How they see us: Hidden motives for backing Mursi

Egyptian liberals are furious at the U.S.—and this week they took it out on Hillary Clinton, said AlJazeera.com. Protesters turned out en masse to demonstrate against “perceived U.S. meddling” in Egypt’s affairs, particularly the Obama administration’s apparent support for Egypt’s newly elected Islamist president, Mohammed Mursi. Foreign media attention focused almost exclusively on a small protest in Alexandria, where a few hundred people pelted Clinton’s motorcade with fruit and shoes and shouted, “Monica! Monica!”—a reference to her husband’s past infidelity that was meant to humiliate her.

But the real story was in Cairo, said Linda Heard in the Arab News (Saudi Arabia). Thousands of people there demonstrated outside Clinton’s hotel, in a mass gathering similar to the Tahrir Square protests that launched Egypt’s revolution. Egypt’s moderates and secularists were expressing their fears that Mursi has hijacked their revolution and intends to install Muslim Brotherhood members throughout the government and the military. Some of them also suspect that the U.S. has given “the new Islamist leadership free rein as a prelude to tagging Egypt as a terrorist state, thus opening the gate to a rerun of Iraq.” It’s happened before: In 2006, the U.S. pretended to support democracy for the Palestinians until Hamas—a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot—was freely elected. American leaders congratulated Hamas with fake smiles, then “targeted it for destruction.” The sudden warmth toward Egyptian Islamists is equally suspect. Given that the U.S. and Egyptian armies have been “joined at the hip for decades,” the sight of Clinton wagging her finger at the generals, admonishing them to stay out of politics, was “strangely surreal”—and not remotely credible.

Still, the U.S.’s embrace of Mursi might be simply pragmatic, said Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt). “It’s safe to assume” that U.S. policy reflects “Washington’s bitter experience with the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979.” The U.S. didn’t even try to forge a relationship with the new rulers, a “strategic mistake” that keeps the prospect of war alive even now, decades later. This time around, the Americans are determined to keep relations friendly and communications open. Administration officials keep citing the key differences between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian mullahs: Sunni rather than Shiite, capitalist rather than statist, moderate toward Israel rather than bent on its destruction. Of course, good intentions are “no guarantee that things will be smooth sailing from now on.”

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The truth is, we can’t be sure what U.S. motives are, said Riham Mazen in Al-Ahram (Egypt). We haven’t forgotten how the Obama administration hung back last year, during the weeks of demonstrations against the Mubarak dictatorship. Nor have we forgotten the scandal earlier this year, when several U.S.-funded, pro-democracy NGOs were caught with maps showing Egypt being divided up like a prize of war. It’s just “far too soon” for Egyptians to start trusting the U.S.