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Who Lost Egypt?
By Dick Morris
Published on DickMorris.com on January 29, 2011
In the 1950s, the accusation “who lost China” resonated throughout
American politics and led to the defeat of the Democratic Party in the
presidential elections of 1952. Unless President Obama
reverses field and strongly opposes letting the Muslim brotherhood take
over Egypt, he will be hit with the modern equivalent of the 1952
question: Who Lost Egypt?
The Iranian government is waiting for Egypt to fall into its lap.
The Muslim Brotherhood, dominated by Iranian Islamic fundamentalism,
will doubtless emerge as the winner should the government of Egypt
fall. The Obama Administration, in failing to throw its weight
against an Islamic takeover, is guilty of the same mistake that led
President Carter to fail to support the Shah, opening the door for the
Ayatollah Khomeini to take over Iran.
The United States has enormous leverage in Egypt - far more than it had
in Iran. We provide Egypt with upwards of $2 billion a year in
foreign aid under the provisos of the Camp David Accords orchestrated
by Carter. The Egyptian military, in particular, receives $1.3
billion of this money. The United States, as the pay master,
needs to send a signal to the military that it will be supportive of
its efforts to keep Egypt out of the hands of the Islamic
fundamentalists. Instead, Obama has put our military aid to Egypt
“under review” to pressure Mubarak to mute his response to the
demonstrators and has given top priority to “preventing the loss of
human life.”
President Obama should say that Egypt has always been a friend of the
United States. He should point out that it was the first Arab
country to make peace with Israel. He should recall that
President Sadat, who signed the peace accords, paid for doing so with
his life and that President Mubarak has carried on in his
footsteps. He should condemn the efforts of the Muslim
Brotherhood extremists to take over the country and indicate that
America stands by her longtime ally. He should address the need
for reform and urge Mubarak to enact needed changes. But his
emphasis should be on standing with our ally.
The return of Nobel laureate Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has to Egypt as the
presumptive heir to Mubarak tells us where this revolution is
headed. Carolyn Glick, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post,
explains how dangerous ElBaradei is. “As IAEA head,” she writes,
“Elbaradei shielded Iran’s nuclear weapons program from the Security
Council. He [has] continued to lobby against significant UN
Security Council sanctions or other actions against Iran...Last week,
he dismissed the threat of a nuclear armed Iran [saying] ‘there is a
lot of hype in this debate’.”
As for the Muslim Brotherhood, Glick notes that “it forms the largest
and best organized opposition to the Mubarak regime and [is] the
progenitor of Hamas and al Qaidi. It seeks Egypt’s transformation
into an Islamic regime that will stand at the forefront of the global
jihad.”
Now is the time for Republicans and conservatives to start asking the
question: Who is losing Egypt? We need to debunk the starry eyed
idealistic yearning for reform and the fantasy that a liberal democracy
will come from these demonstrations. It won’t. Iranian
domination will.
Egypt, with 80 million people, is the largest country in the Middle
East or North Africa. Combined with Iran’s 75 million (the second
largest) they have 155 million people. By contrast the entire
rest of the region -- Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Jordan, UAE, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar
combined-- have only 200 million.
We must not let the two most populous and powerful nations in the
region fall under the sway of Muslim extremism, the one through the
weakness of Jimmy Carter and the other through the weakness of Barack
Obama.
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