UPDATES
Revolution in Egypt, again
Jul 4, 2013
Update from AIJAC
July 04, 2013
Number 07/13 #01
Today’s update looks at the Egyptian army’s suspension of the constitution and removal of the country’s first democratically elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. The army moved after Morsi failed to meet its demand to de-escalate the wave of anti-government demonstrations that had swept much of the country. For a brief explanation of what comes next, Frank Spano from the Investigative Project looks at the Egyptian army’s appointment of Adly Mansour as transitional leader until elections can be held. Mansour is the Chief Justice of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court.
First, Cairo-based journalist Evan Hill looks at what led to the current crisis. He pinpoints the Morsi Government’s winner takes all approach to ruling and an economy that completely tanked, resulted in a perfect storm, compelling millions of Egyptians onto the streets in numbers that dwarfed the Tahrir Square protests in 2011. Seeing that Morsi stood no chance to come back from that kind of public antipathy, the army moved. To read more, CLICK HERE.
Next up, Robert Satloff from the Washington Institute argues that the Obama Administration has a second chance to correct its flawed foreign policy on Egypt since the Arab Spring. He believes the US Administration’s main failing was not a lack of support for Hosni Mubarak but in the “overconfidence” placed by the United States in the Egyptian military’s capacity to handle the transfer from the old regime which, nonetheless, enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to hijack the elections. (Fellow Washington Institute analyst Simon Henderson looks at the financial aid provided to Egypt under Morsi by the Muslim Brotherhood-supporting Qatari government). To read more, CLICK HERE.
Finally, Israeli journalist Ben Caspit assesses the relationship between Jerusalem and Cairo since the Muslim Brotherhood took power. Despite widespread fear that three decades of peace between the two countries might fracture, the treaty has held. Caspit attributes this to the Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to leave it up to the military to deal with Israel. In the bargain, relations with the Egyptian military have been more cordial and responsive than even under former President Hosni Mubarak. For more, CLICK HERE.
Readers may also be interested in:
- Barry Rubin cannot understand why the Obama Administration is focusing its energies on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks when the region is in flames.
- Adam Garfinkle looks at why liberal democracy taking root in Egypt was always a long shot.
- Aayan Hirsi Ali who recently attended Shimon Peres’ Presidential Conference in Israel, argues that it doesn’t matter how much land Israel vacates, until the Palestinians and Arab states accept that compromise does not equal humiliation they will not make peace with Israel.
- Evelyn Gordon on an astute observation by Israeli historian Benny Morris that the delegitimisation of Israel today is akin to the campaign to weaken the democratic state of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.
- Elliott Abrams fears that the gaps between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are too large to justify the risks posed by US Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to restart peace talks.
- Some examples from the many stories and comments now appearing at AIJAC’s “Fresh AIR” blog:
How did we get here?
By Evan Hill
Tahrirsquared.com,
30th June, 2013
Families have stockpiled food and water, drivers have slept nights in petrol lines that snaked for city block after city block, and power cuts have rippled across the governorates and major cities. Half a dozen people have died in a spasm of violence that threatens to become a full-blown seizure when mass protests against President Mohamed Morsi break out today. Headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party have been attacked and burned throughout the Nile Delta, and his supporters’ rallies assaulted. Brotherhood toughs have banded together outside their offices wearing hard hats and makeshift shields and carrying homemade guns, ready to bludgeon or blow away what they fear is a coming wave of paid street thugs, the very embodiment of the counter-revolution.
Morsi’s opponents, sometimes backed by police, have also taken to the streets with firearms. Longtime revolutionaries uneasy with the violent omens and new, questionable allies have swallowed their hesitation and prepare to march on the presidential palace. As protesters sacked a Brotherhood office in Alexandria on Friday, someone in the crowd stabbed to death a young American teacher filming with his camera. In beleaguered Port Said, already subject to gun battles between citizens and police that killed dozens in March, a gas tank exploded at an anti-Morsi rally, reportedly killing one man and horribly maiming many more. Rumors flew that the protest had been bombed.
The country is gripped by expectant hysteria, like a Twilight Zone version of the hours before a World Cup final: nearly 90 million penned-in bystanders waiting on the opening whistle of a match to be played for keeps with guns and knives by partisans they hardly recognize as their own. One online commentator described the impending movement to oust Morsi on the one-year anniversary of his election as the birth of a new political order that may kill its mother. A journalist said it was as if Egypt’s body politic were rejecting a transplant and killing the nation in the process, a fledgling democracy’s auto-immune system gone haywire.
How did the country get here? How did the January 2011 uprising and its young, made-for-TV activists spin out into another zero-sum game for control? The story is complicated, and the strategic and tactical failures by both the secularist opposition and the Brotherhood so profoundly, majestically short-sighted and self-defeating that some have retreated into that most time-tested of rationales, the conspiracy, to explain how things could have gone so wrong, so fast. In their narrative, the crisis has been stage managed by the military, Egypt’s eminence grise and ultimate power-broker, beginning on the day in February 2011 when the generals opportunistically seized on the mass protests to quietly but forcefully escort Hosni Mubarak, his family and his cronies from the stage.
Like most conspiracy theories, the story has a seed of truth. In the heady days before and after the fall of Mubarak, the generals were taking everyone’s temperature. At one time or another, they chatted with many of the revolution’s most prominent instigators. They met with Ahmed Maher of the April 6th Movement. They met with representatives of the Brotherhood. Mohamed Aboul Ghar, who would soon found one of the only serious non-Islamist political parties in the country, once told me how he, the editor of Al Ahram newspaper, and two other men were called before five generals that March. One kept notes as they spoke; he was Abdelfattah el-Sisi, later promoted to defense minister and commander in chief under Morsi. As the meeting adjourned, one of the generals casually remarked that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – the military’s governing body – had in 2010 held a meeting without Mubarak, their commander, and decided not to allow the president’s son, Gamal, to complete a widely telegraphed succession during rigged presidential elections then scheduled for 2011.
“The plan [was], when Gamal is going to take over, they are going make a coup,” Aboul Ghar recalled.
The military’s disdain for Gamal and his generation of casually corrupt businessmen was well known
The only suitable dancing partner was the Muslim Brotherhood, an institution whose organizational, bureaucratic and service-providing experience was deeper than even that of the post-1956 militarized government itself.
And so the transition proceeded under military rule, directed by old, conservative men who learned their craft in a much different Egypt, half of them hoping to protect the old order, the other half pushing their project to usher in a new one. A temporary constitution orchestrated by the military and backed by the Brotherhood and their ultraconservative allies passed easily. Calls from people like Mohamed ElBaradei to create a liberal, progressive and inclusive new constitution from scratch, written by an independent body chosen by consensus, were ignored. As the year dragged on, poor Egyptians remained poor, and Mubarak sat uncharged with any crime in a military hospital. Protests against the SCAF’s reluctance to hand over power grew. They were supported by the Brotherhood, which likely saw in the unrest a useful tactic to keep their prime opponent on the back foot. In November 2011, the protests threatened to get out of control.
Security forces stormed Tahrir Square and brutally dispersed a small sit in of a few hundred people – almost all of them relatives of the revolution’s martyrs or those who had been wounded. They had been forgotten by the state, and they were angry. The revolutionaries were infuriated at the attack, and the result was the battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a five-day brawl with the riot police near the Square that left more than 40 civilians dead. The end of the fighting was precipitated by army intervention, a large concrete wall, and the arrival of a human chain of Muslim Brothers who cajoled or forced the protesters off the street.
The revolutionaries and marginalized young men and women who had joined the fight were filled with righteous anger. They felt betrayed. They had shed blood, supposedly on principle: to force police reform, to snatch some justice for those who had lost sons or daughters or their own health during the revolution, to hold the army to account for abuses under its rule. To them, the Brothers had thrown it all away for political gain. The temporary constitution had paved the way for parliamentary elections, due that month, a critical step that would help decide who ruled post-revolution Egypt. The Brotherhood could not let them be delayed. They went on to dominate the vote. Mohamed Mahmoud cleaved a rift between the two sides that never healed.
Over the course of the following months, it became obvious: The Brotherhood was dutifully, purposefully playing for keeps. Under the temporary constitution they helped to pass, the new parliament would be tasked with choosing those who would write a permanent founding document for post-revolution Egypt – the holy grail. The Brotherhood would go to almost any lengths to secure it. But what they saw as predictable hardball and democratic combat – which they were almost guaranteed to win – the opposition saw as a series of betrayals. The Brotherhood ran for more seats in parliament than some of their prominent members had first promised, then dominated the ministries once elected. The opposition hardly contested the second legislative election, for the less-powerful upper house, which was similarly dominated by the Brotherhood and Salafi parties. When the time came to select the constituent assembly, the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc helped gerrymander its 100-member make-up so that if push came to shove, the Brotherhood and its backers would not be outvoted. The Brotherhood pledged not to seek the presidency, then fielded a candidate, and fielded another – Morsi – when the first was disqualified. After Morsi took office, he failed to form – or could not find those willing to join – a cabinet that some had hoped would involve figures from across the political spectrum and prompt a national reconciliation. On the other side, the Brotherhood felt battered by the forces of the old regime. In the days before Morsi’s victory, the Supreme Constitutional Court used an electoral technicality to annul the lower house of parliament, erasing the Brotherhood’s gains and the country’s most crucial elected body. The court docketed a case to rule on the legitimacy of the constituent assembly. Other courts planned to rule on the legality of the Muslim Brotherhood itself. The entire project was now at risk.
The beginning of the end came in November, almost a year to the day after the Mohamed Mahmoud battle, when Morsi issued a package of sovereign decrees – just four months into his term – that essentially placed himself and assembly above judicial review. He and his allies argued that to stand by and do nothing would leave courts packed with Mubarak appointees free to undermine every step of the transition. The opposition, which may have once been inclined to agree, did not take his side. There had been too many betrayals, trust had evaporated. To the apparent surprise of Morsi’s administration, they were outraged.
Protesters took to the streets, calling the president a “new pharaoh.” The remaining liberals, progressives, leftists and Christians in the constituent assembly walked out. Morsi gave them two extra months to resolve their differences, but the assembly rushed the draft constitution through an overnight session and passed it. Opposition politicians increasingly believed that Morsi did not even call his own shots; that decisions of national import were made in the Brotherhood’s secretive Guidance Bureau. In Egypt’s new constitution, human rights groups and other critics saw gaping loopholes, lax protections for minorities, women and children, and troubling roles for religious oversight from conservative Sunni institutions.
The November crisis awakened the opposition to a harsh reality: they were going to keep losing this game, and the Brotherhood was not going to stop playing. The only solution was to change the rules. They united, for the first time, under the banner of the National Salvation Front. Their faltering effort to boycott and then vote down the new constitution failed, but the unexpectedly tight result convinced them that Morsi’s base was shrinking. Soon after, the NSF declared that it would boycott upcoming parliamentary elections unless many of the rules – written by the nearly wholly Islamist upper house – were changed. Improbably, filled with inflated egos and highly oppositional parties, the NSF held its front.
In December, after Morsi supporters ransacked a small sit-in outside the presidential palace and sparked deadly street battles, a more extreme wing of the opposition began to wield influence inside the coalition. They argued that Morsi had lost all legitimacy. He would have to go, voluntarily or by force. Violent anti-Brotherhood protests became the order of the day. Instability worked in the opposition’s favor. The economy was nose-diving, and security forces – becoming more openly vocal in their disdain for the Brotherhood government – could not or would not do their jobs. They took no pleasure facing the brunt of public ire for protecting a conservative, formerly clandestine movement that had stood against the state for so long. Social media and independent television stations lit up with images of Brotherhood members beating away protesters. Newspapers openly mocked Morsi’s government for its inability to right the ship. Rumors and anonymously sourced news reports spread about the Brotherhood’s ambitions to Islamize the army and police and carve off critical swaths of sovereign assets, such as those along the Suez Canal, to sell to benefactors in Qatar. Morsi – one of the more deeply uncharismatic leaders in modern Arab history – proved incapable of rallying anyone outside his base. Nearly everything he said became gas on the fire of the opposition’s anger.
The Brotherhood’s majoritarian behavior had, by then, convinced many secular-minded Egyptians that Morsi and his administration would not engage in any meaningful negotiation. Promises the president made were broken the next day. His allies – fiery preachers and hardcore Salafis – invoked sectarianism, religious purity and pan-Islamist ambitions on the campaign trail and elsewhere to rally his base, driving away the swing vote that had helped Morsi defeat former Air Force general and prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, and convincing many opponents that their deepest fears of the Brotherhood were justified. Rule-bound parliamentary competition became an almost farcical idea. The goal for many in the opposition became the end of the Brotherhood’s entire project itself.
Ministries were in quiet bureaucratic rebellion. Lower-level employees stalled paperwork. The courts ruled the upper house of parliament’s draft law to elect a new lower house unconstitutional and seemed ready to indefinitely stall the critical elections. Then, they ruled the upper house itself unconstitutional and took up a case to look into the legitimacy of Morsi’s own election victory. Morsi and the Brotherhood had, by now, almost fully retreated to their core supporters. He held a sectarianism-fueled stadium rally where he severed relations with Bashar al-Assad – after his administration encouraged Egyptians to go fight in the war.
As the swamp of a long summer and economic decline loomed, the NSF waited. Then came Tamarod.
The Rebel campaign has publicly put into simple terms what many in the political opposition have been thinking for months: Morsi is the target, he must go. And when he goes, the Brotherhood project ends. The constitution is rewritten; the country presses the reset button on the transition. It’s not hard to see the massive demonstrations taking shape in the coming days. Egypt is more polarized than at any point since the revolution. Many simply despise the Brotherhood. When a friend on Facebook lamented a video showing police and civilians working together to fire shotguns and tear gas at Brotherhood supporters in Alexandria, another person wrote: “Where is the sadness if the police [are] finally shooting the right target?”
The polarized vitriol made me think back to November 2010, two years before Morsi’s disastrous power grab and one year before Mohamed Mahmoud, a time when serious political conversation in Egypt revolved around the NDP’s 90-percent landslide parliamentary victory and Gamal’s coming succession. The idea of revolution wasn’t laughable; it wasn’t even considered.
That month, during the election, I went to Mansoura, in the Delta, to report. In those days, the Brotherhood were a journalist’s best friend: efficient, friendly, motivated, and the underdog. They were seen as clean and untainted by the repressive machinery of the NDP. Two Brothers met me the morning of the vote with a list of polling places and drove us around, receiving and making phone calls to determine where fraud was occurring. We pulled up to the Nasseriya Primary School in Mansoura’s central square, where police and civilians (and civilian-looking police) milled about. A man transferred a blurry cell-phone video to my phone.
It showed chaos and scuffling outside the school half an hour before. The staged fight was a time-tested NDP tactic: buy a microbus or two of underemployed neighborhood toughs and send them to brandish knives and cause a disturbance at a polling place. When those citizens naive enough to be in the voting queue fled, send your people inside to stuff the ballots. The practice had become so accepted by 2010 that the NDP men at the school had begun the ballot stuffing with no care for who was watching. A Brotherhood poll observer told me he had stood inside quietly for twenty minutes before they realized who he was and roughly escorted him outside.
At another poll not far away – also a school – the local NDP candidate, a square-jawed former policeman named Mohamed Bassiouny, threw his arm around the shoulder of one of our Brotherhood sources, a university computer science professor, and confidently assured us of Egypt’s flourishing democracy.
“The direction of this polling place is well known, and it’s for Mohamed Bassiouny,” he said.
After the sun set and the polls closed, the stuffed ballot boxes were driven by truck – surrounded by plainclothes men – to a stadium to be “counted.” Outside the stadium, at least a thousand protesters had gathered, organized by the Brotherhood. Cordoned on a stretch of the boulevard by police, they chanted for judges to do their job, for “reform and change,” and for God. They stayed hours after we left. Down the road in Mahalla, a similar crowd was beaten away by police batons.
It was this Brotherhood that you could see, at one time, working hand in hand with liberals, leftists and progressives to change and reform the decaying Egyptian security state. Now, cooperation seems impossible. Forces once perceived across the opposition as nefarious and possibly fatal to the revolution and Egypt’s health as a modern democracy – the NDP machine, the military-as-state – have in two short years found themselves called upon to protect that very revolution. Protesters silence others who attempt to chant against the military and paste photographs of camouflaged soldiers cradling infants on their cars.
Symbols of the old regime – Omar Suleiman’s aide, the son of one of the Delta’s longtime NDP power brokers – have re-emerged to rally supporters against the Brotherhood. The irony is not lost on many of the most dedicated revolutionaries, who wonder whether their causes have been hijacked and their voices marginalized once again. Others have set aside such concerns, saying the Brotherhood represents the more clear and present danger. The enduring legacy of the Morsi presidency, if he does not survive his four-year term, may be his inadvertent facilitation of the counter-revolution.
If Morsi falls or steps down, millions of Egyptians will view it as a victory. Perhaps he could be succeeded by a salvation government, and some kind of stable progress will ensue, though the Brotherhood can hardly be expected to quietly allow their project to dissolve around them, and it would likely mean the return of the army to a guiding role. Revolutions come with chaos. History teaches us that many years may pass before a country comes out of such upheaval with a working government, satisfactory justice and reconciliation, and a consensus about national identity. But even in such a positive scenario, it is hard not to view the first two and a half years of Egypt’s revolution as a series of squandered promises.
Evan Hill is a Cairo-based journalist.
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After Mohammad Morsi’s ouster, a second chance for Obama
By Robert Satloff
Washington Post, July 4 2013
The Egyptian army’s removal of President Mohammad Morsi gives the Obama administration that rarest of opportunities in foreign policy: a second chance. Getting it right will require understanding where we went wrong the first time.
