Administração Obama incompetente no posicionamento face a acontecimentos no Egipto

Não deixe de seguir o blogue de Barry Rubin se pretende compreender minimamente os acontecimentos no Egipto e avaliar o comportamento da administração Obama no seu posicionamento face a eles:

Amplify’d from rubinreports.blogspot.com

Egypt: Mubarak's Not The One Who Should Resign

By Barry Rubin

This is not a game. This is the fate of the globe. This involves the lives of tens of millions of people. Partisanship and scoring political points is irrelevant. Forget the spin; forget the ignorance about Egypt and the Middle East by instant experts (and sometimes by top intelligence officials). What has happened in the Egypt crisis? The first point—which I’ve been warning about for more than two years—is the incapability of the Obama Administration on several different levels. Following George W. Bush, many people thought, was an easy act to follow. But the quality of the American leadership has grown worse. There has been an attempt to spin President Husni Mubarak’s speech as some type of victory for the Obama Administration. Yet within hours this effort collapsed. The nation’s highest intelligence officials showed they had no idea what the Muslim Brotherhood represents, joked that they didn’t know any more than did CNN, and provided completely inaccurate information on the course of events in Egypt. When the New York Times, which gets a thrill up the leg every time Obama speaks, can write, "American officials said Mr. Panetta was basing his statement not on secret intelligence but on media broadcasts,” you—not Mubarak--should resign. The president of the United States leaped into an issue he didn’t understand, put forward a bad policy, showed he didn’t comprehend the most basic principles of statecraft and diplomacy, publicly celebrated as if he were making a campaign speech projected events in Egypt that didn’t happen, and then admitted that he had no idea what was going on. Even some of his biggest left-wing fans had to admit this was a debacle. "The mystique of America's superpower status has been shattered," said Steve Clemons, of the New America Foundation. Well, who is shattering it? Not the demonstrators; not Mubarak. That catastrophe can only be traced to one man. From the Middle East itself, the reviews are indeed shattering. The Saudis, just about the most cautious and conservative government there is in the world, publicly rebuked President Obama on his strategy. This is not primarily an issue concerning Israel. It’s an issue affecting anyone in the Middle East who opposes revolutionary Islamism and looks to the United States as a protector. Yet what seems to be the administration's immediate response? Not to step back but to push harder on Egypt's government to get rid of Mubarak and turn over power to the opposition faster. "The Egyptian people have been told that there was a transition of authority, but it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful or sufficient," Obama said. Meaningful for whom? Sufficient for whom? As for "immediate," that's an American conception. "Immediate" isn't always good. Obama's reaction to the events in Egypt was "immediate," that is based on no good information, study, or planning. Obama has no idea what he is really saying: The Egyptian government better jump to appease the demonstrators or else!  Is there no concept in the White House of regional stability, the battle against revolutionary Islamism, the dangers of anarchy, or the U.S. national interest? Apparently not. That's the message Mubarak was trying to convey in his last great public act: I am an Arab warrior not a community organizer.

And yet the sole apparent goal of U.S. policy today is the overthrow of not just Mubarak but of the entire Egyptian regime. Or, in other words, for the first time the United States and al-Qaida are on the same side. This is true at a time when the same U.S. government is nicely engaging Syria which combines torture with support for terrorism and killing Americans in Iraq.

Among the many fundamental flaws in the U.S. conception another is the idea that if enough people to demonstrate for change--even if they are less than one percent of the population--a government must give them what they want even if it is its own resignation. An elite must hand over its jobs--and possibly homes, weath, and even lives--on demand. This is not how the Middle East works. Those in the American public debate have no idea of how they discredit themselves in the eyes of Middle Eastern people, both those who want to be their friends and those who are their fanatical adversaries. If you've spent decades reading Muslim Brotherhood speeches and seeing intelligence about what they say in private you are not likely to pay attention to those claiming that they are moderate. If you know your own people, you will snicker at those claiming that they are characterized by being or thinking like hip, Facebook-obsessed youth. If you understand anything about politics, you will not engage in the pleasant dream that a totally unorganized, diverse opposition--lacking a single leader with broad appeal--is going to govern. That's especially true when there is only one actually organized and disciplined civilian group in the country and they'd love to get you in a torture chamber. It does not matter what all those well-dressed reporters and articulate "experts" say. They may impress everyone at a Manhattan cocktail party but that doesn't mean anything in an Egyptian village or Cairo slum.

The American political eite has gotten out of touch with the rest of the world. I think that it is reasonable to state that, for the rest of his time in office, nobody in the Middle East (and a lot of other places) is going to take Obama seriously. And here’s the bottom line: If President Barack Obama doesn't learn the right lessons from this crisis and then gets a second term, that may be the last term for U.S. interests in the region. Read more at rubinreports.blogspot.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/aptx0