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.