Washington vilified on both sides of Egypt's divide

Pictures of Barack Obama have popped up all over Cairo. Some have his faced crossed out in paint. Heavy black beards are daubed onto others.

No matter which side you talk to in Egypt, where people have been polarized by a violent political crisis, the U.S. president is cast as the villain.

Four years ago, cheers greeted Obama's speech at Cairo University, amid brief hopes of closer ties between the United States and the Muslim world. For most Egyptians, those hopes had faded long ago.

Looks like the USA is not "in" anymore w/ the Egyptians....but Obama made sure US taxpayers will keep the foreign aid billions flowing. Americans are little more than pawns in the trillion dollar Mideast scam.....most of it orchestrated by the invisible neocons.

When will Americans be allowed to defend our interests? When can we stop financing the frickin' Mideast? Every two-bit Mideast hellhole puts THEIR interests first--particularly over American interests.

We must acknowledge over years of savage Mideast history---every Mideast hellhole is a threat to Americans. These bullies and savages are collecting trillions of our tax dollars to remake the Mideast into some kind of make-believe LaLa Land.

Americans are struggling survive in Ohaha's economy----and are paying plenty at the pump, as well as being forced to pour trillions into these useless mudholes. Our "reward" is violence, killings, and stratospheric gas prices.

The Mideast con job continues----"hate America" is a cottage industry over there---and is very profitable----trillions of US tax dollars paid out in order for "the haters" to "feel good about themselves." The stupid Mideast con artists know where they can put their lack of self-esteem.

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Obama gave then-Egyptian President Morsi $250 million in March in addition to 200 Abrams tanks and 12 F-16s, with 8 more to be delivered by the end of the year. Pretty strong support for the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Morsi is a member.

FOX news reported Obama is NOT cutting off US aid to Egypt (even though US law denies aid to govts deposed via muilitary coup).

NOTE .....the Egyptian military is neither under civilian control nor primarily financed by the Egyptian government. It gets more than $1 billion annually in US foreign aid......plus a host of additional US-financed programs......

THE MAGIC WORD$$$$: Egypt just says they'll be "a-good-neighbor" and billions of tax dollars start flowing.

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HERE'S WHAT THE LEFT IS SAYING:

EXCERPT---How much does the U.S. spend on Egypt? Egypt gets the most U.S. foreign aid of any country except for Israel. (This doesn't include the trillions of tax dollars spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.)

The exact amount varies from year to year and there are many different funding streams, but U.S. foreign assistance to Egypt has averaged about $2 billion a year since 1979, when Egypt struck a peace treaty with Israel following the Camp David accords, according to the Congressional Research Service. That includes military and economic aid, though the latter has declined by more than two-thirds since 1998, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.

Let's start with the military aid. How much is it, and what does it buy? Military aid — which comes through a funding stream known as Foreign Military Financing — has held steady at about $1.3 billion since 1987. American officials have long argued that the money promotes strong ties between the American and Egyptian militaries, which gives the U.S. all kinds of benefits. US Navy warships, for instance, get "expedited processing" when they pass through the Suez Canal.

Here's a 2009 U.S. embassy cable released by WikiLeaks that makes essentially the same point: President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual FMF as "untouchable compensation" for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace.

The military funding also enables Egypt to purchase US-manufactured military goods and services. But a 2006 report from the Government Accountability Office (PDF) criticized both the State Dept and the Defense Dept for failing to measure how the funding actually contributes to U.S. goals.

Does this aid require Egypt to meet any specific conditions regarding human rights? It didn't for a long time. When an exiled Egyptian dissident called on the U.S. to attach conditions to aid to Egypt in 2008, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who had recently stepped down as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, told the Washington Post the idea was "admirable but not realistic." And Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that military aid "should be without conditions" at a Cairo press conference in 2009.

Last December Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, led Congress in adding language to a spending bill to make aid to Egypt conditional on the secretary of state certifying that Egypt is supporting human rights and being a good neighbor to Israel. The language requires that Egypt abide by the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, support "the transition to civilian government including holding free and fair elections," and put in place policies to protect freedom of expression, association, and religion, and due process of law." It sounds pretty tough, but it's not.

So has American aid to Egypt been cut off? No. Congress threatened to block the aid when Egypt began a crackdown on a number of American pro-democracy groups this winter. A senior Obama administration official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had no way to certify the bill's conditions were being met.

But in March Clinton waived the certification requirement (yes, she can do that) and approved the aid, despite concerns remaining about Egypt's human rights record. The reason? "A delay or cut in $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt risked breaking existing contracts with American arms manufacturers that could have shut down production lines in the middle of Obama's re-election campaign," the NYT reported. Breaking the contracts could have left the Pentagon on the hook for $2 billion.

What kind of arms have we been sending them, anyway? According to the State Department, the aid has included fighter jets, tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, antiaircraft missiles, and surveillance aircraft. In the past, the Egyptian government has bought some of the weaponry on credit.

What about economic aid and efforts to promote democracy? U.S. economic aid to Egypt has slumped from $815 million in 1998 to about $250 million in 2011. The various economic aid efforts have had mixed results.

The State Department has described the Commodity Import Program, which gave Egypt millions of dollars between 1986 and 2008 to import American goods, as "one of the largest and most popular USAID programs."

<><> But an audit of the four-year, $57 million effort to create agricultural jobs and boost rural incomes in 2007 found that the program "has not increased the number of jobs as planned" [PDF].

<><> And an audit of a $151 million program [PDF] to modernize Egypt's real estate finance market in 2009 found that, while the market had improved since the program began, the growth was "not clearly measureable or attributable" to the aid efforts.

The U.S. has also funded programs to promote democracy and good government in Egypt — again with few results. It has sent about $24 million a year between 1999 and 2009 to a variety of NGOs in the country. According to a 2009 inspector general's audit [PDF], the efforts didn't add much due to "a lack of support" from the Egyptian government, which "suspended the activities of many U.S. NGOs because Egyptian officials thought these organizations were too aggressive."

President Obama has promised Egypt $1 billion in aid to support its transition to democracy following the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. But the funding has become a political issue since the attacks on the American embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11.

When the Obama administration announced that it was sending the Egyptian government $450 million to help forestall a budget crisis, Representative Kay Granger, a Texas Republican and the chairwoman of a subcommittee that oversees foreign aid, said she would block the money because of concerns about Egypt's direction under the Muslim Brotherhood. "I am not convinced of the urgent need for this assistance and I cannot /support it at this time," she said in a statement. (SOURCE propublica.com)

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