Obama Botched Egypt — Here's How To Fix It

Coup: After helping topple a key ally, will the Obama administration now foolishly pressure Egypt's military? Will the U.S. help Islamists posing as democrats gain power?

As our once-stable ally Egypt hurtles down a path leading into the dark unknown, the U.S. can blame itself. The White House apparently did little after our intelligence agencies warned late last year that President Hosni Mubarak's government was wobbly.

Like Jimmy Carter's handling of Central America, the U.S. backed a revolution, hoping it would make the revolutionaries our friends.

In recent days Mubarak might have beat the odds to survive. But President Obama publicly insisted he go.

What's more, this president has courted Egypt's notorious Muslim Brotherhood: a breeding ground for terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, and a global force for "civilizational jihad" with a presence around the world.

Obama invited 10 Brotherhood leaders to hear his "New Beginning" speech to the world's Muslims in Cairo in mid-2009. In that speech, Obama snubbed Mubarak, adding that "people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind" and "government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people."

You just can't say such things in a country with thousands of political prisoners — and under an army-enforced state of emergency since the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat — and not expect trouble.

What further frightening blunders lie ahead?

We've already seen Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Thursday describe the Brotherhood as "a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence" and "pursued social ends, betterment of the political order in Egypt, etc."

The prosecutor of the 1993 World Trade Center conspirators, National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy, in his book "The Grand Jihad," demolishes in great detail the claims made that the Muslim Brotherhood is somehow friendly toward representative government.

McCarthy warns that "For Islamists, democracy is a tool for acquiring power, not a culture of governance." And he exposes the preposterous State Department delusion that because al-Qaida operatives "figure the Brothers are soft, they obviously must be moderates — so we can work with these guys!"

Majority rule without liberty amounts to the tyranny of the majority — a chilling prospect in the Mideast. But it's the only "democracy" the Brotherhood will back.

The U.S. should now make the best of a bad situation, quietly helping Egypt's military stay in power for as long as it takes to ensure that Mubarak's successor isn't an Islamist enabler.

That may mean delaying scheduled September elections — and suffering further anti-U.S. rhetoric from former U.N. nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei, a likely candidate for Egypt's presidency.

The vision of Muslim political freedom Obama described in Cairo a year and a half ago — "power through consent, not coercion" in "a spirit of tolerance and compromise" — unfortunately isn't shared by those likely to be elected in Egypt.

The U.S. mustn't fantasize it is and let the land of the pharaohs go the way of Syria or Iran.