Egypt's Morsi resets ties with
US By M K Bhadrakumar
The confusion in the American mind about
Egypt ended this past weekend, a mere nine days
since President Barack Obama made the famous
remark in a television interview that he wasn't
sure of post-Hosni Mubarak Egypt being the United
States' ally.
The confusion actually arose
when US National Security Council spokesman Tommy
Vietor scrambled to clarify that "ally" is a
"legal term of art", whereas Egypt is a
"long-standing and close partner" of the United
States, and, thereupon, State Department
spokeswoman Victoria Nuland butted in to
contradict both Obama and Vietor by insisting
Egypt was indeed a "major non-NATO ally".
In an interview with The New York Times on
Saturday, Egyptian
President Mohamed Morsi
offered to clear up the confusion. Asked whether
Egypt was an ally, Morsi smilingly remarked: "It
depends on your definition of an ally." He then
helpfully suggested that the two countries were
"real friends".
Growing up with the
Brothers Now, as Morsi probably intended,
the thing about "real friends" is that they don't
expect either side to fawn, as a poodle might do
by wagging its tail. Thus when he travels to the
US to address the United Nations General Assembly
on Wednesday, Morsi doesn't have to meet with
Obama. Yet they will remain "real friends" -
although they've never met.
According to
The New York Times, Obama cold-shouldered Morsi's
request for a meeting. Cairo maintains that it is
all a scheduling problem and the planning of a
visit by Morsi to Washington was work in progress.
Meanwhile, Morsi has "quite a busy schedule" in
New York and Obama too happens to have a "tight
schedule" - this according to Egyptian Foreign
Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr.
In fact,
Morsi's only meeting with US officials during this
week's visit to that country may be at the annual
meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (which,
by the way, Obama also is attending).
There is hardly any excuse left now for
the American mind to remain confused about the
bitter harvest of the Arab Spring on Tahrir
Square. The spin doctors who prophesied that Egypt
under the Muslim Brotherhood would ipso facto
pursue the Mubarak track on foreign policies have
scurried away.
This is especially so after
watching Morsi's astounding televised interview on
Saturday, his first to the Egyptian state TV since
his election in June. He spoke at some length on
the Iran question, which has somehow come to be
the litmus test to estimate where exactly Egypt
stands as a regional power.
Morsi affirmed
that it is important for Egypt to have a "strong
relationship" with Iran. He described Iran as "a
major player in the region that could have an
active and supportive role in solving the Syrian
problem". Morsi explained his decision to include
Iran in the four-member contact group that Egypt
has formed - along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia -
on the Syrian crisis.
Dismissing the
Western opposition to engaging Iran, he said: "I
don't see the presence of Iran in this quartet as
a problem, but it is a part of solving the
[Syrian] problem." He said Iran's close proximity
to Syria and Tehran's strong ties Damascus made it
"vital" in resolving the Syrian crisis.
Morsi added: "And we [Egypt] do not have a
significant problem with Iran, it [Egypt-Iran
relationship] is normal like with the rest of the
world's states."
Equally, Morsi spoke
defiantly in his interview with The New York Times
regarding Egypt's ties with the US and the
latter's relations with the Arab world. The
overpowering message is that Cairo will no longer
be bullied by Washington. He said:
"I grew up with the Muslim Brotherhood. I
learned my principles in the Muslim Brotherhood. I
learned how to love my country with the Muslim
Brotherhood. I learned politics with the
Brotherhood. I was a leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood."
"Successive American administrations
essentially purchased with American taxpayer money
the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of
the region."
It was up to Washington to repair relations
with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance
with Egypt.
The United States must respect the Arab
world's history and culture, even when that
conflicts with Western values.
"If you [US] want to judge the performance of
the Egyptian people by the standards of German or
Chinese or American culture, then there is no room
for judgment. When the Egyptians decide something,
probably it is not appropriate for the US. When
the Americans decide something, this, of course,
is not appropriate for Egypt."
