Senator McCain

Senator McCain

Could there ever be a better time for Senator McCain to button his lip – both with Egypt and with Syria?  How could the situation in Egypt be ever more complicated for the administration?  We have a duly elected president in Egypt deposed by the army because he decided once elected that he’d impose an Islamist Theocratic form of government that’s totally rejected by a very large part of the electorate.  We can’t call it a coup because that would require us to withhold financial support from the only entity that’s friendly to us – the Egyptian army.  Senator McCain is calling for us to withhold that aid.  The leadership of the Egyptian army has pledged to bring about an election to install a new president.  And because they are in the process of establishing a true democratic government it’s not a coup in the classic sense, where the army takes over and establishes itself as the ruling body.  This is not the time for a loose cannon from the United States to be urging the administration to be acting precipitously about how we should be reacting to what’s happening there.  The past election showed that the largest faction in the country is the Muslim Brotherhood.  The trick is going to be to find only candidates that will not only accommodate people from that group but also be a president for all the people of Egypt and not someone cut from the same cloth as Morsi.  He jailed more reporters in the year he was in power than Mubarak did in the thirty years he was in charge (Doctor Charles Krauthammer, Fox News 7/8/13).    

About a month ago Senator McCain was urging that a no fly zone should be established over Syria.  He surely had to be one of the rarest of people in government in both parties that thought that was a good idea.  President Bashar al-Sarrad has been committing the most atrocious crimes against his own people, including having babies murdered right in front of their parents.   But what can we or any other nation other than Russia do about it?  And they don’t have the will.  Syria and Russia have mutually beneficial trade agreements, to the point where it could be considered that they have an unspoken defense pact.  For us to establish a no-fly zone could involve us in a serious international crisis.  Another thing we have to be concerned about is the talk about arming the rebels.  The rebel forces are more and more coming under the control of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.  Do we really want to put arms in their hands that might eventually be aimed at us?

Early in the time that it looked like we were going to be getting involved in the fighting in Libya I was one of the people who wrote to pundits asking them to urge the administration not to be getting involved in the turmoil there.  We knew the devil we had with Khadafy and he was pretty well tamed starting with when President Reagan almost bumped him off
after the Pan Am bombing.   We didn’t know who would be replacing him.  But we did know the entire area was infested with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.  We are in no better a position with Libya today than before we first got started. And if we never got involved, Ambassador Chris Stevens and his aides would still be alive today.