President Obama late Wednesday declared himself “very concerned” by the Egyptian military’s overthrow of the country’s democratically elected president and said his administration was reviewing U.S. military aid as a result.
In his first statement since the Egyptian army and the opposition overthrew President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government, Obama repeated that the United States was not taking sides in the dispute and avoided using the word “coup.” He called on the military to quickly restore power to a “democratically elected civilian government.”
“The United States is monitoring the very fluid situation in Egypt, and we believe that ultimately the future of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people,” Obama said in a statement. “Nevertheless, we are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy and suspend the Egyptian constitution.
“I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters. Given today’s developments, I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt."
Apparently, one pathetic last-minute speech by Eqypt’s Mohammed Morsi was sufficient to convince President Barack Obama, who has spent several days and untold amounts of worldwide capital defending the Muslim Brotherhood leader’s staying on the job in the face of what may have been the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in human history.
Politico frantically tried to run interference for the Obama opportunistic change of heart today, running an item which was apparently called “U.S. Eases Away from Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.” The item was up so briefly that it was quickly replaced, while the headline just mentioned still remains in the browser window’s title bar.
How pathetic.
According to the carriage of the “eases away” story at inagist.com, the opening paragraph was as follows:Keep reading…