Angry supporters of Egypt's ousted president have stormed and torched two buildings housing the local government in Giza, the city next to Cairo that is home to the famed pyramids. 
 
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 An Egyptian pulls a banner of Egypt's ousted President Mohammed Morsi near debris left at a protest camp in Nahda Square, Giza, Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013. Egypt faced a new phase of uncertainty... (Associated Press) 
 
 Associated Press reporters saw the buildings _ a two-story colonial style villa and a four-story administrative building _ set ablaze on Thursday. 
 
 The Giza government offices are located on the Pyramids Road on the west bank of the River Nile. 
 
 State TV blamed supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi for the fire. Its footage shows both structures burning with fire men evacuating employees from the larger building. 
 
 Tamarod, the youth movement that organized the mass rallies preceding Morsi's ouster on July 3, called for the creation of popular committees to protect government and private property. ||||| The president could have helped avert the bloodshed in Egypt had he taken blunter action. Instead he offered saccharine words. By Peter Beinart 
 
 Elliot Abrams was right. Rand Paul was right. I was wrong. More importantly, so was Barack Obama. 
 
 After last month’s military coup in Egypt, sober foreign-policy types warned against cutting off U.S. aid. After all, the coup seemed to enjoy substantial public support. President Mohamed Morsi had become increasingly authoritarian. Cutting off aid might destroy what little leverage America had over Egypt’s new military regime. 
 
 So Obama spoke saccharine words about democracy and inclusion but never called the coup a coup, since under U.S. law that would have required cutting off aid. General Abdel Sisi’s government made it increasingly clear it had no intention of allowing real democratic elections—including Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood—ever again. Secretary of State John Kerry, in a terrible gaffe, praised the military for “restoring democracy.” And then, today, all hell broke loose as the military slaughtered Brotherhood supporters by the hundreds and instituted military law. 
 
 There’s a reasonable argument that nothing Obama did would have mattered. The Persian Gulf states, which adored the coup, quickly offered Egypt far more money than the U.S. could have withheld. And it’s not as if the administration remained passive. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns worked hard to bring the Brotherhood and the military together. The White House even sent two of its domestic tormenters, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to Cairo to try to hatch a deal. 
 
 But in hindsight it’s clear (funny how that works) that the people who wanted blunter action were right: Obama’s only real chance of preventing the military from trying to smash its Islamist foes would have been to cut off military aid. 
 
 The irony is that what served the administration so poorly in this case are the very attributes that often serve it well. The hallmarks of Obama’s foreign policy are nuance, humility, caution, which is understandable when you follow George W. Bush. So Obama did the apparently prudent thing. He tried to get both sides to compromise: Asking the military to allow the Brotherhood to participate in politics and the Brotherhood to accept that Morsi wasn’t coming back. He listened to regional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, who feared the Brotherhood’s return. He postponed shipments of F-16s without shutting off aid. 
 
 In some ways, the approach resembled Obama’s Afghan policy in 2009. Back then, faced with hawks who wanted a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign and doves who said Afghanistan was hopeless, Obama split the baby: both sending more troops and setting a date for withdrawal. And it proved a disaster. A lot of young Americans died in a surge that never had any real chance of success. 
 
 The message is clear: Elections are for chumps. Go get your AK-47. 
 
 Here, too, Obama’s attempt to find a middle path has produced the worst of all outcomes. As today’s events make gruesomely clear, our supposed leverage with the Egyptian military is a fiction. But we’ve also destroyed whatever limited influence we may have had with the Brotherhood. To anyone in the Muslim world who needed convincing, it now looks unmistakably clear that the United States favors democracy in the Middle East when, and only when, our side wins. If you’re an Islamist who has now watched the United States wink at coups against democratically elected Islamist governments in Algeria and Egypt, and sought to foment one among the Palestinians after Hamas’ democratic election in 2006, the message is clear: Elections are for chumps. Go get your AK-47. 
 
 By historical standards, the Obama administration has presided over few genuine foreign-policy disasters. That’s no accident. Its self-consciously Hippocratic approach—modeled on world-weary pragmatists like Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush—is designed to avoid them. But sometimes the refusal to take a bold, principled stand turns out to be the riskiest course of all. ||||| With the death toll in Egypt soaring and no sign that the country’s generals are heeding American calls to stop the violence, however, administration officials said they now faced a more wrenching choice: to keep backing the generals, whatever the cost, or to admit that the current relationship is no longer tenable. 
 
