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People of the Tube!
Listen. At the end of the day, all I want to do is come home, sit down, maybe throw
some tax money at a military regime responsible for killing hundreds of civilians, and pop
in a movie. That's it. Don't even pretend you don't have those kinds of days too.
This week, I wanted to dive into the madness that is Egypt right now. There have been some
really good videos on Egypt from about a month ago. But the Egypt of today is a completely
different game.
So without further ado I bring you a segment we'll call good news/bad news history. The
Good news is that Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically-elected president took office
in 2012. The bad news is that this democratically-elected president really wasn't into the whole democratically-elected
thing. And apparently he wasn't the biggest fan of that constitution he signed...which
he made pretty obvious because he gave himself unconstitutional powers, put his fellow Muslim
Brotherhood friends in positions of authority, and imprisoned people who disagreed with him.
But that's ok because the good news is that after some wild protests, the military told
President Morsi that if he didn't clean up his act, he'd have to find a new day job.
But the bad news is that President Morsi didn't change anything. No, it was like he was sitting
in his chair waiting for his seat cushion to hatch into some better plot than—I don't
know—waiting for your seat cushion to hatch! But the good/bad news is that the military
escorted him out of the presidency. The good news is that there is only one bit
of bad news left. And the last bit of bad news is that—that was the last of the good
news! See, the Muslim Brotherhood that Morsi's apart
of began to protest, saying that Morsi was illegally removed from office. Then the military
tried to suppress the protests by gunning hundreds upon hundreds of people down.
So in response to these mass killings, the White House immediately cut the 1.3 billion
dollars that we dole out to Egypt every year. Wait, it was either that, or we told them
we wouldn't come over to play anymore in their stupid joint military exercises. Yeah, you
know what? It was that one. We won't come over to play because you're killing your own
citizens, but we might still build your tanks and give you money. You just need to not use
what we give you to kill any more protesters. And we mean it!
Now, to be fair, the U.S. did finally decide to hold onto a lot of that money in case it
chooses to cut aid to Egypt.
But that's not really what matters. Because at this point, there's probably little that
the U.S. can do that will have any sort of impact in Egypt.
It kind of turns out that even if we completely cut our support, Egypt was already offered
12 billion dollars from Gulf Arab States like Saudi Arabia—countries who are just not
feeling the Muslim Brotherhood and would kind of like to watch them die.
So what interests me is not what we're doing which won't even have an impact at all, but
what we should have done. You know. Before Egypt spiraled out of democracy, ousting a
bad president in exchange for a worse military regime that killed hundreds of people, prompting
oil-rich nations to jamb their feet into the door, along with 12 billion dollars' worth
of influence!
So, why didn't we at least threaten to cut aid to Egypt at any point in that long, tortured
history?
The following are probably the most important reasons that we kept supporting Egypt. And
we're going to start with the fact that giving money to Egypt enforces the treaty they have
with Israel that promotes peace and cooperation between the two nations. Okay, so we also
really like Egypt giving us VIP access to the Suez Canal, and it's also pretty cool
that having good relationships with Israel and Egypt gives our interests a lot more power
in a crucial, unstable region. Or did. Yeah, before oil-rich nations made our 1.3 billion
dollars look like a really bad tip.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if ever there was a good time to withdraw support
from a freedom-usurping nation, to affect lasting change...well that chance...I think
I saw it go that way.
Then what's the point of crying over spilled milk? There is no point. But there is every
reason to rant over spilled blood. And the reason is that knowing where we went wrong
in the past can hopefully prevent these things from happening again. Anyway, thanks for tuning
in, you wonderful people. I'd love it if you subscribed, and please join me for next week's
rant.