Spengler: Obama and the Islamists

Republicans Should Denounce Obama for Funding Egyptian Terrorists

January 26th, 2012

It is a disgrace that the US government has held direct talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, and an outrage that that America is accelerating aid payments to Egypt to support a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and other pro-terrorist, anti-American extremists. The Brotherhood won 47% of seats in Egypt’s parliament, and along with other extreme Islamist parties controls about three-quarters of the total. Reuters reports:

    DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 25 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama plans to accelerate the pace of American aid to Egypt, a top State Department official said on Wednesday, as the most populous Arab nation reaches a critical stage in its uncertain transition away from autocratic rule.

    Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats, part of a U.S. delegation that held unprecedented talks last week with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, said Washington wanted to provide “more immediate benefits” to Egyptians, who earlier this month conducted their first democratic elections in decades.

    “During this period, we want to be as supportive as we can. This is an historic moment. Egypt’s a country of enormous importance,” Hormats said.

    Under the plan, some non-urgent U.S. aid slated for other countries – he did not name them – would be redirected to Egypt. And funding in the pipeline for long-term programs in Egypt would be shifted to quick-impact projects, he said.

This is the same Muslim Brotherhood that is infiltrating terrorists into the United States, according to the director of the FBI.  Now it is in position to control a military establishment created by the United States that includes, among other things, more than two hundred F-16?s.

The Egyptian people are free to choose any party they please, but if they choose parties that are embittered and implacable enemies of the United States and Western freedom in general, we should not help them consolidate their rule. Fortunately, $2 billion here and there won’t help Egypt very much; that’s roughly 2 weeks’ of flight capital leaving the country. American foreign aid will simply help the military kleptocrats who ran Egypt for decade to move more of their private fortunes out of the country, before the Islamists lock the country down. And there is no reason for American taxpayers to subsidize the London townhouses and Paris apartments and Monaco yachts of the Egyptian generals.

 

Obama in Foreign Policy Hell

January 25th, 2012 – 6:15 am

It won’t decide the 2012 election, but the meltdown of Barack Obama’s Islamophile foreign policy has to hurt. Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons humiliates a president so committed to dialogue with the evil lunatics in Tehran that he refused to support a mass outpouring of democracy demonstrators during the summer of 2009. Obama’s closest foreign policy friendship is with the Islamist president of Turkey, who has jailed more journalists than China and steered his country towards imminent economic disaster. Tayyip Erdogan may not be a terrorist, as Rick Perry said in last week’s debate, but he backs them, including Hamas.

And then there is Egypt: Even the New York Times has noticed that Egypt’s economy is collapsing, and that the country faces disaster as it runs out of money.

    The reasons for his plight have been piling up all year: a virtual cutoff of foreign investment, a 30 percent decline in tourist visits and the stagnation of economic growth. The official unemployment rate is 12 percent, but among young people the real rate of unemployment is at least double that figure.

    The military rulers have also presided over a period of financial turmoil. Inflation has surged into double digits, and the exchange rate for the currency, the Egyptian pound, is under heavy pressure. Foreign exchange reserves have plunged, as the government is spending about $2 billion a month in a losing battle to prop up the pound. Foreign currency reserves have fallen to about $10 billion, after certain obligations, from about $36 billion before the revolt.

Readers of this blog are familiar with the story. The only piece of news in the Times’ very belated offering is the estimate that Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves are down to just $10 billion (rather than the reported $18 billion), or import coverage of a month and a half, preparing an “all but inevitable further devaluation of Egypt’s currency that could send the prices of food and other goods soaring.”  In an Asia Times essay last Monday, I observed that the Egyptian government no longer could borrow from its own capital markets, suggesting that reserve figures were much lower than reported; the Times does not say where it got the $10 billion number, but it sounds reasonable.

Egypt’s crisis was the easiest market call since Moses warned Pharaoh about the frogs; I wrote half a dozen essays in 2011 predicting it, including this one in June. Obama and his radical coterie were so persuaded that Egypt’s revolution heralded a brave new world of democratic Islam that Washington helped force out Hosni Mubarak, the closest thing America had to an ally in the Arab world. To be fair, Obama’s delusion was shared by many on the right, who hoped for validation of the “Bush Freedom Agenda” in democratic movements in the Arab world, but that is beside the point: Obama is the president, and he owns the Egyptian disaster. Egypt’s horrifying descent into Somali-style chaos will be an extended, excruciating object lesson for those who thought democracy was an exportable technology.

To adapt Freud, Egypt has gone from ordinary unhappiness to hysterical misery, thanks in large measure to the Obama administration’s decision to pull the rug out from under Mubarak. It would have happened eventually, to be sure, but the point is that it happened on Obama’s watch, as the result of Obama’s actions.

January 27, 2012 | Comments »

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