The Truth About Egypt
Michael J. Totten
15 August 2013
Egypt looks dodgier than ever right now.
Just six weeks after overthrowing the government in a military coup, the armed forces opened fire on civilians protesting the removal of President Mohammad Morsi and killed more than 500 people, prompting President Barack Obama to cancel joint American-Egyptian military drills.
Springtime never came to Cairo at all. In some ways, Egypt is right back where it was when Hosni Mubarak still ruled the country. The political scene is exactly the same. Two illiberal titansa military regime and an Islamist oppositionare battling it out. But in other ways, Egypt is in worse shape now than it was. Its more chaotic, more violent. Its economy is imploding, its people increasingly desperate.
I recently interviewed Eric Trager, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Hes a real expert on Egypt and has been more consistently right than just about anyone. He called out the Muslim Brotherhood as an inherently authoritarian organization while scores of other supposed experts falsely pimped it as moderate. And contrary to claims from the opposing camp, that the army restored democracy with its coup, he saw the recent bloody unpleasantness coming well in advance.
I spoke to him before this weeks massacre happened, but its clear from his remarks that he suspected something like it was coming.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/truth-about-egypt
CJCRANE
(18,184 posts)BadtotheboneBob
(413 posts)And pretty much validates what I think about how the administration has handled the situation, i.e. Badly. Tunisia and Libya, too. Additionally, anyone who thinks that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate institution should read this. They are not! They are religious totalitarians!
JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)...as they try to make the Muslim Brotherhood supporters of Morsi look like valiant defenders of freedom, constantly prating about the "overthrow of the first freely elected democratic president of Egypt" and the valiant defense of democracy being waged on the streets of Cairo against the military coup.
They don't mention that just a few weeks ago a far larger number of Egyptians were in the streets protesting against Morsi and the Islamist government, and they fail to observe that the Egyptian Army has the support of a far larger portion of the Egyption people than does Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood.
proverbialwisdom
(4,959 posts)JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)The content is grim, as are the implications for an informed public, but the network itself is hilarious in its display of ignorance and bias as it calls upon one "expert" after another to spout bullshit.
Warpy
(110,913 posts)I wondered if the appointment of El Baradei, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, signaled some reluctance on the part of the army to step back in. According to Trager, that was the case.
Unfortunately, the military always knew what the Muslim Brotherhood was so violence was likely unavoidable. Morsi was not going to serve out a term, get defeated, and go away quietly. That's not what religious nuts do. That Morsi had lost control of the whole process as the bureaucratic infrastructure fragmented was news to me, although I'm not terribly surprised. He was more interested in remaking the country than governing it.
I just hope we're not looking at our ugly future. Our country is certainly polarized as working people have been put under more and more stress. It's not going to take much to turn it all violent.
It's infuriating because it is as preventable here as it was unpreventable in Egypt.
ConcernedCanuk
(13,509 posts).
.
.
I hope y'all hang off until I'm dead,
Canada is sure to suffer as well.
I don't wanna be around.
CC
Warpy
(110,913 posts)However, the whole mess is completely unsustainable. It can't last much longer.
Don't worry about the spillover. The mess down here will allow Canada to rein in its own crazy people once the mushy middle sees what their end game really is.
Having terrible time, wish I was there.
JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)I think this country has reached the point where peaceful return of governance to the people is no longer possible, and that the explosion is coming soon. The governing class of both parties are no longer even pretending, no longer even trying to make their lies believable, no longer even trying to conceal the graft. Such is their level of control that they are not afraid of the governed.
Like a previous commenter, I have been taking comfort in thinking that the status quo will last my lifetime, but I'm no longer sure that it will,. I Think things may come unglued while I am still here, and I am 70 years old.
Igel
(35,198 posts)I always have. Sometimes he's saying that's that flout the party line, so to speak--"Pallywood"-type stuff.
On occasion he's wrong, but he's good at digging and fairly independent. (It's just that there are DUers who think if you agree with them you're great and always have been, but if you disagree with them you're evil sockpuppets of death--there can be only one.) I think he got started in Lebanon or Iraq, independent and then issued a call for support.
Anyway, I think Trager has failed to define a term. "Democratic." The Brotherhood is certainly authoritarian, but it's possible to be authoritarian and closely run everything and still be democratic. They're familiar with running things under oppression, to be sure--and know it can be done. Morsi may have been high-ranking MB, but he wasn't just MB. There were differences. "Jihad is our way," but when pressed to call for jihad he didn't. When pressured to really oppress civil society, he acceded to the opposite and moderated the proposed legislation.
That's important. So Morsi had authoritarian views, fine; but his actions were pragmatic. The predictions were that that would quickly change and become truly oppressive.
What's key is if Morsi, when the inevitable election was pending in which he would lose power, would allow it to happen by allowing free campaigning and free elections. Everybody predicted "no".
What distresses me is that the coup and its justification are based less on what happened than on predictions.
One fact is a problem: He did step outside the constitutionally provided role. On the other hand, Trager's right--by the end, he had no authority. The courts had stripped every bit from him that he could have had, the Army stepped aside, and the bureaucracy also wasn't cooperating. This says little about Morsi. This says a lot about the democratic loyalties of the Army, the courts, and the bureaucracy. It says that if you want to elect somebody, first he has to be vetted by the courts, the Army, and the bureaucracy--then the petty electorate can choose among the acceptable candidates.
The electorate must not be uppity. Otherwise it leads to bad things. So there will be no democratic transition in Egypt; there will only be a guiding to a leader and parliament that the PTB--we use the term in the US, but the effect in the US is far more subtle and nuanced than the blatant exertion of power in Egypt by those groups--have decided they can use.
The contrarian in me says that the MB would have been good for Egypt. During Morsi's rule, had it been allowed, the entrenched powers would have lost ground. The MB might have gained ground, but not that much, not quickly. In the gap opened up perhaps a civil society that wasn't based in the mosque could have arisen.
Trager also points out, accurately I'd guess, that the MB has lost support and in any event only had 25% of the vote. That doesn't entail that the non-religious parties have gained support. Morsi got the top job because the parties *more* conservative than the MB threw their weight behind him. The question is, Will the rank-and-file Egyptian support those that caused Morsi's failure so they could gain power, believing that Morsi created the problem? Or will they consolidate against the remaining anti-government parties, most of which are even more hardline Muslim?