Egyptian army units block a road in Cairo, Feb. 6, 2011. Credit: IPS/Mohammed Omer

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Dec 3 2014 (IPS)

The acquittal of former Egyptian President Muhammad Hosni Mubarak is not a legal or political surprise. Yet it carries serious ramifications for Arab autocrats who are leading the counterrevolutionary charge, as well as the United States.

The court’s decision, announced Nov. 29 in Cairo, was the last nail in the coffin of the so-called Arab Spring and the Arab upheavals for justice, dignity, and freedom that rocked Egypt and other Arab countries in 2011.If the United States is interested in containing the growth of terrorism in the region, it must ultimately focus on the economic, political, and social root causes that push young Muslim Arabs towards violent extremism.

Chief Judge Mahmud Kamel al-Rashidi, who read the acquittal decision, and his fellow judges on the panel are holdover from the Mubarak era.

The Egyptian judiciary, the Sisi military junta, and the pliant Egyptian media provided the backdrop to the court’s ruling, which indicates how a popular revolution can topple a dictator but not the regime’s entrenched levers of power.

Indeed, no serious observer of Egypt would have been surprised by the decision to acquit Mubarak and his cronies of the charges of killing dozens of peaceful demonstrators at Tahrir Square in January 2011.

Arab autocrats in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere have worked feverishly to stamp out all vestiges of the 2011 revolutions. They have used bloody sectarianism and the threat of terrorism to delegitimise popular protests and discredit demands for genuine political reform.

The acquittal put a legal imprimatur on the dictator of Egypt’s campaign to re-write history.

Following the 2013 coupe that toppled President Mohamed Morsi, who is still in jail facing various trumped up charges, Arab dictators cheered on former Field Marshall and current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, lavishing him with billions of dollars. They parodied his narrative against the voices—secularists and Islamists alike—who cried out for good governance.

Regardless of how weak or solid the prosecution’s case against Mubarak was, the court’s ruling was not about law or legal arguments—from day one it was about politics and counter-revolution.

The unsurprising decision does, however, offer several critical lessons for the region and for the United States.

Removing a dictator is easier than dismantling his regime

Arab authoritarian regimes, whether dynasties or presidential republics, have perfected the art of survival, cronyism, systemic corruption, and control of potential opponents. They have used Islam for their cynical ends, urged the security service to silence the opposition, and encouraged the pliant media to articulate the regime’s narrative.

In order to control the “deep state” regime, Arab dictators in Egypt and elsewhere have created a pro-regime judiciary, dependable and well-financed military and security services, a compliant parliament, a responsive council of ministers, and supple and controlled media.

Autocrats have also ensured crucial loyalty through patronage and threats of retribution; influential elements within the regime see their power and influence as directly linked to the dictator.

The survival of both the dictator and the regime is predicated on the deeply held assumption that power-sharing with the public is detrimental to the regime and anathema to the country’s stability. This assumption has driven politics in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and several other countries since the beginning of the Arab Spring.

In anticipating popular anger about the acquittal decision, Judge Rashidi had the temerity to publicly claim that the decision “had nothing to do with politics.” In reality, however, the decision had everything to do with a pre-ordained decision on the part of the Sisi regime to turn the page on the January 25 revolution.

Dictatorship is a risky form of governance

Authoritarian regimes across the Arab world are expected to welcome Mubarak’s acquittal and the Sisi regime’s decision to move away from the pro-democracy demands that rocked Egypt in January 2011.

Bahrain’s King Hamad, for example, called Mubarak the day the decision was announced to congratulate him, according to the official news agency of the Gulf Arab island nation.

The New York Times has also reported that the Sisi regime is confident that because of the growing disinterest in demonstrations and instability, absolving Mubarak would not rile up the Egyptian public.

If the Sisi regime’s reading of the public mood proves accurate, Arab autocrats would indeed welcome the Egyptian ruling with open arms, believing that popular protests on behalf of democracy and human rights would be, in the words of the Arabic proverb, like a “summer cloud that will soon dissipate.”

