor. But the idea that she has been positively disposed toward the Muslim Brotherhood government, or that she should have been more voluble last autumn when Morsi was literally trying to steal the (government) show, displays ignorance of what her job entails. As we will do now as a government—try to deal with the powers that be—she was doing until a few days ago—trying to deal with the powers that were. If she failed to object more to the MB’s creeping (sometimes galloping) authoritarianism during the past year, it’s most likely because no one seemed to have her back either in Foggy Bottom or in the White House—besides which the Pentagon often takes the lead role in private relations with Egypt because that’s where our main influence and budget-punch is. She is not an entirely free agent over there.

I am not defending everything Ambassador Patterson has done. And just by the way, I do not know her hardly at all, and so have no personal stake in this. I am just trying to point out that hers is a difficult and stressful job that is hard to do flawlessly under any circumstances, and particularly so under circumstances where your bosses could seem to care less about your portfolio. The fact that she is reviled by anti-MB voices in Egypt now really only proves two things: There’s no pleasing these people, who are used to having scapegoats to blame for their own unacknowledged shortcomings (and so it’s only a matter of time before they figure a way to blame the Jews); and she’s the model for effigy burning because her superiors are nowhere to be found, too busy are they laboring away  at the core diplomatic-national security agenda of 1975……U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control and the Arab-Israeli conflict. (Secretary Kerry’s role in the past few days has been appropriately comical: He eventually got around to calling the Egyptian Foreign Minister only to learn that he had just resigned.)

We have made some mistakes, botched up our signaling, too—no doubt about it. By living in the hell of half measures, by trying to split every difference we could identify, we are now in a situation where no side in the Egyptian political struggle trusts us—which is much, much worse than having neither side like us. But the buck for that outcome doesn’t stop with Anne Patterson. It stops on the desk that Harry Truman once indicated as being “here”, in the Oval Office.

Besides, it’s not the end of the world. This outcome is reversible if we start doing the right things. But we should realize as we do that neither Americans as a nation nor the U.S. government specifically can “fix” Egypt, whatever that is supposed to mean. We never could. We did not cause their problems and we cannot solve them. We cannot turn Egypt into our kind or any kind of democracy, and we can only help Egyptians who want to travel that road if they ask us—not the other way around.

More to present needs, however, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is neither devil nor savior, neither destroyer of democracy nor the man-on-white-horse answer to Egypt’s suffering. He can’t change the past or control the future, but he needs help where he can find it in the present. We have a somewhat awkward and unglamorous interest in providing some of that help, if only because it can restore some of the leverage we have lost in recent years. As far as policy is concerned, this is not a time to bathe our conscience in abstractions; it’s a time to get down to work.

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/#sthash.qDz2WFMf.dpuf

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi--Memorize That Name

July 1: From the very beginning of the so-called revolution in Egypt, I have taken some pains to throw a wet mop in the face of all those clueless Western commentators who believed that democracy, as we understand it, let alone liberal democracy, was at hand in Egypt—or anywhere else in the Arab world save maybe Tunisia. I said at the time in this blog—you can look it up—that the likelihood of any Arab country ending up as a genuine democracy was small, that opportunities for authoritarian-minded political Islam of many shapes and sizes to thrive were large, and, specifically in Egypt, that betting on twittering 20-something “democrats” to outduel the Army over time was a big-time losing proposition.

Just before the election of Mohamed Morsi, in June of 2012, I had this to say in conclusion to a post entitled “The Muddled East (Updated)”: “[W]hen all is said and done, post-revolutionary Egypt will function a whole lot like pre-revolutionary Egypt. It may look a little or a lot different, depending on the density of the constitutional veil now being manufactured, but it won’t really be different.” The Army, in other words, would prevail one way or another.

As editor of The American Interest I have imposed my view on the magazine, too. Take a look back at our May/June 2011 issue and you’ll see, from the cover to the inside, that we were very skeptical of all the breathless optimism in the air about the riotously misnamed “Arab Spring.” Compare and contrast with other publications: I dare you.

