U.S. gives another $1.3 billion in weapons to Egypt’s vicious regime– to keep Israel happy?

Once again, certain principled members of the U.S. Congress will try to cut the huge American military aid package to Egypt. The lawmakers, who include, perhaps surprisingly, arch-conservative Senator Rand Paul of Tennessee, ask pointedly why the Biden administration is giving $1.3 billion to a military regime that has an estimated 60,000 political prisoners, one of the highest totals in the world. 

Foreign Policy just reported that: “A battle is brewing between the Biden administration and Congress over military aid [to Egypt],” adding that “in classic Washington fashion, that battle is being fought in the most boring and indirect way possible: on Page 313, Section 7019 of a 716-page congressional appropriations bill.”

What explains the U.S. aid, which contradicts President Biden’s expressed concern for human rights? The mainstream media has done some reporting on the Abdel Fattah el-Sisi regime’s repression. A recent, long New York Times article chronicled the awful conditions, which include denial of any legal due process and extensive torture. 

So why does the U.S. continue to look the other way? An excellent 2018 book let the cat out of the bag; the U.S. has been bribing Egypt for the past 4 decades to maintain peace with Israel, and this year’s military aid is just the latest payoff. Into the Hands of the Soldiers, by the former New York Times Cairo correspondent David J. Kirkpatrick, is a superb and accurate history of Egypt from the 2011 Arab Spring uprising onward. 

Kirkpatrick used his access as a Times reporter to reach high-level U.S. officials and pose penetrating questions. He interviewed Leon Panetta, a Defense Secretary under Obama, and asked him why the American military aid continued, year after year, despite expressing occasional concerns about human rights. Panetta said forthrightly:

The Congress knows that in a part of the world where Israel does not have a lot of friends, it does not make a heck of a lot of sense to kick Egypt in the ass, because they are one of the few players in the area that are a friend to Israel.

Panetta’s explanation makes complete sense. Egypt has no real enemies in the region, and has no need to be the second-largest recipient of U.S. military assistance (after only Israel itself). 

Back in 1986, in Cairo, I had the good fortune to meet Drew Middleton, the legendary New York Times military correspondent. He was in Egypt to look into the state of the nation’s armed forces, which the U.S. was already supplying. He got right to the point: “Egypt can’t really use most of this sophisticated equipment that we are giving them. Their army is mostly conscripts, many of them illiterate. They don’t — yet — have enough background to master complex weapons systems.”

Egypt has raised its literacy rate considerably since then. But even now, with no significant regional threats, that $1.3 billion every year looks more like a giant bribe to el-Sisi and his fellow generals, raising the military’s prestige, and not incidentally, providing plenty of opportunities for graft on the side. 

Meanwhile, Rand Paul pointed out that Human Rights Watch says: “Egypt’s security apparatus has arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted tens of thousands of persons,” and that “torture crimes against detainees in Egypt are systematic, widespread and likely constitute crimes against humanity.” And: “The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Egypt the third-worst jailer of members of its profession, behind only China and Myanmar.”

El-Sisi seized power in July 2013, after overthrowing a flawed but democratically-elected government. Kirkpatrick reports that Israel supported the coup, and (successfully) lobbied the Obama administration to accept it. Israel’s trademark boast that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East” sounds more than a little hollow.