No one in Washington is celebrating the policy achievements of US President Barack Obama's administration in the Middle East, if indeed there are any to be claimed. It would not be surprising for US officials to admit, as did President Truman's legendary US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, to “a feeling of dissatisfaction with everything we did in the Middle East." Syria is all but a lost cause whomever triumphs, and US policy there risks a descent into incoherence. Washington studiously ignores the daily toll in Iraq. And the Arab-Israeli “peace process” remains stuck in reverse. But it is Egypt — long the jewel in the crown of US-Middle East policy — where the latest disaster now threatens.
Washington rejected rule by former autocratic President Hosni Mubarak, and since the events of July 1, the president duly elected to take his place.
The Obama administration now finds itself reluctantly embracing the merits of Morsi's ouster. It is not a pretty sight to see US officials dancing around the definition of a military coup and touting the advantages of revolutionary legitimacy over that conferred by the ballot box — a response more in keeping with the radical spirit of the soon-to-be celebrated Bastille Day than the constitutional convention in Philadelphia.
It wasn't always this way. When last faced with a revolutionary change in the order of things in Egypt — in the period between Black Saturday in January 1952 and the Free Army Officers' July revolution — Washington played a far more direct, leading and successful role in sorting Egyptian affairs.
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