To some, President Obama’s fundamental error in Egypt policy was to withdraw U.S. support from longtime leader Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, when thousands of Egyptians first filled Tahrir Square demanding change. In this view, the United States should have stuck by Mubarak, a firm opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood whose soldiers fought alongside U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf war and who remained faithful to Egypt’s peace with Israel despite isolation in the Arab world.
That view, however, is wrong. Mubarak’s failing health meant that his rule was coming to an end, a fact he refused to face, instead surrounding himself with sycophants and acting like a modern pharoah. To U.S. interests, Mubarak had become a liability, and there was a reasonable alternative.
In early 2011, that reasonable alternative was the army. Despite Obama’s soaring rhetoric about the Tahrir activists being the inheritors of Gandhi and King, U.S. policy was effectively to protect American interests in Egypt by supporting the transfer of power from an 82-year-old air force general to a 75-year-old army general, Field Marshal Mohammad Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Egypt’s army, the country’s most popular institution, could be counted on to navigate political storms and find a civilian captain to steer the ship of state to a safe harbor — or so we thought.
In retrospect, the United States’ great error was born in the over-confidence we placed in the generals. When the White House moved on to Libya and other issues, it effectively put Egypt policy on auto-pilot, deferring to the generals on the pace and content of their “democratic transition.” Everyone knew the generals’ real interest was devising a political system that preserved their power and wealth. But they were “our guys,” men who understood the overlap of U.S. and Egyptian regional security imperatives — keeping the peace with Israel — and they claimed to appreciate the need for a political process that was popular, participatory and legitimate.
This policy was logical. And because no one imagined the breadth of the generals’ political incompetence, it was tragically wrong.
In just 18 months, the all-powerful Tantawi supervised a political process in which a marginal player in the Tahrir Square drama — the Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive, ideological Islamist underground movement — methodically engineered a takeover of Egypt’s political system. Tantawi may have let this happen believing he had found a domestic political player to safeguard the generals’ institutional interests, but reality soon set in. The Brotherhood’s takeover — partly through the ballot box, partly through extralegal means — was so complete that, in August 2012, one of the first moves of its newly elected president was to fire Tantawi. In a region of inept politicians, Tantawi stands out.
Throughout this period, the United States saw the generals make mistake after mistake — including failing to draft a constitution, blessing an elections law designed to favor Islamists and giving vent to anti-Christian violence — but policymakers did little more than pose questions. In public, we often advanced the right principles — pluralism, religious freedom, economic reform — but we consistently deferred to the generals in private. Even when the transition took an anti-American turn in late 2011, with the arrest and trial of American employees of U.S. government-funded pro-democracy institutions, Washington was embarrassingly quiet.
Thus, the pattern was set for U.S. relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and its representative in the presidential palace, Morsi. Like the generals, the Brotherhood promised a measure of stability, including a frigid peace with Israel. All it asked was to be left alone. At a time when “nation building at home” was the new American motif, the offer from the Egyptian people’s newly elected representatives was alluring.
The administration may have talked the talk of economic reform, but U.S. emissaries went to Cairo with checks, as though the money would keep flowing no matter how ill-conceived the Brotherhood’s populist economic policies. The administration pronounced on civil rights and tolerance, but it did nothing when journalists, activists and ordinary citizens were jailed for blaspheming Islam or insulting the president. And there can be no greater riposte to the American retreat in support of civil society, reflected in our spinelessness in the face of the prosecution of U.S. pro-democracy activists, than the millions of Egyptians who have filled streets in recent days to take back their country.
No one should revel in the deposition of an elected leader by a country’s military, but this is not a coup in the traditional sense and does not merit a suspension of U.S. assistance our law prescribes. Indeed, the army almost surely prevented a bloodbath that would have scarred Egypt for decades. Inaction, not intervention, would have been criminal.
But with the army back in the saddle, it would also be criminal for the administration to repeat the errors of the last episode of military rule, when everything was sacrificed on the altar of stability. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the new white knight, is no more a democrat than Tantawi, though he may be more adept. Washington needs to be more adept, too.
Obama has frequently said that the United States rejects the false choice between democracy or stability; nowhere is this more apropos than Egypt. In the post-Morsi world, Washington should articulate a policy in which our support for Egypt is conditioned not just on Egypt’s peace with Israel but also on continual movement toward building a democratic, pluralistic government that pursues sound economic policies. In practice, that means engaging broadly with Egypt’s political spectrum, not just the ruling party; offering vocal defense of minorities (Christians, Bahai’s, Shiites); reinvesting in civil society programs that help Egyptians translate their street activism into political organization; and leading a disciplined “friends of Egypt” grouping that promises substantial financial assistance but only to cushion the impact of overdue cuts in bloated subsidies.
With the American brand sullied by the perception of deference to the Brotherhood, the next phase of U.S.-Egypt relations will be rocky. Our influence is diminished but still exists. Egypt is important. Let’s get it right this time.
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Israel Cautiously Optimistic On Egypt
Ben Caspit
Al-Monitor, July 2 2013
“Sixty-four long years passed until it became clear to the masses of Eastern Europe that communism couldn’t provide the goods. It couldn’t feed the citizens and provide for their welfare, so they had to find some other system.” This observation was given on June 30 by an experienced Israeli security official. He continued, “It took the masses in Egypt exactly one year to understand the same thing about the Muslim Brotherhood.” Then he added, “On the one hand, it’s rather impressive and encouraging, on the other hand, it could also be startling and terrifying.”
The Middle Eastern roller coaster is whizzing forward at full steam as it zigzags over the abyss. It goes up and down, speeds up and slows down, while the passengers who are stuck on board try not to look down or think ahead. Israel’s security establishment is in the initial stages of adapting to the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a scenario which has been considered the ultimate nightmare for as long as the Jewish state existed. Yet now, while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the security establishment are finally starting to get used to it, they are finding out that the “Ikhwan” — as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic slang — has already been cast onto the garbage heap of history. Today, Mohammed Morsi is president. Tomorrow, he could be pacing a cage right next to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, gaping all around him in terror, without understanding how it could have happened to him.
In the past few days, both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have played host to a number of security and diplomatic discussions about the situation in Egypt. The truth of the matter is that no one in Israel knows whether to celebrate or fret, whether to fear or hope. Only one thing is sure. They are leaving all the options open. Israel’s initial Pavlovian response after the surprising and rapid fall of Mubarak was to air out its emergency warehouses and determine whether it was at all possible to re-establish the “Southern Column” — a group of armored divisions that was dismantled after the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was reached. That was what then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman suggested to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example.
Then, after a few months had passed, it became quite clear that the demon wasn’t quite as bad as they had imagined. The Muslim Brotherhood stepped back from everything to do with Israel. Once Morsi was elected president, he transferred responsibility for Israel to the army. Having recognized their limitations — the “Brotherhood” could never maintain direct contact with Israel because of a religious prohibition — the movement’s leadership decided to act like they didn’t and feel like they did. They gave former Defense Minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi — and later Gen. Abdul Fatah al-Sisi — total freedom when it came to managing affairs along the border with Israel, while they went about dealing with their own business.
As strange as it may sound, security relations between Israel and Egypt improved significantly during this period. The IDF could hardly believe it. Security collaboration was tightened, and the Egyptians were seen taking vigorous action in response to intelligence they received from Israel — two phenomena that didn’t exist in the past. Senior defense official and Israeli envoy to Egypt Gen. Amos Gilad continued flying to Cairo — where he received considerable respect from his colleagues — and the new reality proved yet again that it is greater than all the commonly accepted horror stories serving as potential scenarios. There was a logical explanation to this as well. Under Mubarak, the Egyptian government was afraid of being portrayed as doing Israel’s bidding, fearing harsh criticism from the Muslim Brotherhood. Suddenly, there really was nothing to worry about. The Muslim Brotherhood was in power now, so that fear dissipated and was replaced by a relationship driven by issues.
Now, all of that is under threat too. Even before Mubarak was toppled, Israeli intelligence assessed that the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn’t “go the extra mile.” They wouldn’t try to seize control of the presidency immediately after Mubarak’s fall. “They know that the first president will take all the blame, and is identified as the person who shattered the Egyptian dream,” said intelligence sources in Israel. “They’ll let someone else get elected to the presidency, let him break his head over it, and then they’ll appear as saviors.”
This assessment was debunked, but not because Israel lacked quality intelligence. Quite the contrary: the intelligence was accurate. The Muslim Brotherhood itself admits that it had no intention of running for the presidency, but then the scent of authority wafted into their nostrils, and the drunken thrill of power spread through their bones. They simply could not resist the temptation. “It was a fatal strategic error of historic significance, from which there was no way back,” Israeli observers now say. The “Brothers” themselves also recognize the scope of their mistake. They stormed the presidency and conquered it, never imagining that their downfall would be so rapid, so intense, so brutal.
Now all that’s left for the Muslim Brotherhood to do is pick up the pieces. At the same time, this is also no small blow to US foreign policy, which proved its shortsightedness yet again by making some awkward decisions. US President Barack Obama and his staff decided to gamble on the Muslim Brotherhood during their first term in office. When it seemed Mubarak was about to fall, they sent messengers, established contacts and made it quite clear that they have no problem with an Islamist government — as radical as it may be — as long as all agreements are kept, as long as none of the tools are broken.
This US policy proved to be a tactical success. The fact is that Morsi maintained Egypt’s foreign policy and avoided shaking it up unnecessarily, even keeping the peace agreement with Israel. But in the wake of this tactical success came a strategic breakdown. Once again, for the second time in a year, the Americans lost their anchor in Cairo. They now watch as the Egyptians topple the very government that they wanted to see respected, which leaves the Americans in a bind and needing to start from scratch.
What will happen? That’s the most disturbing question of all. If Morsi fails, how will the next president in line succeed? Who will have the magical formula to feed almost 90 million hungry people each morning, provide hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year, revitalize tourism and industry and contend with the spread of corruption, raging violence, shrinking credit and depleted foreign currency reserves? No one has yet come up with a plan to create a new Egypt overnight.
Whoever agrees to be the next president of Egypt will be either brave or crazy or both. Meanwhile, in Israel at least, people are trying to focus on the cup that is half full. The Islamist extremists suffered a huge blow. The spirit of real democracy, openness and liberalism is blowing through the streets of Cairo. This is a harsh blow to Hamas as well, and to all the other extremists in our region, regardless of whom they might be. “No matter how we look at it, nothing really bad for us can come out of this,” says one Israeli intelligence source. On the other hand, the last time this happened, everyone in Israel thought that nothing good could come of it for us, and something good actually did come out of it. So the truth is that there is no way of knowing.
Ben Caspit is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse. He is also a senior columnist and political analyst for Israeli newspapers, and has a daily radio show and regular TV shows on politics and Israel.
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Revolution in Egypt, again
July 04, 2013
Number 07/13 #01
Today’s update looks at the Egyptian army’s suspension of the constitution and removal of the country’s first democratically elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamad Morsi. The army moved after Morsi failed to meet its demand to de-escalate the wave of violent anti-government demonstrations that had swept much of the country. For a brief explanation of what comes next, Frank Spano from the Investigative Project looks at the Egyptian army’s appointment of Adly Mansour as transitional leader until elections can be held. Mansour is the Chief Justice of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court.
First, Cairo-based journalist Evan Hill looks at what led to the current crisis. He pinpoints the Morsi Government’s winner takes all approach to ruling and an economy that completely tanked resulted in a perfect storm, compelling millions of Egyptians onto the streets in numbers that dwarfed the Tahrir Square protests in 2011. Seeing that Morsi stood no chance to come back from that kind of public antipathy, the army moved. To read more, CLICK HERE.
Next up, Robert Satloff from the Washington Institute argues that the Obama Administration has a second chance to correct its flawed foreign policy on Egypt since the Arab Spring. He believes the Administration’s main failing was not a lack of support for Hosni Mubarak but in the “overconfidence” placed by the United States in the Egyptian military’s capacity to handle the transfer from the old regime which enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to hijack the elections. (Fellow Washington Institute analyst Simon Henderson looks at the financial support provided to Egypt under Morsi by the Muslim Brothehood-aligned Qatari government). To read more, CLICK HERE.
Finally, Israeli journalist Ben Caspit assesses the relationship between Jerusalem and Cairo since the Muslim Brotherhood took power. Despite widespread fear that three decades of peace between the two countries might fracture, the treaty has held. Caspit attributes this to the Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to leave it up to the military to deal with Israel. In the bargain, relations with the Egyptian military have been more cordial and responsive than even under former President Hosni Mubarak. For more, CLICK HERE.
Readers may also be interested in:
- Barry Rubin – who predicted before former president Hosni Mubarak was deposed over two years ago – that policy missteps by the US would lead to another government upheaval in Egypt.
- Adam Garfinkle looks at why liberal democracy taking root in Egypt was always a long shot.
- Aayan Hirsi Ali who recently attended Shimon Peres’ Presidential Conference in Israel, argues that it doesn’t matter how much land Israel vacates, until the Palestinians and Arab states accept that compromise does not equal humiliation they will not make peace with Israel.
- Evelyn Gordon on an astute observation by Israeli historian Benny Morris that the delegitimisation of Israel today is akin to the campaign to weaken the democratic state of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.
- Elliot Abrams fears that the gaps between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are too large to justify the risks posed by US Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to restart peace talks.
- Some examples from the many stories and comments now appearing at AIJAC’s “Fresh AIR” blog:
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How did we get here?
By Evan Hill,
Tahrirsquared.com,
30th June, 2013
Families have stockpiled food and water, drivers have slept nights in petrol lines that snaked for city block after city block, and power cuts have rippled across the governorates and major cities. Half a dozen people have died in a spasm of violence that threatens to become a full-blown seizure when mass protests against President Mohamed Morsi break out today. Headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party have been attacked and burned throughout the Nile Delta, and his supporters’ rallies assaulted. Brotherhood toughs have banded together outside their offices wearing hard hats and makeshift shields and carrying homemade guns, ready to bludgeon or blow away what they fear is a coming wave of paid street thugs, the very embodiment of the counter-revolution.
Morsi’s opponents, sometimes backed by police, have also taken to the streets with firearms. Longtime revolutionaries uneasy with the violent omens and new, questionable allies have swallowed their hesitation and prepare to march on the presidential palace. As protesters sacked a Brotherhood office in Alexandria on Friday, someone in the crowd stabbed to death a young American teacher filming with his camera. In beleaguered Port Said, already subject to gun battles between citizens and police that killed dozens in March, a gas tank exploded at an anti-Morsi rally, reportedly killing one man and horribly maiming many more. Rumors flew that the protest had been bombed.
The country is gripped by expectant hysteria, like a Twilight Zone version of the hours before a World Cup final: nearly 90 million penned-in bystanders waiting on the opening whistle of a match to be played for keeps with guns and knives by partisans they hardly recognize as their own. One online commentator described the impending movement to oust Morsi on the one-year anniversary of his election as the birth of a new political order that may kill its mother. A journalist said it was as if Egypt’s body politic were rejecting a transplant and killing the nation in the process, a fledgling democracy’s auto-immune system gone haywire.
How did the country get here? How did the January 2011 uprising and its young, made-for-TV activists spin out into another zero-sum game for control? The story is complicated, and the strategic and tactical failures by both the secularist opposition and the Brotherhood so profoundly, majestically short-sighted and self-defeating that some have retreated into that most time-tested of rationales, the conspiracy, to explain how things could have gone so wrong, so fast. In their narrative, the crisis has been stage managed by the military, Egypt’s eminence grise and ultimate power-broker, beginning on the day in February 2011 when the generals opportunistically seized on the mass protests to quietly but forcefully escort Hosni Mubarak, his family and his cronies from the stage.
Like most conspiracy theories, the story has a seed of truth. In the heady days before and after the fall of Mubarak, the generals were taking everyone’s temperature. At one time or another, they chatted with many of the revolution’s most prominent instigators. They met with Ahmed Maher of the April 6th Movement. They met with representatives of the Brotherhood. Mohamed Aboul Ghar, who would soon found one of the only serious non-Islamist political parties in the country, once told me how he, the editor of Al Ahram newspaper, and two other men were called before five generals that March. One kept notes as they spoke; he was Abdelfattah el-Sisi, later promoted to defense minister and commander in chief under Morsi. As the meeting adjourned, one of the generals casually remarked that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – the military’s governing body – had in 2010 held a meeting without Mubarak, their commander, and decided not to allow the president’s son, Gamal, to complete a widely telegraphed succession during rigged presidential elections then scheduled for 2011.
“The plan [was], when Gamal is going to take over, they are going make a coup,” Aboul Ghar recalled.
The military’s disdain for Gamal and his generation of casually corrupt businessmen was well known
The only suitable dancing partner was the Muslim Brotherhood, an institution whose organizational, bureaucratic and service-providing experience was deeper than even that of the post-1956 militarized government itself.
And so the transition proceeded under military rule, directed by old, conservative men who learned their craft in a much different Egypt, half of them hoping to protect the old order, the other half pushing their project to usher in a new one. A temporary constitution orchestrated by the military and backed by the Brotherhood and their ultraconservative allies passed easily. Calls from people like Mohamed ElBaradei to create a liberal, progressive and inclusive new constitution from scratch, written by an independent body chosen by consensus, were ignored. As the year dragged on, poor Egyptians remained poor, and Mubarak sat uncharged with any crime in a military hospital. Protests against the SCAF’s reluctance to hand over power grew. They were supported by the Brotherhood, which likely saw in the unrest a useful tactic to keep their prime opponent on the back foot. In November 2011, the protests threatened to get out of control.
