The neocons acknowledge the disaster in Egypt—but blame it all on Obama

At 2:39 this afternoon I took the Commentary blog to task for having remained silent about the explosive news that President Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood had seized dictatorial power in Egypt (which I first posted about at 7 p.m. yesterday and which Barry Rubin wrote about on Saturday night).

At 5:14 p.m. this afternoon reader D. Edwards sent this:

The power of VFR:

Cairo Coup Another Obama “Success”
Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary
08.13.2012—4:32 PM

Hah. I “got results” from Commentary in just two hours. But, as you can see from the title, Jonathan Tobin blames it all on Obama, not on his fellow neocons who championed Egyptian “democracy.” He writes:

[Mursi’s] firing of Egypt’s defense minister and the army chief of staff makes it clear the Brotherhood is now completely in control of the country…. It will mean the start of a process whereby the Brotherhood obtains control over every segment of Egyptian society and government.

But it’s Obama’s fault, because, uh, because he didn’t do enough to prevent the Brotherhood from coming to power. But of course who comes to power was up to the Egyptian people! Democracy, remember? The neocons (and the mainstream Republicans who share their world view) are literally insane. They actually believe that we can push Egypt’s leader out (which is what Obama did to Mubarak, with the cheering of the neocons and Republicans), and Egypt can hold democratic elections, and that we can then control the results of those democratic elections! How? Oh, by, uh, you know, “empowering secular and democratic groups.”

Tobin’s position is exactly like that of the “apostate neocons” such as Richard Perle and David Frum who turned against President Bush in 2006 on the Iraq war. They said the disaster was the administration’s doing, not theirs, a position I destroyed. For example, in my January 2009 article, “How the neocons went along with Bush’s Iraq disaster,” I wrote:

Richard Perle tells Vanity Fair that the main problem with the Iraq policy was not neocon ideals but dysfunctional leadership within the administration leading to chaos in Iraq. But Perle in 2004 co-wrote with David Frum a book called An End to Evil. There can of course be no end of evil in the sublunary realm in which history takes place. The belief that there can be an end of evil causes men to disregard the indispensable requirements of civil order, which, let us remember, is exactly what the administration did in Iraq. Perle promotes a liberal utopian idea of reality, while blaming our failure to enact this utopian idea on administration dysfunction. The question arises, what sort of “non-dysfunctional” action by Bush could have brought Perle’s utopian idea into effect and not led to disaster?

A man who says there can be an end of evil has disqualified himself from participation in politics, pending his renunciation of such dangerous nonsense. Perle has not renounced it. Therefore he has no right to talk about the dysfunction in the Bush administration. The dysfunction was and is in Richard Perle’s understanding of the world.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 13, 2012 06:21 PM | Send