251. In the Grip of Our Highest Priority

 

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?  Get used to him, fellow Americans.  We're in the grip of our highest priority.

I know, it's pretty hard to take, a dictator telling John Kerry one day that he's on the path to progressive government and the next day letting his  kangaroo court sentence journalists to jail for doing nothing the public will be told about, but you've got to understand: this all follows logically from America's priorities, as confirmed by its Secretary of State.  It differs from other plays on those priorities only in that this dictator (I use the de-euphemized term) is a little smarter than other players and a little quicker to take advantage of them.

The priority here is the survival of Israel.  That makes us favor governments who let us exercise that priority over governments who don't, or possibly won't.  Mubarak's and el-Sisi's  governments let us; Morsi's government possibly wouldn't.  We favor the dictators over the democratically elected president because our ideals of democracy have a lower priority than our commitment to the survival of Israel.

When our number one commitment was the containment of communism we subordinated our democratic and humane ideals in the same way.  Smart dictators played this to their advantage.  They knew that, whatever our idealistic talk, we would have to stomach their abominations. 

Not that we wouldn't be allowed to relieve our indigestion from time to time.  In an Arab Spring, when pressure for democracy builds up worldwide, we, the leader, may have to expel a dictator or two, but the smart ones know that this is temporary.  The dictator, Mubarak, will be back with a new name, el-Sisi.

And the smarter he is the more he will squeeze out of us, materially and psychologically.  He will get money, he will get arms, and, maybe best of all, he will get flattering rhetoric.  The dictator will, judging by what our Secretary of State said about el-Sisi yesterday, give him "a very strong sense of his commitment" to "a re-evaluation of human rights legislation" and "re-evaluation of the judicial process" (NYT 6-23-14), or something like that.

If the dictator is exceptionally smart he will know how to play on American fear of being culturally intolerant.  When he uses the iron fist he will say, "Look at us with Egyptian eyes" and "don't apply your culture, your regimes, your development"  (NYT 6-24-14)

And he will be able to get away with that.  You know why? Because he knows how firmly we are attached to our priorities, and how rigorously, how rationally, we, in our Western way, make deductions from this one.  With that knowledge he can squeeze us to the last drop.  "Complaining are you?  Well, do you want protection in the Sinai or don't you?" He's already seen that our attachment was strong enough to bear such things when, on the occasion of his coup we refused to deny his aircraft spare parts, the action that could have defeated that coup.  He knew he had us.

I know of nothing that describes his so far successful dismissal of our ideals better than the vulgar expression used by CIA realpoliticians to dismiss idealists during the Viet Nam War.  The idealists thought we should win minds and hearts and elections first, before we used our overwhelming military force.  "When you've got 'em by the balls," said the realists, "their hearts and minds will follow."  Well, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has us by the balls of our highest priority, and unless we, unthinkably, change that priority, we might as well get used to the squeezes.