Security forces stormed Tahrir Square and brutally dispersed a small sit in of a few hundred people – almost all of them relatives of the revolution’s martyrs or those who had been wounded. They had been forgotten by the state, and they were angry. The revolutionaries were infuriated at the attack, and the result was the battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a five-day brawl with the riot police near the Square that left more than 40 civilians dead. The end of the fighting was precipitated by army intervention, a large concrete wall, and the arrival of a human chain of Muslim Brothers who cajoled or forced the protesters off the street.
The revolutionaries and marginalized young men and women who had joined the fight were filled with righteous anger. They felt betrayed. They had shed blood, supposedly on principle: to force police reform, to snatch some justice for those who had lost sons or daughters or their own health during the revolution, to hold the army to account for abuses under its rule. To them, the Brothers had thrown it all away for political gain. The temporary constitution had paved the way for parliamentary elections, due that month, a critical step that would help decide who ruled post-revolution Egypt. The Brotherhood could not let them be delayed. They went on to dominate the vote. Mohamed Mahmoud cleaved a rift between the two sides that never healed.
Over the course of the following months, it became obvious: The Brotherhood was dutifully, purposefully playing for keeps. Under the temporary constitution they helped to pass, the new parliament would be tasked with choosing those who would write a permanent founding document for post-revolution Egypt – the holy grail. The Brotherhood would go to almost any lengths to secure it. But what they saw as predictable hardball and democratic combat – which they were almost guaranteed to win – the opposition saw as a series of betrayals. The Brotherhood ran for more seats in parliament than some of their prominent members had first promised, then dominated the ministries once elected. The opposition hardly contested the second legislative election, for the less-powerful upper house, which was similarly dominated by the Brotherhood and Salafi parties. When the time came to select the constituent assembly, the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc helped gerrymander its 100-member make-up so that if push came to shove, the Brotherhood and its backers would not be outvoted. The Brotherhood pledged not to seek the presidency, then fielded a candidate, and fielded another – Morsi – when the first was disqualified. After Morsi took office, he failed to form – or could not find those willing to join – a cabinet that some had hoped would involve figures from across the political spectrum and prompt a national reconciliation. On the other side, the Brotherhood felt battered by the forces of the old regime. In the days before Morsi’s victory, the Supreme Constitutional Court used an electoral technicality to annul the lower house of parliament, erasing the Brotherhood’s gains and the country’s most crucial elected body. The court docketed a case to rule on the legitimacy of the constituent assembly. Other courts planned to rule on the legality of the Muslim Brotherhood itself. The entire project was now at risk.
The beginning of the end came in November, almost a year to the day after the Mohamed Mahmoud battle, when Morsi issued a package of sovereign decrees – just four months into his term – that essentially placed himself and assembly above judicial review. He and his allies argued that to stand by and do nothing would leave courts packed with Mubarak appointees free to undermine every step of the transition. The opposition, which may have once been inclined to agree, did not take his side. There had been too many betrayals, trust had evaporated. To the apparent surprise of Morsi’s administration, they were outraged.
Protesters took to the streets, calling the president a “new pharaoh.” The remaining liberals, progressives, leftists and Christians in the constituent assembly walked out. Morsi gave them two extra months to resolve their differences, but the assembly rushed the draft constitution through an overnight session and passed it. Opposition politicians increasingly believed that Morsi did not even call his own shots; that decisions of national import were made in the Brotherhood’s secretive Guidance Bureau. In Egypt’s new constitution, human rights groups and other critics saw gaping loopholes, lax protections for minorities, women and children, and troubling roles for religious oversight from conservative Sunni institutions.
The November crisis awakened the opposition to a harsh reality: they were going to keep losing this game, and the Brotherhood was not going to stop playing. The only solution was to change the rules. They united, for the first time, under the banner of the National Salvation Front. Their faltering effort to boycott and then vote down the new constitution failed, but the unexpectedly tight result convinced them that Morsi’s base was shrinking. Soon after, the NSF declared that it would boycott upcoming parliamentary elections unless many of the rules – written by the nearly wholly Islamist upper house – were changed. Improbably, filled with inflated egos and highly oppositional parties, the NSF held its front.
In December, after Morsi supporters ransacked a small sit-in outside the presidential palace and sparked deadly street battles, a more extreme wing of the opposition began to wield influence inside the coalition. They argued that Morsi had lost all legitimacy. He would have to go, voluntarily or by force. Violent anti-Brotherhood protests became the order of the day. Instability worked in the opposition’s favor. The economy was nose-diving, and security forces – becoming more openly vocal in their disdain for the Brotherhood government – could not or would not do their jobs. They took no pleasure facing the brunt of public ire for protecting a conservative, formerly clandestine movement that had stood against the state for so long. Social media and independent television stations lit up with images of Brotherhood members beating away protesters. Newspapers openly mocked Morsi’s government for its inability to right the ship. Rumors and anonymously sourced news reports spread about the Brotherhood’s ambitions to Islamize the army and police and carve off critical swaths of sovereign assets, such as those along the Suez Canal, to sell to benefactors in Qatar. Morsi – one of the more deeply uncharismatic leaders in modern Arab history – proved incapable of rallying anyone outside his base. Nearly everything he said became gas on the fire of the opposition’s anger.
The Brotherhood’s majoritarian behavior had, by then, convinced many secular-minded Egyptians that Morsi and his administration would not engage in any meaningful negotiation. Promises the president made were broken the next day. His allies – fiery preachers and hardcore Salafis – invoked sectarianism, religious purity and pan-Islamist ambitions on the campaign trail and elsewhere to rally his base, driving away the swing vote that had helped Morsi defeat former Air Force general and prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, and convincing many opponents that their deepest fears of the Brotherhood were justified. Rule-bound parliamentary competition became an almost farcical idea. The goal for many in the opposition became the end of the Brotherhood’s entire project itself.
Ministries were in quiet bureaucratic rebellion. Lower-level employees stalled paperwork. The courts ruled the upper house of parliament’s draft law to elect a new lower house unconstitutional and seemed ready to indefinitely stall the critical elections. Then, they ruled the upper house itself unconstitutional and took up a case to look into the legitimacy of Morsi’s own election victory. Morsi and the Brotherhood had, by now, almost fully retreated to their core supporters. He held a sectarianism-fueled stadium rally where he severed relations with Bashar al-Assad – after his administration encouraged Egyptians to go fight in the war.
As the swamp of a long summer and economic decline loomed, the NSF waited. Then came Tamarod.
The Rebel campaign has publicly put into simple terms what many in the political opposition have been thinking for months: Morsi is the target, he must go. And when he goes, the Brotherhood project ends. The constitution is rewritten; the country presses the reset button on the transition. It’s not hard to see the massive demonstrations taking shape in the coming days. Egypt is more polarized than at any point since the revolution. Many simply despise the Brotherhood. When a friend on Facebook lamented a video showing police and civilians working together to fire shotguns and tear gas at Brotherhood supporters in Alexandria, another person wrote: “Where is the sadness if the police [are] finally shooting the right target?”
The polarized vitriol made me think back to November 2010, two years before Morsi’s disastrous power grab and one year before Mohamed Mahmoud, a time when serious political conversation in Egypt revolved around the NDP’s 90-percent landslide parliamentary victory and Gamal’s coming succession. The idea of revolution wasn’t laughable; it wasn’t even considered.
That month, during the election, I went to Mansoura, in the Delta, to report. In those days, the Brotherhood were a journalist’s best friend: efficient, friendly, motivated, and the underdog. They were seen as clean and untainted by the repressive machinery of the NDP. Two Brothers met me the morning of the vote with a list of polling places and drove us around, receiving and making phone calls to determine where fraud was occurring. We pulled up to the Nasseriya Primary School in Mansoura’s central square, where police and civilians (and civilian-looking police) milled about. A man transferred a blurry cell-phone video to my phone.
It showed chaos and scuffling outside the school half an hour before. The staged fight was a time-tested NDP tactic: buy a microbus or two of underemployed neighborhood toughs and send them to brandish knives and cause a disturbance at a polling place. When those citizens naive enough to be in the voting queue fled, send your people inside to stuff the ballots. The practice had become so accepted by 2010 that the NDP men at the school had begun the ballot stuffing with no care for who was watching. A Brotherhood poll observer told me he had stood inside quietly for twenty minutes before they realized who he was and roughly escorted him outside.
At another poll not far away – also a school – the local NDP candidate, a square-jawed former policeman named Mohamed Bassiouny, threw his arm around the shoulder of one of our Brotherhood sources, a university computer science professor, and confidently assured us of Egypt’s flourishing democracy.
“The direction of this polling place is well known, and it’s for Mohamed Bassiouny,” he said.
After the sun set and the polls closed, the stuffed ballot boxes were driven by truck – surrounded by plainclothes men – to a stadium to be “counted.” Outside the stadium, at least a thousand protesters had gathered, organized by the Brotherhood. Cordoned on a stretch of the boulevard by police, they chanted for judges to do their job, for “reform and change,” and for God. They stayed hours after we left. Down the road in Mahalla, a similar crowd was beaten away by police batons.
It was this Brotherhood that you could see, at one time, working hand in hand with liberals, leftists and progressives to change and reform the decaying Egyptian security state. Now, cooperation seems impossible. Forces once perceived across the opposition as nefarious and possibly fatal to the revolution and Egypt’s health as a modern democracy – the NDP machine, the military-as-state – have in two short years found themselves called upon to protect that very revolution. Protesters silence others who attempt to chant against the military and paste photographs of camouflaged soldiers cradling infants on their cars.
Symbols of the old regime – Omar Suleiman’s aide, the son of one of the Delta’s longtime NDP power brokers – have re-emerged to rally supporters against the Brotherhood. The irony is not lost on many of the most dedicated revolutionaries, who wonder whether their causes have been hijacked and their voices marginalized once again. Others have set aside such concerns, saying the Brotherhood represents the more clear and present danger. The enduring legacy of the Morsi presidency, if he does not survive his four-year term, may be his inadvertent facilitation of the counter-revolution.
If Morsi falls or steps down, millions of Egyptians will view it as a victory. Perhaps he could be succeeded by a salvation government, and some kind of stable progress will ensue, though the Brotherhood can hardly be expected to quietly allow their project to dissolve around them, and it would likely mean the return of the army to a guiding role. Revolutions come with chaos. History teaches us that many years may pass before a country comes out of such upheaval with a working government, satisfactory justice and reconciliation, and a consensus about national identity. But even in such a positive scenario, it is hard not to view the first two and a half years of Egypt’s revolution as a series of squandered promises.
Evan Hill is a Cairo-based journalist.
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After Mohammad Morsi’s ouster, a second chance for Obama
By Robert Satloff
Washington Post, July 4 2013.
The Egyptian army’s removal of President Mohammad Morsi gives the Obama administration that rarest of opportunities in foreign policy: a second chance. Getting it right will require understanding where we went wrong the first time.
To some, President Obama’s fundamental error in Egypt policy was to withdraw U.S. support from longtime leader Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, when thousands of Egyptians first filled Tahrir Square demanding change. In this view, the United States should have stuck by Mubarak, a firm opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood whose soldiers fought alongside U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf war and who remained faithful to Egypt’s peace with Israel despite isolation in the Arab world.
That view, however, is wrong. Mubarak’s failing health meant that his rule was coming to an end, a fact he refused to face, instead surrounding himself with sycophants and acting like a modern pharoah. To U.S. interests, Mubarak had become a liability, and there was a reasonable alternative.
In early 2011, that reasonable alternative was the army. Despite Obama’s soaring rhetoric about the Tahrir activists being the inheritors of Gandhi and King, U.S. policy was effectively to protect American interests in Egypt by supporting the transfer of power from an 82-year-old air force general to a 75-year-old army general, Field Marshal Mohammad Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Egypt’s army, the country’s most popular institution, could be counted on to navigate political storms and find a civilian captain to steer the ship of state to a safe harbor — or so we thought.
In retrospect, the United States’ great error was born in the over-confidence we placed in the generals. When the White House moved on to Libya and other issues, it effectively put Egypt policy on auto-pilot, deferring to the generals on the pace and content of their “democratic transition.” Everyone knew the generals’ real interest was devising a political system that preserved their power and wealth. But they were “our guys,” men who understood the overlap of U.S. and Egyptian regional security imperatives — keeping the peace with Israel — and they claimed to appreciate the need for a political process that was popular, participatory and legitimate.
This policy was logical. And because no one imagined the breadth of the generals’ political incompetence, it was tragically wrong.
In just 18 months, the all-powerful Tantawi supervised a political process in which a marginal player in the Tahrir Square drama — the Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive, ideological Islamist underground movement — methodically engineered a takeover of Egypt’s political system. Tantawi may have let this happen believing he had found a domestic political player to safeguard the generals’ institutional interests, but reality soon set in. The Brotherhood’s takeover — partly through the ballot box, partly through extralegal means — was so complete that, in August 2012, one of the first moves of its newly elected president was to fire Tantawi. In a region of inept politicians, Tantawi stands out.
Throughout this period, the United States saw the generals make mistake after mistake — including failing to draft a constitution, blessing an elections law designed to favor Islamists and giving vent to anti-Christian violence — but policymakers did little more than pose questions. In public, we often advanced the right principles — pluralism, religious freedom, economic reform — but we consistently deferred to the generals in private. Even when the transition took an anti-American turn in late 2011, with the arrest and trial of American employees of U.S. government-funded pro-democracy institutions, Washington was embarrassingly quiet.
Thus, the pattern was set for U.S. relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and its representative in the presidential palace, Morsi. Like the generals, the Brotherhood promised a measure of stability, including a frigid peace with Israel. All it asked was to be left alone. At a time when “nation building at home” was the new American motif, the offer from the Egyptian people’s newly elected representatives was alluring.
The administration may have talked the talk of economic reform, but U.S. emissaries went to Cairo with checks, as though the money would keep flowing no matter how ill-conceived the Brotherhood’s populist economic policies. The administration pronounced on civil rights and tolerance, but it did nothing when journalists, activists and ordinary citizens were jailed for blaspheming Islam or insulting the president. And there can be no greater riposte to the American retreat in support of civil society, reflected in our spinelessness in the face of the prosecution of U.S. pro-democracy activists, than the millions of Egyptians who have filled streets in recent days to take back their country.
No one should revel in the deposition of an elected leader by a country’s military, but this is not a coup in the traditional sense and does not merit a suspension of U.S. assistance our law prescribes. Indeed, the army almost surely prevented a bloodbath that would have scarred Egypt for decades. Inaction, not intervention, would have been criminal.
But with the army back in the saddle, it would also be criminal for the administration to repeat the errors of the last episode of military rule, when everything was sacrificed on the altar of stability. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the new white knight, is no more a democrat than Tantawi, though he may be more adept. Washington needs to be more adept, too.
Obama has frequently said that the United States rejects the false choice between democracy or stability; nowhere is this more apropos than Egypt. In the post-Morsi world, Washington should articulate a policy in which our support for Egypt is conditioned not just on Egypt’s peace with Israel but also on continual movement toward building a democratic, pluralistic government that pursues sound economic policies. In practice, that means engaging broadly with Egypt’s political spectrum, not just the ruling party; offering vocal defense of minorities (Christians, Bahai’s, Shiites); reinvesting in civil society programs that help Egyptians translate their street activism into political organization; and leading a disciplined “friends of Egypt” grouping that promises substantial financial assistance but only to cushion the impact of overdue cuts in bloated subsidies.
With the American brand sullied by the perception of deference to the Brotherhood, the next phase of U.S.-Egypt relations will be rocky. Our influence is diminished but still exists. Egypt is important. Let’s get it right this time.
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Israel Cautiously Optimistic On Egypt
Ben Caspit,
Al-Monitor, July 2 2013
“Sixty-four long years passed until it became clear to the masses of Eastern Europe that communism couldn’t provide the goods. It couldn’t feed the citizens and provide for their welfare, so they had to find some other system.” This observation was given on June 30 by an experienced Israeli security official. He continued, “It took the masses in Egypt exactly one year to understand the same thing about the Muslim Brotherhood.” Then he added, “On the one hand, it’s rather impressive and encouraging, on the other hand, it could also be startling and terrifying.”
The Middle Eastern roller coaster is whizzing forward at full steam as it zigzags over the abyss. It goes up and down, speeds up and slows down, while the passengers who are stuck on board try not to look down or think ahead. Israel’s security establishment is in the initial stages of adapting to the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a scenario which has been considered the ultimate nightmare for as long as the Jewish state existed. Yet now, while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the security establishment are finally starting to get used to it, they are finding out that the “Ikhwan” — as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic slang — has already been cast onto the garbage heap of history. Today, Mohammed Morsi is president. Tomorrow, he could be pacing a cage right next to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, gaping all around him in terror, without understanding how it could have happened to him.
In the past few days, both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have played host to a number of security and diplomatic discussions about the situation in Egypt. The truth of the matter is that no one in Israel knows whether to celebrate or fret, whether to fear or hope. Only one thing is sure. They are leaving all the options open. Israel’s initial Pavlovian response after the surprising and rapid fall of Mubarak was to air out its emergency warehouses and determine whether it was at all possible to re-establish the “Southern Column” — a group of armored divisions that was dismantled after the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was reached. That was what then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman suggested to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example.
Then, after a few months had passed, it became quite clear that the demon wasn’t quite as bad as they had imagined. The Muslim Brotherhood stepped back from everything to do with Israel. Once Morsi was elected president, he transferred responsibility for Israel to the army. Having recognized their limitations — the “Brotherhood” could never maintain direct contact with Israel because of a religious prohibition — the movement’s leadership decided to act like they didn’t and feel like they did. They gave former Defense Minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi — and later Gen. Abdul Fatah al-Sisi — total freedom when it came to managing affairs along the border with Israel, while they went about dealing with their own business.
