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.
Read more on Pressure Points: http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2016/03/23/repression-deepens-in-egypt/#more-7921