Dear Turkey, America doesn't like you enough

A puzzle, indeed, that we are no closer to solving after reading Joshua Hersh's New Yorker comment on a "liberal" Egyptian's creepily enthusiastic support for the military coup. When you read such voices, or end up getting into discussions with them as I do -- Allah bless social media -- you are forced to step back a bit and wonder. Do they really believe what they're saying?

This is what I hear, followed by what I respond with: So completely had the Brotherhood extended its authoritarian tentacles over and across Egypt that, in the span of one month, over 900 civilians have been killed (by the New York Times' latest count), the elected president deposed and disappeared, the son of its Supreme Guide killed (on Friday, by a shot to the head, apparently) and now talk is of banning the movement altogether. Clearly the Brotherhood was in danger of being omniscient and all-powerful.

When one argument pops up, and is handily swatted down, another one pops up to take its place. Thirty million people supported the coup! A: Egypt's under-18 population is nearly 30 million, so are we to expect that 50 percent of the country's adults were out in the streets? When that doesn't work, we get the "well, what would you do if Nixon wouldn't leave power?" forgetting that Richard Nixon wasn't removed by military decree but by constitutional process. What a tangled web we weave when we practice taking back what was won by popular demand. Thus the irony of a movement called Rebellion reinstating military rule. It is an out-and-out counterrevolution.

What is especially striking about the army's vicious crackdown, which has been more brutal than anything that happened under the Brotherhood's watch, is how timidly it has been responded to by the Obama administration. This essay by the New York Times explains why:

"For Mr. Obama, the violent crackdown has left him in a no-win position: risk a partnership that has been the bedrock of Middle East peace for 35 years, or stand by while longtime allies try to hold on to power by mowing down opponents. From one side, he has been lobbied by the Israelis, Saudis and other Arab allies to go easy on the generals in the interest of thwarting what they see as the larger and more insidious Islamist threat. From the other, he has been urged by an unusual mix of conservatives and liberals to stand more forcefully against the sort of autocracy that has been a staple of Egyptian life for decades."

America's policy on Egypt is by and large shaped by the need to maintain a friendly Egypt on Israel's borders, and openness of the Suez to tankers and other maritime traffic. In other words, America, the superpower, is forced to accede to whatever policies the Egyptian military chooses to pursue in its anti-Islamist, anti-democratic counterrevolution. This is one of the fascinating things about power. For all our might, America is stuck in a policy course that leaves us impotent. Because America is not the all-powerful actor it is assumed to be, and as its power goes into relative decline, it can be expected to try to hang on by becoming less demanding and ever more accommodating. We would like so badly for things to go back to the way they used to be.

But they will not.

After all, it's one thing for the US to endorse a brutal military. We Americans have done that before. But now that same military publicly mocks and blames the United States; we know too from painful experience that Egypt's prisons are generators of extremists, both intellectually and actually. With yet another likely crackdown on at least some Islamists, we can be sure that Egypt will generate more internal instability, on the bet (I'm not convinced it's a particularly solid one) that they can keep let the monster out of the cage without losing a handle on its leash. This is, by the way, what Pakistan tried with its own support of militancy, and clearly that didn't work out particularly well. With insecure borders and imploding states all around, Egypt's army is playing a dangerous game.

But what I think still more interesting is how our own influence is falling to pieces just as quickly as too many parts of the Middle East appear to be. You cannot, in such conflicts, remain neutral. Turkey's zero problems with neighbors was a nice idea, but is unsustainable when your neighbors go through democratic, populist or militant convulsions. And America, too, has a problem. For if America sides, say, with Israel and Saudi on Egypt, and elects to remain quiet about what may be one of the bloodiest one-day crackdowns since Tiananmen Square, then America is choosing to reject the advice and position of one of its closest allies: Turkey. Lately, things have seemed rather lonely for the Republic, its economy still reasonably dynamic, but its policies in confusion.

But in its loneliness, neither is Turkey alone.

The same jihadi groups that are bankrolled by Saudi Arabia may turn on Egypt; already we saw a small bomb blast in Benghazi, aimed at the Egyptian consulate. My fear is that while neutrality is not an option, any partisan position is likely to draw some kind of wrath. We are too interconnected to pretend to stay aloof from one another, but the Middle East is too riven by bitter and paranoid feuds and conspiracy theories to be able to soberly assess its long-term interests. I do not think the Middle East is, however, doomed. I think this is all part of a very long and drawn-out process of decolonization, and now we are at the stage when local powers become more powerful, and distant patrons become relatively less powerful, and it's a long way forward from here. The future belongs to the leader who has the vision to imagine a new order, and the generosity of spirit to transcend divisions and cultivate a generous, welcoming unity.

So far, though, what we see are attempts to unify by means of crass and cruel division: Kurds, Palestinians, Alevis, Sunnis, Islamists, Israelis, Christians. Everyone's got a favorite enemy. And sometimes the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy, while the friend of our friend is also our enemy, and somehow, out of all this, a new Middle East will be born.