As strange as it may sound, security relations between Israel and Egypt improved significantly during this period. The IDF could hardly believe it. Security collaboration was tightened, and the Egyptians were seen taking vigorous action in response to intelligence they received from Israel — two phenomena that didn’t exist in the past. Senior defense official and Israeli envoy to Egypt Gen. Amos Gilad continued flying to Cairo — where he received considerable respect from his colleagues — and the new reality proved yet again that it is greater than all the commonly accepted horror stories serving as potential scenarios. There was a logical explanation to this as well. Under Mubarak, the Egyptian government was afraid of being portrayed as doing Israel’s bidding, fearing harsh criticism from the Muslim Brotherhood. Suddenly, there really was nothing to worry about. The Muslim Brotherhood was in power now, so that fear dissipated and was replaced by a relationship driven by issues.
Now, all of that is under threat too. Even before Mubarak was toppled, Israeli intelligence assessed that the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn’t “go the extra mile.” They wouldn’t try to seize control of the presidency immediately after Mubarak’s fall. “They know that the first president will take all the blame, and is identified as the person who shattered the Egyptian dream,” said intelligence sources in Israel. “They’ll let someone else get elected to the presidency, let him break his head over it, and then they’ll appear as saviors.”
This assessment was debunked, but not because Israel lacked quality intelligence. Quite the contrary: the intelligence was accurate. The Muslim Brotherhood itself admits that it had no intention of running for the presidency, but then the scent of authority wafted into their nostrils, and the drunken thrill of power spread through their bones. They simply could not resist the temptation. “It was a fatal strategic error of historic significance, from which there was no way back,” Israeli observers now say. The “Brothers” themselves also recognize the scope of their mistake. They stormed the presidency and conquered it, never imagining that their downfall would be so rapid, so intense, so brutal.
Now all that’s left for the Muslim Brotherhood to do is pick up the pieces. At the same time, this is also no small blow to US foreign policy, which proved its shortsightedness yet again by making some awkward decisions. US President Barack Obama and his staff decided to gamble on the Muslim Brotherhood during their first term in office. When it seemed Mubarak was about to fall, they sent messengers, established contacts and made it quite clear that they have no problem with an Islamist government — as radical as it may be — as long as all agreements are kept, as long as none of the tools are broken.
This US policy proved to be a tactical success. The fact is that Morsi maintained Egypt’s foreign policy and avoided shaking it up unnecessarily, even keeping the peace agreement with Israel. But in the wake of this tactical success came a strategic breakdown. Once again, for the second time in a year, the Americans lost their anchor in Cairo. They now watch as the Egyptians topple the very government that they wanted to see respected, which leaves the Americans in a bind and needing to start from scratch.
What will happen? That’s the most disturbing question of all. If Morsi fails, how will the next president in line succeed? Who will have the magical formula to feed almost 90 million hungry people each morning, provide hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year, revitalize tourism and industry and contend with the spread of corruption, raging violence, shrinking credit and depleted foreign currency reserves? No one has yet come up with a plan to create a new Egypt overnight.
Whoever agrees to be the next president of Egypt will be either brave or crazy or both. Meanwhile, in Israel at least, people are trying to focus on the cup that is half full. The Islamist extremists suffered a huge blow. The spirit of real democracy, openness and liberalism is blowing through the streets of Cairo. This is a harsh blow to Hamas as well, and to all the other extremists in our region, regardless of whom they might be. “No matter how we look at it, nothing really bad for us can come out of this,” says one Israeli intelligence source. On the other hand, the last time this happened, everyone in Israel thought that nothing good could come of it for us, and something good actually did come out of it. So the truth is that there is no way of knowing.
Ben Caspit is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse. He is also a senior columnist and political analyst for Israeli newspapers, and has a daily radio show and regular TV shows on politics and Israel.
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Revolution in Egypt, again
July 04, 2013
Number 07/13 #01
Today’s update looks at the Egyptian army’s suspension of the constitution and removal of the country’s first democratically elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamad Morsi. The army moved after Morsi failed to meet its demand to de-escalate the wave of violent anti-government demonstrations that had swept much of the country. For a brief explanation of what comes next, Frank Spano from the Investigative Project looks at the Egyptian army’s appointment of Adly Mansour as transitional leader until elections can be held. Mansour is the Chief Justice of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court.
First, Cairo-based journalist Evan Hill looks at what led to the current crisis. He pinpoints the Morsi Government’s winner takes all approach to ruling and an economy that completely tanked resulted in a perfect storm, compelling millions of Egyptians onto the streets in numbers that dwarfed the Tahrir Square protests in 2011. Seeing that Morsi stood no chance to come back from that kind of public antipathy, the army moved. To read more, CLICK HERE.
Next up, Robert Satloff from the Washington Institute argues that the Obama Administration has a second chance to correct its flawed foreign policy on Egypt since the Arab Spring. He believes the Administration’s main failing was not a lack of support for Hosni Mubarak but in the “overconfidence” placed by the United States in the Egyptian military’s capacity to handle the transfer from the old regime which enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to hijack the elections. (Fellow Washington Institute analyst Simon Henderson looks at the financial support provided to Egypt under Morsi by the Muslim Brothehood-aligned Qatari government). To read more, CLICK HERE.
Finally, Israeli journalist Ben Caspit assesses the relationship between Jerusalem and Cairo since the Muslim Brotherhood took power. Despite widespread fear that three decades of peace between the two countries might fracture, the treaty has held. Caspit attributes this to the Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to leave it up to the military to deal with Israel. In the bargain, relations with the Egyptian military have been more cordial and responsive than even under former President Hosni Mubarak. For more, CLICK HERE.
Readers may also be interested in:
- Barry Rubin – who predicted before former president Hosni Mubarak was deposed over two years ago – that policy missteps by the US would lead to another government upheaval in Egypt.
- Adam Garfinkle looks at why liberal democracy taking root in Egypt was always a long shot.
- Aayan Hirsi Ali who recently attended Shimon Peres’ Presidential Conference in Israel, argues that it doesn’t matter how much land Israel vacates, until the Palestinians and Arab states accept that compromise does not equal humiliation they will not make peace with Israel.
- Evelyn Gordon on an astute observation by Israeli historian Benny Morris that the delegitimisation of Israel today is akin to the campaign to weaken the democratic state of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.
- Elliot Abrams fears that the gaps between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are too large to justify the risks posed by US Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to restart peace talks.
- Some examples from the many stories and comments now appearing at AIJAC’s “Fresh AIR” blog:
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How did we get here?
By Evan Hill,
Tahrirsquared.com,
30th June, 2013
Families have stockpiled food and water, drivers have slept nights in petrol lines that snaked for city block after city block, and power cuts have rippled across the governorates and major cities. Half a dozen people have died in a spasm of violence that threatens to become a full-blown seizure when mass protests against President Mohamed Morsi break out today. Headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party have been attacked and burned throughout the Nile Delta, and his supporters’ rallies assaulted. Brotherhood toughs have banded together outside their offices wearing hard hats and makeshift shields and carrying homemade guns, ready to bludgeon or blow away what they fear is a coming wave of paid street thugs, the very embodiment of the counter-revolution.
Morsi’s opponents, sometimes backed by police, have also taken to the streets with firearms. Longtime revolutionaries uneasy with the violent omens and new, questionable allies have swallowed their hesitation and prepare to march on the presidential palace. As protesters sacked a Brotherhood office in Alexandria on Friday, someone in the crowd stabbed to death a young American teacher filming with his camera. In beleaguered Port Said, already subject to gun battles between citizens and police that killed dozens in March, a gas tank exploded at an anti-Morsi rally, reportedly killing one man and horribly maiming many more. Rumors flew that the protest had been bombed.
The country is gripped by expectant hysteria, like a Twilight Zone version of the hours before a World Cup final: nearly 90 million penned-in bystanders waiting on the opening whistle of a match to be played for keeps with guns and knives by partisans they hardly recognize as their own. One online commentator described the impending movement to oust Morsi on the one-year anniversary of his election as the birth of a new political order that may kill its mother. A journalist said it was as if Egypt’s body politic were rejecting a transplant and killing the nation in the process, a fledgling democracy’s auto-immune system gone haywire.
How did the country get here? How did the January 2011 uprising and its young, made-for-TV activists spin out into another zero-sum game for control? The story is complicated, and the strategic and tactical failures by both the secularist opposition and the Brotherhood so profoundly, majestically short-sighted and self-defeating that some have retreated into that most time-tested of rationales, the conspiracy, to explain how things could have gone so wrong, so fast. In their narrative, the crisis has been stage managed by the military, Egypt’s eminence grise and ultimate power-broker, beginning on the day in February 2011 when the generals opportunistically seized on the mass protests to quietly but forcefully escort Hosni Mubarak, his family and his cronies from the stage.
Like most conspiracy theories, the story has a seed of truth. In the heady days before and after the fall of Mubarak, the generals were taking everyone’s temperature. At one time or another, they chatted with many of the revolution’s most prominent instigators. They met with Ahmed Maher of the April 6th Movement. They met with representatives of the Brotherhood. Mohamed Aboul Ghar, who would soon found one of the only serious non-Islamist political parties in the country, once told me how he, the editor of Al Ahram newspaper, and two other men were called before five generals that March. One kept notes as they spoke; he was Abdelfattah el-Sisi, later promoted to defense minister and commander in chief under Morsi. As the meeting adjourned, one of the generals casually remarked that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – the military’s governing body – had in 2010 held a meeting without Mubarak, their commander, and decided not to allow the president’s son, Gamal, to complete a widely telegraphed succession during rigged presidential elections then scheduled for 2011.
“The plan [was], when Gamal is going to take over, they are going make a coup,” Aboul Ghar recalled.
The military’s disdain for Gamal and his generation of casually corrupt businessmen was well known
The only suitable dancing partner was the Muslim Brotherhood, an institution whose organizational, bureaucratic and service-providing experience was deeper than even that of the post-1956 militarized government itself.
And so the transition proceeded under military rule, directed by old, conservative men who learned their craft in a much different Egypt, half of them hoping to protect the old order, the other half pushing their project to usher in a new one. A temporary constitution orchestrated by the military and backed by the Brotherhood and their ultraconservative allies passed easily. Calls from people like Mohamed ElBaradei to create a liberal, progressive and inclusive new constitution from scratch, written by an independent body chosen by consensus, were ignored. As the year dragged on, poor Egyptians remained poor, and Mubarak sat uncharged with any crime in a military hospital. Protests against the SCAF’s reluctance to hand over power grew. They were supported by the Brotherhood, which likely saw in the unrest a useful tactic to keep their prime opponent on the back foot. In November 2011, the protests threatened to get out of control.
Security forces stormed Tahrir Square and brutally dispersed a small sit in of a few hundred people – almost all of them relatives of the revolution’s martyrs or those who had been wounded. They had been forgotten by the state, and they were angry. The revolutionaries were infuriated at the attack, and the result was the battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a five-day brawl with the riot police near the Square that left more than 40 civilians dead. The end of the fighting was precipitated by army intervention, a large concrete wall, and the arrival of a human chain of Muslim Brothers who cajoled or forced the protesters off the street.
The revolutionaries and marginalized young men and women who had joined the fight were filled with righteous anger. They felt betrayed. They had shed blood, supposedly on principle: to force police reform, to snatch some justice for those who had lost sons or daughters or their own health during the revolution, to hold the army to account for abuses under its rule. To them, the Brothers had thrown it all away for political gain. The temporary constitution had paved the way for parliamentary elections, due that month, a critical step that would help decide who ruled post-revolution Egypt. The Brotherhood could not let them be delayed. They went on to dominate the vote. Mohamed Mahmoud cleaved a rift between the two sides that never healed.
Over the course of the following months, it became obvious: The Brotherhood was dutifully, purposefully playing for keeps. Under the temporary constitution they helped to pass, the new parliament would be tasked with choosing those who would write a permanent founding document for post-revolution Egypt – the holy grail. The Brotherhood would go to almost any lengths to secure it. But what they saw as predictable hardball and democratic combat – which they were almost guaranteed to win – the opposition saw as a series of betrayals. The Brotherhood ran for more seats in parliament than some of their prominent members had first promised, then dominated the ministries once elected. The opposition hardly contested the second legislative election, for the less-powerful upper house, which was similarly dominated by the Brotherhood and Salafi parties. When the time came to select the constituent assembly, the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc helped gerrymander its 100-member make-up so that if push came to shove, the Brotherhood and its backers would not be outvoted. The Brotherhood pledged not to seek the presidency, then fielded a candidate, and fielded another – Morsi – when the first was disqualified. After Morsi took office, he failed to form – or could not find those willing to join – a cabinet that some had hoped would involve figures from across the political spectrum and prompt a national reconciliation. On the other side, the Brotherhood felt battered by the forces of the old regime. In the days before Morsi’s victory, the Supreme Constitutional Court used an electoral technicality to annul the lower house of parliament, erasing the Brotherhood’s gains and the country’s most crucial elected body. The court docketed a case to rule on the legitimacy of the constituent assembly. Other courts planned to rule on the legality of the Muslim Brotherhood itself. The entire project was now at risk.
The beginning of the end came in November, almost a year to the day after the Mohamed Mahmoud battle, when Morsi issued a package of sovereign decrees – just four months into his term – that essentially placed himself and assembly above judicial review. He and his allies argued that to stand by and do nothing would leave courts packed with Mubarak appointees free to undermine every step of the transition. The opposition, which may have once been inclined to agree, did not take his side. There had been too many betrayals, trust had evaporated. To the apparent surprise of Morsi’s administration, they were outraged.
Protesters took to the streets, calling the president a “new pharaoh.” The remaining liberals, progressives, leftists and Christians in the constituent assembly walked out. Morsi gave them two extra months to resolve their differences, but the assembly rushed the draft constitution through an overnight session and passed it. Opposition politicians increasingly believed that Morsi did not even call his own shots; that decisions of national import were made in the Brotherhood’s secretive Guidance Bureau. In Egypt’s new constitution, human rights groups and other critics saw gaping loopholes, lax protections for minorities, women and children, and troubling roles for religious oversight from conservative Sunni institutions.
The November crisis awakened the opposition to a harsh reality: they were going to keep losing this game, and the Brotherhood was not going to stop playing. The only solution was to change the rules. They united, for the first time, under the banner of the National Salvation Front. Their faltering effort to boycott and then vote down the new constitution failed, but the unexpectedly tight result convinced them that Morsi’s base was shrinking. Soon after, the NSF declared that it would boycott upcoming parliamentary elections unless many of the rules – written by the nearly wholly Islamist upper house – were changed. Improbably, filled with inflated egos and highly oppositional parties, the NSF held its front.
In December, after Morsi supporters ransacked a small sit-in outside the presidential palace and sparked deadly street battles, a more extreme wing of the opposition began to wield influence inside the coalition. They argued that Morsi had lost all legitimacy. He would have to go, voluntarily or by force. Violent anti-Brotherhood protests became the order of the day. Instability worked in the opposition’s favor. The economy was nose-diving, and security forces – becoming more openly vocal in their disdain for the Brotherhood government – could not or would not do their jobs. They took no pleasure facing the brunt of public ire for protecting a conservative, formerly clandestine movement that had stood against the state for so long. Social media and independent television stations lit up with images of Brotherhood members beating away protesters. Newspapers openly mocked Morsi’s government for its inability to right the ship. Rumors and anonymously sourced news reports spread about the Brotherhood’s ambitions to Islamize the army and police and carve off critical swaths of sovereign assets, such as those along the Suez Canal, to sell to benefactors in Qatar. Morsi – one of the more deeply uncharismatic leaders in modern Arab history – proved incapable of rallying anyone outside his base. Nearly everything he said became gas on the fire of the opposition’s anger.
The Brotherhood’s majoritarian behavior had, by then, convinced many secular-minded Egyptians that Morsi and his administration would not engage in any meaningful negotiation. Promises the president made were broken the next day. His allies – fiery preachers and hardcore Salafis – invoked sectarianism, religious purity and pan-Islamist ambitions on the campaign trail and elsewhere to rally his base, driving away the swing vote that had helped Morsi defeat former Air Force general and prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, and convincing many opponents that their deepest fears of the Brotherhood were justified. Rule-bound parliamentary competition became an almost farcical idea. The goal for many in the opposition became the end of the Brotherhood’s entire project itself.
Ministries were in quiet bureaucratic rebellion. Lower-level employees stalled paperwork. The courts ruled the upper house of parliament’s draft law to elect a new lower house unconstitutional and seemed ready to indefinitely stall the critical elections. Then, they ruled the upper house itself unconstitutional and took up a case to look into the legitimacy of Morsi’s own election victory. Morsi and the Brotherhood had, by now, almost fully retreated to their core supporters. He held a sectarianism-fueled stadium rally where he severed relations with Bashar al-Assad – after his administration encouraged Egyptians to go fight in the war.
As the swamp of a long summer and economic decline loomed, the NSF waited. Then came Tamarod.
The Rebel campaign has publicly put into simple terms what many in the political opposition have been thinking for months: Morsi is the target, he must go. And when he goes, the Brotherhood project ends. The constitution is rewritten; the country presses the reset button on the transition. It’s not hard to see the massive demonstrations taking shape in the coming days. Egypt is more polarized than at any point since the revolution. Many simply despise the Brotherhood. When a friend on Facebook lamented a video showing police and civilians working together to fire shotguns and tear gas at Brotherhood supporters in Alexandria, another person wrote: “Where is the sadness if the police [are] finally shooting the right target?”
The polarized vitriol made me think back to November 2010, two years before Morsi’s disastrous power grab and one year before Mohamed Mahmoud, a time when serious political conversation in Egypt revolved around the NDP’s 90-percent landslide parliamentary victory and Gamal’s coming succession. The idea of revolution wasn’t laughable; it wasn’t even considered.
