Obama Decides Not To Decide; after Three Days, the EU Moves

Criticism is focusing on the president for indecision on Cairo. Brussels threatens to stop funds. But the funds are just small fish: The regime is controlled by the Saudis to the tune of billions.

The liberal intelligentsia and democratic Oslo awarded Obama a Nobel Peace Prize on trust, proclaiming him the savior of the world. Five years later, the blood of the Egyptian town squares is the litmus test of Obama’s devastating Middle East policies. These are irredeemably disastrous policies for the Middle Eastern populations whom Obama promised to be reconciled with and for an America that once again is taking the lead as the most hated country — from Cairo to Kabul and from Baghdad to Tunis. These policies are capable of frustrating even the weight of $1.3 billion with which the White House deludes itself that it is keeping a leash on Egyptian generals. In the wake of these policies, the European Union has slipped, yielding to Obama’s word and condemning itself to an even greater helplessness.

In this climate, the statement in which the Council President Enrico Letta and French President Francois Hollande denounce the excessive response and ask the Egyptian military to end violence and repression takes on the unmistakable scent of deceptive emptiness. The illusion that generals deaf to the calls of America would listen to Italy, to France, to the warnings of the EU High Representative Catherine Ashton or to those of Angela Merkel — ready to “review their position on Egypt” — is a naïve illusion.

An illusion born of a series of errors since Hosni Mubarak deserted his fate. Those errors are also the sum of Obama’s ineptitude.

Mubarak was certainly an authoritarian and corrupt dictator, but he was also a controllable dictator, aware that his intransigence and his autonomy could not exceed the standards of acceptability established by Washington and its European partners. Instead Obama granted him an agreed exit he preferred to trust to Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood and delivered him to the generals ready to stab him in the back. Now, 30 months later, Obama is responding to his mistakes and massacres, proclaiming that he did not wish to join forces with them. But the administration’s main problem is one of having sided itself too much — and always on the wrong side. The support granted to the Muslim Brotherhood in the belief that Qatar, a country that has never seen an election, would lead them to democracy led to the dictates of Morsi, the launching of a constitution based on Shariah law and the military coup of June 30.

Obama has tried to remedy those mistakes, embracing the army commander, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Too bad the general — though educated in an American college — grew up in the religious shadow of Salafism and is not a man from America, but from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The executioner of Cairo is now the trusted and available accomplice to the Sunni nations; he decided to stem the attempt by Qatar, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood to dominate the Middle East. The blunder by Secretary of State John Kerry, who long ago credited al-Sisi with having “restored democracy,” manifests the superficiality with which the Democratic administration has dealt with the scourge of Egypt. The consequence of such superficiality is impotence. And the Obama administration is responding to the massacres by threatening to suspend joint military exercises with Egypt, demonstrating its devastating irrelevance.

An irrelevance made even more frustrating by the uselessness of the secret weapon on which Washington has always counted to maneuver the generals, that being the $1.3 billion in military aid from the United States guaranteed to them — loot devalued and depreciated in the face of the treasure trove of $12 billion pledged by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf countries in exchange for the availability of al-Sisi to corner Turkey and Qatar and to make mincemeat of the Muslim Brotherhood. Not to mention the $500 million in funds: the small fish that Europe is threatening to halt, even if it is an empty threat.