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 “While we want to sustain our relationship with Egypt, our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” Mr. Obama said, reading a statement in front of his rented vacation house here, the sun-splashed trees an incongruous backdrop for his stark message. 
 
 In his remarks, Mr. Obama noted “it’s tempting” inside Egypt to blame the United States, saying that protesters accused it alternately of backing Mr. Morsi or colluding with those who ousted him. But Mr. Obama’s reluctance to be drawn into conflicts in the Mideast, from Syria to Bahrain, has frequently been criticized. 
 
 Until the latest eruption of violence, White House officials were still uncertain whether the Egyptian military might yet rewind history and give democracy a fresh chance, or if it was simply restoring the sort of autocracy that has dominated Egypt in the past. Now they said they seem to have the answer. 
 
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 But while their frustration is palpable, officials said there were voices in favor of working with Egypt and of cutting off its aid, and they expected the debate would take time to play out. 
 
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 White House officials said Mr. Obama issued the order to pull the United States out of the military exercises, known as Bright Star, in a phone call with his national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, on Wednesday evening. The Egyptians were notified before the president’s announcement, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel later spoke by telephone with Egypt’s defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. 
 
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 Despite the large scale of the exercises, and the fact that they date to the 1980s, administration officials said they had few illusions that the decision would by itself stop the crackdown. Egypt’s military leaders, they said, regard the Islamist protests as an “existential threat” to the nation, which they must crush at all costs. 
 
 Mr. Obama said he had instructed his national security staff to weigh additional measures. He did not specify what those could be, though he said nothing about suspending the military aid. “We’ll be looking at both the case-by-case examples but also the more fundamental relationship,” said a senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “There’s a basic threshold where we can’t give a tacit endorsement to them.” 
 
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 Given the deep schism in Egypt, this official said, the White House is still skeptical that cutting off aid would compel the generals to return the country to a democratic transition. And it could destabilize the region, particularly the security of Israel, whose 1979 peace treaty with Egypt is predicated on the aid. 
 
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 For weeks, officials from Israel and several Arab countries have pressured the administration to maintain the flow of aid. If it were cut off, they said, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates would move quickly to make up the shortfall — and then some. 
 
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 Saudi Arabia and the emirates pledged $8 billion in grants and loans to Egypt’s post-Morsi government last month: $5 billion from Saudi Arabia in grants and loans; $3 billion from the emirates. That is more than enough, analysts say, to offset any cutoff from the United States, even if the two countries do not fulfill their entire pledges. 
 
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 Shutting off the aid spigot now would not have an immediate impact on the Egyptian military, defense officials say, because this year’s military assistance has already been delivered. Beyond money, Arab officials worry that a rupture between Washington and the Egyptian military would further erode American influence in a country that has historically been a bellwether in the Arab world, and would open the door to rivals like Russia or China. 
 
 “If the aid gets cut, you can be sure that Putin will arrive in Cairo in two or three months,” one senior Arab official said. “And he will give aid with no strings attached.” 
 
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 Still, even with the aid flowing, Defense Department officials fear that whatever leverage the Pentagon might have had with Egypt’s military leadership is ebbing quickly. Since the military’s ouster of Mr. Morsi on July 3, Mr. Hagel has had more than 15 phone calls with General Sisi, pleading in vain for him to change course. 
 
 Mr. Hagel, in a statement on Thursday, said that in his latest exchange with the general, “I made it clear that the violence and inadequate steps towards reconciliation are putting important elements of our longstanding defense cooperation at risk.” 
 
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 While administration officials acknowledge that Egypt could replace the lost American military aid, they said it would pay a long-term price in lost foreign investment and a ruined tourism industry — a point that Mr. Obama made in his statement on Thursday. 
 
 Some analysts said the administration had hurt itself by not undertaking a thorough review of its policy toward Egypt after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The United States, they said, was too wedded to the privileges it gained from the relationship, like fly-over rights and fast-track transit through the Suez Canal. 
 