However, most students of the region believe Arab dictators’ support of the Sisi regime is shortsighted and devoid of any strategic assessment of the region.

Many regional experts also believe that popular frustration with regime intransigence and repression would lead to radicalisation and increased terrorism.

The rise of Islamic State (ISIS or IS) is the latest example of how popular frustration, especially among Sunni Muslims, could drive a terrorist organization.

This phenomenon sadly has become all too apparent in Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, and elsewhere. In response to popular resistance, however, the regimes in these countries have simply applied more repression and destruction.

Indeed, Sisi and other Arab autocrats have yet to learn the crucial lesson of the Arab Spring: People cannot be forced to kneel forever.

Blowback from decades of misguided U.S. regional policies

Focused on Sisi’s policies toward his people, Arab autocrats seem less attentive to Washington’s policies in the region than they have been at any time in recent decades.

They judge American regional policies as rudderless and preoccupied with tactical developments.

Arab regimes and publics have heard lofty American speeches in support of democratic values and human rights, and then seen US politicians coddle dictators.

Time after time, autocrats in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Syria have also seen Washington’s tactical policies in the region trump American national values, resulting in less respect for the United States.

Yet while Mubarak’s acquittal might soon fade from the front pages of the Egyptian media, the Arab peoples’ struggle for human rights, bread, dignity, and democracy will continue.

Sisi believes the US still views his country as a critical ally in the region, especially because of its peace treaty with Israel, and therefore would not cut its military aid to Egypt despite its egregious human rights record. Based on this belief, Egypt continues to ignore the consequences of its own destructive policies.

Now might be the right time, however, for Washington to reexamine its own position toward Egypt and reassert its support for human rights and democratic transitions in the Arab world.

If the United States is interested in containing the growth of terrorism in the region, it must ultimately focus on the economic, political, and social root causes that push young Muslim Arabs towards violent extremism.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Egypt's military rulers have set security solutions over political ones. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 2014 (IPS)

The unexpected resignation of Hazem al-Biblawi, Egypt’s interim prime minister, and his government this week and the appointment of Ibrahim Mehlib, a Mubarak-era industrialist, as a new prime minister seem to pave the way for Field Marshal Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s anticipated presidential bid.

These intriguing government shuffles, however, fail to hide the reality of the military junta’s repression and massive human rights violations.Washington has a huge reservoir of “soft power” in the region, which it could and should use to bring about democratic transitions.

The politically motivated indictments, trials, and convictions of regime critics, including journalists, academics, entertainers, comedians, and ideologically diverse political activists have cut across large segments of Egyptian society. The regime’s initial claim that repressive measures were necessary to uproot the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters and decapitate its leadership is no longer believable.

The military junta is determined to live its “fascist moment,” in the words of Professor Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, and to maintain its grip on power come what may. Sisi doesn’t seem worried about a potential loss of U.S. military or economic aid because he expects Saudi Arabia and Russia to fill the gap.

Perhaps the real reason that underpins his lack of concern about losing U.S. aid is the belief that the Obama administration would not certify to Congress that the junta has not made any progress toward democracy. Washington would not want to lose Egypt, which means military aid will continue; hence, no certification.

While Sisi presents his leadership style to many Egyptians as a combination of the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Russia’s current ruler Vladimir Putin, many in the region and in Washington are asking one key question: Does the Obama administration have the will and credibility to halt Egypt’s deepening dictatorship and promote human rights and freedom of expression?

This is a fair question since President Barack Obama has invoked U.S. democratic values in supporting the revolution that toppled Mubarak, in urging the Bahraini regime to engage the opposition in meaningful dialogue, and in calling for an end to the Assad regime in Syria. Additionally, most observers believe the international community cannot act decisively on behalf of human rights in any of these countries without U.S. leadership.

I have argued in the past two years in this space and elsewhere that Washington has a huge reservoir of “soft power” in the region, which it could and should use to bring about democratic transitions. Democratiation would reflect U.S. values and serve U.S. interests. Other regional experts advocated a similar approach.

