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On ElBaradei And Other Thoughts On Egypt
Reading through the comments we all seem to agree that there was a military coup in Egypt and that it was, seen from a pure democratic standpoint, illegitimate in that it did not follow the law.
Now I for one have always been willing to consider illegitimate means when confronting authorities, especially right-wing neoliberal ones like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Be that through unsanctioned demonstrations, some clashes with police forces or whatever. There are projects that deserve such resistance and in some case such resistance has been successful. Legitimacy is thereby not the core question to me. Discussing legitimacy will also change nothing on the ground. The coup is done. Get over with it.
What we can do though is analyze the situation and how it came about. We can learn from it. Morsi came to power through elections with a rather small margin over the candidate of the old regime. It was obvious and foreseeable that he would be hindered in government by the old establishment. He should have recognized that from the get-go and should have acted accordingly. Unless large scale brutal force is used change in a complex society will only come in small steps.
At the beginning Morsi made peace with the army. The army in Egypt is a somewhat parallel society that has, at the higher officer ranks, lots of privileges and makes a lot of money. It is involved in all kinds of civilian businesses. That is a fact of life in Egypt and is, unless there is a real revolution, unlikely to change in the near future. Morsi considered this and when the army insisted on having its privileges written into the new constitution he agreed.
But Morsi did not really try to win the bureaucracy to his side. He did increase its wages (which is economically not sustainable) but that bribe was not enough. Over 80 years the state had been the enemy of the Brotherhood. Now the Brotherhood was supposed to lead it. There was distrust and paranoia on both sides and the first steps should have been to remove that distrust and to cooperate. Unfortunately that did not happen. Instead of elevating people from the establishment that could have helped him Morsi (or the MB) insisted on putting rather incompetent MB followers into leading bureaucratic positions.
The “renaissance” Morsi had promised for his first 100 days never got off the ground. There was no viable economic program visible and little execution. Egypt needed money and Morsi went around all possible donors and tried to get as much as possible. While doing this he sold out important foreign policy positions and did this in a rather amateurish way. That was the point that in the end pushed the army to intervene:
[R]elations between Mursi and his new generals deteriorated within months of his inauguration. Even Mursi’s apparent success in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip irked the military.
“Mursi’s intervention in the Gaza war made Egypt guarantee that Hamas would not carry out attacks on Israel. Which threatens Egyptian national security, because what if Hamas did? It could prompt Israel to retaliate against us,” the security source said.
Mursi also talked loosely about possible Egyptian participation in a jihad (holy war) to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, and raised the prospect of military action over a Nile River dam in Ethiopia. As a result, distrust of him grew in Egypt’s high command, which saw him as recklessly risking their involvement in conflicts without properly consulting and respecting the generals.
“It reached a point where we began to be worried about putting important national security reports in front of someone we perceived as a threat to national security,” the security source said.
The generals do have a point here. When the head of state runs around selling commitments that require military means there needs to be at least some consultation. Calling for Jihad in Syria to get money from Qatar while the Egyptian army fights such Jihdaists in the Sinai was really, really stupid.
Now some say that the army would have been incapable of taking down Morsi without foreign help. The army has run the Egyptian state for the last 60 years, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak were all officers. In a certain sense the Egyptian army is the state. It has smart and capable officers. It has intelligence services. It has financial means. It has over the years learned how to play the amateurs leading the State Department. Many people in Eygpt were also fed up with Morsi. At least some of the public support for the coup was certainly genuine and not just paid for claqueures. Whoever thinks that the Egyptian military needed U.S. help to plan and execute this coup should explain how it was able to run the country for 60 years in the first place.
My impression is that Washington was very split over the question of a coup. It wasn’t really happy with Morsi even while Morsi was not avers to U.S. policy. But it also did not want to ruin its long time neoconned/Wilsonian project of “spreading democracy”. It was told of the coup plans but tried to avoid its execution. In the end, I believe, the Egyptian generals simply had enough and created the facts on the ground. Washington now has to adopt to them. The cacophony of opinions about the coup, pro and contra, coming out of Washington these days supports this view.
Today Mohammed ElBaradei was sworn in as prime minister of Egypt. In his time at the IAEA ElBaradei has shown that he is no pushover. But is he capable of being prime minister? ElBaradei has no real constituency in Egypt but that is, I believe, an advantage as he will not have to cater to any special group. Unlike Morsi he knows how to play hard core international politics and that may be valuable in getting out of the economic mess the country is in.
The problems Egypt has are manifold and huge: poverty, unemployment, lack of water, lack of arable land, lack of investment and a very uneven wealth distribution. ElBaradei will try to tackle them all. It is unlikely that he will solve any of them but he may be able to take the first steps towards a better future. It will be a job where he will get no love but a lot of criticism and hate. In a year or two, should he survive that long, he will be burned (out) and will be replaced. I admire that he is putting himself knowingly into this impossible position.
“People at MoonOfAlabama would rather see Egypt as a US colony than see it ruled by the MB, even if the MB wins more votes than the opposition in every election. That’s shameful and you should think about why that is. The answer cannot be pleasant.’
Arnold, you are beginning to sound like a troll. You are better than that.
You have made your point and, for those who missed school Civics classes, your explanation of the relationship between popular sovereignty and elections must have been enlightening. By now the point will have sunk in, so let us drop it.
As to Egypt being a US colony: no it isn’t.
The US wields enormous influence there, but not as much as a million people in Tahrir Square. And much less than the US government wields in Britain or Germany. The US wields great influence in many countries, as Evo Morales will attest.
