How Should the USA Respond to Events in Egypt

How Should the U.S. Respond to Mideast Turmoil? Help Our Friends—Defeat Our Enemies. (Duh!)



Huge confusion ensued among Mideast pundits and politicians when the Egyptian generals threw out duly elected President Mohammed Morsi. This was understandable given the profound misunderstanding that prevailed from the outset of the Arab unheaval and even after Morsi's unceremonious ouster.

First, the mainstream media, joined by the Obama administration, characterized the so-called Arab Spring as the "Arab Democracy Movement." (It wasn't.)

Second, both the media and the administration characterized Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood as a "moderate" political movement. (It's not.)

Third, these influential voices in American politics were sorely conflicted at the notion of supporting a military coup over an elected official---no matter how undemocratically that official was behaving.

But this kind of confusion has bedeviled U.S. foreign policy for most of President Obama's term. In his haste to throw out anything that smelled of the Bush administration's "war on terror" as being anti-Muslim, Obama went the other way and began embracing all things Islam. Unfortunately, this included Islam's murderous brethren, the Islamists.

Thus, the administration tried to sidle up to Iran's ayatollahs (who openly wish to defeat the U.S. and Israel), to Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (a vicious anti-Semite who is slowly turning Turkey into a Sharia-dominated dictatorship and who has recently rebuffed even his "friend," the U.S. president), as well as to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (which hid its terrorist and anti-democratic philosophy only long enough to get elected and start agglomerating absolute power).

The message we can all learn from the experience in Egypt is sobering, especially for those who believe free elections are a solution to the world's problems. But it wasn't the solution when Hitler was elected, it wasn't the solution when Hamas was elected, and it wasn't the solution when Morsi was elected. In fact, democracy means more---and requires more---than free elections.

What we in the United States need to focus on instead of superficial trappings of democracy is who our friends are and who our enemies are. Let's start with a simple truth: Islamists---those who advocate an intolerant, anti-pluralistic, Sharia law-dominated society---are the enemies of democracy, and they are the enemies of the United States.

Based on an article by Andrew C. McCarthy in the National Review