That month, during the election, I went to Mansoura, in the Delta, to report. In those days, the Brotherhood were a journalist’s best friend: efficient, friendly, motivated, and the underdog. They were seen as clean and untainted by the repressive machinery of the NDP. Two Brothers met me the morning of the vote with a list of polling places and drove us around, receiving and making phone calls to determine where fraud was occurring. We pulled up to the Nasseriya Primary School in Mansoura’s central square, where police and civilians (and civilian-looking police) milled about. A man transferred a blurry cell-phone video to my phone.
It showed chaos and scuffling outside the school half an hour before. The staged fight was a time-tested NDP tactic: buy a microbus or two of underemployed neighborhood toughs and send them to brandish knives and cause a disturbance at a polling place. When those citizens naive enough to be in the voting queue fled, send your people inside to stuff the ballots. The practice had become so accepted by 2010 that the NDP men at the school had begun the ballot stuffing with no care for who was watching. A Brotherhood poll observer told me he had stood inside quietly for twenty minutes before they realized who he was and roughly escorted him outside.
At another poll not far away – also a school – the local NDP candidate, a square-jawed former policeman named Mohamed Bassiouny, threw his arm around the shoulder of one of our Brotherhood sources, a university computer science professor, and confidently assured us of Egypt’s flourishing democracy.
“The direction of this polling place is well known, and it’s for Mohamed Bassiouny,” he said.
After the sun set and the polls closed, the stuffed ballot boxes were driven by truck – surrounded by plainclothes men – to a stadium to be “counted.” Outside the stadium, at least a thousand protesters had gathered, organized by the Brotherhood. Cordoned on a stretch of the boulevard by police, they chanted for judges to do their job, for “reform and change,” and for God. They stayed hours after we left. Down the road in Mahalla, a similar crowd was beaten away by police batons.
It was this Brotherhood that you could see, at one time, working hand in hand with liberals, leftists and progressives to change and reform the decaying Egyptian security state. Now, cooperation seems impossible. Forces once perceived across the opposition as nefarious and possibly fatal to the revolution and Egypt’s health as a modern democracy – the NDP machine, the military-as-state – have in two short years found themselves called upon to protect that very revolution. Protesters silence others who attempt to chant against the military and paste photographs of camouflaged soldiers cradling infants on their cars.
Symbols of the old regime – Omar Suleiman’s aide, the son of one of the Delta’s longtime NDP power brokers – have re-emerged to rally supporters against the Brotherhood. The irony is not lost on many of the most dedicated revolutionaries, who wonder whether their causes have been hijacked and their voices marginalized once again. Others have set aside such concerns, saying the Brotherhood represents the more clear and present danger. The enduring legacy of the Morsi presidency, if he does not survive his four-year term, may be his inadvertent facilitation of the counter-revolution.
If Morsi falls or steps down, millions of Egyptians will view it as a victory. Perhaps he could be succeeded by a salvation government, and some kind of stable progress will ensue, though the Brotherhood can hardly be expected to quietly allow their project to dissolve around them, and it would likely mean the return of the army to a guiding role. Revolutions come with chaos. History teaches us that many years may pass before a country comes out of such upheaval with a working government, satisfactory justice and reconciliation, and a consensus about national identity. But even in such a positive scenario, it is hard not to view the first two and a half years of Egypt’s revolution as a series of squandered promises.
Evan Hill is a Cairo-based journalist.
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After Mohammad Morsi’s ouster, a second chance for Obama
By Robert Satloff
Washington Post, July 4 2013.
The Egyptian army’s removal of President Mohammad Morsi gives the Obama administration that rarest of opportunities in foreign policy: a second chance. Getting it right will require understanding where we went wrong the first time.
To some, President Obama’s fundamental error in Egypt policy was to withdraw U.S. support from longtime leader Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, when thousands of Egyptians first filled Tahrir Square demanding change. In this view, the United States should have stuck by Mubarak, a firm opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood whose soldiers fought alongside U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf war and who remained faithful to Egypt’s peace with Israel despite isolation in the Arab world.
That view, however, is wrong. Mubarak’s failing health meant that his rule was coming to an end, a fact he refused to face, instead surrounding himself with sycophants and acting like a modern pharoah. To U.S. interests, Mubarak had become a liability, and there was a reasonable alternative.
In early 2011, that reasonable alternative was the army. Despite Obama’s soaring rhetoric about the Tahrir activists being the inheritors of Gandhi and King, U.S. policy was effectively to protect American interests in Egypt by supporting the transfer of power from an 82-year-old air force general to a 75-year-old army general, Field Marshal Mohammad Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Egypt’s army, the country’s most popular institution, could be counted on to navigate political storms and find a civilian captain to steer the ship of state to a safe harbor — or so we thought.
In retrospect, the United States’ great error was born in the over-confidence we placed in the generals. When the White House moved on to Libya and other issues, it effectively put Egypt policy on auto-pilot, deferring to the generals on the pace and content of their “democratic transition.” Everyone knew the generals’ real interest was devising a political system that preserved their power and wealth. But they were “our guys,” men who understood the overlap of U.S. and Egyptian regional security imperatives — keeping the peace with Israel — and they claimed to appreciate the need for a political process that was popular, participatory and legitimate.
This policy was logical. And because no one imagined the breadth of the generals’ political incompetence, it was tragically wrong.
In just 18 months, the all-powerful Tantawi supervised a political process in which a marginal player in the Tahrir Square drama — the Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive, ideological Islamist underground movement — methodically engineered a takeover of Egypt’s political system. Tantawi may have let this happen believing he had found a domestic political player to safeguard the generals’ institutional interests, but reality soon set in. The Brotherhood’s takeover — partly through the ballot box, partly through extralegal means — was so complete that, in August 2012, one of the first moves of its newly elected president was to fire Tantawi. In a region of inept politicians, Tantawi stands out.
Throughout this period, the United States saw the generals make mistake after mistake — including failing to draft a constitution, blessing an elections law designed to favor Islamists and giving vent to anti-Christian violence — but policymakers did little more than pose questions. In public, we often advanced the right principles — pluralism, religious freedom, economic reform — but we consistently deferred to the generals in private. Even when the transition took an anti-American turn in late 2011, with the arrest and trial of American employees of U.S. government-funded pro-democracy institutions, Washington was embarrassingly quiet.
Thus, the pattern was set for U.S. relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and its representative in the presidential palace, Morsi. Like the generals, the Brotherhood promised a measure of stability, including a frigid peace with Israel. All it asked was to be left alone. At a time when “nation building at home” was the new American motif, the offer from the Egyptian people’s newly elected representatives was alluring.
The administration may have talked the talk of economic reform, but U.S. emissaries went to Cairo with checks, as though the money would keep flowing no matter how ill-conceived the Brotherhood’s populist economic policies. The administration pronounced on civil rights and tolerance, but it did nothing when journalists, activists and ordinary citizens were jailed for blaspheming Islam or insulting the president. And there can be no greater riposte to the American retreat in support of civil society, reflected in our spinelessness in the face of the prosecution of U.S. pro-democracy activists, than the millions of Egyptians who have filled streets in recent days to take back their country.
No one should revel in the deposition of an elected leader by a country’s military, but this is not a coup in the traditional sense and does not merit a suspension of U.S. assistance our law prescribes. Indeed, the army almost surely prevented a bloodbath that would have scarred Egypt for decades. Inaction, not intervention, would have been criminal.
But with the army back in the saddle, it would also be criminal for the administration to repeat the errors of the last episode of military rule, when everything was sacrificed on the altar of stability. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the new white knight, is no more a democrat than Tantawi, though he may be more adept. Washington needs to be more adept, too.
Obama has frequently said that the United States rejects the false choice between democracy or stability; nowhere is this more apropos than Egypt. In the post-Morsi world, Washington should articulate a policy in which our support for Egypt is conditioned not just on Egypt’s peace with Israel but also on continual movement toward building a democratic, pluralistic government that pursues sound economic policies. In practice, that means engaging broadly with Egypt’s political spectrum, not just the ruling party; offering vocal defense of minorities (Christians, Bahai’s, Shiites); reinvesting in civil society programs that help Egyptians translate their street activism into political organization; and leading a disciplined “friends of Egypt” grouping that promises substantial financial assistance but only to cushion the impact of overdue cuts in bloated subsidies.
With the American brand sullied by the perception of deference to the Brotherhood, the next phase of U.S.-Egypt relations will be rocky. Our influence is diminished but still exists. Egypt is important. Let’s get it right this time.
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Israel Cautiously Optimistic On Egypt
Ben Caspit,
Al-Monitor, July 2 2013
“Sixty-four long years passed until it became clear to the masses of Eastern Europe that communism couldn’t provide the goods. It couldn’t feed the citizens and provide for their welfare, so they had to find some other system.” This observation was given on June 30 by an experienced Israeli security official. He continued, “It took the masses in Egypt exactly one year to understand the same thing about the Muslim Brotherhood.” Then he added, “On the one hand, it’s rather impressive and encouraging, on the other hand, it could also be startling and terrifying.”
The Middle Eastern roller coaster is whizzing forward at full steam as it zigzags over the abyss. It goes up and down, speeds up and slows down, while the passengers who are stuck on board try not to look down or think ahead. Israel’s security establishment is in the initial stages of adapting to the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a scenario which has been considered the ultimate nightmare for as long as the Jewish state existed. Yet now, while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the security establishment are finally starting to get used to it, they are finding out that the “Ikhwan” — as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic slang — has already been cast onto the garbage heap of history. Today, Mohammed Morsi is president. Tomorrow, he could be pacing a cage right next to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, gaping all around him in terror, without understanding how it could have happened to him.
In the past few days, both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have played host to a number of security and diplomatic discussions about the situation in Egypt. The truth of the matter is that no one in Israel knows whether to celebrate or fret, whether to fear or hope. Only one thing is sure. They are leaving all the options open. Israel’s initial Pavlovian response after the surprising and rapid fall of Mubarak was to air out its emergency warehouses and determine whether it was at all possible to re-establish the “Southern Column” — a group of armored divisions that was dismantled after the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was reached. That was what then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman suggested to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example.
Then, after a few months had passed, it became quite clear that the demon wasn’t quite as bad as they had imagined. The Muslim Brotherhood stepped back from everything to do with Israel. Once Morsi was elected president, he transferred responsibility for Israel to the army. Having recognized their limitations — the “Brotherhood” could never maintain direct contact with Israel because of a religious prohibition — the movement’s leadership decided to act like they didn’t and feel like they did. They gave former Defense Minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi — and later Gen. Abdul Fatah al-Sisi — total freedom when it came to managing affairs along the border with Israel, while they went about dealing with their own business.
As strange as it may sound, security relations between Israel and Egypt improved significantly during this period. The IDF could hardly believe it. Security collaboration was tightened, and the Egyptians were seen taking vigorous action in response to intelligence they received from Israel — two phenomena that didn’t exist in the past. Senior defense official and Israeli envoy to Egypt Gen. Amos Gilad continued flying to Cairo — where he received considerable respect from his colleagues — and the new reality proved yet again that it is greater than all the commonly accepted horror stories serving as potential scenarios. There was a logical explanation to this as well. Under Mubarak, the Egyptian government was afraid of being portrayed as doing Israel’s bidding, fearing harsh criticism from the Muslim Brotherhood. Suddenly, there really was nothing to worry about. The Muslim Brotherhood was in power now, so that fear dissipated and was replaced by a relationship driven by issues.
Now, all of that is under threat too. Even before Mubarak was toppled, Israeli intelligence assessed that the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn’t “go the extra mile.” They wouldn’t try to seize control of the presidency immediately after Mubarak’s fall. “They know that the first president will take all the blame, and is identified as the person who shattered the Egyptian dream,” said intelligence sources in Israel. “They’ll let someone else get elected to the presidency, let him break his head over it, and then they’ll appear as saviors.”
This assessment was debunked, but not because Israel lacked quality intelligence. Quite the contrary: the intelligence was accurate. The Muslim Brotherhood itself admits that it had no intention of running for the presidency, but then the scent of authority wafted into their nostrils, and the drunken thrill of power spread through their bones. They simply could not resist the temptation. “It was a fatal strategic error of historic significance, from which there was no way back,” Israeli observers now say. The “Brothers” themselves also recognize the scope of their mistake. They stormed the presidency and conquered it, never imagining that their downfall would be so rapid, so intense, so brutal.
Now all that’s left for the Muslim Brotherhood to do is pick up the pieces. At the same time, this is also no small blow to US foreign policy, which proved its shortsightedness yet again by making some awkward decisions. US President Barack Obama and his staff decided to gamble on the Muslim Brotherhood during their first term in office. When it seemed Mubarak was about to fall, they sent messengers, established contacts and made it quite clear that they have no problem with an Islamist government — as radical as it may be — as long as all agreements are kept, as long as none of the tools are broken.
This US policy proved to be a tactical success. The fact is that Morsi maintained Egypt’s foreign policy and avoided shaking it up unnecessarily, even keeping the peace agreement with Israel. But in the wake of this tactical success came a strategic breakdown. Once again, for the second time in a year, the Americans lost their anchor in Cairo. They now watch as the Egyptians topple the very government that they wanted to see respected, which leaves the Americans in a bind and needing to start from scratch.
What will happen? That’s the most disturbing question of all. If Morsi fails, how will the next president in line succeed? Who will have the magical formula to feed almost 90 million hungry people each morning, provide hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year, revitalize tourism and industry and contend with the spread of corruption, raging violence, shrinking credit and depleted foreign currency reserves? No one has yet come up with a plan to create a new Egypt overnight.
Whoever agrees to be the next president of Egypt will be either brave or crazy or both. Meanwhile, in Israel at least, people are trying to focus on the cup that is half full. The Islamist extremists suffered a huge blow. The spirit of real democracy, openness and liberalism is blowing through the streets of Cairo. This is a harsh blow to Hamas as well, and to all the other extremists in our region, regardless of whom they might be. “No matter how we look at it, nothing really bad for us can come out of this,” says one Israeli intelligence source. On the other hand, the last time this happened, everyone in Israel thought that nothing good could come of it for us, and something good actually did come out of it. So the truth is that there is no way of knowing.
Ben Caspit is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse. He is also a senior columnist and political analyst for Israeli newspapers, and has a daily radio show and regular TV shows on politics and Israel.
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Revolution in Egypt, again
July 04, 2013
Number 07/13 #01
Today’s update looks at the Egyptian army’s suspension of the constitution and removal of the country’s first democratically elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamad Morsi. The army moved after Morsi failed to meet its demand to de-escalate the wave of violent anti-government demonstrations that had swept much of the country. For a brief explanation of what comes next, Frank Spano from the Investigative Project looks at the Egyptian army’s appointment of Adly Mansour as transitional leader until elections can be held. Mansour is the Chief Justice of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court.
First, Cairo-based journalist Evan Hill looks at what led to the current crisis. He pinpoints the Morsi Government’s winner takes all approach to ruling and an economy that completely tanked resulted in a perfect storm, compelling millions of Egyptians onto the streets in numbers that dwarfed the Tahrir Square protests in 2011. Seeing that Morsi stood no chance to come back from that kind of public antipathy, the army moved. To read more, CLICK HERE.
Next up, Robert Satloff from the Washington Institute argues that the Obama Administration has a second chance to correct its flawed foreign policy on Egypt since the Arab Spring. He believes the Administration’s main failing was not a lack of support for Hosni Mubarak but in the “overconfidence” placed by the United States in the Egyptian military’s capacity to handle the transfer from the old regime which enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to hijack the elections. (Fellow Washington Institute analyst Simon Henderson looks at the financial support provided to Egypt under Morsi by the Muslim Brothehood-aligned Qatari government). To read more, CLICK HERE.
Finally, Israeli journalist Ben Caspit assesses the relationship between Jerusalem and Cairo since the Muslim Brotherhood took power. Despite widespread fear that three decades of peace between the two countries might fracture, the treaty has held. Caspit attributes this to the Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to leave it up to the military to deal with Israel. In the bargain, relations with the Egyptian military have been more cordial and responsive than even under former President Hosni Mubarak. For more, CLICK HERE.
Readers may also be interested in:
- Barry Rubin – who predicted before former president Hosni Mubarak was deposed over two years ago – that policy missteps by the US would lead to another government upheaval in Egypt.
- Adam Garfinkle looks at why liberal democracy taking root in Egypt was always a long shot.
- Aayan Hirsi Ali who recently attended Shimon Peres’ Presidential Conference in Israel, argues that it doesn’t matter how much land Israel vacates, until the Palestinians and Arab states accept that compromise does not equal humiliation they will not make peace with Israel.
- Evelyn Gordon on an astute observation by Israeli historian Benny Morris that the delegitimisation of Israel today is akin to the campaign to weaken the democratic state of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.
- Elliot Abrams fears that the gaps between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are too large to justify the risks posed by US Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to restart peace talks.
- Some examples from the many stories and comments now appearing at AIJAC’s “Fresh AIR” blog:
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How did we get here?
By Evan Hill,
Tahrirsquared.com,
30th June, 2013
Families have stockpiled food and water, drivers have slept nights in petrol lines that snaked for city block after city block, and power cuts have rippled across the governorates and major cities. Half a dozen people have died in a spasm of violence that threatens to become a full-blown seizure when mass protests against President Mohamed Morsi break out today. Headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party have been attacked and burned throughout the Nile Delta, and his supporters’ rallies assaulted. Brotherhood toughs have banded together outside their offices wearing hard hats and makeshift shields and carrying homemade guns, ready to bludgeon or blow away what they fear is a coming wave of paid street thugs, the very embodiment of the counter-revolution.