The Arabs and Americans have "a shared
objective, each to live free in their own land,
according to their customs and values, in a fair
and democratic fashion ... [in] a harmonious,
peaceful co-existence".
Americans "have a special responsibility" for
the Palestinians because the United States signed
the 1978 Camp David accord. "As long as peace and
justice are not fulfilled for the Palestinians,
then the treaty remains unfulfilled."
If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its
treaty with Israel, Washington should also live up
to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian
self-rule. The last bit in particular is ominous.
Morsi could be hinting that Egypt intends to seek
changes to the 1978 peace treaty. Israeli Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman hurried to declare on
Sunday that there was not the "slightest
possibility" that Israel would accept any such
changes. "We will not accept any modification of
the Camp David Accords," Lieberman said.
A 'fast-forward' The refrain by
Western experts used to be that Egypt's Brothers
depended on US and Saudi generosity to run their
government in Cairo. More important, Washington
spread an impression that it enjoyed a
larger-than-life influence over the New Egypt. The
US was supposed to have acted as a mediator
between the Egyptian military and the Brothers.
But Morsi scattered the thesis. "No, no,
it is not that they [military leadership]
'decided' to do it [stepping down]. This is the
will of the Egyptian people through the elected
president, right? The president of the Arab
Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed
forces. Full stop ... We are behaving according to
the Egyptian people's choice and will, nothing
else - is it clear?" he asked the New York Times
editors.
The picture that emerges from
Morsi's stunning interview is that the US has
suffered a huge setback to its regional strategy
in the Middle East. The fact that Obama has shied
away from meeting with Morsi this week underscores
the gravity of the deep chill in the US-Egyptian
ties. And Obama's snub comes after he took the
initiative to invite Morsi to visit the US and
insisted it should be an early visit, even sending
Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to deliver
the invitation letter and thereafter following up
with visits by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to
Cairo.
Morsi has taken a series of steps
since he took over in July, which, in retrospect,
had the principal objective of conveying to
Washington that he resented the US diktat and
intended to follow an independent foreign policy.
His decision to visit China and Iran was a
calculated one, intended to signal his empathy
with countries that challenged US hegemony in the
Middle East and to underscore that he hoped to
reduce Egypt's dependence on the United States.
But Washington kept pretending that it didn't take
notice.
However, there has been a
"fast-forward" in the past 10 days, since the
anti-Islam American film, the killing of the US
ambassador in Benghazi and the storming of the US
Embassy in Cairo by Egyptian protesters. Morsi
didn't react to the storming of the embassy for a
full 36 hours. Simply put, he could sense the Arab
street heaving with fury toward the US and he
decided that it would be politically injudicious
for him to do anything other than let the popular
anger play out.
Morsi's deafening silence
or inertia provoked Obama to call him up to
admonish him (according to leaked US accounts),
but all that Morsi would do was to send police
reinforcements to protect the embassy compound. He
never condemned the storming of the embassy as
such.
Living with yesterday's
tyrant Things can never be the same again
in the US-Egypt relationship. A 33-year slice of
diplomatic history through which Cairo used to be
Washington's dependable ally is breaking loose and
drifting to the horizon. Uncharted waters lie
ahead for the US diplomacy in the Middle East.
Clearly, the axis that is pivotal to the US
regional strategy in the Middle East - comprising
Israel and the so-called "moderate" Arab states
such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, etc - cannot
hold together without Egypt, and the strategy
itself is in peril.
In immediate terms,
the fallout is going to be serious in Syria. A
Western intervention in Syria now can be virtually
ruled out. On the other hand, without an
intervention, a regime change will be a long haul.
In turn, Turkey is going to be in a fix, having
bitten more than it could chew and with the US in
no mood to step in to expedite the Arab Spring in
Damascus. (Obama called up Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Erdogan last week to extend moral support.)
