Andrew McCarthy: Military Right to Fight Brotherhood

Restoring democracy is impossible in a country that has never had it, so the United States should stop projecting its values on Egypt if it wants to find a solution to the Middle Eastern countries problems, says former U.S. prosecutor Andrew McCarthy.

"The Muslim Middle East is part of a different civilization and does not share our core beliefs," McCarthy writes in an editorial for The National Review.

Instead, the region is "adherent to supremacist Islam (and) rejects equality under the law," and there are "no constituents to represent," he said.

But Secretary of State John Kerry, rather than calling the ousting of elected President Mohammed Morsi a coup, referred to it as an exercise in "restoring democracy," wrote the former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the terrorists responsible for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

United States law requires aid to be terminated when a foreign government is toppled by a coup, so Kerry was struggling to avoid the word.

"Let’s face it: Morsi was forcibly removed from power, and he is being detained, along with other major Muslim Brotherhood figures," McCarthy said. "That is a coup to most sensible people — people who are not paid to fret over the statutory ramifications of admitting reality, and who have no patience for fastidious distinctions like whether the generals have actually taken over the government or are “merely” backing the civilian technocrats they’ve put in place."

But Egypt has never had a democracy, said McCarthy, author of the book "Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy," so the military could not have restored one.

Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood, which backed Morsi's election, is defined by the implementation of sharia, or Islamic law. But elections do not equal democracy, said McCarthy.

"Western commentators should thus stop mindlessly repeating the Brotherhood mantra that Mohammed Morsi is, or was, the “democratically elected” president," he wrote. "He was the popularly elected president of an overwhelmingly anti-democratic society — the same society whose citizens, only eight months ago, voted to approve a sharia constitution by a two-to-one landslide.

"Installing anti-democrats in positions of power, even if done by a popular vote, is the antithesis of real democracy," McCarthy added.