BY DAVID KENNER , GORDON LUBOLD
In 2006, Professor Stephen Gerras hosted a Super Bowl party at his house for the foreign military officers who were taking his courses at the U.S. Army War College. As the Pittsburgh Steelers clobbered the Seattle Seahawks, Gerras kept one eye on a partygoer who wasn’t paying much attention to the game — Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, currently the most powerful man in Egypt.
“My mother had come to help with the food, and she’s this almost 80-year-old Italian mother,” Gerras said. “And he grabs her and gives her a tour of all the things in our house that are written in Arabic, and the religious significance of it. Nobody else that I’ve ever had has ever felt the need to do that.”
Some officers use their year at the War College to relax a bit — they have been plucked out of their military hierarchy, after all, and the senior generals who determine their professional advancement are absent. Gerras, who served as Sisi’s faculty advisor and was his professor in three courses at the War College, said his former pupil was nothing like that. And it went far beyond one Super Bowl party: “He was smart, his English was very good, and he was very serious,” said Gerras. “He would be the most serious [military fellow]that I’ve had.”
Sisi, who trained at the U.S. Army War College from 2005 to 2006, is the first Egyptian military chief to be trained by the United States rather than Russia. During his year in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he took classes in strategic thinking, theory of war and strategy, national policy formulation, and — in an ironic twist, given the position in which he now finds himself — an elective on civil-military relations. However, there’s little evidence that Sisi’s studies have given Washington any influence over the Egyptian general: Though Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel repeatedly warned him against launching a coup and subsequently called on him to build an inclusive political system, Sisi not only deposed President Mohamed Morsy — he went on to imprison top Muslim Brotherhood officials, while Egypt’s security forces have opened fire on pro-Morsy demonstrators.
In an odd turn, Sisi has unleashed some of the harshest anti-U.S. rhetoric in decades from an Egyptian army chief. In an interview with the Washington Post published this weekend, he blasted the United States for not more fully supporting the July 3 military takeover: “You left the Egyptians, you turned your back on the Egyptians and they won’t forget that,” he said. “Now you want to continue turning your backs on Egyptians?”
Despite such rhetorical broadsides, however, U.S. officials insist their communications channel through Sisi remains strong. According to one U.S. official with knowledge of the dialogue between President Barack Obama’s administration and Sisi, the message they reiterate “is that we believe in a strong relationship, a strong Egypt.”
However, the official added, the United States realizes how the situation on the ground could damage that relationship. “If things get out of hand [in Cairo], it’s going to be very difficult for us.”