Why tell you this now? Because just a few hours ago the Egyptian Minister of Defense, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, issued an ultimatum to the Morsi government: Fix this ugly roiling mess within 48 hours or you’re breakfast foule. (If you don’t know what this is, MSM guy or gal, it means you’ve never been to Egypt, and you probably don’t know a fava bean from a blue-eyed fart.)

Morsi can’t fix anything, of course, whether in 48 hours or in 48 days. During yesterday’s massive demonstrations the police stepped aside while crowds torched the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters building in Cairo. He doesn’t control the guns, neither in the Army, the police or the para-military police. Four members of his cabinet resigned before al-Sisi’s ultimatum, knowing it was coming. The Army is back, exactly as I said it would be… sort of.

* * *

What do I mean by “sort of”? I will tell you, but first a brief analysis of what has gone so very wrong for Morsi.

I can be brief because my TAI colleague, Walter Russell Mead, has most of the “right stuff” laid down in his excellent blog post from June 29, “A Light Fails in Egypt.” Read it if you haven’t yet. The one thing that’s missing from this fine analysis, and that ties together a lot of the descriptive elements in it, is that Egypt is experiencing a headlong bureaucratic/administrative collapse. It’s important, I think, to understand this, and the main reasons for it.

Since July 1952, increasingly over time, the Army ran the economy. It ran—indeed, it created and it was—the Egyptian deep state. Since Field Marshal Tantawi and the elders were pushed off the stage nearly a year ago, the non-military elements of the state have tried to run what is, on balance, a highly centralized, quasi-socialist apparatus. (Only the local non-monetarized subsistence agricultural economy still works, and even it doesn’t work very well thanks to the state’s incessant meddling in it over the years.) Everything else is collapsing because the sectarian/patriarchal patronage networks that have formed over the past year consist of people who have no idea whatsoever how to run anything. It’s similar, on a much, much larger scale, to what’s been happening in Libya since Qaddafi.

Years ago a clever and truth-telling fellow named David Lamb devised what he called the IBM syndrome to describe political culture in Egypt and the Arab world. The “I” stands for “inshallah“, may God will it: in other words, fatalism.  The “B” stands for “bokr“—tomorrow morning, or just tomorrow: suggestive of an extremely elastic, pre-modern perception of time, vaguely akin to some uses of the Spanish word mañana. The “M” stands for “malesh“, which is untranslatable, but which kind of means “whatever”, “never mind” or “fagetaboutit”: not my job, someone else will take care of it, or not, who cares? What difference does it make?

Now, it is very politically incorrect to say this, but I will say it anyway: A typical Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood rank-and-file type now saddled up on the gyrating entrails of the Egyptian state bureaucracy not only is afflicted with the IBM syndrome, but he does not accept or understand causality as we use the word. Takfiris assert that God recreates the universe in full each instant, so there is no need for causality, since that would imply a diminution of God’s power. He also does not accept the existence of an objective fact separate from how he feels about it, and if he should feel negatively disposed toward the fact, whatever it is, the fact can be made simply to disappear. (Want an example, from elsewhere? Easy: When the mother of the Tsarnaev brothers denied that her sons could be murderers or terrorists, she made a fact disappear, right before her eyes. Some anthropologists call this a votive act, and in some places it is really quite common. Egypt is one of those places.) And he usually cannot navigate even a simple syllogism.

In short, we are talking about mostly culturally pre-modern people who flat-out flunk abstraction. They cannot run a centralized modern state. Obviously, this does not apply to all MB types, and certainly it does not apply to all Egyptians; but it applies to enough of them currently in the state administrative sector to matter. If you don’t believe me, ask an Egyptian who does have a decent Western education. You’ll get quite an enlightening earful.

As it happens, the Army in Egypt is the only institution in the history of the country, at least since Tutankhamun’s time, that does not suffer utterly from the IBM syndrome. That’s probably because its members have long been exposed to modern technology in the form of weaponry and had to adapt themselves to its exigencies—something they have not done especially well, true, but the effort has nevertheless put them a light year or so ahead of the rest of country (save for the elite 2 percent who have Western educations… but, as Walter said, probably most of them live and work abroad). At least the senior Army types understand agency, time and the requisites of basic organizational order. And that is why, from the start of Egypt’s most recent political adventure, I have insisted that the Army will end up running the country. Because, the way it’s been made path dependent on a gigantic dirigiste bureaucracy since Nasser’s time, no one else can.

