BLOWBACK IN EGYPT
US "DEMOCRACY" - PROMOTING EFFORTS ON TRIAL

By: Justin Raimondo

The trial of 43 employees of Western-backed “pro-democracy” groups in Egypt has been postponed until July, when government prosecution witnesses are scheduled to testify. The case attracted international attention when the authorities accused US- and European-backed groups of trying to overthrow the government. As Egyptian police raided the offices of several NGOs, and detained Sam La Hood – son of US labor secretary Ray La Hood – Egypt’s minister for international cooperation Fayza Abulnaga issued a dossier on their activities, which amounted, she said, to promoting “American and Israeli interests” and “preventing the emergence of Egypt as a democratic state.” The state-controlled Al-Ahram newspaper headlined the story: “American Funding Aims to Spread Anarchy in Egypt.”

While the move was popular in Egypt, where suspicions of US – and Israeli – covert activity runs high, in the US the Washington glitterati were in outrage mode: Hillary Clinton threatened to cut off the $1.5 billion in aid scheduled to be delivered to Cairo, and the pundits went wild with scorn: Thomas Friedman denounced the trial as a “witch hunt,” while Sen. John “Boots-on-the-ground” McCain gave vent to his “growing alarm and outrage.” The “civil society” crowd went bananas, naturally, since this is a bread-and-butter issue for them, being entirely dependent on Western governments and the generosity of George Soros. If taking government money is cause for suspicion and legal problems in countries like Egypt, their whole racket is over.

What their racket consists of is carrying out the foreign policy agendas of the US and its European allies under the guise of “promoting democracy.” It is, in short, a program of organized subversion, similar to that carried out by the old Soviet Union in the days of the Comintern. Back then, the Soviets were upfront about their commitment to “proletarian internationalism,” actively promoting “revolutionary” movements funded and directed from Moscow. Our own internationalism, albeit far from proletarian, is similar in its intent and hypocritical cant. An entire wing of the national security bureaucracy is centered around the mythology of America as the great promoter of “democracy” and “transparency,” with both political parties operating their own separate arms of an international apparatus which is nothing less – or more – than an instrument of US foreign policy.

Even the Egyptian employees of these “democracy promotion” projects were well aware of what sugar daddy Uncle Sam is up to: it turns out that they resigned en masse a few months before the raids. AP reports:

“They complained that the US group, described as nonpartisan, had excluded the country's most popular Islamist political organization from its programs, collected sensitive religious information about Egyptians when conducting polls to send to Washington, and ordered employees to erase all computer files and turn over all records for shipment abroad months before the raids.

“’Our resignation is a result of many different practices we have been witnessing that seem suspicious and unprofessional,’ the Egyptian employees wrote in their 17 October resignation letter.”

Among these practices was failing to report where the money was going, a legal requirement in Egypt (and the US, I might add). Dawlat Soulam, a former employee of the International Republican Institute (IRI), told AP:

“Are we doing something we want to hide from the Egyptians? Are you playing a political agenda and you don't want to show that you want to take sides?”

A pledge to post the information publicly went unfulfilled, in spite of “weekly meetings” at which the subject was discussed. The employees’ main complaint was that, contrary to their public pronouncements, US officials were taking sides in Egypt’s election, directly funding secular liberal parties and excluding the others, including the Islamists. I’m sure this was just an oversight, however, since we’re funding the most radical Islamists in Syria at this very moment. In any case, apparently the IRI’s Democratic counterpart, the National Democratic Institute, was making up for this shameless neglect by providing “training” to Muslim Brotherhood activists.

The idea that the US government is some sort of above-the-fray “democracy”-promoter, who therefore is obligated to ladle out millions in aid to all parties – including those that advocate, say, the imposition of Sharia law – is born of an empty-headed illusion shared by more than one native activist who looks to the US as a model for their own country. These people take seriously the propaganda points of US policymakers who insist their “democracy promotion” efforts are all about process rather than the pursuit of US foreign policy objectives – just as yesteryear’s idealistic Comintern agents sincerely believed in the Kremlin’s devotion to “proletarian internationalism.” When they discover otherwise, a whole generation of “the god that failed” ex-ideologues is born.

In reality, and in all cases, nation-states pursue their own interests, which are, first and foremost, the political interests of those who rule. This is true in democracies as well as dictatorships, and it is the basic premise of a realistic view of world politics, the starting point for all serious analyses of political actors, from the local to the international scene.

In the case of the Soviet Union, the Comintern was tasked with propagandizing for Russian national interests abroad, and it used the indigenous Communist parties and fellow-travelers to promote a geopolitical strategy that was primarily defensive. Saddled with enormous economic problems at home, and an increasingly restive subject population, Kremlin leaders avoided the Trotskyite strategy of pursuing “world revolution” in favor of building “socialism in one country” – i.e. working furiously to manage the inefficiencies of a socialist system and avoid complete collapse. Their efforts, as we know, ended in failure, as the economic and political disaster that had been awaiting them since 1917 finally worked out its inexorable logic and the Berlin Wall was toppled.