The Obama administration has lost much of its credibility in the region, particularly in Egypt. It worked closely with the Mubarak regime and then abandoned him in favour of the revolution in January 2011.

Washington supported Mohamed Morsi’s presidency because he was the first ever freely elected president of Egypt. Yet the Obama administration failed to condemn his removal in a military coup led by Sisi. In fact, the administration went through all kinds of rhetorical hoops and gymnastics in order to avoid calling the military coup by its real name — a coup.

Washington has also remained silent in the face of ongoing state persecution of journalists and nationally known academics. Some academics have spent time in Washington, D.C. and other U.S. cities in the past three years consulting with U.S. officials about the prospects of democracy in Egypt.

Sadly, they are no longer walking in Washington’s halls of power but languishing in Egyptian jails.

Several factors could explain Washington’s apparent paralysis when it comes to Egypt. First, according to media reports, much uncertainly seems to characterise the administration’s policy debates on the Middle East but particularly on Egypt. The constant attempt to resolve the Values versus Interests dichotomy has left the national security community within the administration rudderless, creating an impression of impotence, confusion, and a lack of direction.

Second, the administration’s vacillation on Syria — whether to pursue a diplomatic or a military solution to the conflict — has rendered the United States a “paper tiger” in the eyes of Arab publics. Most of the world had expected Obama to strike Syria, but instead he took the case to the U.S. Congress with the promise that Syria would destroy its chemical weapons.

Syria’s delivery of the weapons for destruction has stalled, and the Geneva talks have failed. The Assad regime was playing for time, and Washington is left holding an empty bag.

The statements and rationalisations that Secretary of State John Kerry made in his TV interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Feb. 26 were a pallid display of the administration’s pendulous position on Syria and by extension on Egypt. When Mitchell pushed Kerry about the human tragedy in Syria and the regime’s use of its air force to drop “barrel” bombs on the population, he demurred and said that all options are on the table.

The pro-democracy convictions Kerry expressed in the interview in support of the anti-regime uprising in Ukraine were totally absent when he spoke on Syria and other “Arab Spring” countries.

Third, Obama’s upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia must have been preceded by intense efforts at appeasing the Saudis and allaying their doubts about U.S. resolve on Syria. A palatable visit from the Saudi perspective would be for the U.S. president to support the Sisi coup and keep U.S. military aid flowing to the Egyptian military.

The Saudis also would urge Obama to ease up on the Al Khalifa regime in Bahrain and be wary of Iran’s perceived charm offensive.

The pessimistic assessment of the administration’s policy oscillation could be reversed if Washington compels Syria to ground its air force and if it publicly and unequivocally demands that Sisi chart a clear pathway to democracy.

Supporting democracy in Ukraine reflects U.S. values and serves Washington’s national strategic interests. This should be the default position toward Egypt as well.

Emile Nakhleh is a former Senior U.S. Intelligence Officer, a Research Professor at the University and author of “A Necessary Engagement:  Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World”.

A woman steps away from tear gas during a riot in Cairo. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS.

By Hisham Allam
CAIRO, Dec 1 2013 (IPS)

“Subsidies from the Arab world are large and reflect Arabs’ love towards the Egyptian people, but we cannot depend on that to build an economy that can compete with other countries,” said economist Dr Alia el Mahdi.

She was explaining the economic situation in Egypt after the current government made repeated requests for financial assistance from Gulf countries.

“Our dependence on them should not exceed temporary assistance, and it should not become the mainstay of the national economy, just to gain a better international credit rating,” she added.

The credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s raised its long- and short-term foreign and local currency sovereign credit ratings for Egypt on Nov. 15, from “CCC+/C” to “B-/B” with a “stable” rating outlook.

In his short trip to the United Arab Emirates last October, Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi was told by the deputy prime minister of the UAE, Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, that “Arab support for Egypt will not last long, and Egypt should come up with innovative and unconventional solutions.”

El Mahdi, a former dean of the economics and political science faculty at Cairo University, told IPS that “The armed forces should stop funding the national economy and go back to their essential mission, which is maintaining security along the borders.”