* * *

Which brings me to what I mean by “sort of.”

Egypt is such a mess—and was becoming that mess in Mubarak’s later years—that the Army developed an interest in not being as directly involved as before in day-to-day affairs, lest blame fall upon it for the state’s manifest and multiple failures. So I thought last summer that the Army would accept a civilian-led, democratically elected government so long as every major actor knew where the red lines were. And the main red lines as far as the Army was concerned were fourfold: We decide our own promotions and retirements; we control our own budget—once we tell you what it is; we control foreign and national security policy; and you keep your hands off the Army-controlled parastatals in the economy that represent our “pension plan”, so to speak.

I was right about that, but I (as well as many smart Egyptians I know) underestimated how fast Morsi would be able to consolidate some charismatic authority, and thus show himself able to wriggle out from under those red lines. I was surprised by how fast Field Marshal Tantawi and company were dispatched from the scene, and I wasn’t sure that the younger generation of officers was as steeled as the old vets, many of whom still remembered King Farouk and the Brits.

Maybe they were all along. Maybe they were just waiting for Morsi and the Brotherhood to hang themselves on the ropes of their own ineptitude and authoritarian instincts. I have heard this theory from some Egyptians. But maybe things just deteriorated faster and further than anyone thought they would. Whatever the case, the Army is now poised to again be arbiter of Egypt’s political future.

So what will happen next? Anyone who claims to be sure is not to be taken seriously. But here’s my hunch.

The Army will not seek to rule formally or openly. Rather, it will convene all the major political forces and dictate a new arrangement for a transitional authority. (A transition to what?  Too soon even to ask; besides, as Adam Ulam once said, nothing endures in politics like the provisional.) The Muslim Brotherhood will be part of the arrangement, to be sure, and maybe Morsi himself will be included in the new pantheon—partly because there is no delicate constitutional way to depose him. Other non-MB civilian names will be named, however, as minister of this and that—including maybe Amr Moussa, Mohamed elBaradei and the like. But the senior echelons of the military will be calling the major shots. The deep state will once again, slowly or not-so-slowly but surely, come under the full direction of the Army. The gas lines will end.

Alas, this will not summarily solve Egypt’s problems, either the immediate ones or the longer-term ones. There will still be “revolutionaries” out in the street 48 and 72 hours from now, most likely, although keeping the MB in the mix ought to diminish outright armed opposition to the new arrangement. Will the Army shoot such “revolutionaries” to restore order? Maybe, and if it shoots the right people—and not too many of them (Egyptians are not like Iraqis; they don’t enjoy violence for its own sake)—most Egyptians will silently applaud.  (The Obama Administration’s warning that Morsi should not shoot protestors is really passing strange: How would he do that, now that the police and Army are pretty much beyond his command?!)

But there will still be no money, and the growing strain on the country’s ability to feed itself will not abate just because of the Army-directed musical chairs soon to come in Cairo. As long as the Muslim Brotherhood government stood, the Qataris have been willing to kick in a few billion dollars a month, but they are not likely to continue that with the de facto return of the Army.

One item on the American “to do” list, therefore, if only our President and Secretary of State can reposition their attention away from their respective obsessions with profoundly old business (I speak of the atavistic perseverations with U.S.-Russian arms control and the Arab-Israeli conflict), would be to twist some Saudi and Emirati arms to replace that money before all Hobbesean hell breaks lose in Egypt. Because it otherwise will, and it may do so anyway.

* * *

Most Americans who have cared to observe what has been happening in Egypt over the past two years do what most Americans always do in the face of telegenic foreign dramas: They superimpose their own unselfaware frames of reference, which are parochial but are presumed to be universal, onto others, where they have neither cultural nor historical reasons for being. And then, seeing what they want to see, and applying the only verbs and nouns they know to describe it, they wonder why they don’t have a clue as to what is happening, or why it is happening.