Morsi’s opponents, sometimes backed by police, have also taken to the streets with firearms. Longtime revolutionaries uneasy with the violent omens and new, questionable allies have swallowed their hesitation and prepare to march on the presidential palace. As protesters sacked a Brotherhood office in Alexandria on Friday, someone in the crowd stabbed to death a young American teacher filming with his camera. In beleaguered Port Said, already subject to gun battles between citizens and police that killed dozens in March, a gas tank exploded at an anti-Morsi rally, reportedly killing one man and horribly maiming many more. Rumors flew that the protest had been bombed.
The country is gripped by expectant hysteria, like a Twilight Zone version of the hours before a World Cup final: nearly 90 million penned-in bystanders waiting on the opening whistle of a match to be played for keeps with guns and knives by partisans they hardly recognize as their own. One online commentator described the impending movement to oust Morsi on the one-year anniversary of his election as the birth of a new political order that may kill its mother. A journalist said it was as if Egypt’s body politic were rejecting a transplant and killing the nation in the process, a fledgling democracy’s auto-immune system gone haywire.
How did the country get here? How did the January 2011 uprising and its young, made-for-TV activists spin out into another zero-sum game for control? The story is complicated, and the strategic and tactical failures by both the secularist opposition and the Brotherhood so profoundly, majestically short-sighted and self-defeating that some have retreated into that most time-tested of rationales, the conspiracy, to explain how things could have gone so wrong, so fast. In their narrative, the crisis has been stage managed by the military, Egypt’s eminence grise and ultimate power-broker, beginning on the day in February 2011 when the generals opportunistically seized on the mass protests to quietly but forcefully escort Hosni Mubarak, his family and his cronies from the stage.
Like most conspiracy theories, the story has a seed of truth. In the heady days before and after the fall of Mubarak, the generals were taking everyone’s temperature. At one time or another, they chatted with many of the revolution’s most prominent instigators. They met with Ahmed Maher of the April 6th Movement. They met with representatives of the Brotherhood. Mohamed Aboul Ghar, who would soon found one of the only serious non-Islamist political parties in the country, once told me how he, the editor of Al Ahram newspaper, and two other men were called before five generals that March. One kept notes as they spoke; he was Abdelfattah el-Sisi, later promoted to defense minister and commander in chief under Morsi. As the meeting adjourned, one of the generals casually remarked that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – the military’s governing body – had in 2010 held a meeting without Mubarak, their commander, and decided not to allow the president’s son, Gamal, to complete a widely telegraphed succession during rigged presidential elections then scheduled for 2011.
“The plan [was], when Gamal is going to take over, they are going make a coup,” Aboul Ghar recalled.
The military’s disdain for Gamal and his generation of casually corrupt businessmen was well known
The only suitable dancing partner was the Muslim Brotherhood, an institution whose organizational, bureaucratic and service-providing experience was deeper than even that of the post-1956 militarized government itself.
And so the transition proceeded under military rule, directed by old, conservative men who learned their craft in a much different Egypt, half of them hoping to protect the old order, the other half pushing their project to usher in a new one. A temporary constitution orchestrated by the military and backed by the Brotherhood and their ultraconservative allies passed easily. Calls from people like Mohamed ElBaradei to create a liberal, progressive and inclusive new constitution from scratch, written by an independent body chosen by consensus, were ignored. As the year dragged on, poor Egyptians remained poor, and Mubarak sat uncharged with any crime in a military hospital. Protests against the SCAF’s reluctance to hand over power grew. They were supported by the Brotherhood, which likely saw in the unrest a useful tactic to keep their prime opponent on the back foot. In November 2011, the protests threatened to get out of control.
Security forces stormed Tahrir Square and brutally dispersed a small sit in of a few hundred people – almost all of them relatives of the revolution’s martyrs or those who had been wounded. They had been forgotten by the state, and they were angry. The revolutionaries were infuriated at the attack, and the result was the battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a five-day brawl with the riot police near the Square that left more than 40 civilians dead. The end of the fighting was precipitated by army intervention, a large concrete wall, and the arrival of a human chain of Muslim Brothers who cajoled or forced the protesters off the street.
The revolutionaries and marginalized young men and women who had joined the fight were filled with righteous anger. They felt betrayed. They had shed blood, supposedly on principle: to force police reform, to snatch some justice for those who had lost sons or daughters or their own health during the revolution, to hold the army to account for abuses under its rule. To them, the Brothers had thrown it all away for political gain. The temporary constitution had paved the way for parliamentary elections, due that month, a critical step that would help decide who ruled post-revolution Egypt. The Brotherhood could not let them be delayed. They went on to dominate the vote. Mohamed Mahmoud cleaved a rift between the two sides that never healed.
Over the course of the following months, it became obvious: The Brotherhood was dutifully, purposefully playing for keeps. Under the temporary constitution they helped to pass, the new parliament would be tasked with choosing those who would write a permanent founding document for post-revolution Egypt – the holy grail. The Brotherhood would go to almost any lengths to secure it. But what they saw as predictable hardball and democratic combat – which they were almost guaranteed to win – the opposition saw as a series of betrayals. The Brotherhood ran for more seats in parliament than some of their prominent members had first promised, then dominated the ministries once elected. The opposition hardly contested the second legislative election, for the less-powerful upper house, which was similarly dominated by the Brotherhood and Salafi parties. When the time came to select the constituent assembly, the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc helped gerrymander its 100-member make-up so that if push came to shove, the Brotherhood and its backers would not be outvoted. The Brotherhood pledged not to seek the presidency, then fielded a candidate, and fielded another – Morsi – when the first was disqualified. After Morsi took office, he failed to form – or could not find those willing to join – a cabinet that some had hoped would involve figures from across the political spectrum and prompt a national reconciliation. On the other side, the Brotherhood felt battered by the forces of the old regime. In the days before Morsi’s victory, the Supreme Constitutional Court used an electoral technicality to annul the lower house of parliament, erasing the Brotherhood’s gains and the country’s most crucial elected body. The court docketed a case to rule on the legitimacy of the constituent assembly. Other courts planned to rule on the legality of the Muslim Brotherhood itself. The entire project was now at risk.
The beginning of the end came in November, almost a year to the day after the Mohamed Mahmoud battle, when Morsi issued a package of sovereign decrees – just four months into his term – that essentially placed himself and assembly above judicial review. He and his allies argued that to stand by and do nothing would leave courts packed with Mubarak appointees free to undermine every step of the transition. The opposition, which may have once been inclined to agree, did not take his side. There had been too many betrayals, trust had evaporated. To the apparent surprise of Morsi’s administration, they were outraged.
Protesters took to the streets, calling the president a “new pharaoh.” The remaining liberals, progressives, leftists and Christians in the constituent assembly walked out. Morsi gave them two extra months to resolve their differences, but the assembly rushed the draft constitution through an overnight session and passed it. Opposition politicians increasingly believed that Morsi did not even call his own shots; that decisions of national import were made in the Brotherhood’s secretive Guidance Bureau. In Egypt’s new constitution, human rights groups and other critics saw gaping loopholes, lax protections for minorities, women and children, and troubling roles for religious oversight from conservative Sunni institutions.
The November crisis awakened the opposition to a harsh reality: they were going to keep losing this game, and the Brotherhood was not going to stop playing. The only solution was to change the rules. They united, for the first time, under the banner of the National Salvation Front. Their faltering effort to boycott and then vote down the new constitution failed, but the unexpectedly tight result convinced them that Morsi’s base was shrinking. Soon after, the NSF declared that it would boycott upcoming parliamentary elections unless many of the rules – written by the nearly wholly Islamist upper house – were changed. Improbably, filled with inflated egos and highly oppositional parties, the NSF held its front.
In December, after Morsi supporters ransacked a small sit-in outside the presidential palace and sparked deadly street battles, a more extreme wing of the opposition began to wield influence inside the coalition. They argued that Morsi had lost all legitimacy. He would have to go, voluntarily or by force. Violent anti-Brotherhood protests became the order of the day. Instability worked in the opposition’s favor. The economy was nose-diving, and security forces – becoming more openly vocal in their disdain for the Brotherhood government – could not or would not do their jobs. They took no pleasure facing the brunt of public ire for protecting a conservative, formerly clandestine movement that had stood against the state for so long. Social media and independent television stations lit up with images of Brotherhood members beating away protesters. Newspapers openly mocked Morsi’s government for its inability to right the ship. Rumors and anonymously sourced news reports spread about the Brotherhood’s ambitions to Islamize the army and police and carve off critical swaths of sovereign assets, such as those along the Suez Canal, to sell to benefactors in Qatar. Morsi – one of the more deeply uncharismatic leaders in modern Arab history – proved incapable of rallying anyone outside his base. Nearly everything he said became gas on the fire of the opposition’s anger.
The Brotherhood’s majoritarian behavior had, by then, convinced many secular-minded Egyptians that Morsi and his administration would not engage in any meaningful negotiation. Promises the president made were broken the next day. His allies – fiery preachers and hardcore Salafis – invoked sectarianism, religious purity and pan-Islamist ambitions on the campaign trail and elsewhere to rally his base, driving away the swing vote that had helped Morsi defeat former Air Force general and prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, and convincing many opponents that their deepest fears of the Brotherhood were justified. Rule-bound parliamentary competition became an almost farcical idea. The goal for many in the opposition became the end of the Brotherhood’s entire project itself.
Ministries were in quiet bureaucratic rebellion. Lower-level employees stalled paperwork. The courts ruled the upper house of parliament’s draft law to elect a new lower house unconstitutional and seemed ready to indefinitely stall the critical elections. Then, they ruled the upper house itself unconstitutional and took up a case to look into the legitimacy of Morsi’s own election victory. Morsi and the Brotherhood had, by now, almost fully retreated to their core supporters. He held a sectarianism-fueled stadium rally where he severed relations with Bashar al-Assad – after his administration encouraged Egyptians to go fight in the war.
As the swamp of a long summer and economic decline loomed, the NSF waited. Then came Tamarod.
The Rebel campaign has publicly put into simple terms what many in the political opposition have been thinking for months: Morsi is the target, he must go. And when he goes, the Brotherhood project ends. The constitution is rewritten; the country presses the reset button on the transition. It’s not hard to see the massive demonstrations taking shape in the coming days. Egypt is more polarized than at any point since the revolution. Many simply despise the Brotherhood. When a friend on Facebook lamented a video showing police and civilians working together to fire shotguns and tear gas at Brotherhood supporters in Alexandria, another person wrote: “Where is the sadness if the police [are] finally shooting the right target?”
The polarized vitriol made me think back to November 2010, two years before Morsi’s disastrous power grab and one year before Mohamed Mahmoud, a time when serious political conversation in Egypt revolved around the NDP’s 90-percent landslide parliamentary victory and Gamal’s coming succession. The idea of revolution wasn’t laughable; it wasn’t even considered.
That month, during the election, I went to Mansoura, in the Delta, to report. In those days, the Brotherhood were a journalist’s best friend: efficient, friendly, motivated, and the underdog. They were seen as clean and untainted by the repressive machinery of the NDP. Two Brothers met me the morning of the vote with a list of polling places and drove us around, receiving and making phone calls to determine where fraud was occurring. We pulled up to the Nasseriya Primary School in Mansoura’s central square, where police and civilians (and civilian-looking police) milled about. A man transferred a blurry cell-phone video to my phone.
It showed chaos and scuffling outside the school half an hour before. The staged fight was a time-tested NDP tactic: buy a microbus or two of underemployed neighborhood toughs and send them to brandish knives and cause a disturbance at a polling place. When those citizens naive enough to be in the voting queue fled, send your people inside to stuff the ballots. The practice had become so accepted by 2010 that the NDP men at the school had begun the ballot stuffing with no care for who was watching. A Brotherhood poll observer told me he had stood inside quietly for twenty minutes before they realized who he was and roughly escorted him outside.
At another poll not far away – also a school – the local NDP candidate, a square-jawed former policeman named Mohamed Bassiouny, threw his arm around the shoulder of one of our Brotherhood sources, a university computer science professor, and confidently assured us of Egypt’s flourishing democracy.
“The direction of this polling place is well known, and it’s for Mohamed Bassiouny,” he said.
After the sun set and the polls closed, the stuffed ballot boxes were driven by truck – surrounded by plainclothes men – to a stadium to be “counted.” Outside the stadium, at least a thousand protesters had gathered, organized by the Brotherhood. Cordoned on a stretch of the boulevard by police, they chanted for judges to do their job, for “reform and change,” and for God. They stayed hours after we left. Down the road in Mahalla, a similar crowd was beaten away by police batons.
It was this Brotherhood that you could see, at one time, working hand in hand with liberals, leftists and progressives to change and reform the decaying Egyptian security state. Now, cooperation seems impossible. Forces once perceived across the opposition as nefarious and possibly fatal to the revolution and Egypt’s health as a modern democracy – the NDP machine, the military-as-state – have in two short years found themselves called upon to protect that very revolution. Protesters silence others who attempt to chant against the military and paste photographs of camouflaged soldiers cradling infants on their cars.
Symbols of the old regime – Omar Suleiman’s aide, the son of one of the Delta’s longtime NDP power brokers – have re-emerged to rally supporters against the Brotherhood. The irony is not lost on many of the most dedicated revolutionaries, who wonder whether their causes have been hijacked and their voices marginalized once again. Others have set aside such concerns, saying the Brotherhood represents the more clear and present danger. The enduring legacy of the Morsi presidency, if he does not survive his four-year term, may be his inadvertent facilitation of the counter-revolution.
If Morsi falls or steps down, millions of Egyptians will view it as a victory. Perhaps he could be succeeded by a salvation government, and some kind of stable progress will ensue, though the Brotherhood can hardly be expected to quietly allow their project to dissolve around them, and it would likely mean the return of the army to a guiding role. Revolutions come with chaos. History teaches us that many years may pass before a country comes out of such upheaval with a working government, satisfactory justice and reconciliation, and a consensus about national identity. But even in such a positive scenario, it is hard not to view the first two and a half years of Egypt’s revolution as a series of squandered promises.
Evan Hill is a Cairo-based journalist.
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After Mohammad Morsi’s ouster, a second chance for Obama
By Robert Satloff
Washington Post, July 4 2013.
The Egyptian army’s removal of President Mohammad Morsi gives the Obama administration that rarest of opportunities in foreign policy: a second chance. Getting it right will require understanding where we went wrong the first time.
To some, President Obama’s fundamental error in Egypt policy was to withdraw U.S. support from longtime leader Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, when thousands of Egyptians first filled Tahrir Square demanding change. In this view, the United States should have stuck by Mubarak, a firm opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood whose soldiers fought alongside U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf war and who remained faithful to Egypt’s peace with Israel despite isolation in the Arab world.
That view, however, is wrong. Mubarak’s failing health meant that his rule was coming to an end, a fact he refused to face, instead surrounding himself with sycophants and acting like a modern pharoah. To U.S. interests, Mubarak had become a liability, and there was a reasonable alternative.
In early 2011, that reasonable alternative was the army. Despite Obama’s soaring rhetoric about the Tahrir activists being the inheritors of Gandhi and King, U.S. policy was effectively to protect American interests in Egypt by supporting the transfer of power from an 82-year-old air force general to a 75-year-old army general, Field Marshal Mohammad Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Egypt’s army, the country’s most popular institution, could be counted on to navigate political storms and find a civilian captain to steer the ship of state to a safe harbor — or so we thought.
In retrospect, the United States’ great error was born in the over-confidence we placed in the generals. When the White House moved on to Libya and other issues, it effectively put Egypt policy on auto-pilot, deferring to the generals on the pace and content of their “democratic transition.” Everyone knew the generals’ real interest was devising a political system that preserved their power and wealth. But they were “our guys,” men who understood the overlap of U.S. and Egyptian regional security imperatives — keeping the peace with Israel — and they claimed to appreciate the need for a political process that was popular, participatory and legitimate.
This policy was logical. And because no one imagined the breadth of the generals’ political incompetence, it was tragically wrong.
In just 18 months, the all-powerful Tantawi supervised a political process in which a marginal player in the Tahrir Square drama — the Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive, ideological Islamist underground movement — methodically engineered a takeover of Egypt’s political system. Tantawi may have let this happen believing he had found a domestic political player to safeguard the generals’ institutional interests, but reality soon set in. The Brotherhood’s takeover — partly through the ballot box, partly through extralegal means — was so complete that, in August 2012, one of the first moves of its newly elected president was to fire Tantawi. In a region of inept politicians, Tantawi stands out.
Throughout this period, the United States saw the generals make mistake after mistake — including failing to draft a constitution, blessing an elections law designed to favor Islamists and giving vent to anti-Christian violence — but policymakers did little more than pose questions. In public, we often advanced the right principles — pluralism, religious freedom, economic reform — but we consistently deferred to the generals in private. Even when the transition took an anti-American turn in late 2011, with the arrest and trial of American employees of U.S. government-funded pro-democracy institutions, Washington was embarrassingly quiet.
Thus, the pattern was set for U.S. relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and its representative in the presidential palace, Morsi. Like the generals, the Brotherhood promised a measure of stability, including a frigid peace with Israel. All it asked was to be left alone. At a time when “nation building at home” was the new American motif, the offer from the Egyptian people’s newly elected representatives was alluring.
The administration may have talked the talk of economic reform, but U.S. emissaries went to Cairo with checks, as though the money would keep flowing no matter how ill-conceived the Brotherhood’s populist economic policies. The administration pronounced on civil rights and tolerance, but it did nothing when journalists, activists and ordinary citizens were jailed for blaspheming Islam or insulting the president. And there can be no greater riposte to the American retreat in support of civil society, reflected in our spinelessness in the face of the prosecution of U.S. pro-democracy activists, than the millions of Egyptians who have filled streets in recent days to take back their country.
No one should revel in the deposition of an elected leader by a country’s military, but this is not a coup in the traditional sense and does not merit a suspension of U.S. assistance our law prescribes. Indeed, the army almost surely prevented a bloodbath that would have scarred Egypt for decades. Inaction, not intervention, would have been criminal.