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 “They’ve limited their own options by believing the idea that in order to influence things, you need to remain engaged,” said Steven A. Cook, an expert on Egypt at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We’ve never tested the proposition of cutting them off.” 
 
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 Other experts said Mr. Obama had few attractive alternatives and mainly wanted to keep out of the situation. 
 
 “Anything they do that is dramatic puts the United States in the middle of a story that we really don’t want to be in the middle of,” said Steven Simon, a former National Security Council official under Mr. Obama who is now head of the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. 
 
 Heather Hurlburt, a former Clinton White House official who is now the executive director of the National Security Network, said the administration should cut off “targeted” cooperation with Egypt’s military without halting all aid. “No matter where you’re coming from ideologically,” she said, “the playing field we face in the Middle East is not the playing field we faced a month ago.” 
 
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 Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who just returned from a trip to Cairo at Mr. Obama’s request, was sharply critical of the president for not acting more forcefully against the military takeover, citing a law requiring the cutoff of American aid to countries where a military coup has dislodged an elected government. Mr. McCain has said the Muslim Brotherhood needs to accept that Mr. Morsi will not be returned to power, but he has also urged the military to establish a democratic process. “We violated our own rule of law by not calling it for what it is,” Mr. McCain said on CNN. “We undercut our own values.” ||||| (CNN) -- When Egypt's first democratically elected president was tossed out this year, the White House stopped short of calling it a coup. 
 
 Doing so would have forced an end to the $1.23 billion that the United States sends in military aid a year -- and changed the course of its relationship with its strongest Arab ally in the region. 
 
 But that was before Wednesday, when the military-led interim government stormed two camps full of former President Mohamed Morsy's supporters. More than 525 people were killed and 3,717 wounded in the bloodiest day in Egypt's recent history, officials there said. 
 
 On Thursday, President Barack Obama condemned the violence against civilians and announced the United States is canceling next month's joint U.S.-Egyptian military exercises. 
 
 But will the carnage in Egypt spur more changes in U.S. policy toward the most populous Arab country? And might the hardening U.S. stance affect Egypt's own approach? 
 
 The short answer: We'll have to wait and see. 
 
 Mom's desperate text to daughter killed in Egypt 
 
 'A hornets' nest' 
 
 The United States helps Egypt in part because it's one of only two Arab countries -- along with Jordan -- that made peace with Israel. 
 
 In return, Egypt gets more than $1 billion each year in U.S. taxpayer money for military and civilian programs. No other country except Israel gets more. 
 
 That aid buys Washington an ally to depend on in a turbulent region. 
 
 The U.S. doesn't want to upset that balance. And pulling aid might do so. 
 
 "It's a hornets' nest. And that's why the administration is trying not to stir it too much," CNN's Fareed Zakaria said. 
 
 What experts say about the bloodshed in Cairo 
 
 Give up some to get some 
 
 But it's not just the peace process and regional stability that the United States is interested in. 
 
 Egypt controls the Suez Canal, a crucial sea route used by more than 4% of the world's oil traffic and 8% of all seaborne trade. So far, the canal is running smoothly. But a disruption there could end up hitting Americans in the pocketbook, not to mention affect the safe passage of U.S. military ships and equipment. 
 
 Then there's business for American companies, intelligence cooperation -- and the military relationship. 
 
 "The reality is that the Egyptian military has not only been a source of stability for the United States in an otherwise turbulent Middle East, but it has also been a cash cow," said Khairi Abaza, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 
 
 "Currently, the Egyptian military relies on U.S. military equipment, training and services. This reliance means that Egypt is essentially a client of the U.S. military complex, and aid money is in fact re-injected back into the U.S. economy." 
 
 World urges Egypt to show restraint 
 
 All of the factors are enough to give the U.S. pause. 
 
 "We need to have a discussion about the costs and benefits of different relationships with the Egyptians, and the Egyptians need to have the same about their relationship with us," said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 
 
 "If you want a different relationship, you have to articulate what that looks like, and accept you are going to have to give up some things to get other things." 
 
 'A really tough dilemma' 
 
 From the Obama administration's side, it's an "incredibly complex and difficult situation" that will require more time to figure out. 
 
 That's what White House spokesman Jay Carney said in July soon after Morsy was ousted, and reporters pressed him as to why the administration wasn't calling it a coup. 
 