She said foreign investment has almost fled from Egypt, as reflected by the small numbers of experts and foreign investors who attend economic conferences and seminars held in Egypt. “If we want to bring them back again, then there is no alternative other than political stability and security,” she said.

“Small industries in Egypt, which represent 87 percent of the volume of industrial plants and 13 percent of industrial production, are suffering badly,” she added.

El-Beblawi’s cabinet had a great opportunity to curb the economic decline that the government of ousted president Mohamed Morsi (2012-2013) exacerbated, “but they didn’t,” el Mahdi said.

“The current state of Egypt’s economy has become a disaster that requires immediate intervention to save it before it’s too late,” said Salah Gouda, head of the Economic Studies Centre in Cairo.

“The monetary reserves decreased from 36 billion dollars in January 2011 to 22 billion dollars by late November 2011,” he said. “Then they descended to 13.6 billion dollars by March 2013, due to a rise in imports as a result of not running at full production capacity.”

The unemployment rate has reached 15 percent, which means there are about 10 million people unemployed in this country of 84 million, Gouda said.

“Everyone was expecting a lot from Beblawi’s cabinet, who took the oath after the Jul. 3 military crackdown against Morsi,” he added. “But all the crises plaguing Egyptians while Morsi was in power still exist – gas shortages, traffic jams, lack of security – even train accidents.

“I can say that interim President Adly Mansour’s first hundred days have resembled the first 100 days of former president Morsi – both are disappointing,” Gouda told IPS.

He said the current regime frittered away public support after the Jun. 30 public uprising, in addition to 12 billion dollars in financial aid from the Gulf countries.

“Despite all this, the government’s performance was weak, with the ministries working merely to make it through the current period without being exposed to legal questions later,” he argued.

The military are now leading Egypt in many fields, especially the economy, standing by the current government to enforce law and security, and addressing any crises that arise. “The military are very keen to keep their prestige,” he added.

Another problem the current regime is facing, Gouda said, was that “after foreign investment fled as a result of the security situation, large numbers of businessmen belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood or supporters of the ousted president decided to withdraw their investments to strike an economic blow to the current system, and they succeeded to some extent.”

Ali Fayez, a former head of the Federation of Egyptian Banks, told IPS “the banking system stopped funding small and big projects, which led to hundreds of businessmen being on the black lists of banks as a result of their inability to pay some instalments.

“European and Gulf subsidies are vitamins and painkillers,” he said. “It would be better if they pumped real investments into Egypt, because the results would be more sustainable than cash payments.”

“Domestic debt has exceeded all safe limits since before the Jan. 25, 2011 revolution, and all the cabinets that have ruled since the fall of Hosni Mubarak [1981-2011] have depended on delaying and rescheduling payments,” Fayez told IPS. “None of the successive governments have tried to face it, and this is seen as a major burden for the coming generations.

“The only difference between the two governments, the Muslim Brotherhood and the current administration, is that the former was relying on aid from Qatar and Turkey while the second is depending on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,” Fayez said.

The killing of Muslim Brotherhood supporters has only strengthened resolve within the party to resist the current regime. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani/IPS

By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
CAIRO, Aug 23 2013 (IPS)

The ongoing crackdown on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi has prompted some analysts to warn of the apparent resurgence of the Mubarak-era police state.

“Since the Jul. 3 military coup against President Morsi, we’ve seen what can only be described as a return of the police state,” Seif Abdel-Fattah, professor of political science at Cairo University and former Morsi aide (who resigned from the post last November), told IPS.

“We’ve now reverted to Mubarak-era fascism, replete with killing demonstrators, raiding homes [of political activists], emergency laws and perpetual surveillance,” said Abdel-Fattah, who is not affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Since Morsi’s ouster, hundreds – possibly thousands – have been killed by security forces, including Brotherhood members and others opposed to renewed military rule.

On Wednesday Aug. 14, hundreds of demonstrators were gunned down in a violent dispersal of a pro-Morsi protest in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawia Square.

The authorities say that scores of security personnel have been killed in clashes with “armed demonstrators” and in attacks by “militants”.