An example: Some American observers chide the Obama Administration for pushing Mubarak from power because that’s what enabled the rise of political Islam in Egypt; but other observers chide the Administration for not distancing itself faster from the old regime and racing to embrace the new democracy, so that unseemly behavior, like the Morsi government’s conviction of pro-democracy Egyptian and American NGO workers, could have been averted via sincere “engagement.” Both of these views border on the ridiculous.

First, the U.S. Government did not push Mubarak from power; betraying a functioning ally was not its sin. Its sin, its failure, which goes back some years, is that it failed to encourage and support Egyptians’ efforts to plan for the inevitable transition to a post-Mubarak era—and failing that to make our own prophylactic plans for that eventuality. Or do those who argue that we pushed Mubarak from power think that the man was going to live and thrive forever? Have they never seen an actuarial chart? He was 83 and in poor health when he was deposed, for heaven’s sake; the place was falling apart apace with our “ally” infirmly in place.

Second, the idea that the U.S. government could ever have been a decisive factor in Egyptian domestic politics in the throes of upheaval is preposterous. We had no power to make a Muslim Brotherhood government less authoritarian-minded than it was going to be. We had no power to understand, let alone control, the swirling fluid forces of Egyptian society once the bulwarks of Mubarak’s era gave way. We certainly had no power to come to the rescue of a young democracy, insofar as it ever existed. No social receptacle existed to collect the few precious drops of Egyptian democracy there were and turn them into a powerful political force. Between the Army to the one side and the Brotherhood to the other, the idea that a single relatively free election could birth a democracy, in a country with virtually no democratic habits of the heart, testifies only to the cartoonish understanding behind that idea.

This drama has never been about the fate of democracy or liberal attitudes and institutions. That was our passion play, not Egypt’s. This drama has always been about the fractionation and dissipation of traditional sources of social authority in a country that has tried and failed now at least three times since Napoleon’s 1799 invasion to come to terms with the press of modernity. There has been significant and positive social change in Egypt in recent years, but not enough of it to command the political heights–not yet. And maybe not ever, for it has now come down, in the summer of 2013, to the survival of order, any order. It has vanishingly little to do at this point with elections or constitutions or certainly with the U.S.-Egyptian bilateral relationship. American pressmen who think otherwise suffer from the standard failure of our Enlightenment-“lite” imagination.

I’m not rooting these days for the survival of democracy in Egypt because, as Walter Lippmann once wrote, it is a disease of the soul to be in love with impossible things. I am rooting only for the survival of civilization.

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Talkin Syria Intervention Blues

So the Administration announced yesterday that it was going to arm the Syrian rebels, and it’s moving some military forces around, too. Commentators are nearly unanimous in concluding that we’re edging much close now to involvement in this civil war, one with major and fairly large regional implications. Some folks are singing the talkin’ Syria intervention blues already, and I’m playing my old Gibson F-4 mandolin right along with them.

One thinks of Greek tragedy at a time like this. You can see the disaster coming; everyone can see it. But you can’t avoid it despite the seeing. One remembers, via now-available documents and memoirs, how Lyndon Johnson agonized over Vietnam, knowing as early as August 1964 close to exactly what sort of risks he and the country would be running if he deepened the American commitment to Vietnam. There wasn’t a single latter-day accusation launched against him over Vietnam policy that he had not anticipated as his own B-team interrogator as he rolled the problem over and over again in his mind. But he committed the nation anyway, because circumstances conspired to make it hard to know how not to.

So one sympathizes with President Obama’s resistance to getting lured toward another steep, slimy and rocky slope, this one in Syria. One can even sympathize with his desire to reduce the U.S. profile in that regional altogether in favor of spending rationed resources in strategically more important places—like Asia. But he and his Administration have screwed up this policy big time, and he has no one to blame (well, not quite no one……) for his current dilemma but himself.

Even if one discounts pre-November 2012 election motives for passivity over Syria (but I didn’t then and I still don’t now), Obama Administration policy amounted to a sort of forlorn Macawberism. The principals didn’t know what to do; everything was hard, or dangerous, or lonely, or all three. So they hoped it would just go away—that Assad would fall, or leave, or disappear, or something.  In lieu of any promising actions we could take pretty much on the cheap, they just hoped that “something would turn up.” It didn’t.

