{{President Barack Obama has asked two senior Republican senators to travel to Egypt to meet with its military leaders and the opposition, as Cairo’s allies struggle with how to address the turmoil convulsing the country.}}<\/p>\n
Senator John McCain and Lindsey Graham, both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, hope to travel to Egypt next week, Graham said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“The president reached out to us, and I said obviously I’d be glad to go,” Graham told reporters outside the Senate. “We want to deliver a unified message that killing the opposition is becoming more and more like a coup” and to encourage the military to move toward holding elections.<\/p>\n
He said specifics of the trip, including with whom he and McCain would meet, had not yet been worked out.<\/p>\n
McCain and Graham, two of the Senate’s most influential voices on foreign policy matters, have at times been harsh critics of Obama’s foreign policy. The White House has recently been reaching out to them on a range of issues.<\/p>\n
U.S. officials have been grappling with how to respond to the situation in Egypt since its elected Islamist president, Mohamed Mursi, was ousted by the military on July 3.<\/p>\n
In particular, they have struggled with how to handle the $1.55 billion in mostly military aid Washington sends to Cairo each year. Egypt has long been an important U.S. ally in a tumultuous region and officials in Washington value their ties to its military leaders, many of whom have studied in the United States.<\/p>\n
U.S. law bars sending aid to countries in which there has been a military coup, and Obama administration officials have been scrambling to talk about events in Egypt without using the word.<\/p>\n
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