Speaking on Monday (Aug. 19), social solidarity minister Ahmed al-Borei defended the methods used by security forces to disperse pro-Morsi protests, alleging that demonstrators at Rabaa al-Adawiya were armed and had posed a “threat to national security.”

Following the bloody protest dispersal and the angry demonstrations that came in its wake, the government announced a month-long state of emergency, including an 11-hour daily curfew. A staple of Mubarak’s 30-year rule, Egypt’s emergency law allows police to make arrests without charge and search homes without warrant.

This week, authorities rounded up hundreds of Brotherhood members nationwide, along with figures from allied Islamist groups, such as Egypt’s Gamaa Islamiya. At least 1,000 high- and mid-ranking Brotherhood members are reported to have been arrested to date.

On Tuesday (Aug. 20), Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie was arrested in Cairo and charged with “inciting violence”. His trial has already been set for later this month and he reportedly faces the death penalty if convicted.

“Carrying out mass arrests in such a manner…constitutes nothing less than a return to the Mubarak era, the emergency state, media lies and fabrications,” Gamaa Islamiya declared in a statement.

It went on to note that senior group member Mustafa Hamza had been arrested by “dawn visitors” who raided his home in Egypt’s Beni Sueif province, “taking him from his family without levelling any charges.”

“Dawn visitors” is a Mubarak-era term used to describe early morning raids by security forces on the homes of the regime’s opponents.

The military-backed government, insisting that it is “fighting terrorism,” blames the Brotherhood for a series of attacks on security installations and personnel in the restive Sinai Peninsula.

On Monday, the government announced that 25 policemen had been killed by “suspected militants” near the North Sinai city of Rafah.

The Brotherhood has condemned the violence in Sinai, denying any involvement or that of its Islamist allies. It also strenuously denies any connection to a recent spate of attacks on Christian churches, and has continued to call for strictly peaceful means of protest.

State media organs, meanwhile, along with most of their privately-owned counterparts, have consistently portrayed pro-Morsi demonstrations as “violent” threats to the general public – while providing little credible proof in support of their claims.

Last year Brotherhood candidate Morsi became Egypt’s first-ever freely elected president. On Jul. 3 of this year he was overthrown by the head of the powerful military establishment Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, head of military intelligence under Mubarak, amid massive and well-coordinated demonstrations against his presidency.

Morsi, who faces a raft of criminal charges his supporters say are politically motivated, has been held at an undisclosed location ever since.

Morsi’s opponents call his ouster a “second revolution” along the lines of Egypt’s January 2011 uprising, which ostensibly ended the Mubarak regime.

But Morsi’s supporters call it a “military coup” against a democratically elected president; a “counter-revolution” by Mubarak’s “deep state” which they say has remained deeply entrenched in Egypt’s judicial system, media institutions, intelligence apparatus and security services.

Fears of looming oppression – especially of Islamists – were stoked last month when interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim announced the reactivation of a Mubarak-era police unit devoted to monitoring and combating “religious extremism”. The unit had been part of Mubarak’s dreaded state security apparatus, known for committing gross rights violations, especially against the regime’s Islamist opponents.

Last week Ibrahim went further, vowing to provide levels of “security” unseen since before Egypt’s Jan. 25, 2011 uprising. “As soon as conditions stabilise and the Egyptian street stabilises… security will be restored to this nation as if it was before Jan. 25 – and more,” he said.

According to Cairo University’s Abdel-Fattah, Ibrahim’s comments “reveal an intention to restore the interior ministry to its pre-revolution glory with all that it entails, including rights violations, spying, heavy-handed policing, a total lack of accountability, and the domination of Egypt’s political and cultural spheres.

“And from what we’ve seen recently,” he added, “it’s already begun.”

Foreign ministry spokesman Badr Abdel Ati dismissed any comparison between the Mubarak regime and Egypt’s new military-installed government.

“The emergency law will only last for one month and for one objective: to fight terrorism,” he declared. “And the only way to fight terrorism is to apply the rule of law and some emergency measures, for only one month, to restore law and order.”

