The USA and EU come to a grim realization and a rude awakening

update:  link fixed.  Sorry about that.

The Middle East countries hate the West and their middle fingers are stiff, upright and longer than expected.

All the rotten, shriveled up prunes like McCain and gang did not prevent Egypt's new rulers from doing what is considered by millions of  commonsense people around the world as the "right thing."   Nice article below from the NY Times which surprisingly for a change,  appears to be not too slanted.  If you dare to be impudent and ask:  How many NY Times journalists does it take to write a slightly non-biased article?   The answer is "Three."

The US and EU better keep a good relationship with Egypt's new rulers and keep that aid flowing smoothly...  if they want their conflict oil from Saudi and those other Sunni places  to flow to them via the Suez Canal.  Egypt holds the Ace ... for now and until the West weans itself away from Saudi's oily tits.

David Kirkpatrick, Peter Baker and Michael Gordon writing at the NYTimes:

For a moment, at least,   American and European diplomats trying to defuse the volatile standoff in Egypt thought they had a breakthrough.

As thousands of Islamist supporters of the ousted president Mohamed Morsi braced for a crackdown by the military-imposed government, a senior European diplomat, Bernardino León, told the Islamists of “indications” from the leadership that within hours they would free two imprisoned opposition leaders. In turn, the Islamists had agreed to reduce the size of two protest camps by about half.

An hour passed and nothing happened. Another hour passed and still no one had been released.

The Americans heightened the pressure. Two visiting senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, met with Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the officer who ousted Mr. Morsi and appointed the new government, and the interim prime minister, Hazem el-Beblawi, and pushed for release of the two prisoners. But the Egyptians brushed them off.


“You could tell people were itching for a fight,” Mr. Graham recalled in an interview. “The prime minister was a disaster. He kept preaching to me, ‘You can’t negotiate with these people, they’ve got to get out of the streets and respect the rule of law.’ I said, ‘Mr. prime minister, it’s pretty hard for you to lecture anyone on the rule of law. How many votes did you get? Oh yeah, you didn’t have an election.’ ”

General Sisi, Mr. Graham, said seemed “a little bit intoxicated by power.”

The senators walked out that day, Aug. 6, gloomy and convinced that a violent showdown was looming. But the diplomats still held out hope, believing they had persuaded the government at least not to declare the talks a failure.

The next morning, the government issued a statement declaring that diplomatic efforts had been exhausted and blaming the Islamists for any casualties from the coming crackdown. A week later, Egyptian forces opened a ferocious assault that so far has killed more than 900 protesters.

All of the efforts of the United States government, all the cajoling, the veiled threats, the high-level envoys from Washington and the 17 personal phone calls by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, all of it failed to forestall the worst political bloodletting in modern Egyptian history. The generals in Cairo felt free to stiff the Americans first on the prisoner release and then on the statement in a cold-eyed calculation that they would not pay a significant cost — a conclusion bolstered when President Obama responded by canceling a joint military exercise but not $1.5 billion in aid.


For Mr. Obama, the violent crackdown has left him in a no-win position: risk a partnership that has been the bedrock of Middle East peace for 35 years, or stand by while longtime allies try to hold on to power by mowing down opponents. From one side, he has been lobbied by the Israelis, Saudis and other Arab allies to go easy on the generals in the interest of thwarting what they see as the larger and more insidious Islamist threat. From the other, he has been urged by an unusual mix of conservatives and liberals to stand more forcefully against the sort of autocracy that has been a staple of Egyptian life for decades........