That accurate, but still misleading, headline also should remind us that Morsi\u2019s brief reign over Egypt was in no small measure the product of the Obama administration\u2019s disastrous reaction to the Arab Spring protests. Rather than Morsi\u2019s passing being the news hook for a new spate of stories excoriating the military regime that overthrew and jailed him, it ought instead to cause Americans to ponder whether their current and future leaders will be smart enough to learn the lessons of that particular act of colossal arrogance and folly.<\/p>\n
In the spring of 2011, a series of protests broke out across the Arab world against the authoritarian and theocratic governments that govern every nation in the region except for democratic Israel. However, what followed was not\u2014as some Western sympathizers had hoped\u2014a movement aimed at overthrowing tyrannies and replacing them with genuine democracies. Violence and rebellions that sought to replace old tyrannies with Islamist ones followed. Genuine democrats were few and far between.<\/p>\n
Egypt, whose importance is based on its size, population and strategic significance, illustrated this problem, as the old corrupt military regime led by Hosni Mubarak found itself under siege.<\/p>\n
Many in the West welcomed the Arab Spring as a chance for the Muslim and Arab world to embrace the cause of freedom, much in the same way that the administration of President George W. Bush had naively thought that the toppling of Saddam Hussein might lead to democracy in Iraq. President Barack Obama was particularly taken with the notion that this was an opportunity for the United States to shed its image in the Arab world as an imperialist force and a friend of Israel.<\/p>\n
A wiser man than he would have perceived the dangers inherent in meddling in such a complex environment, where forces supporting the kinds of democratic changes Americans wanted lacked numbers and power. But that didn\u2019t stop the president from helping to undermine Mubarak. While the United States didn\u2019t orchestrate what happened in Cairo, as the source of billions of aid that poured into its government, it still played an outsized role in the political ferment.<\/p>\n
Obama sought to ease Mubarak out of power and then pushed for elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood was the only organized political party in the country. Washington also warned the military not to interfere with the vote or to prevent the Islamist theocratic group from taking power.<\/p>\n
The result was the election of a Brotherhood government in 2012 led by Morsi. Obama and much of the mainstream press consistently sought to portray his regime as legitimate. But while the Brotherhood may have been elected democratically, they soon made clear that they had no intention of ever allowing the Egyptian people to vote them out. Morsi sought to assume dictatorial powers, and the prospect of Egypt becoming a Sunni version of the Islamist theocracy that transformed Iran into the dark tyranny and threat to the region soon became obvious.<\/p>\n
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