Abdel-Fattah, in line with increasingly common opinion, was not reassured. “Since Morsi’s ouster, some of those most closely associated with the Mubarak regime, including key members of Mubarak’s [now defunct] National Democratic Party, have begun returning to political life.”

On Wednesday, Mubarak himself was released from prison after being acquitted of corruption allegations. Although he still faces other criminal charges, including complicity in the murder of unarmed protesters in 2011, the Brotherhood described the development as “a victory for the counter-revolution.”

The Muslim Brotherhood formally renounced violence in the 1950s and says it has used strictly political methods to accomplish its aims ever since. Under Mubarak, the group was outlawed and its members routinely persecuted.

In Egypt’s first post-revolution parliamentary poll in late 2011, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won roughly half of the seats in the People’s Assembly (later dissolved by the military), while another quarter went to other Islamist-leaning parties.

One day after the killing by the Egyptian army and security forces of hundreds of civilian protestors, U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday announced the cancellation of joint U.S.-Egyptian military exercises scheduled for September.

Cancellation of the biannual Operation Bright Star marked the first concrete step taken by Obama to distance Washington from the Egyptian military since the latter ousted President Mohamed Morsi Jul. 3 and installed an interim government which it increasingly appears to dominate.“There is no question this has highlighted the reduced significance and leverage the U.S. has with regard to Egypt.” -- Samer Shehata

The move came, however, amidst growing calls from lawmakers and others to go much farther by immediately suspending 1.3 billion dollars Washington provides in military aid to Egypt each year, a step that the administration is considered by most experts unlikely to take unless Wednesday’s bloody crackdown continues in the coming days.

“(W)hile we want to sustain our relationship with Egypt, our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” Obama declared in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where he is currently vacationing with his family.

“As a result, this morning we notified the Egyptian government that we are canceling our biannual joint military exercise which was scheduled for next month,” he added.

“Going forward I’ve asked my national security team to assess the implications of the actions taken by the interim government and further steps that we may take as necessary with respect to the U.S.-Egyptian relationship.”

With the official death toll from Wednesday’s violence climbing overnight to well over 600 and another 4,000 people injured, prospects for restoring stability to the country appear very uncertain.

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose partisans were the principal victims of the bloodshed and whose leaders are reportedly being rounded up throughout the country, has vowed to continue demonstrating until Morsi is re-instated.

Virtually all analysts here agree that Washington’s influence over events and the key protagonists in Egypt appears extremely limited at the moment.

Efforts by top U.S. officials, including, notably, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, to persuade his Egyptian counterpart, Gen. Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, not to evict pro-Morsi protestors and two Cairo encampments with lethal force were clearly unavailing. Similar efforts to convince top Brotherhood leaders to drop their demand that Morsi be re-instated also came to naught.

“There is no question this has highlighted the reduced significance and leverage the U.S. has with regard to Egypt,” Samer Shehata, an Egypt expert at the University of Oklahoma, told IPS.

The suspension of military aid, he added, “seems to be the most extreme action the administration would take. If the levels of violence continue, it will be seriously considered, but if they diminish, I don’t think it will.”

Nonetheless, a number of influential lawmakers are calling for precisely such action.

“While suspending joint military exercises as the president has done is an important step, our law is clear: aid to the military should cease unless they restore democracy,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the key Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Thursday.

He was joined by Republican Sen. John McCain, who last week personally warned officials in Cairo that aid would be cut if the military carried through with its threat to use force in clearing two squares in Cairo that had been occupied by tens of thousands of pro-Morsi demonstrators since the coup.

Only two weeks ago, McCain had spoken in opposition to legislation mandating a cut-off of all aid to Egypt, arguing that it would reduce U.S. influence with the generals.

They were backed by the editorial boards of both the Washington Post and the New York Times which Thursday argued that until “the generals change their ways, …the United States should slam the door on an aid program that has provided the Egyptian military with a munificent 1.3 billion dollars a year for decades.”

