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.
