Mideast: The death toll in Egypt reaches 150 after the toppling of a Muslim Brotherhood flunky as president. Blood is on the hands of a U.S. president who undermined a key ally.
It was as if a self-satisfied President Obama told the Egyptians: “Behold, I will strike with the rod that is in my hand the water of the river, and it shall be turned into blood.”
Obama went to Cairo his first summer as president with a kind of Moses complex, promising miracles, “a new beginning” in Muslim relations based on America apologizing for “crimes” such as saving Iran from Marxism-Leninism in 1953.
Instead, the land of the Nile suffers a modern plague of blood stemming from the U.S. belief that the mob could improve on the heavily policed rule of our longtime ally, now-deposed President Hosni Mubarak, who kept Islamist terrorism in check for decades after the assassination of peacemaker Anwar Sadat.
Police clashes with Muslim Brotherhood supporters have now killed 150 Egyptians who’d be alive were Mubarak still in power. But Obama’s visit to Egypt in 2009 seemed calculated to weaken his rule there.
Another Democratic president with glazed-over ideas of Peace In Our Time did something similarly naïve. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, in which Jimmy Carter’s undermining of the Shah led to the Ayatollah Khomeini coming into power, not only led to Iranian blood flowing through the streets but to 53 Americans being held hostage for 444 days. That Islamofascist regime remains in power today, poised to go nuclear.
Carter’s approach to Iran also stretched down to Central America. The idea was that anti-Western revolution was inevitable, so the West must help it along.
Carter helped Daniel Ortega’s communist Sandinistas into power during the Cold War in Nicaragua. He’s been back in power for the last 6 1/2 years, further wrecking his country’s economy all these years later.
With expansionist communism gone, Islamism is today the greatest threat to U.S. national security. But in eerily Carteresque fashion, Obama believes we should “get behind the revolution” by backing forces like the Muslim Brotherhood.
Obama’s ex-secretary of state, would-be President Hillary Clinton, made a point of flying to Egypt’s presidential palace just two weeks after the swearing-in, where she “smiled for cameras and traded pleasantries with President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist jailed more than once” by Mubarak’s government, as the New York Times described him.
Obama’s new U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, who was behind our misguided efforts in Libya leading to the Benghazi disaster, wants the U.S. military to become a kind of armed International Red Cross, conducting interventions without regard to American strategic interests.
Post-World War II history suggests that Egypt naturally gravitates toward making war with Israel.
America struck a delicate balance that changed that, but the blood flowing on the banks of the Nile today attests to the arrogance of a U.S. president who thought he could go to the Mideast and part the Red Sea.