In the meantime, the Administration supported pointless and actually counterproductive diplomatic approaches, including ones with one party—Russia—that had zero interest in an outcome that aligned with any we could favor. It’s not clear that senior Administration officials, certainly to include the President, actually understood a year or so ago that the Syrian crucible was not just about Syria, but also about Iran, and Turkey, and Jordan, Lebanon, Israel…… It’s also not clear that they, any more than their predecessors, had a clue about the history and nature of sectarian cleavages in the region between Sunni and Shi’a Islam.

So the Obama Administration did not lead from behind on Syria. Instead, it sat on its behind—and there is a difference. And though many warned (me, too, for what it’s worth) that, left to its own dynamics, the situation in Syria would probably both get much worse internally and spread externally, the Administration still did nothing, even in a case where its humanitarian inclinations aligned perfectly with strategic interests with regard to Iran. It did nothing even when it had at least some chance of reaching an understanding with the Turks early on in the crisis. It did nothing repeatedly…..if such a thing is logically possible.

Some believe that the Administration did nothing repeatedly in Syria in hopes of parlaying its passivity into a negotiating asset with regard to Iran and its nuclear weapons program. In other words: We let you win in Syria and you be reasonable over the nuke program—that’s quid, pro and quo, rock, paper and scissors, no one loses this game and everyone can go home happy. Time will tell, perhaps, if that is really how these folks were thinking last year and into this—before the most recent Iranian finger in the eye in Kazakhstan. If they were, it will certainly rank as one of the most outrageous examples of bad judgment in recent decades. Me, I can’t bring myself to believe it. Yet.

There is something to be learned here, and there is even a chance that some Administration principles may belatedly learn it: The mantra that the use of force, even the indirect use of force via arms provision to allies or would-be clients, should always be a last resort, is just that—a mantra with no relevance to real life. This is like, as I have said before, advising a cancer victim to wait until the very last moment to consider surgery. It epitomizes the Neville Chamberlain school of diplomacy.

Relatedly, the genuinely crazy idea that force and diplomacy are opposites rather than complements—crazy because it spites every significant historical example we have—must by now be an embarrassment to at least some sentient folks in the American halls of decision-making. Conducting diplomacy severed from the backdrop of relative power is like trying to conduct a serious foreign policy with a condom, so to speak. But these were the “engagement” biases of many in the Administration back in January 2009, as they remain today, somehow, the biases of a great many clueless liberals everywhere.

But all that’s a lesson for next time. Maybe. Really bad ideas never die; they just come back in slightly different (or sometimes the same) form. For now, to invoke the hallowed wisdom of Buckaroo Bonzai, wherever you go, there you are. So regardless of how we got here, here we are, and so we’re entitled to ask:  What now? What next?

As many have observed, yesterday’s announcement doesn’t mean the imminent insertion of American airplanes delivering weapons to rebels, or the insertion of U.S. special forces folks to direct traffic on the ground into Syria from Jordan and Turkey, or air strikes and no-fly zones. It may just be a prelude to another joust at diplomacy, designed to set the President in some armor for his G-8 meeting in North Ireland with Vladimir Putin next week. Could be.

But anyone who thinks that yesterday’s announcement is by itself going to set Putin back on his heels should please call me about a certain bridge I have for sale. You can’t get clout from mere words. To believe otherwise, after the President’s ridiculous equivocations about his chemical weapons “red line”, is just another Macawberist delusion. You can’t change the position of a shadow by doing things to the shadow. You have to actually do something real. Which brings me to a more general point.

U.S. foreign policy is much, much too garrulous. In recent times every Administration has catered excessively to the Washington press corps, essentially agreeing to help them do their jobs in presumed exchange for the press being, well, “nice” to them. The last President who really disliked the press corps and couldn’t hide his generalized disdain was Richard Nixon, and it would be an understatement, I think, to say that the press was very not nice to him in return. But it’s not the legacy of Watergate that accounts for the motor-mouth character of recent habits. It’s politics.

Political campaigns are all about announcements and briefings and press releases and speeches—words strung together in every possible way, shape and size. Governing is about something else, but so set in the campaign mode are our leaders these days that once they get their hands on the great wheels that turn policy they nevertheless cling to the patterns of the permanent campaign. This needs to change.