But with the army back in the saddle, it would also be criminal for the administration to repeat the errors of the last episode of military rule, when everything was sacrificed on the altar of stability. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the new white knight, is no more a democrat than Tantawi, though he may be more adept. Washington needs to be more adept, too.
Obama has frequently said that the United States rejects the false choice between democracy or stability; nowhere is this more apropos than Egypt. In the post-Morsi world, Washington should articulate a policy in which our support for Egypt is conditioned not just on Egypt’s peace with Israel but also on continual movement toward building a democratic, pluralistic government that pursues sound economic policies. In practice, that means engaging broadly with Egypt’s political spectrum, not just the ruling party; offering vocal defense of minorities (Christians, Bahai’s, Shiites); reinvesting in civil society programs that help Egyptians translate their street activism into political organization; and leading a disciplined “friends of Egypt” grouping that promises substantial financial assistance but only to cushion the impact of overdue cuts in bloated subsidies.
With the American brand sullied by the perception of deference to the Brotherhood, the next phase of U.S.-Egypt relations will be rocky. Our influence is diminished but still exists. Egypt is important. Let’s get it right this time.
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Israel Cautiously Optimistic On Egypt
Ben Caspit,
Al-Monitor, July 2 2013
“Sixty-four long years passed until it became clear to the masses of Eastern Europe that communism couldn’t provide the goods. It couldn’t feed the citizens and provide for their welfare, so they had to find some other system.” This observation was given on June 30 by an experienced Israeli security official. He continued, “It took the masses in Egypt exactly one year to understand the same thing about the Muslim Brotherhood.” Then he added, “On the one hand, it’s rather impressive and encouraging, on the other hand, it could also be startling and terrifying.”
The Middle Eastern roller coaster is whizzing forward at full steam as it zigzags over the abyss. It goes up and down, speeds up and slows down, while the passengers who are stuck on board try not to look down or think ahead. Israel’s security establishment is in the initial stages of adapting to the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a scenario which has been considered the ultimate nightmare for as long as the Jewish state existed. Yet now, while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the security establishment are finally starting to get used to it, they are finding out that the “Ikhwan” — as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic slang — has already been cast onto the garbage heap of history. Today, Mohammed Morsi is president. Tomorrow, he could be pacing a cage right next to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, gaping all around him in terror, without understanding how it could have happened to him.
In the past few days, both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have played host to a number of security and diplomatic discussions about the situation in Egypt. The truth of the matter is that no one in Israel knows whether to celebrate or fret, whether to fear or hope. Only one thing is sure. They are leaving all the options open. Israel’s initial Pavlovian response after the surprising and rapid fall of Mubarak was to air out its emergency warehouses and determine whether it was at all possible to re-establish the “Southern Column” — a group of armored divisions that was dismantled after the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was reached. That was what then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman suggested to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example.
Then, after a few months had passed, it became quite clear that the demon wasn’t quite as bad as they had imagined. The Muslim Brotherhood stepped back from everything to do with Israel. Once Morsi was elected president, he transferred responsibility for Israel to the army. Having recognized their limitations — the “Brotherhood” could never maintain direct contact with Israel because of a religious prohibition — the movement’s leadership decided to act like they didn’t and feel like they did. They gave former Defense Minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi — and later Gen. Abdul Fatah al-Sisi — total freedom when it came to managing affairs along the border with Israel, while they went about dealing with their own business.
As strange as it may sound, security relations between Israel and Egypt improved significantly during this period. The IDF could hardly believe it. Security collaboration was tightened, and the Egyptians were seen taking vigorous action in response to intelligence they received from Israel — two phenomena that didn’t exist in the past. Senior defense official and Israeli envoy to Egypt Gen. Amos Gilad continued flying to Cairo — where he received considerable respect from his colleagues — and the new reality proved yet again that it is greater than all the commonly accepted horror stories serving as potential scenarios. There was a logical explanation to this as well. Under Mubarak, the Egyptian government was afraid of being portrayed as doing Israel’s bidding, fearing harsh criticism from the Muslim Brotherhood. Suddenly, there really was nothing to worry about. The Muslim Brotherhood was in power now, so that fear dissipated and was replaced by a relationship driven by issues.
Now, all of that is under threat too. Even before Mubarak was toppled, Israeli intelligence assessed that the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn’t “go the extra mile.” They wouldn’t try to seize control of the presidency immediately after Mubarak’s fall. “They know that the first president will take all the blame, and is identified as the person who shattered the Egyptian dream,” said intelligence sources in Israel. “They’ll let someone else get elected to the presidency, let him break his head over it, and then they’ll appear as saviors.”
This assessment was debunked, but not because Israel lacked quality intelligence. Quite the contrary: the intelligence was accurate. The Muslim Brotherhood itself admits that it had no intention of running for the presidency, but then the scent of authority wafted into their nostrils, and the drunken thrill of power spread through their bones. They simply could not resist the temptation. “It was a fatal strategic error of historic significance, from which there was no way back,” Israeli observers now say. The “Brothers” themselves also recognize the scope of their mistake. They stormed the presidency and conquered it, never imagining that their downfall would be so rapid, so intense, so brutal.
Now all that’s left for the Muslim Brotherhood to do is pick up the pieces. At the same time, this is also no small blow to US foreign policy, which proved its shortsightedness yet again by making some awkward decisions. US President Barack Obama and his staff decided to gamble on the Muslim Brotherhood during their first term in office. When it seemed Mubarak was about to fall, they sent messengers, established contacts and made it quite clear that they have no problem with an Islamist government — as radical as it may be — as long as all agreements are kept, as long as none of the tools are broken.
This US policy proved to be a tactical success. The fact is that Morsi maintained Egypt’s foreign policy and avoided shaking it up unnecessarily, even keeping the peace agreement with Israel. But in the wake of this tactical success came a strategic breakdown. Once again, for the second time in a year, the Americans lost their anchor in Cairo. They now watch as the Egyptians topple the very government that they wanted to see respected, which leaves the Americans in a bind and needing to start from scratch.
What will happen? That’s the most disturbing question of all. If Morsi fails, how will the next president in line succeed? Who will have the magical formula to feed almost 90 million hungry people each morning, provide hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year, revitalize tourism and industry and contend with the spread of corruption, raging violence, shrinking credit and depleted foreign currency reserves? No one has yet come up with a plan to create a new Egypt overnight.
Whoever agrees to be the next president of Egypt will be either brave or crazy or both. Meanwhile, in Israel at least, people are trying to focus on the cup that is half full. The Islamist extremists suffered a huge blow. The spirit of real democracy, openness and liberalism is blowing through the streets of Cairo. This is a harsh blow to Hamas as well, and to all the other extremists in our region, regardless of whom they might be. “No matter how we look at it, nothing really bad for us can come out of this,” says one Israeli intelligence source. On the other hand, the last time this happened, everyone in Israel thought that nothing good could come of it for us, and something good actually did come out of it. So the truth is that there is no way of knowing.
Ben Caspit is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse. He is also a senior columnist and political analyst for Israeli newspapers, and has a daily radio show and regular TV shows on politics and Israel.
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Revolution in Egypt, again
July 04, 2013
Number 07/13 #01
Today’s update looks at the Egyptian army’s suspension of the constitution and removal of the country’s first democratically elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamad Morsi. The army moved after Morsi failed to meet its demand to de-escalate the wave of violent anti-government demonstrations that had swept much of the country. For a brief explanation of what comes next, Frank Spano from the Investigative Project looks at the Egyptian army’s appointment of Adly Mansour as transitional leader until elections can be held. Mansour is the Chief Justice of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court.
First, Cairo-based journalist Evan Hill looks at what led to the current crisis. He pinpoints the Morsi Government’s winner takes all approach to ruling and an economy that completely tanked resulted in a perfect storm, compelling millions of Egyptians onto the streets in numbers that dwarfed the Tahrir Square protests in 2011. Seeing that Morsi stood no chance to come back from that kind of public antipathy, the army moved. To read more, CLICK HERE.
Next up, Robert Satloff from the Washington Institute argues that the Obama Administration has a second chance to correct its flawed foreign policy on Egypt since the Arab Spring. He believes the Administration’s main failing was not a lack of support for Hosni Mubarak but in the “overconfidence” placed by the United States in the Egyptian military’s capacity to handle the transfer from the old regime which enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to hijack the elections. (Fellow Washington Institute analyst Simon Henderson looks at the financial support provided to Egypt under Morsi by the Muslim Brothehood-aligned Qatari government). To read more, CLICK HERE.
Finally, Israeli journalist Ben Caspit assesses the relationship between Jerusalem and Cairo since the Muslim Brotherhood took power. Despite widespread fear that three decades of peace between the two countries might fracture, the treaty has held. Caspit attributes this to the Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to leave it up to the military to deal with Israel. In the bargain, relations with the Egyptian military have been more cordial and responsive than even under former President Hosni Mubarak. For more, CLICK HERE.
Readers may also be interested in:
- Barry Rubin – who predicted before former president Hosni Mubarak was deposed over two years ago – that policy missteps by the US would lead to another government upheaval in Egypt.
- Adam Garfinkle looks at why liberal democracy taking root in Egypt was always a long shot.
- Aayan Hirsi Ali who recently attended Shimon Peres’ Presidential Conference in Israel, argues that it doesn’t matter how much land Israel vacates, until the Palestinians and Arab states accept that compromise does not equal humiliation they will not make peace with Israel.
- Evelyn Gordon on an astute observation by Israeli historian Benny Morris that the delegitimisation of Israel today is akin to the campaign to weaken the democratic state of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.
- Elliot Abrams fears that the gaps between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are too large to justify the risks posed by US Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to restart peace talks.
- Some examples from the many stories and comments now appearing at AIJAC’s “Fresh AIR” blog:
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How did we get here?
By Evan Hill,
Tahrirsquared.com,
30th June, 2013
Families have stockpiled food and water, drivers have slept nights in petrol lines that snaked for city block after city block, and power cuts have rippled across the governorates and major cities. Half a dozen people have died in a spasm of violence that threatens to become a full-blown seizure when mass protests against President Mohamed Morsi break out today. Headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party have been attacked and burned throughout the Nile Delta, and his supporters’ rallies assaulted. Brotherhood toughs have banded together outside their offices wearing hard hats and makeshift shields and carrying homemade guns, ready to bludgeon or blow away what they fear is a coming wave of paid street thugs, the very embodiment of the counter-revolution.
Morsi’s opponents, sometimes backed by police, have also taken to the streets with firearms. Longtime revolutionaries uneasy with the violent omens and new, questionable allies have swallowed their hesitation and prepare to march on the presidential palace. As protesters sacked a Brotherhood office in Alexandria on Friday, someone in the crowd stabbed to death a young American teacher filming with his camera. In beleaguered Port Said, already subject to gun battles between citizens and police that killed dozens in March, a gas tank exploded at an anti-Morsi rally, reportedly killing one man and horribly maiming many more. Rumors flew that the protest had been bombed.
The country is gripped by expectant hysteria, like a Twilight Zone version of the hours before a World Cup final: nearly 90 million penned-in bystanders waiting on the opening whistle of a match to be played for keeps with guns and knives by partisans they hardly recognize as their own. One online commentator described the impending movement to oust Morsi on the one-year anniversary of his election as the birth of a new political order that may kill its mother. A journalist said it was as if Egypt’s body politic were rejecting a transplant and killing the nation in the process, a fledgling democracy’s auto-immune system gone haywire.
How did the country get here? How did the January 2011 uprising and its young, made-for-TV activists spin out into another zero-sum game for control? The story is complicated, and the strategic and tactical failures by both the secularist opposition and the Brotherhood so profoundly, majestically short-sighted and self-defeating that some have retreated into that most time-tested of rationales, the conspiracy, to explain how things could have gone so wrong, so fast. In their narrative, the crisis has been stage managed by the military, Egypt’s eminence grise and ultimate power-broker, beginning on the day in February 2011 when the generals opportunistically seized on the mass protests to quietly but forcefully escort Hosni Mubarak, his family and his cronies from the stage.
Like most conspiracy theories, the story has a seed of truth. In the heady days before and after the fall of Mubarak, the generals were taking everyone’s temperature. At one time or another, they chatted with many of the revolution’s most prominent instigators. They met with Ahmed Maher of the April 6th Movement. They met with representatives of the Brotherhood. Mohamed Aboul Ghar, who would soon found one of the only serious non-Islamist political parties in the country, once told me how he, the editor of Al Ahram newspaper, and two other men were called before five generals that March. One kept notes as they spoke; he was Abdelfattah el-Sisi, later promoted to defense minister and commander in chief under Morsi. As the meeting adjourned, one of the generals casually remarked that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – the military’s governing body – had in 2010 held a meeting without Mubarak, their commander, and decided not to allow the president’s son, Gamal, to complete a widely telegraphed succession during rigged presidential elections then scheduled for 2011.
“The plan [was], when Gamal is going to take over, they are going make a coup,” Aboul Ghar recalled.
The military’s disdain for Gamal and his generation of casually corrupt businessmen was well known
The only suitable dancing partner was the Muslim Brotherhood, an institution whose organizational, bureaucratic and service-providing experience was deeper than even that of the post-1956 militarized government itself.
And so the transition proceeded under military rule, directed by old, conservative men who learned their craft in a much different Egypt, half of them hoping to protect the old order, the other half pushing their project to usher in a new one. A temporary constitution orchestrated by the military and backed by the Brotherhood and their ultraconservative allies passed easily. Calls from people like Mohamed ElBaradei to create a liberal, progressive and inclusive new constitution from scratch, written by an independent body chosen by consensus, were ignored. As the year dragged on, poor Egyptians remained poor, and Mubarak sat uncharged with any crime in a military hospital. Protests against the SCAF’s reluctance to hand over power grew. They were supported by the Brotherhood, which likely saw in the unrest a useful tactic to keep their prime opponent on the back foot. In November 2011, the protests threatened to get out of control.
Security forces stormed Tahrir Square and brutally dispersed a small sit in of a few hundred people – almost all of them relatives of the revolution’s martyrs or those who had been wounded. They had been forgotten by the state, and they were angry. The revolutionaries were infuriated at the attack, and the result was the battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a five-day brawl with the riot police near the Square that left more than 40 civilians dead. The end of the fighting was precipitated by army intervention, a large concrete wall, and the arrival of a human chain of Muslim Brothers who cajoled or forced the protesters off the street.
The revolutionaries and marginalized young men and women who had joined the fight were filled with righteous anger. They felt betrayed. They had shed blood, supposedly on principle: to force police reform, to snatch some justice for those who had lost sons or daughters or their own health during the revolution, to hold the army to account for abuses under its rule. To them, the Brothers had thrown it all away for political gain. The temporary constitution had paved the way for parliamentary elections, due that month, a critical step that would help decide who ruled post-revolution Egypt. The Brotherhood could not let them be delayed. They went on to dominate the vote. Mohamed Mahmoud cleaved a rift between the two sides that never healed.
Over the course of the following months, it became obvious: The Brotherhood was dutifully, purposefully playing for keeps. Under the temporary constitution they helped to pass, the new parliament would be tasked with choosing those who would write a permanent founding document for post-revolution Egypt – the holy grail. The Brotherhood would go to almost any lengths to secure it. But what they saw as predictable hardball and democratic combat – which they were almost guaranteed to win – the opposition saw as a series of betrayals. The Brotherhood ran for more seats in parliament than some of their prominent members had first promised, then dominated the ministries once elected. The opposition hardly contested the second legislative election, for the less-powerful upper house, which was similarly dominated by the Brotherhood and Salafi parties. When the time came to select the constituent assembly, the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc helped gerrymander its 100-member make-up so that if push came to shove, the Brotherhood and its backers would not be outvoted. The Brotherhood pledged not to seek the presidency, then fielded a candidate, and fielded another – Morsi – when the first was disqualified. After Morsi took office, he failed to form – or could not find those willing to join – a cabinet that some had hoped would involve figures from across the political spectrum and prompt a national reconciliation. On the other side, the Brotherhood felt battered by the forces of the old regime. In the days before Morsi’s victory, the Supreme Constitutional Court used an electoral technicality to annul the lower house of parliament, erasing the Brotherhood’s gains and the country’s most crucial elected body. The court docketed a case to rule on the legitimacy of the constituent assembly. Other courts planned to rule on the legality of the Muslim Brotherhood itself. The entire project was now at risk.
The beginning of the end came in November, almost a year to the day after the Mohamed Mahmoud battle, when Morsi issued a package of sovereign decrees – just four months into his term – that essentially placed himself and assembly above judicial review. He and his allies argued that to stand by and do nothing would leave courts packed with Mubarak appointees free to undermine every step of the transition. The opposition, which may have once been inclined to agree, did not take his side. There had been too many betrayals, trust had evaporated. To the apparent surprise of Morsi’s administration, they were outraged.
Protesters took to the streets, calling the president a “new pharaoh.” The remaining liberals, progressives, leftists and Christians in the constituent assembly walked out. Morsi gave them two extra months to resolve their differences, but the assembly rushed the draft constitution through an overnight session and passed it. Opposition politicians increasingly believed that Morsi did not even call his own shots; that decisions of national import were made in the Brotherhood’s secretive Guidance Bureau. In Egypt’s new constitution, human rights groups and other critics saw gaping loopholes, lax protections for minorities, women and children, and troubling roles for religious oversight from conservative Sunni institutions.
The November crisis awakened the opposition to a harsh reality: they were going to keep losing this game, and the Brotherhood was not going to stop playing. The only solution was to change the rules. They united, for the first time, under the banner of the National Salvation Front. Their faltering effort to boycott and then vote down the new constitution failed, but the unexpectedly tight result convinced them that Morsi’s base was shrinking. Soon after, the NSF declared that it would boycott upcoming parliamentary elections unless many of the rules – written by the nearly wholly Islamist upper house – were changed. Improbably, filled with inflated egos and highly oppositional parties, the NSF held its front.
