Kerry's Theater of the Absurd

Foreign affairs as practiced by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is a theater of the absurd, a traveling roadshow of lies, that makes one pine for the almost Achesonian (in comparison) Hillary Clinton. Once Kerry climbs aboard his jet aircraft with his faithful scribe Michael Gordon in tow you can expect the mendacity to run like the wind and absolutely nothing to be accomplished.

Presently, the Secretary of State is in Baghdad trying to secure a replacement for Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; this despite the fact that he solemnly pronounced at his last stop, in Cairo, that the United States was "not in the business of picking Iraq’s leaders." Don't count on al-Maliki stepping down.

In Cairo, Kerry embraced the military coup government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, announcing that all -- the massacre of innocents, the show trials culminating in blanket death sentences for hundreds, the abolition of political organizations -- is forgotten and the money will flow. According to David Kirkpatrick and Michael Gordon, writing in "Kerry Says U.S. Is Ready to Renew Ties With Egypt":

Mr. Kerry expressed firm confidence that the United States would soon fully restore $650 million — the first tranche of the $1.3 billion in annual aid — to the military that the Obama administration had partly withheld after the takeover.

“I am absolutely confident we will get on track there,” he said. Addressing a previously suspended shipment of 10 Apache helicopter gunships that the Egyptian military has been especially eager for, Mr. Kerry said he was just as confident “that the Apaches will come, and that they will come very, very soon.”

And in Egypt’s economic challenges, Mr. Kerry said, President Obama and the United States are “committed to be helpful.”

Three years after Mr. Obama called publicly for President Hosni Mubarak to bow to the Arab Spring uprising demanding his ouster, Mr. Kerry’s remarks appeared to suggest that the administration is now ready to work with another military-backed strongman.

Mr. Sisi won 97 percent of the official votes in a barely contested election last month, and both European and United States-funded observer delegations said it fell short of international standards of democracy. But Mr. Kerry’s comments suggested that the Obama administration was nonetheless ready to try to work with Egypt’s new military-backed government while urging it to improve its records on human rights.

Mr. Kerry tacitly acknowledged the administration’s criticisms of the new government’s authoritarian record, including its heavy-handed crackdown on both the Islamist opposition and liberal or leftist dissenters. “I emphasized also our strong support for upholding the universal rights and freedoms of all Egyptians, including freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association,” he said. 

Mr. Kerry said they had talked about the verdict expected Monday in the case of three journalists who have been jailed since December on politicized charges without any publicly disclosed evidence of a crime. And he said they had also talked about the hurried mass trials that had handed death sentences to more than a dozen senior leaders of the Islamist opposition and hundreds of their supporters, arousing horrified alarms from Western governments and rights groups. 

He also alluded to the government’s criminalization of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group whose party dominated the recent free elections but has since been excluded from politics. “There is no question that Egyptian society is stronger when all of its citizens have a say and a stake in its success,” Mr. Kerry said.

The Leveretts, along with Seyed Mohammad Marandi, in their most recent article, "Trying to Force Iran to “Surrender” Will Backfire—Why U.S. Engagement with Tehran Needs to Respect Iranian Independence," remind us that the policy of Egyptian subjugation to U.S. hegemony enshrined in the Camp David Accords is tied to the rise of Saudi-backed jihad and Israeli regional military unilateralism:

The United States has tried subordinating the strategic orientation of a major Middle Eastern state before. Three and a half decades ago, the U.S.-brokered Camp David accords reduced Egypt to a strategic and economic dependency of the United States. While American foreign policy elites regularly extol the regional “stability” wrought by Camp David, that stability was in fact dangerously illusory.

In the wake of Camp David, Saudi Arabia made promotion of violent jihadism an increasingly prominent tool in Saudi foreign policy—a trend that incubated al Qaeda and is still spawning an ever-proliferating array of ideologically similar threats to international security. Three decades of rule by a U.S.-puppet regime, with accompanying political repression and economic stagnation, made Egypt itself a prime source for jihadi ideologues (such as al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri) and fighters. And allowing the Israeli military to consolidate nearly absolute freedom of unilateral initiative—one of Camp David’s first fruits—has been deeply corrosive of America’s regional standing.

On the jet to Cairo, Gordon scribbled down the prevarications of a "senior official" regarding the funding of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham:

[ISIS] is largely self-sustaining because of its success with extortions and in the plundering of the banks in Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, which it controls. But some funding "has flowed into Iraq from its neighbors," a senior official on Mr. Kerry's plane said.

"That does not mean that it is the result of an official government policy in many, if not most, cases," the official added.

The idea that ISIS funds itself by looting banks in a city it has held for two weeks is absurd. ISIS has been in control of large parts of northern Syria for a year. Efforts are being made to distance the member states of the GCC from ownership of ISIS, a sign that last week the truth was emerging as to the role of Saudi, Qatari and Kuwaiti sponsorship.