President Obama's "condemnation"of the Egyptian military's massacre of civilians sounded like obligatory ass-covering. ... The sense of absurdity in the air takes one back to the halcyon days of Richard Nixon and his "credibility gap", which now seems like child's play. Incredibly, even John McCain has a more critical analysis of the Egyptian coup. ... We have repeatedly called on the Egyptian military and security forces to show restraint," he told the press. It was like the US was saying to General Sisi, "We wish you could be nicer."

Having watched two-faced US operations for decades now, I tend to lean toward the latter. That is, that policy formulators in Washington and Tel Aviv have concluded that an Egypt cleansed of Islamic influence is in their interests. So, therefore, it's necessary to crank up instruments of public relations like Earnest Josh to run interference with reality.

If he was ever apprehensive, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Sisi can relax. Obama spoke but he did not speak a language that the generals will interpret as anything but a license to kill. So much for Obama's lofty expressions about a new beginning in his address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009. ... What Obama's foreign policy appears to amount to is abdication, a passive surrender to events.

Egypt is not Syria. America has long been directly, intimately engaged in its affairs. But Obama is acting as though he's an innocent bystander, wringing his hands over the terrible things he's witnessing but incapable of actually trying to influence events. No doubt Obama was right to state "America cannot determine the future of Egypt." But this is a straw man. Who said America could determine its future? What it could have attempted to do was nudge Egypt toward compromise. Now it may be too late. Obama may have acted like he was putting Egypt on notice, but the only thing the generals will end up noticing is his passivity.

American power is diminishing, as it has been in fact since its peak in 1945, but it's still incomparable. And it's dangerous. Obama's remarkable global terror campaign and the limited, pathetic reaction to it in the West is one shocking example. And it is a campaign of international terrorism - by far the most extreme in the world. Those who harbor any doubts on that should read the report issued by Stanford University and New York University, and actually I'll return to even more serious examples than international terrorism... Well, another important feature of RECD ["really existing capitalist democracy"] is that the public must be kept in the dark about what is happening to them. The "herd" must remain "bewildered". The reasons explained lucidly by the professor of the science of government at Harvard - that's the official name - mirror another respected liberal figure, Samuel Huntington. As he pointed out, ''Power remains strong when it remains in the dark. Exposed to sunlight, it begins to evaporate... '' As I mentioned, Obama's now conducting the world's greatest international terrorist campaign - the drones and special forces campaign. It's also a terror-generating campaign. The common understanding at the highest level [is] that these actions generate potential terrorists. I'll quote General Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus' predecessor. He says that "for every innocent person you kill", and there are plenty of them, "you create 10 new enemies".