WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama gathered top aides on Tuesday to review US aid to Egypt, but the White House rejected reports it had already quietly frozen assistance after Cairo’s crackdown on Islamists.
Obama chaired a meeting of his National Security Council, which includes top diplomatic, defence, intelligence officials and uniformed military brass.
Aides said no imminent decisions were expected from the meeting in the White House Situation Room, amid a cresting political row over aid to Egypt following the ouster of ex-president Mohamed Morsi.
The crackdown, which has killed nearly 900 people, has left Obama balancing US political values and hopes for Arab democracy, and national security interests guarded by Cairo’s military.
The White House also took a new public shot at Egypt’s military government, by calling the arrest on Tuesday of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie incompatible with the military’s pledge for an “inclusive political process.”
Debate over US aid to Egypt was fuelled by a report that suggested that Washington had already frozen pending military aid shipments.
But White House spokesman Josh Earnest said there had been no final decision on a review of US aid to Egypt, which totals US$1.3 billion a year, launched after the military’s ouster of Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected leader.
“That review that the president ordered in early July has not concluded,” Earnest said.
“Reports to the contrary that suggest that assistance to Egypt has been cut off are not accurate.”
In an increasingly confusing game of semantics, Earnest insisted that the flow of aid was not a “faucet” that could be turned off and on.
“Assistance is provided episodically, assistance is provided in tranches… This is not a matter of turning the dial one way or the other,” he said.
Earlier, an aide to Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat who heads the subcommittee on foreign operations, said the flow of aid had been “stopped.”
“This is current practice, not necessarily official policy, and there is no indication of how long it will last,” the aide said.
The Obama administration has decided not to make a determination on whether the overthrow of Morsi was a coup, to avoid tangling its Egypt policy in a law which requires aid to be cut in such circumstances.
The State Department says $585 billion in military aid is still outstanding to Egypt this year – but is not officially due to be handed over until the end of September.
“We have not made a policy decision to suspend our aid to Egypt, period,” said Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman.
“We have not made a decision to suspend all of our assistance to Egypt or to slow our assistance; any reports to the contrary are simply false.”
The Daily Beast website earlier reported that the administration had decided to treat the events in Egypt as a coup, but without making an official designation.
Such a tack gave the administration flexibility to reverse its stance if required at the end of the policy review, the report said.
Egypt’s interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi said in an interview Tuesday it would be a mistake if the United States cut off military aid but insisted Cairo could survive without it.
Such a move would be a “bad sign and will badly affect the military for some time,” Beblawi told ABC News in an interview.
But in a veiled warning to Washington, Beblawi said in the past, Egypt had turned to Russia for weapons and would find a way forward, even without American help if necessary.
“Let’s not forget that Egypt went with the Russian military for support and we survived. So, there is no end to life,” he said.
Saudi Arabia has said it and other Arab states would step in to provide assistance if Washington shut the flow of military aid – which has flowed as part of Washington’s role as guarantor of the Camp David peace accords.
The United States has provided $1.3 billion in military assistance, including F-16 fighters and Abrams tanks, to Egypt every year since 1987.AFP
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