The good thing is that the US and its
allies may now be open to the idea of a national
dialogue involving the Syrian government. In fact,
the most recent Russian statements on Syria hint
at an air of nascent expectations. On the
contrary, nervousness with a touch of bitterness
is already apparent in the comment by the
Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper on the weekend,
while taking stock of the United States' growing
difficulties with Egypt's Brothers:
Will the US president allow his
legacy to bear the headline of having kept
Bashar al-Assad in power? It would be a terrible
legacy to leave behind, no matter how much it
could be justified by such arguments as the
wisdom of living with yesterday's tyrant because
today's tyrant could be worse - and what is
meant here is not just the tyrant of unruly
mobs, but also the tyrants of Muslim extremism
and its relations with moderate Islamism in
power.
Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia
stayed away from the meeting of the quartet on
Syria that Cairo hosted last Monday, without
offering any explanation.
Simply put,
Riyadh is unable to come to terms with Egypt's
return to the centre stage of Arab politics after
a full three decades of absence during which the
Saudi regime appropriated for itself Cairo's
traditional role as the throbbing heart of
Arabism. Riyadh will find it painful to vacate the
role as the leader of the Arab world that it got
used to enjoying. Almost every single day, Saudi
media connected with the regime pour calumnies on
Egypt's Brothers, even alleging lately that they
are the twin brothers of al-Qaeda.
Uncontrollable anger Again, the
elaborate charade that the Saudis stage-managed -
propagating the Muslim sectarian discords as the
core issue on the Middle East's political arena -
is not sticking anymore, now that the two biggest
Sunni and Shi'ite countries in the region - Egypt
and Iran - are holding each other's hands,
demonstrating goodwill and displaying willingness
to work together to address key regional issues.
The worst-case scenario for the Saudi regime will
be if in the coming months the Arab Spring begins
its fateful journey toward Riyadh and the Arabian
Peninsula, where the Brothers have been active for
decades, welcomes it as a long-awaited spring.
The heart of the matter is that on a
regional plane, the Iranian viewpoint that the
Arab Spring is quintessentially "Islamic" stands
vindicated. In an interview with the Financial
Times last week, the Speaker of Iran's parliament,
Ali Larijani, made the stunning disclosure that
Iranian diplomats had met members of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Syria as well as the Salafis (who
are being financed by the Saudis) to encourage
them to accept "democratic reforms through
peaceful behavior, not violence". This made
complete mockery of the Syrian logarithm as per
the Saudi (and Turkish and US) estimation - Sunni
militancy as the antidote to (Shi'ite) Iran's
influence in the region.
In sum, Morsi's
friendly remarks about Iran point toward a
regional strategic realignment on an epic scale
subsuming the contrived air of sectarian schisms,
which practically no Western (or Turkish) experts
could have foreseen. It is a matter of time now
before Egypt-Iran relations are fully restored,
putting an end to the three-decade-old rupture.
The biggest beneficiary of this paradigm
shift in Middle Eastern politics is going to be
Iran. Arguably, we are probably already past the
point of an Israeli attack on Iran, no matter
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tilting at the
windmill. In the prevailing surcharged atmosphere,
the Muslim Middle East would explode into
uncontrollable violence in the event of an Israeli
(or US) attack on Iran.
In the event of
such an attack, Egypt's Brothers would most
probably annul the peace treaty with Israel - and
Jordan would be compelled to follow suit; Egypt
and Jordan might sever diplomatic ties with
Israel. Baghdad is seething with fury that the US
and Turkey are encouraging Kurdistan to secede;
Lebanon's Hezbollah has been threatening
retribution if Iran is attacked.
Even more
serious than all this put together would be the
domino effect of region-wide mayhem on the Arab
street on the fate of the oligarchies in the
Persian Gulf, which lack legitimacy and are allied
with the US - and where the Brothers have been
clandestinely operating for decades.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His
assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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