Dumb, Dumber, Dumberer in Washington

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

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

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

Here is Max Boot at the Commentary blog on July 25th:

Rather than trying to reach accommodation with the Islamists, who for all their faults did win a free election, the army is demonizing them as "traitors" who must be rooted out. Dispensing with the facade of civilian rule, the military commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, is calling for mass protests to give the military a mandate to crack down on "terrorism" and "violence," which, if delivered, no doubt will be interpreted as a mandate to crack down on all opposition, period.

Egypt is seeing not the rule of law but the rule of the mob and the military. Alas, history teaches that when well-organized movements with mass support are pushed out of the political process, they are likely to resort to violence. See the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, or Egypt's own bloodletting during that decade during a war against radical jihadists.

And Reuel Marc Gerecht at the Wall Street Journal, the previous day:

Economic revitalization in Egypt won't happen unless the poor accept the pain that will come with shrinking the country's unsustainable subsidies and state-owned enterprises. Buying in now, after the coup, will be much more difficult for those who support Islamist causes.

It also isn't clear that the secular crowd is economically more adept than the Muslim faithful. Socialism has been a hard-to-kick drug for Egypt's legions of nominally college-educated youth, who came of age expecting government jobs. Capitalism has probably got firmer roots among devout Muslims, where Islamic law teaches a certain respect for private property.

The Muslim Brotherhood's senior leadership may not recover from the coup…But only the deluded, the naïve and the politically deceitful—Western fans of the coup come in all three categories—can believe that Islamism's "moment" in Egypt has passed. More likely, it's just having an interlude.

Gerecht has staked his reputation on what he calls "The Islamist Road to Democracy," and embraces died-in-the-wool totalitarians as long as they keep up democratic pretenses. Anyone who disagrees with him is "deluded, naive, or politically deceitful." How about "realistic"? It seems churlish to point this out, but I was right about Egypt from the outset while Gerecht was dead wrong. I predicted a failed state in Egypt on Feb. 2, 2011, observing that then-President Hosni Mubarak's problems arose from a free fall of the Egyptian economy already in progress. No-one is right all the time, and there is no shame in having been wrong, unless, of course, one insults everyone who might disagree with a view that already has produced a catastrophically wrong forecast.

Gerecht asserts — without a shred of evidence — that Egypt can stabilize its economy by shutting down subsidies. Morsi refused to do so (as the International Monetary Fund demanded) because he did not believe he could do so and survive politically. It is absurd to suggest that restoring the Brotherhood to power in some way would make possible the austerity measures that the Brotherhood could not push through when it had all the power. Who is deluded here may be adduced from the track record.

Half of Egypt's people live on $1.65 a day or less and the country imports half its food. Its economy is in ruins and cannot be revived by an IMF austerity package, as Gerecht seems to imply. Morsi fell when he ran out of money. The Saudis and other Gulf states refused to bankroll the Muslim Brotherhood, which is seeking to overthrow the Arab monarchies, but immediately lent $12 billion to Morsi's successors, averting starvation in Egypt for the next year.

I wrote in the cited May 20 Tablet essay:

It is a widespread misimpression (reinforced by conspiracy theorists seeking the malign influence of the "Israel Lobby") that the neoconservative movement is in some way a Jewish thing. On the contrary, it is a distinctly American thing. As the born-again Methodist George W. Bush said in 2003, "Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it." The Catholic neoconservative and natural-law theorist Michael Novak put it just as passionately in his 2004 book The Universal Hunger for Liberty: "The hunger for liberty has only slowly been felt among Muslims. That hunger is universal, even when it is latent, for the preconditions for it slumber in every human breast."

One is reminded of the industrialist in the 1930s who refused to book radio ads on Sunday on the grounds that everyone would be out playing polo. It is hard for Americans to understand that everyone is not like us: are we not an amalgam of all the cultures and races of the world? But that is a fallacy of composition: we Americans are brands plucked out of the fire, the few individuals who rejected the tragedies of the cultures of our origin and embraced something radically different.

The "political philosophy" that has guided so many diligent and clever analysts into absurdities does not address the definitive political phenomenon of our time, namely cultural suicide. The materialism of Hobbes et. al. proceeds from the idea of individual self-preservation to a theory of the state; it does not consider that cultures may veer collectively toward self-destruction. At its worst, so-called rationalist political philosophy turns into the old materialist assertion that being determines consciousness: put people into democratic institutions and they will turn into democrats, just as the Communists asserted that collectivizing the means of production would produce a "new man." Perhaps something good will come out of all of this: Max Boot and Reuel Marc Gerecht are as close as living writers can come to an embodiment of reductio ad absurdum.

Mr. Goldman, president of Macrostrategy LLC, is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and the London Center for Policy Research.