Larison shakes his head:
If the U.S. isn’t willing to suspend aid to a foreign military after it carries out what everyone can recognize as a coup against a properly elected government, it won’t be willing to suspend it later when the coup leaders fail to hold early elections or for any other reason. I think everyone debating this in the U.S. knows perfectly well that this is so. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that all this talk of U.S. leverage is just a pretense that the U.S. has the ability to influence events in Egypt when it no longer does.
Goldblog makes the case for keeping that cash flowing:
In Pakistan, we saw what can happen when American military aid is cut off. After Pakistan went nuclear, the U.S. retaliated by punishing its army. Most notably, the U.S. stopped bringing members of the Pakistani officer corps to America for training. The result: a Pakistani officer corps that doesn’t know, or like, the U.S. And, of course, our boycott of Pakistan’s military didn’t actually end the country’s nuclear program. Cutting off the Egyptian military would only free it to behave more brutally toward its internal foes than it does now.
I’m with George Washington:
The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest … The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.
End aid to Egypt and Israel. The first doesn’t deserve it; the second doesn’t need it. And the long taxpayer-funded bribery to keep the two countries from conflict has inevitably led to what Washington warned so presciently against. Because of this “unbreakable” bond, we have supported violent dictators in Egypt and a brutal, grinding occupation in Palestine. And the Arab world blames us for both. They are not wrong.
Turning the US into a slave of the expansionist Jewish state and of the Egyptian military needs to end. It has hurt all three of its participants … and may even force the US into an insane attack on Iran’s nuclear program. This is a golden opportunity to cut our ties. We should take it – and would, if the Congress were not also a victim of this departure from America’s “duty and its interest”.
Recent Dish on the subject here.
(Photo: A man displays a poster picturing the crossed face of U.S. President Barack Obama as tens of thousands of people attend a rally in Tahrir Square against ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on July 7, 2013 in Cairo, Egypt. By Carsten Koall/Getty.)
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