Egypt Is Burning and U.S. Should Do Little, Very Quietly

With violence threatening to destroy Egypt’s fledgling democracy, a growing number of voices there and abroad are calling on the U.S. to take a stronger, more public stand in favor of the secular opposition and against President Mohamed Mursi and his supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood.

For now, the U.S. would be wise to resist these calls. It would probably be pilloried for any position it took, whether backing an Islamist government with authoritarian reflexes or a secular minority that wants to unseat a party that beat it in free elections. As the military theorist Anthony Cordesman wrote this week in a paper about upheavals in the Muslim world, the U.S. can’t hope to control the outcome of what is at root a contest within Islam.