While Egypt’s President Sisi has fought Islamic State, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood in both word and deed, he has also shown himself to be a brutal and repressive ruler. Elliott Abrams contends that Sisi’s behavior cannot be excused by his opposition to jihadism, and is also counterproductive:

Realism demands that we speak out [against Sisi’s behavior] for two reasons. First, the people Sisi is repressing are . . . the democrats, liberals, secular citizens, and moderates—the very base for future progress for [Egyptian] society. It is simply untrue that the repression is only targeting Muslim Brotherhood members, jihadists, extremists, and terrorists.

Second, what Sisi is doing will not work. The combination of corruption, lack of economic progress, and repression means that Egypt will remain unstable. For example, Sisi has made no gains against jihadists in the Sinai, in part because of the government’s conduct there, and Islamic State (IS) appears to be stronger there now than it was a couple of years ago. Filling the prisons with everyone who speaks out against repression or who criticizes the government will not stop IS.

In essence the United States is back where we began, supporting a repressive regime in the supposed interest of stability. That’s what we did with Mubarak, for the most part, until almost the day he fell. The only differences are that Sisi is more repressive than Mubarak, and that because of IS the stakes are higher today.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.