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(Mandal Ngan)
In June 2009, then-President Obama journeyed to Cairo and delivered what was seen at the time as a landmark address — an American leader, with Hussein for a middle name, eagerly hoping to reset relations with the Muslim world after years of war and mistrust.
Obama spoke of human rights and universal values. He emphasized the importance of pluralism and building democracy. He urged religious tolerance in the Middle East and the West. He lamented American mistakes, including support for an era-defining anti-democratic coup in Iran. He extended an olive branch to Tehran. He even insisted that it was part of his “responsibility as president of the United States” to counter “negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
Today that speech seems like an artifact of a distant past. The current occupant of the White House has remarked that “Islam hates us” and banned millions of Muslims from entering the United States. By reinstating sanctions on Iran, he unraveled the nuclear deal with Tehran, the signature diplomatic achievement of the Obama era. He has turned his back on the democratic aspirations of people across the Middle East, preferring to embrace strongmen and monarchs.
To be sure, the Obama administration was unable to follow through on the spirit of the Cairo address. Obama struggled to reckon with the 2011 pro-democracy upheavals in the Arab world and was compelled to abandon his lofty idealism when faced with a 2013 military coup in Egypt. But the Trump administration has gone an extra step, tightening Washington’s bonds with a cast of human rights abusers.
Those bonds will be on full display this week, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo embarks on a Middle Eastern tour aimed at shoring up support from Arab allies at a time of increased confusion over the White House’s policies.
On Thursday, Pompeo is expected to deliver a speech in Cairo, an address that may serve as yet another rejection of Trump’s predecessor. In a background briefing with reporters, a State Department official said Pompeo will trumpet “America as a force for good in the region” — though with evidently less nuance than Obama did a decade ago.
“Pompeo is slated to tell his audience that Obama — although he may not name the former president — misled the people of the Middle East about the true source of terrorism, including what contributed to the rise of the Islamic State,” reported Politico’s Nahal Toosi. “Pompeo will insist that Iran, a country Obama tried to engage, is the real terrorist culprit. The speech’s drafts also have Pompeo suggesting that Iran could learn from the Saudis about human rights and the rule of law.”
All these contentions are provocative: The theocratic leadership in Iran, a predominantly Shiite nation, is bitterly opposed to the Sunni fundamentalism of terrorist groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. While Iran is hardly a free society, it’s debatable that Saudi Arabia, a monarchy entangled in a disastrous foreign war and implicated in the assassination of a journalist on foreign soil, has lessons to teach.
The same could be said for Pompeo’s Egyptian hosts. The country’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, has violently reversed what paltry democratic gains were made after the Arab Spring uprisings. He led a 2013 coup against the country’s democratically elected Islamist government and has since cracked down ruthlessly on dissent, the media and civil society, allegedly killing hundreds and imprisoning thousands. Critics suggest Sissi’s campaign of repression is worse than those undertaken by his authoritarian predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, who ruled for three decades before his ouster in 2011.
None of this has earned any meaningful rebuke from the Trump administration, which continues to send Egypt about $1.5 billion in military aid every year. Trump has long championed Sissi as his kind of strongman, tough on jihadists and friendly to Christians. Over the weekend, he cheered Egypt’s unveiling of a giant cathedral for its Christian minority.
But while the White House may be soft on Sissi, other Americans are less obliging. The Egyptian president sat for an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that was televised on Sunday. It was clearly an uncomfortable experience — not long after the filming, Egyptian officials contacted the American network, demanding that the interview not be aired.
Sissi’s interviewers pressed him on his government’s record of abuses, including the murders of political opponents and mass detention of suspected dissidents. “I said there are no political prisoners in Egypt,” Sissi retorted. “Whenever there is a minority trying to impose their extremist ideology, we have to intervene regardless of their numbers.”
“Sissi has made this false claim before, and the assertion that his opponents are all Islamist extremists has underpinned his nearly five-year rule,” noted my colleague Tamer El-Ghobashy. “But human rights groups and his Egyptian critics point to a far-reaching crackdown on dissent that has ensnared more people than just Muslim Brotherhood supporters — including some of the secular and reform-minded activists who became prominent during the 2011 revolt that unseated longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak.”
None of that has perturbed Trump, who seems to parrot the mantra preached by Arab autocrats: “stability” above all else. But critics warn of a looming crisis now enabled by Trump.
“Since Sissi took office, living standards have declined. The country is crumbling,” said Andrew Miller, an Obama-era official, to CBS. “And you’ve seen the mass incarceration of peaceful activists alongside hardened jihadists, which threatens to turn more Egyptians to terrorism. That seems to be a recipe for the very instability that Sissi claims he’s preventing.”
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This story was originally published by Washington Post
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