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Morally Depraved Obama Fails in Response to Egyptian Massacre

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The New York Times headline for its story summarizing Barack Obama’s statement yesterday on the violence in Egypt parrots the administration’s hapless plea that Obama has few options in dealing with Egypt: “His Options Few, Obama Rebukes Egypt’s Leaders“. Obama’s grand statement delivered the stinging blow of canceling joint military exercises with the Egyptians. We also are reminded later in the article that the US has delayed delivery of four F-16 fighter jets without also being informed that this delay was announced prior to the massacre of Egyptian civilians.

In his statement, Obama never addressed the huge piece of leverage that the US does have in relation to Egypt. The roughly $1.5 billion in US aid that flows to Egypt each year is primarily for the military and supports about a third of the military’s budget. The article in the Times goes to great lengths to explain to us just why Obama can’t cut off this aid. We are told first that if we cut off aid, “Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates” will rush into the void to provide the missing funding And if that isn’t scary enough, we are told a couple of paragraphs later that cutting off the aid would open the door for Russia and China to step in.

With the death toll from the crackdown now above 600 and likely to go much higer, and with grisly videos surfacing of civilians being gunned down in cold blood by the military, we see a quote from the standard anonymous “senior official” who says “There’s a basic threshold where we can’t give a tacit endorsement to them.”

Just wow. The Egyptian military has staged a coup in which they have removed a democratically elected (although dysfunctional and failed) government and massacred over 600 of its citizens in cold blood. None of that rises to the level of the “threshold where we can’t give a tacit endorsement to them”? What on earth do they have to do to get the US to cut them off?

One answer to that question is in the next paragraph:

And it could destabilize the region, particularly the security of Israel, whose 1979 peace treaty with Egypt is predicated on the aid.

It would appear that Egypt can kill all of its own civilians it wants with the weapons and money we provide as long as they don’t also kill any Israelis.

But there is another insidious tie in the US aid to Egypt. US defense contractors are making tons of money off of it. From a Bloomberg piece describing US support of the Egyptian military two years ago at the beginning of the uprising against Mubarak: Read more →

The Imperial Overlords Giveth, the Imperial Overlords Taketh Away

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In the US yesterday, the big press outlets were reporting on a big push to give Egypt “aid” to get its economy back on track. (WaPo, NYT) Though the NYT’s URL (and original title, I think) used the word “aid,” what we’re really planning on doing is offering Egypt debt relief.

Nearly 16 months after first pledging to helpEgypt’s failing economy, the Obama administration is nearing an agreement with the country’s new government to relieve $1 billion of its debt as part of an American and international assistance package intended to bolster its transition to democracy, administration officials said.

In addition, we’re talking an IMF loan, economic liberalization of the sort that brought about the revolution in the first place, and a dog and pony show for the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt.

The day before, on the other side of the pond, the Guardian and some other outlets reported on the loot Hosni Mubarak’s cronies stashed in England which hasn’t been frozen (and/or wasn’t before they hid it somewhere else).

Britain has allowed key members of Egypt’s toppled dictatorship to retain millions of pounds of suspected property and business assets in the UK, potentially violating a globally-agreed set of sanctions.

[snip]

Three days after Mubarak’s downfall, with popular pressure to recover Egypt’s ‘stolen billions’ mounting in the street, the interim government in Cairo requested that western authorities freeze the assets of several former regime members who were suspected of embezzling public funds and hiding them in property and business interests.

William Hague, the foreign secretary, told MPs the request would be co-operated with, and government ministers promised “firm, decisive and prompt action”.

Yet although Switzerland took only half an hour to begin freezing Egyptian regime assets following Mubarak’s overthrow, the UK took 37 days to follow suit – a delay which critics say could have allowed assets to be liquidated and illicit funds to be moved offshore.

And while Switzerland has frozen almost £500m of suspect Egyptian assets, the UK has frozen less than a fifth of that and returned none of it to Egypt.

Read thew whole thing–the Guardian describes how some of Mubarak’s cronies are opening new businesses in London.

The Guardian also reminds that one of the things that facilitated all this looting was the kind of “free market liberalizations” that the US is now applauding more of in Egypt.

An aggressive free-market reform programme instituted by the Mubarak regime in the 1990s and 2000s saw previously state-owned companies and landholdings shift into the hands of private businessmen at an astonishing rate. Prominent “big sharks” within the ruling NDP party – including Mubarak’s playboy son and assumed successor Gamal – amassed huge riches.

Now, the “news” that England has been sheltering Egyptian loot is not news. I posted this 18 months ago.

The New York Times heralds that,

Swiss Locate Funds Linked to Mubarak

But what the story really reports is that the Swiss have located just “several dozen million Swiss francs,” which works out to less than $38 million of the up to $70 billion Hosni Mubarak reportedly looted from Egypt. The real headline of the story ought to be…

Former Western Allies Dragging Feet on Mubarak’s Millions

Read more →