Egypt Burning

I wrote several weeks ago that Egypt is the front line in the war against Islamists.  This past week as the tension and violence in Cairo has escalated I have watched in complete disbelief the liberal whiners on the major networks worried about the rights of the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s be clear. There are NO good guys in this situation.  There are only bad guys.  Our choice is between the lesser of two evils.  In Egypt, the bigger evil is the Muslim Brotherhood.

Across the entire Mideast, there are only two countries relatively stable: Israel and Jordan.  Israel is the only functioning democracy.  Other than Israel, America has NO reliable friends in the Mideast; not Saudi Arabia; not Turkey; not Iraq.  It is a dysfunctional part of the world that holds the seeds of destruction to the western democracies much more than the Soviet Union ever did.

These folks are religious fanatics who subjugate women, kill homosexuals, and practice Sharia law which cuts off people’s hands, pokes out their eyes, and beheads them in the public square.  Their goal is an Islamist world.  They burn down churches.  Persecute Jews and Christians.  Imprison people for life for carrying a Bible.  These folks are evil….and they sense America is weak and on the run.

The only source of stability in northern Africa right now is the Egyptian Army, which receives 1/10^th of its funding from the United States.   The balance comes from Saudi Arabia.  The Egyptian Army is fighting for the future of a secularized, moderate Egypt who recognizes Israel and acts accordingly.   While they are brutal and dictatorial, they are not willing to sacrifice Egypt to the theocrats who want an Islamic state.  The Egyptian Army more than anyone else on this planet understands the threat of human degradation by the Islamists.  The whining press may be willing to walk away from it.  Obama may be willing to walk away from it.  But the Egyptian army is not.  They have to live there and are fighting for their lives.

It is easy for us to sit here in the United States and pontificate on democracy.  We did that once before, in Vietnam, and got our butts kicked by a piddley ass third world country. Imagine life in a re-established caliphate.  Imagine Iran with nuclear bombs.  Imagine the Islamists controlling the Suez Canal.  Imagine the coming war when an Islamist Egypt facilitates the destruction of Israel by other Mideast states.  Imagine the dead Americans as we go to war for a third time in the Mideast.  It is not a pretty picture.

Foreign policy is tough.  Mideast foreign policy is next to impossible.  But the Obama administration is hanging out to dry the good people of Egypt who want rights we take for granted here not smothered by a bunch of Islamist extremist whack jobs.  Can anyone be so inept? 

America, and liberal Americans, need to wake up to the fact that you can’t play nice with folks who want to kill you.  There is no bridge to be built with zealots. No matter what you do they will still want to kill you. These are violent people who are burning churches and killing Christians and Jews.  We better hope that the Egyptian Army prevails.  If Egypt falls to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, there will be hell to pay in ways we can't imagine.  It will make both Iraq wars and the Afghan war look like Sunday playtime. 

Better the Egyptian army fights these people than us.