The Obama Administration’s refusal to characterize Egypt’s military takeover as a “coup” even though that’s what the word coup actually means continued today, with Secretary of State John Kerry seeming to praise the junta for its action.
“You had an extraordinary situation in Egypt of life and death, of the potential of civil war and enormous violence, and you now have a constitutional process proceeding forward very rapidly,” insisted Kerry, warning against a “rush to judgment.”
Absent in Kerry’s comments are that the protests which were used as an excuse for the takeover were orchestrated by the military leadership with the express purpose of justifying a coup.
US law forbids military aid in the wake of a coup, a law which the Obama Administration is overtly flouting. Kerry says that the situation needs to be taken into consideration, though US law makes no such distinction for coups that the US favors, and in theory would leave that up to Congress to decide, as they did when they backed Pakistan’s last coup.