The same is true of the army: the US pays it, essentially not to threaten Israel, and it doesn’t threaten Israel. It pays the army because if it didn’t someone else would. Or the Army might start trying to increase its popularity by standing up to the US. Or throw its weight around in Sudan or Libya, or Yemen. The way that Nasser did.
The Egyptian army is being paid to do nothing, which is very different from being paid to, for example, invade Syria or, as the Wall Street Journal wants, to become Pinochet on the Nile. It might consider that but it will cost much more and there is no guarantee that the men would agree to it.
Penny:
“Just two months ago, Secretary of State John Kerry approved $1.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Egypt – the second largest recipient of such help after Israel.”
There is nothing new about this, Penny is there? Except that Kerry is now the Secretary of State.
“In the past, American aid to Egypt has included armored personnel carriers, helicopters, anti-aircraft missiles, surveillance systems, fighter jets and tanks, as well as training as the U.S. poured more than $70 billion in military and economic aid into Egypt since 1948.”
To put this into context it helps to bear in mind that, from 1952 until the mid seventies, Egypt was neutral and received most of its arms and training from countries other than the US. It was certainly not a US colony under Nasser.
“On Wednesday, the same military ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi”
That would be a little more than a year after they installed him, in your terms. In fact they declined to maintain him in power by using force against the tens of millions protesting against him.
The US is very powerful but it controls very little.
I am sure that Washington is far from happy about what has been going on: it fears real popular uprisings. This is a distraction, just as the troubles in Turkey are, from its campaigns against Iraq, Syria and Iran.
Obama’s foreign policy is falling apart: Jordan isn’t looking too good either, Yemen is wobbling again. And there is still no treaty with Karzai. South America is up in arms, how long will the Brazilians continue to prop up the neo-Duvalier regime in Haiti? The news tonight is that the NSA is spying on Brazil too, which puts the pro US media in Latin America (one of the CIA’s prized assets) in a very embarrassing position. Then there is Libya…
It must be music to Washington’s ears to come to these blogs and learn how the world dances to Yankee Doodle: with luck, they tell each other, these bloggers, like Arnold and Penny, may help convince Americans that we know what we are doing, that we aren’t wasting their tax dollars while our dreams of Empire fade.
Posted by: bevin | Jul 7 2013 2:45 utc | 46
As a politician with the top bottle-washer post, ex-president of the Freedom and Justice party, Morsi made alliances that were counter-nature, and too many of them.
Parts of the old Mubarak regime, the Army, USisr, Qatar…
To be fair, while one can espouse the new broom sweeps clean approach, on the ground and in the country itself, one often has to deal with that sh*t, and integrate or tolerate old elements. (i realise i am using cleaning metaphors, i’ll try for a few more.)
At the same time, as ex-leader, president, of the MB, he sought to brother-ize, sorry for the neologism, the country, by all and any means -nominating those regional guvs was really over the top-, and would not play the democratic game of reaching out to local political opponents, integrating some, forming political alliances over circumstancial issues, and so forth.
He ignored 50% of the voters and a higher % of citizens.
This, in itself, was bound to lead to disaster.
Add in that he seems self-satisfied, old-fashioned, boring and pig-headed and has little political experience (as W types like myself would see it.)
Some ways back I used the image of Morsi as King and some objected to it, he is elected by the ppl, yada yada. But Egypt ain’t Norway, and this is the way Kings behave. Or at least modern-day Kings – who seek alliances with power, money, banking, with social conservatism and religious values, plus minimal social aid, keeping the populace at home in its place, etc. (Oh and with a wee bit of help from the street cleaners, the police and the judiciary..)
Political Islam is a joke, but a joke many want, or strategically prefer, to believe in. Before I’m accused of orientalism, if the ppl of Egypt want Sharia law (or whatever type of hyper-traditionalist method to regulate society) I don’t judge that to be inferior to for ex. the US new slavery system, the industrial-prison complex.
In Egypt, civil and ‘democratic’ institutions, as well as branches of Gvmt. (e.g. Ministry of Health..) or other, e.g. a teacher’s union, or whatever, or public-private partnerships, with *some* independent power (legislated or just bargaining, argumentative, power plays…), are weak or non-existent, and under Morsi, didn’t attain ‘nascent’ to use NYT vocabulary, stature.
So there’s that, a kind of structural issue, inherited from the past, but Morsi was, as a compromise candidate, representing the largest voting block, supposed to kick-start that kind of process. But No. So the top bottle-washer bears heavy responsibility and is at risk for being ousted.
In Egypt, the Army is not just National Defense, subsumed to a Government, but a prime and perhaps (?) supreme political and economic mover, power-house. The MB formed a pol. party (for obvious reasons, the vote..) the Army cannot, and doesn’t wish to, they can act alternatively front-stage or behind-the-curtains and there ain’t nobody to call them to account. (See the massive support from secularists etc., too naive..) Quarreling about semantics is trivia, but a military coup – officially it might seem to be so – is perhaps not the right term.
A powerful, unintegrated, independent, semi-rogue, section of society, invested with legacy power, part of a Shadow Gvmt. etc. is calling the shots. It moves when it is forced to act, only in its own interests, basically, acquiring a front-man that preserves its position.
So it plays the National Interest Card, the We Stop Violence Card. The MB crowd with Morsi as Top Organiser (with his US engineering management handbook) proved to be too clumsy and detested by too many.
Posted by: Noirette | Jul 7 2013 14:25 utc | 84
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