This is painful to watch, and if Iran had done it those on the right would be ripping Iran's rulers for it:
More than 600 were confirmed killed and thousands had been wounded since Wednesday in clashes between Egypt's military-backed interim government and Morsi supporters. The government has declared a nationwide state of emergency and nighttime curfew.
But remember that Iran's dictatorial rulers would be beating and killing protesters who want democracy; while in Egypt it is the Moslem Brotherhood--an organization interested in democracy only as the means to power--that is under attack by a government under pressure to begin democracy. And the Islamists have been fighting back, don't forget. Gandhi wasn't reborn in Tahrir Square with a Mursi poster in hand. Egypt's government is better than Iran's government and Egypt's pro-Mursi protesters are worse than Iran's Green Revolution protesters. How's that for nuance?
So President Obama's response is reasonable, I think:
President Barack Obama scrapped plans for joint American-Egyptian military exercises Thursday, announcing the first concrete U.S. reaction to the spiraling violence in and around Cairo but stopping well short of withholding $1.3 billion in annual American military aid.
The aid is payment for remaining at peace with Israel. That agreement was made with a dictatorship and the lack of new democracy in Egypt seems no reason to cancel the payments.
Sure, some say it would be folly for Egypt to wage war on Israel. This is true. But since when have Islamists been rational? Is it really rational for al Qaeda to believe they can murder their way to a global caliphate? Yet that is what the seek to achieve. Go figure. So the Moslem Brotherhood is fully capable of believing they could start a war with Israel and emerge victorious--God willing. Egypt would lose that war, but we'd have had a war and the fallout from that fight to deal with. Best not to go there.
And the Bright Star exercises might have been scaled way back anyway by the Egyptians who might think their military is too busy to practice conventional warfare with us this year.
Besides, with tensions high from civil strife, I wouldn't want a "green-on-blue" incident with some Mursi-supporter corporal stabbing one of our troops in a joint exercise.
I haven't been leaning forward in hitting the Obama administration for their handling of Egypt, as if better foreign policy would have erased the chaos of Egypt. That would make the mistake that many critics of America make who assume that no butterfly flaps its wings without us having a say in it. People around the world do things--or don't do them--without our input all the time.
I'd have preferred to have excluded the Moslem Brotherhood from the elections in the first place. I was in favor of banning anti-democratic parties from the election to keep Islamists from gaining power as Mursi did. But that didn't happen and Mursi won the election.
So we have to look forward. Hopefully we can talk to the generals and get them to be restrictive in their use of deadly force. Given police deaths, this wasn't just gunning down peaceful protests.
But we can't simply say we don't have issues with the tactics that in other countries we'd condemn. If the Moslem Brotherhood is waging war, the state has to fight. But like our counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Egypt has to make sure their use of firepower doesn't alienate more people than the enemies it kills. The state must sift the population and deal only with enemies as enemies. Otherwise, people may come to sympathize with the Moslem Brotherhood.
On the bright side, Egyptians have had plenty of time to sour on the Moslem Brotherhood's governing style. So the military-backed government has some leeway in popular opinion, it seems, to err on the side of violence.
Even if the Obama administration was perfect in responding to the problem of Egypt, I'm not sure our impact can be decisive on what the outcome is. I just hope we have enough credibility to keep the least-bad guys from winning and be able to step in to help pick up the pieces if it goes all to Hell.
UPDATE: Let's remember that the Moslem Brotherhood isn't some democractic organization denied power by thugs. They are thugs who scored big with voting to seize power. Far less objectionable thugs have stopped them.
The fighting going on is one-sided but it isn't a massacre of innocents:
Security forces cleared a Cairo mosque after a gunbattle with followers of the Muslim Brotherhood on Saturday, while Egypt's army-backed government, facing deepening chaos, considered banning the Islamist group.
Three Reuters witnesses saw gunmen shoot from a window of the al-Fath mosque, where supporters of deposed president Mohamed Mursi had taken shelter during ferocious confrontations in the heart of the Egyptian capital on Friday.
Another gunman was shown on television shooting from the mosque's minaret and soldiers outside returning fire. Hours later, police moved in and secured the building, making scores of arrests as crowds on the streets cheered them on.
We really would rather have the army win this fight even as we try to use our influence to keep them from going overboard against unarmed civilians. One day we can push for democracy--with the Moslem Brotherhood banned as an anti-democratic institution--but right now we just don't want Egypt to get worse.
I don't dismiss the promotion of democracy as that writer does. But I do take the long view. Democracy (with rule of law) is an objective we need to move toward. It took time in Latin America, Taiwan, and South Korea, but they did largely make it.
