The reason is that the US and its allies were clearly behind this coup, like so many others. The overthrow of President Morsi does not itself represent the decline of US power in the region. US-Israeli interests converged with the popular Egyptian interest expressed in the protests. Rather than losing control of the Egyptian army, the US lost control over Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in general. The West worked together with Islamists to overthrow Gaddafi – one of the sole leaders in the region who did have a sovereign development project based in national and not foreign interests – and subsequently helped ship them over to Syria to attempt a rerun there. Islamist fighters of various degrees of extremism poured in to Syria from across the globe, largely financed by US allies in the Gulf. The US’s and Israel’s plan A in Syria seems to have been to try to use defecting officers and Islamist fighters to help bring down Assad relatively quickly and then, if possible, install a pro-Western government that could be controlled, or if not, allow the country to degenerate into a managed sort of chaos like in Libya. Given that the Syrian army is stronger than expected and the opposition uncontrollable, their plan B seems to have been to allow the war to drag on so that the Syrian army and the Islamists would mutually self-destruct. Given that the US has just succeeded in a military coup d’état in Egypt and a palace coup in Qatar, to what extent is it justified to talk about the decline of US power in the region? the coup as a warning about what can happen if a government which does not control the army attempts policies that diverge from the US-dictated line. Egypt remains an occupied country as long as the US pays for its military.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 10:40:50 +0000
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