 "It would not be in the best interests of the United States to immediately change our assistance programs" to Egypt, Carney said at the time. 
 
 Middle East analyst Robin Wright with the Wilson Center says the core issue is what our policy ought to be. 
 
 "The United States faces a really tough dilemma now," she said. "What to do about the most important country in the Arab world, the cornerstone of the peace process, a country that has received over $30 billion in U.S. aid since the peace process began in the late 1970s." 
 
 Cameraman killed in Cairo violence 
 
 Calls mounting 
 
 Some in Congress, including Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, already have called for halting the aid, saying the United States "should not be supporting this coup." McCain traveled to Egypt on August 5 along with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Both held meetings with representatives of the interim government and the Muslim Brotherhood. 
 
 Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said the United States hasn't committed much of this year's aid -- and that's a good thing. 
 
 "This is an opportunity to have a pause and say to the Egyptians, 'You have an opportunity to come together,' " he said. "You have to have the military understand that that's what we're looking for, a transition right away, as soon as possible." 
 
 Three choices 
 
 According to senior U.S. officials last month, the administration is examining three potential options: 
 
 -- Call it a coup and cut off aid. 
 
 -- Call it a coup and issue a national security waiver to allow aid to continue. 
 
 -- Don't call it a coup because the Egyptian military has taken steps to move the country toward a civilian transitional government and subsequent elections. 
 
 Now, officials -- both current and former -- recognize the climate is not encouraging. 
 
 'Time to call it a coup' 
 
 "I think it is time to call it a coup. I think it was time six weeks ago," former Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley said Wednesday. 
 
 "Suspend military assistance so the military is invested in the process of rewriting the constitution, setting the parliament and electing a new president." 
 
 Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that while a political solution is still possible, "it has been made much, much harder, much more complicated." 
 
 "The path toward violence leads only to greater instability, economic disaster and suffering," Kerry said 
 
 He also called for an end to Egypt's new state of emergency, which prevents freedom of peaceful assembly and due process. 
 
 The Egypt raid, at a glance 
 
 U.S. still considering its strategy 
 
 But as far as firm actions, the United States' game plan has yet to be drawn. 
 
 The Pentagon is mulling whether to halt or delay arms exports. 
 
 But as leaders in Washington mull their options, Americans overwhelmingly support staying out of the unrest, according to a recent United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll. 
 
 Almost eight in 10 Americans (78%) said the United States should "mostly stay out of events" in Egypt, according to the poll. But 16% said the U.S. should "do more" to end the violence. 
 
 The desire to stay out of Egypt's affairs might be connected to the fact that a majority of Americans feel what happens in the country isn't very important to U.S. interests. 
 
 According to a Pew Research Center poll, 61% of Americans say what happens in Egypt is somewhat important or not important, while 36% say it is very important. 
 
 But ultimately, it's up to Egyptians to find a peaceful resolution between the military-backed interim government and those who want Morsy back. 
 
 "The role the United States had tried to play as mediator between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood to try to find some kind of compromise is now moot," said Wright, the Middle East analyst. "There's not much the United States can do." 
 
 CNN's Elise Labott, Barbara Starr, Greg Botelho and Mohammed Tawfeeq contributed to this report.
– President Obama interrupted his vacation today to condemn the violence in Egypt and announce that the US is canceling joint military exercises with the nation, reports CNN. "Our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual while civilians are being killed in the streets," said Obama in his brief address this morning. The move likely won't do much to appease critics who think the White House should be far more aggressive and, say, cut off its $1.3 billion in US military aid. But this is the "first concrete American response," notes the New York Times. "We appreciate the complexity of the situation," said Obama. While conceding that Mohamed Morsi's government wasn't exactly a pillar of democracy, Obama said the military should not have used force to oust him. A peaceful political solution was still possible immediately after the ouster, but yesterday's violence shows that military leaders instead chose a "more dangerous path." The president called for the newly declared state of emergency to be lifted and asked "people who are protesting to do so peacefully." He spoke as the official death toll passed the 500 milestone, a figure certain to rise. The AP reports that Morsi supporters set fire to two government buildings today in Giza, home to the pyramids. The city is next to Cairo.