He’s making it look like the period in which the revolutions in Syria and Egypt will still be self-determining is coming to an end.
In Egypt at any rate. There he sits down with Morsi and the big bourgeoisie, putting the revolution face to face with the counter-revolution. He tells them to patch things up with the International Monetary Fund. It’s good advice.
Then he sits down with some of the representatives of the opposition within the revolution (they are still too fractured all to agree to attend) and tells them, I imagine, that he had already told Morsi to safeguard the rights of women, religious minorities, etc. And maybe those who did attend will be satisfied with that.
Thus Secretary Kerry’s vision for Egyptian unity: sitting down with the parties and making suggestions backed by a relatively few American bucks…as if the revolution had never occurred and was not occurring and they were not, dialectically speaking, mortal enemies.
So it goes when a historically decisive entity decides it would like to impose its will on the self-determinations of a revolution taking place within an entity of the same order, but not the same magnitude. Moreover, as the representative of national capitals, the IMF is a dialectical entity of a different order, but also of great magnitude. It’s a powerful external combination for ending the revolutionary period in Egypt.
In Syria, a decisive act ending the bloody course of self-determination the parties are currently pursuing would be welcome. At least Secretary Kerry is avoiding the Cold War spectacle of two proxy armies, one wielding Russian weapons, the other American, at war with each other while their suppliers watch. I’ve already argued that not arming the Free Syrian Army was a fearful, self-absorbed mistake. At this point, Bashar’s fall would not come years or months from now, but weeks – even if the Russians and Iranians continue to resupply him with ordinance – were the FSA suitably armed. How many Syrians die in a week? in a month? Are their actual victims less precious than the merely putative victims of merely putative terrorism? How many Syrian lives would the Secretary like to throw into this balance?
Because frankly, Al Qaida has no intercontinental reach anymore that I can detect. Maybe the government can detect it. To me, it consists of warlords leading armed gangs, in deserts rather than streets, that hide their bullying and theft behind the mask of a stern religion that ignores several millennia of human progress. And the only people they have killed lately, contrary to their original principles, are mostly Muslims.
Anyway, to paraphrase Churchill, at least it’s a policy, even if it’s wrong. That’s better than the previous Secretary seems to have done. As a policy, it might even lead somewhere.