In December, after Morsi supporters ransacked a small sit-in outside the presidential palace and sparked deadly street battles, a more extreme wing of the opposition began to wield influence inside the coalition. They argued that Morsi had lost all legitimacy. He would have to go, voluntarily or by force. Violent anti-Brotherhood protests became the order of the day. Instability worked in the opposition’s favor. The economy was nose-diving, and security forces – becoming more openly vocal in their disdain for the Brotherhood government – could not or would not do their jobs. They took no pleasure facing the brunt of public ire for protecting a conservative, formerly clandestine movement that had stood against the state for so long. Social media and independent television stations lit up with images of Brotherhood members beating away protesters. Newspapers openly mocked Morsi’s government for its inability to right the ship. Rumors and anonymously sourced news reports spread about the Brotherhood’s ambitions to Islamize the army and police and carve off critical swaths of sovereign assets, such as those along the Suez Canal, to sell to benefactors in Qatar. Morsi – one of the more deeply uncharismatic leaders in modern Arab history – proved incapable of rallying anyone outside his base. Nearly everything he said became gas on the fire of the opposition’s anger.
The Brotherhood’s majoritarian behavior had, by then, convinced many secular-minded Egyptians that Morsi and his administration would not engage in any meaningful negotiation. Promises the president made were broken the next day. His allies – fiery preachers and hardcore Salafis – invoked sectarianism, religious purity and pan-Islamist ambitions on the campaign trail and elsewhere to rally his base, driving away the swing vote that had helped Morsi defeat former Air Force general and prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, and convincing many opponents that their deepest fears of the Brotherhood were justified. Rule-bound parliamentary competition became an almost farcical idea. The goal for many in the opposition became the end of the Brotherhood’s entire project itself.
Ministries were in quiet bureaucratic rebellion. Lower-level employees stalled paperwork. The courts ruled the upper house of parliament’s draft law to elect a new lower house unconstitutional and seemed ready to indefinitely stall the critical elections. Then, they ruled the upper house itself unconstitutional and took up a case to look into the legitimacy of Morsi’s own election victory. Morsi and the Brotherhood had, by now, almost fully retreated to their core supporters. He held a sectarianism-fueled stadium rally where he severed relations with Bashar al-Assad – after his administration encouraged Egyptians to go fight in the war.
As the swamp of a long summer and economic decline loomed, the NSF waited. Then came Tamarod.
The Rebel campaign has publicly put into simple terms what many in the political opposition have been thinking for months: Morsi is the target, he must go. And when he goes, the Brotherhood project ends. The constitution is rewritten; the country presses the reset button on the transition. It’s not hard to see the massive demonstrations taking shape in the coming days. Egypt is more polarized than at any point since the revolution. Many simply despise the Brotherhood. When a friend on Facebook lamented a video showing police and civilians working together to fire shotguns and tear gas at Brotherhood supporters in Alexandria, another person wrote: “Where is the sadness if the police [are] finally shooting the right target?”
The polarized vitriol made me think back to November 2010, two years before Morsi’s disastrous power grab and one year before Mohamed Mahmoud, a time when serious political conversation in Egypt revolved around the NDP’s 90-percent landslide parliamentary victory and Gamal’s coming succession. The idea of revolution wasn’t laughable; it wasn’t even considered.
That month, during the election, I went to Mansoura, in the Delta, to report. In those days, the Brotherhood were a journalist’s best friend: efficient, friendly, motivated, and the underdog. They were seen as clean and untainted by the repressive machinery of the NDP. Two Brothers met me the morning of the vote with a list of polling places and drove us around, receiving and making phone calls to determine where fraud was occurring. We pulled up to the Nasseriya Primary School in Mansoura’s central square, where police and civilians (and civilian-looking police) milled about. A man transferred a blurry cell-phone video to my phone.
It showed chaos and scuffling outside the school half an hour before. The staged fight was a time-tested NDP tactic: buy a microbus or two of underemployed neighborhood toughs and send them to brandish knives and cause a disturbance at a polling place. When those citizens naive enough to be in the voting queue fled, send your people inside to stuff the ballots. The practice had become so accepted by 2010 that the NDP men at the school had begun the ballot stuffing with no care for who was watching. A Brotherhood poll observer told me he had stood inside quietly for twenty minutes before they realized who he was and roughly escorted him outside.
At another poll not far away – also a school – the local NDP candidate, a square-jawed former policeman named Mohamed Bassiouny, threw his arm around the shoulder of one of our Brotherhood sources, a university computer science professor, and confidently assured us of Egypt’s flourishing democracy.
“The direction of this polling place is well known, and it’s for Mohamed Bassiouny,” he said.
After the sun set and the polls closed, the stuffed ballot boxes were driven by truck – surrounded by plainclothes men – to a stadium to be “counted.” Outside the stadium, at least a thousand protesters had gathered, organized by the Brotherhood. Cordoned on a stretch of the boulevard by police, they chanted for judges to do their job, for “reform and change,” and for God. They stayed hours after we left. Down the road in Mahalla, a similar crowd was beaten away by police batons.
It was this Brotherhood that you could see, at one time, working hand in hand with liberals, leftists and progressives to change and reform the decaying Egyptian security state. Now, cooperation seems impossible. Forces once perceived across the opposition as nefarious and possibly fatal to the revolution and Egypt’s health as a modern democracy – the NDP machine, the military-as-state – have in two short years found themselves called upon to protect that very revolution. Protesters silence others who attempt to chant against the military and paste photographs of camouflaged soldiers cradling infants on their cars.
Symbols of the old regime – Omar Suleiman’s aide, the son of one of the Delta’s longtime NDP power brokers – have re-emerged to rally supporters against the Brotherhood. The irony is not lost on many of the most dedicated revolutionaries, who wonder whether their causes have been hijacked and their voices marginalized once again. Others have set aside such concerns, saying the Brotherhood represents the more clear and present danger. The enduring legacy of the Morsi presidency, if he does not survive his four-year term, may be his inadvertent facilitation of the counter-revolution.
If Morsi falls or steps down, millions of Egyptians will view it as a victory. Perhaps he could be succeeded by a salvation government, and some kind of stable progress will ensue, though the Brotherhood can hardly be expected to quietly allow their project to dissolve around them, and it would likely mean the return of the army to a guiding role. Revolutions come with chaos. History teaches us that many years may pass before a country comes out of such upheaval with a working government, satisfactory justice and reconciliation, and a consensus about national identity. But even in such a positive scenario, it is hard not to view the first two and a half years of Egypt’s revolution as a series of squandered promises.
Evan Hill is a Cairo-based journalist.
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After Mohammad Morsi’s ouster, a second chance for Obama
By Robert Satloff
Washington Post, July 4 2013.
The Egyptian army’s removal of President Mohammad Morsi gives the Obama administration that rarest of opportunities in foreign policy: a second chance. Getting it right will require understanding where we went wrong the first time.
To some, President Obama’s fundamental error in Egypt policy was to withdraw U.S. support from longtime leader Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, when thousands of Egyptians first filled Tahrir Square demanding change. In this view, the United States should have stuck by Mubarak, a firm opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood whose soldiers fought alongside U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf war and who remained faithful to Egypt’s peace with Israel despite isolation in the Arab world.
That view, however, is wrong. Mubarak’s failing health meant that his rule was coming to an end, a fact he refused to face, instead surrounding himself with sycophants and acting like a modern pharoah. To U.S. interests, Mubarak had become a liability, and there was a reasonable alternative.
In early 2011, that reasonable alternative was the army. Despite Obama’s soaring rhetoric about the Tahrir activists being the inheritors of Gandhi and King, U.S. policy was effectively to protect American interests in Egypt by supporting the transfer of power from an 82-year-old air force general to a 75-year-old army general, Field Marshal Mohammad Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Egypt’s army, the country’s most popular institution, could be counted on to navigate political storms and find a civilian captain to steer the ship of state to a safe harbor — or so we thought.
In retrospect, the United States’ great error was born in the over-confidence we placed in the generals. When the White House moved on to Libya and other issues, it effectively put Egypt policy on auto-pilot, deferring to the generals on the pace and content of their “democratic transition.” Everyone knew the generals’ real interest was devising a political system that preserved their power and wealth. But they were “our guys,” men who understood the overlap of U.S. and Egyptian regional security imperatives — keeping the peace with Israel — and they claimed to appreciate the need for a political process that was popular, participatory and legitimate.
This policy was logical. And because no one imagined the breadth of the generals’ political incompetence, it was tragically wrong.
In just 18 months, the all-powerful Tantawi supervised a political process in which a marginal player in the Tahrir Square drama — the Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive, ideological Islamist underground movement — methodically engineered a takeover of Egypt’s political system. Tantawi may have let this happen believing he had found a domestic political player to safeguard the generals’ institutional interests, but reality soon set in. The Brotherhood’s takeover — partly through the ballot box, partly through extralegal means — was so complete that, in August 2012, one of the first moves of its newly elected president was to fire Tantawi. In a region of inept politicians, Tantawi stands out.
Throughout this period, the United States saw the generals make mistake after mistake — including failing to draft a constitution, blessing an elections law designed to favor Islamists and giving vent to anti-Christian violence — but policymakers did little more than pose questions. In public, we often advanced the right principles — pluralism, religious freedom, economic reform — but we consistently deferred to the generals in private. Even when the transition took an anti-American turn in late 2011, with the arrest and trial of American employees of U.S. government-funded pro-democracy institutions, Washington was embarrassingly quiet.
Thus, the pattern was set for U.S. relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and its representative in the presidential palace, Morsi. Like the generals, the Brotherhood promised a measure of stability, including a frigid peace with Israel. All it asked was to be left alone. At a time when “nation building at home” was the new American motif, the offer from the Egyptian people’s newly elected representatives was alluring.
The administration may have talked the talk of economic reform, but U.S. emissaries went to Cairo with checks, as though the money would keep flowing no matter how ill-conceived the Brotherhood’s populist economic policies. The administration pronounced on civil rights and tolerance, but it did nothing when journalists, activists and ordinary citizens were jailed for blaspheming Islam or insulting the president. And there can be no greater riposte to the American retreat in support of civil society, reflected in our spinelessness in the face of the prosecution of U.S. pro-democracy activists, than the millions of Egyptians who have filled streets in recent days to take back their country.
No one should revel in the deposition of an elected leader by a country’s military, but this is not a coup in the traditional sense and does not merit a suspension of U.S. assistance our law prescribes. Indeed, the army almost surely prevented a bloodbath that would have scarred Egypt for decades. Inaction, not intervention, would have been criminal.
But with the army back in the saddle, it would also be criminal for the administration to repeat the errors of the last episode of military rule, when everything was sacrificed on the altar of stability. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the new white knight, is no more a democrat than Tantawi, though he may be more adept. Washington needs to be more adept, too.
Obama has frequently said that the United States rejects the false choice between democracy or stability; nowhere is this more apropos than Egypt. In the post-Morsi world, Washington should articulate a policy in which our support for Egypt is conditioned not just on Egypt’s peace with Israel but also on continual movement toward building a democratic, pluralistic government that pursues sound economic policies. In practice, that means engaging broadly with Egypt’s political spectrum, not just the ruling party; offering vocal defense of minorities (Christians, Bahai’s, Shiites); reinvesting in civil society programs that help Egyptians translate their street activism into political organization; and leading a disciplined “friends of Egypt” grouping that promises substantial financial assistance but only to cushion the impact of overdue cuts in bloated subsidies.
With the American brand sullied by the perception of deference to the Brotherhood, the next phase of U.S.-Egypt relations will be rocky. Our influence is diminished but still exists. Egypt is important. Let’s get it right this time.
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Israel Cautiously Optimistic On Egypt
Ben Caspit,
Al-Monitor, July 2 2013
“Sixty-four long years passed until it became clear to the masses of Eastern Europe that communism couldn’t provide the goods. It couldn’t feed the citizens and provide for their welfare, so they had to find some other system.” This observation was given on June 30 by an experienced Israeli security official. He continued, “It took the masses in Egypt exactly one year to understand the same thing about the Muslim Brotherhood.” Then he added, “On the one hand, it’s rather impressive and encouraging, on the other hand, it could also be startling and terrifying.”
The Middle Eastern roller coaster is whizzing forward at full steam as it zigzags over the abyss. It goes up and down, speeds up and slows down, while the passengers who are stuck on board try not to look down or think ahead. Israel’s security establishment is in the initial stages of adapting to the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a scenario which has been considered the ultimate nightmare for as long as the Jewish state existed. Yet now, while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the security establishment are finally starting to get used to it, they are finding out that the “Ikhwan” — as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic slang — has already been cast onto the garbage heap of history. Today, Mohammed Morsi is president. Tomorrow, he could be pacing a cage right next to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, gaping all around him in terror, without understanding how it could have happened to him.
In the past few days, both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have played host to a number of security and diplomatic discussions about the situation in Egypt. The truth of the matter is that no one in Israel knows whether to celebrate or fret, whether to fear or hope. Only one thing is sure. They are leaving all the options open. Israel’s initial Pavlovian response after the surprising and rapid fall of Mubarak was to air out its emergency warehouses and determine whether it was at all possible to re-establish the “Southern Column” — a group of armored divisions that was dismantled after the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was reached. That was what then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman suggested to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example.
Then, after a few months had passed, it became quite clear that the demon wasn’t quite as bad as they had imagined. The Muslim Brotherhood stepped back from everything to do with Israel. Once Morsi was elected president, he transferred responsibility for Israel to the army. Having recognized their limitations — the “Brotherhood” could never maintain direct contact with Israel because of a religious prohibition — the movement’s leadership decided to act like they didn’t and feel like they did. They gave former Defense Minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi — and later Gen. Abdul Fatah al-Sisi — total freedom when it came to managing affairs along the border with Israel, while they went about dealing with their own business.
As strange as it may sound, security relations between Israel and Egypt improved significantly during this period. The IDF could hardly believe it. Security collaboration was tightened, and the Egyptians were seen taking vigorous action in response to intelligence they received from Israel — two phenomena that didn’t exist in the past. Senior defense official and Israeli envoy to Egypt Gen. Amos Gilad continued flying to Cairo — where he received considerable respect from his colleagues — and the new reality proved yet again that it is greater than all the commonly accepted horror stories serving as potential scenarios. There was a logical explanation to this as well. Under Mubarak, the Egyptian government was afraid of being portrayed as doing Israel’s bidding, fearing harsh criticism from the Muslim Brotherhood. Suddenly, there really was nothing to worry about. The Muslim Brotherhood was in power now, so that fear dissipated and was replaced by a relationship driven by issues.
Now, all of that is under threat too. Even before Mubarak was toppled, Israeli intelligence assessed that the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn’t “go the extra mile.” They wouldn’t try to seize control of the presidency immediately after Mubarak’s fall. “They know that the first president will take all the blame, and is identified as the person who shattered the Egyptian dream,” said intelligence sources in Israel. “They’ll let someone else get elected to the presidency, let him break his head over it, and then they’ll appear as saviors.”
This assessment was debunked, but not because Israel lacked quality intelligence. Quite the contrary: the intelligence was accurate. The Muslim Brotherhood itself admits that it had no intention of running for the presidency, but then the scent of authority wafted into their nostrils, and the drunken thrill of power spread through their bones. They simply could not resist the temptation. “It was a fatal strategic error of historic significance, from which there was no way back,” Israeli observers now say. The “Brothers” themselves also recognize the scope of their mistake. They stormed the presidency and conquered it, never imagining that their downfall would be so rapid, so intense, so brutal.
Now all that’s left for the Muslim Brotherhood to do is pick up the pieces. At the same time, this is also no small blow to US foreign policy, which proved its shortsightedness yet again by making some awkward decisions. US President Barack Obama and his staff decided to gamble on the Muslim Brotherhood during their first term in office. When it seemed Mubarak was about to fall, they sent messengers, established contacts and made it quite clear that they have no problem with an Islamist government — as radical as it may be — as long as all agreements are kept, as long as none of the tools are broken.
This US policy proved to be a tactical success. The fact is that Morsi maintained Egypt’s foreign policy and avoided shaking it up unnecessarily, even keeping the peace agreement with Israel. But in the wake of this tactical success came a strategic breakdown. Once again, for the second time in a year, the Americans lost their anchor in Cairo. They now watch as the Egyptians topple the very government that they wanted to see respected, which leaves the Americans in a bind and needing to start from scratch.
What will happen? That’s the most disturbing question of all. If Morsi fails, how will the next president in line succeed? Who will have the magical formula to feed almost 90 million hungry people each morning, provide hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year, revitalize tourism and industry and contend with the spread of corruption, raging violence, shrinking credit and depleted foreign currency reserves? No one has yet come up with a plan to create a new Egypt overnight.
Whoever agrees to be the next president of Egypt will be either brave or crazy or both. Meanwhile, in Israel at least, people are trying to focus on the cup that is half full. The Islamist extremists suffered a huge blow. The spirit of real democracy, openness and liberalism is blowing through the streets of Cairo. This is a harsh blow to Hamas as well, and to all the other extremists in our region, regardless of whom they might be. “No matter how we look at it, nothing really bad for us can come out of this,” says one Israeli intelligence source. On the other hand, the last time this happened, everyone in Israel thought that nothing good could come of it for us, and something good actually did come out of it. So the truth is that there is no way of knowing.
Ben Caspit is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse. He is also a senior columnist and political analyst for Israeli newspapers, and has a daily radio show and regular TV shows on politics and Israel.
Tags: Egypt
