Despite Obama Administration’s Entreaties, Egyptian Military Deposes Morsi
The White House has yet to deem the military’s decision to wrest control from Egypt’s elected leader a coup. Eli Lake and Josh Rogin report.
Despite
a series of private and public warnings in the last 48 hours from top
Obama administration officials to Egypt’s generals not to depose the
country’s first elected leader, the military sprung into action
Wednesday and unseated the Muslim Brotherhood–aligned president, Mohamed
Morsi.
The
actions from the military lay bare the limited influence the Obama
administration has over the leadership of an Egyptian military that gets
$1.3 billion a year in aid from the United States and relies on
American spare parts and training to function, while also perhaps
suggesting that the private warnings delivered from top Obama officials
like Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel could have been stronger.
“There
was a press to avoid the kind of turbulence we have seen today,” one
U.S. official involved in reacting to the crisis in Egypt tells The
Daily Beast. “But the jury is out on precisely what the next steps are.
We will see what the process as defined by the military and their
statement leads to.”
In
public, the Obama administration Wednesday was careful not to take
sides in the political conflict that has subsumed Egypt in the last
three days. Nonetheless, Obama condemned the military coup and said his
administration would begin to review its foreign aid to Egypt in light
of the events.
“We
are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian armed forces to
remove President Morsi and suspend the Egyptian Constitution,” Obama
said in a statement Wednesday evening. Nonetheless, Obama did not call
directly on the military to return Morsi to power. Instead he said, “I
now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to
return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian
government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent
process and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsi and his
supporters.”
After
Morsi on Tuesday evening declared that he was “ready to die” for his
country, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki expressed disappointment
in the Egyptian president. But Wednesday, asked for her reaction to the
military takeover, she offered no specific criticisms.
The
situation is chaotic in Egypt for the United States. All nonessential
personnel were being evacuated late Tuesday from the U.S. Embassy in
Cairo. The State Department issued a warning urging Americans to avoid
travel to the country and asked American Fulbright scholars studying in
Egypt to return home.
In
the initial hours after the coup, the U.S. government has yet to make a
formal determination that such an event even happened. If the White
House does determine that the events in Egypt constitute the military
overthrow of an elected leader, U.S. law would require the suspension of
military aid.
Sen.
Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that determines
the foreign-aid budget, said Wednesday that he would review the $1.3
billion in annual assistance the country sends to Egypt. “Egypt’s
military leaders say they have no intent or desire to govern, and I hope
they make good on their promise,” a statement from Leahy said. “In the
meantime, our law is clear: U.S. aid is cut off when a democratically
elected government is deposed by military coup or decree.” Psaki on
Wednesday declined to characterize the events inside Egypt as a coup.
Amy
Hawthorne, an Egypt expert and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council,
said Egypt’s military has calculated that Obama needs the military more
than the military needs Obama. “They’ve watched our reaction at several
points, and they probably came to the conclusion that they could take
this action without a great risk that they would rupture the
relationship with the United States,” she said.
One
factor that may have led Egypt’s military to conclude there would be no
consequence for deposing Morsi is Obama’s history of fighting attempts
from members of Congress to impose restrictions on the annual U.S. aid package to Egypt.
Steven
A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the
coup in some ways was not surprising. The circumstances inside the
country, including massive street demonstrations, “made it so that the
military couldn’t not intervene at this point,” he said. “Morsi’s
defiance and the mass mobilization of Egyptians really did threaten
social stability and national security.” Cook added that the military
had made clear that “if these things are in jeopardy, they would
intervene.”
Rep.
Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs, was mainly critical of Morsi in a statement Wednesday. “It is
unfortunate that Morsi did not heed popular demands for early elections
after a year of his incompetent leadership and attempting a power grab
for the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said. “Morsi was an obstacle to the
constitutional democracy most Egyptians wanted.”
Eli Lake is the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He previously covered national security and intelligence for The Washington Times. Lake has also been a contributing editor at The New Republic since 2008 and covered diplomacy, intelligence, and the military for the late New York Sun. He has lived in Cairo and traveled to war zones in Sudan, Iraq, and Gaza. He is one of the few journalists to report from all three members of President Bush’s axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Josh Rogin is senior correspondent for national security and politics for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He previously worked at Foreign Policy magazine, Congressional Quarterly, Federal Computer Week magazine, and Japan’s leading daily newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun. He hails from Philadelphi
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