Does the Russian government make an announcement every time it decides to do something in Syria? It makes announcements when it’s trying to create an impression, like the announcement about the S-300s that it shoved up John Kerry’s backside last month; it understands the traditional need to orchestrate words and deeds together. But it doesn’t blabber about everything it has done, is doing or will do there or anywhere else, like we seem to do. Nor is any serious government engaged in national security policy smitten with logorrhea likes ours is. Sometimes it’s a lot more effective to just do something, wait for the press report it, and let other governments flex their nerve endings wondering what it means.

The United States is a powerful, wealthy and capable nation. When we act, others know it—or they’ll find out about it soon enough. We don’t have to announce things like “pivots” to Asia, for example, and ordinarily we shouldn’t. That sort of thing reminds me of what 5-year olds do when they ring the little silver bell on their tricycle handlebars—as if we grownups wouldn’t otherwise see them coming down the sidewalk. Yesterday’s announcement concerning Syria may be an exception, if a near-term diplomatic objective is being sought. But then again it may not be.

No matter: The Russians won’t cave into a deal to our liking on the sidelines of the G-8 meeting. Their guy is winning; why should they? If the President wants to change that, he’s going to have to stop wringing hands and start wringing necks. And so we come to the rub: Should he?

One regular reader of this blog, who’ll remain unnamed, wrote me recently asking, in effect, didn’t I agree that the Administration can’t allow the formation of a Shi’a crescent all the way from Iran through a Hizballacized Lebanon and into Syria, connecting down to a Shi’a regime in Baghdad? And he added that, if they—meaning the Obama Administration—don’t do something pretty soon, that’s what we’ll get.

I agree that unless someone does something pretty soon, that crescent will form. But is it a vital interest of the United States to prevent it? Is it worth using military force directly to prevent that? And let’s not kid ourselves, folks: Once we commit to preventing that from happening, we’re bound to ratchet up the means of prevention as each successive escalation fails to do the trick—exactly what happened to poor ‘ol Lyndon now so many years ago.

My answer is no.  We do have a pretty serious, if not quite vital, interest in making sure Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons. (I and many others have discussed the reasons for this many times before, and this is not a time for rehearsal.) But the survival or fall of the Assad regime in Damascus is not a central component of that drama. Whatever happens in Syria, the U.S. government can still address the core of the Iranian challenge. To argue otherwise is more or less tantamount to arguing that FDR should have brought the United States into the Spanish Civil War in 1937 against Franco and his German supporters. Would Spain’s rescue from the fascists have averted World War II?  No; we would have had to fight that “good war” anyway.

So, arms to the Syrian rebels? Well, what arms, and how many, to which rebels? I don’t know the answers to those questions, and they kind of matter. But sure, go ahead. Some special forces on the ground to keep the lethal stuff inside the guardrails? Yeah, well, OK. Some on-site training? Look, someone will have to teach them how to use this stuff, right? Fine. How about some bombing runs to stop the Syrian regime’s forces from launching planes and helicopters against the rebels in the coming battle of Aleppo? Now, that would make me a little nervous, especially if we were dumb enough to make some damned announcement as to what the raids were designed to achieve. Because if we don’t achieve that aim, then what do we do? Launch some Marines that have already been deployed in Jordan?  To do exactly what? 

Slip sliding away….slip sliding into another Middle Eastern war we don’t need and can’t win by any realistic measure, save for a near-term and post-combat reconstruction investment we cannot afford right now. Mr. President, if you’d acted earlier at pretty low wager rates you wouldn’t be in this mess; but you didn’t. (Not that having to endure Bill Clinton lecture you on your supposed mistakes shouldn’t piss you off; what he said was completely inappropriate, even if in a supposedly “private” venue.) Now your options are both fewer and more dangerous in every way. You hear that sucking sound out there threatening to drag you down the slope, don’t you? That’s because, at this point, this whole thing really does suck. If you decide to throw reputational capital at Syria right now, please have in mind very strict limits on how much of it you’re prepared to fling. If you’re heading toward that slope, for God’s sake, sir, don’t wear loafers; wear cleats.