Egypt: “Obama green lighted the coup”
Shadi Hamid says that Barack Obama green lighted the Egyptian military’s coup
The causes of the Egyptian coup are varied, and a lot of work has been done on this topic since 2013 when Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, was overthrown by his military, led by defense minister Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. The coup worked out well for Sisi, who, almost a decade on, is still the country’s president.
Most people obviously recognize the unrest in Egypt as one of the key factors. In the summer of 2013, millions of people took to the streets of Cairo, demanding Morsi’s resignation. He chose not to do so and was defiant in his final moments.
Others point to the sharp deterioration of ties between Cairo on one side and Abu Dhabi and Riyadh on the other. The Gulf monarchies were threatened by the popular protests that brought down the seemingly stable regimes of North Africa. According to a report by Dexter Filkins, who spoke to a US diplomat, when “Morsi got elected, the Saudis and the Emiratis went into overdrive” to bring him down. Prince Bandar bin Sultan and then Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed led the charge to overthrow Morsi’s fragile government.
However, he was encouraged by Turkey’s intelligence chief (now foreign minister) who visited three times in the weeks leading up to the coup and told him to stand his ground according to Gönül Tol’s new book, Erdogan’s War. Morsi also would have taken heart from a phone call between his national security advisor, Essam al-Haddad, and the US national security advisor, Susan Rice, who reportedly said, “We will not abandon you, we stand for democracy, we have made it very clear.”
But despite that phone call, Shadi Hamid highlights the lack of clarity in the US’s exact role in how the coup played out. There is no doubt that US intelligence agencies were aware in the run-up, but Hamid claims that not only was the US aware, but “Obama gave the Egyptian military what amounted to a green light to overthrow the country’s first-ever democratically elected government.” Here are some excerpts from his article published by Foreign Policy.
Firstly, the obvious: the US was unwilling to call a spade a spade by declaring what happened in Egypt a coup. Jen Psaki, spokesperson for the State Department, said, “[W]e have determined that we do not have to make a determination about whether or not this was a coup.” Not to be outdone by Psaki, John Kerry took the express train all the way to Absurdistan and claimed that Sisi was, in fact, “restoring democracy.” But all that is on the public record and support Hamid’s more newer points after having spoken to dozens of White House staffers.
Kerry, according to a State Department official, “hates Islamists.” The anonymous officials says he:
gained his knowledge and information about the Middle East… by talking to Arab leaders. And if you’re dealing with the leaders for however many decades in the Senate, you get a particular view. … Kerry likes dictators. It’s kinda like [President Joe] Biden. All these guys. They’re all from that generation of “just deal with strong men.” That’s all they ever knew in the Middle East.
After the coup which overthrew Morsi, Obama entered a meeting of his staffers and said: “Well, so, we’re not going to declare this a coup, so what should we do?” At that point, Hamid points out, Egypt was the second-largest recipient of US military assistance after its eastern neighbour Israel. Many believed the US had the leverage to be able to get the generals to abandon their plan.
Anne Patterson was the American ambassador to Egypt then and she told Hamid as much: “The fact is, we probably did have leverage, but we were never going to use maximum leverage to prevent a coup.” He asked her why they didn’t. “At that point, there were a lot of people that weren’t sorry to see Morsi go.”
