By Chuck Spinney, (Appeared in Time Battleland Blog)
MARINA DE CAMPO, Italy — As Esam Al-Amin explains here, Mohamad Morsi made some colossal blunders during his one year rule of Egypt as its democratically elected president.
He was elected in what most observers regard as a reasonably fair election.
But this exclusive report by Al Jazeera reveals that the United States — which claims to support democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere — has been actively involved in bankrolling Morsi’s opposition, and in so doing has continued its long policy of subverting Islamist democratic victories when they win fair elections (Hamas in 2006) or threaten to win fair elections (Algeria, 1991).
Al Jazeera reveals how stark contradictions continue to rip through the three legs of the moral triangle that is U.S. foreign policy — i.e., the contradictions between
- The values we profess to the world that we uphold.
- The values we actually hold, as demonstrated by our actions abroad as well as at home (don’t forget the neo-fascist, non-accountable, hidden hand that the emerging American deep state exemplified by the NSA scandal).
- The world we have to deal with deal with (in this case epitomized by the changing conditions of the Arab Spring).
The result is an accumulating grand strategic blunder of immense and long-lasting, perhaps irreversible, proportions.
Not only do our actions violate the criteria for sensible grand strategy; this particular violation of the U.S. moral triangle took place on President Obama’s watch, which is doubly ironic, given that Obama demonstrated an intuitive feel for exploiting the weaknesses in his adversary’s moral triangle, with his resounding defeat of John McCain in 2008 (as I explained here).
Put bluntly, if the report in Al Jazeera is close to being true (and Juan Cole has labeled it “muddled mush“), the United States is pursuing a morally obtuse grand strategy that makes Kaiser Wilhelm’s look like a stroke of genius.