Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

What Obama Misunderstands About Egypt

What the White House fails to understand is that the Egyptian military has very different ideas about what "reconciliation" should look like.

August 15, 2013 at 6:10 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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This morning, President Barack Obama condemned the Egyptian military's slaughter of Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers, andcanceled joint military exercises scheduled for next month. He said that the violence should stop and that "a process of national reconciliation should begin."

What the White House fails to understand is that the Egyptian military has very different ideas about what "reconciliation" should look like. Its goal is to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood, its traditional adversary, by killing as many Brothers as possible and by jailing or otherwise hounding the others. As for the surprise registered in the White House that Egypt's military rulers didn't listen to repeated American pleas for reconciliation and compromise: How hard is it to believe that Middle Eastern potentates promised one thing to the U.S., and then did something else entirely?