The cancellation of Bright Star “falls short of what the circumstances on the ground merit, given the bloodshed and how many civilians have been killed,” Mona Yacoubian, an Egypt expert at the Stimson Centre, told IPS.

The administration, she added “should very strongly consider a suspension of aid until the situation improves.”

But a number of analysts believe the Egyptian military may be willing to forgo the aid in what it may believe is an existential struggle against the Brotherhood.

“[T]he military there are not concerned about American opinion,” wrote Col. Pat Lang (ret.), a former top Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) on his blog, “Sic Semper Tyrannis” Thursday.

“They don’t think the money will be cut off for long. They have other sources of money. They are basically an internal security force and do not need the fancy gear that we have provided them. Abrams tanks, F-16s, etc. are too sophisticated for them to use effectively in actual combat.”

Those other sources of money include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait which together have pledged 12 billion dollars for Egypt since the coup – almost 10 times the total amount of U.S. military aid, most of which ends up, in any event, in the coffers of U.S. arms manufacturers which, along with the Gulf states and Israel, can be expected to lobby hard against any aid cut-off.

“The calculation of the Egyptian generals is right,” noted Joshua Stacher, an Egypt expert at KentStateUniversity in Ohio. “As the administration, what’s your ultimate play? You’re [not] going to break 35 years of a policy …whose essence is reliance on the Egyptian military.

“The Israelis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Emiratis are saying, ‘Don’t cut those relations.’ Not only are they allies and friends, but they also buy an enormous amount of military hardware [from U.S. manufacturers],” he told IPS.

According to Shehata, “What the U.S. is concerned about, first and foremost, is the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. That is the lens through which the U.S. sees Egypt.

“Secondary to that is military co-operation: expedited passage of naval vessels through the Suez Canal, overflight through Egyptian airspace, intelligence sharing in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Of course, human rights concerns are there someplace, but, unfortunately, they are below these other concerns on the list of priorities.”

Indeed, in an op-ed published Thursday in the New York Daily News, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) noted precisely such considerations in arguing not only against cutting off aid but also against the administration’s appeals for a post-coup transition that would include, rather than repress, the Brotherhood.

“What Washington needs to do is clear. U.S. policy should be to support only Egyptian leaders unambiguously committed to Camp David [the Israeli-Egyptian treaty]…And we must assist those who place highest priority on repairing Egypt’s badly weakened economy and securing its international economic obligations, particularly safe transit through the Suez Canal.”

Even an aid cut-off which, according to Stacher, has become a real possibility, is unlikely to have the desired effect for the reasons cited by Lang.

“If you really want to get to the heart of the relationship, you have to attack the military-to-military exchanges – the training visits to the U.S., and the informal officer-to-officer relationships that take place outside the formal chain of command.

“As long as these informal officer-to-officer relationships exist, the generals won’t believe threats coming out of Washington as credible,” he said.

“Until these relationships are severed and the military-to-military relationship is formalised, any U.S. administration has wiggle room to look like it’s changing its policies without actually changing the essence of the relationship, which is U.S. reliance on the Egyptian military.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The revolutionary aspirations for justice, dignity and hope that Egypt’s young people brought to the world in January 2011 were crushed Wednesday by the military’s bloody crackdown.

Declaring a State of Emergency and putting the army on the streets is a sure sign that the January 2011 revolution, which toppled Hosni Mubarak, has been upended. Many Egyptians are worried that key elements of the Mubarak regime are back in the saddle. Egypt may be sliding into civil war and state failure.

Muhammad El-Baradei’s resignation as vice president indicates that Egyptian liberals who supported the military in ousting former democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi are becoming clear-eyed about the military’s intention to scuttle the post-Mubarak democratic experiment.

General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s appointment of over a dozen and a half retired army generals as governors throughout Egypt is yet another sign that the military is here to stay.

The massive street demonstrations, which al-Sisi called for as a “mandate” to depose Morsi, would soon reappear demanding his own ouster. It will again mobilise the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters.

No matter how much they despise the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian liberals now realise that military rule cannot be synonymous with democracy.

In an op-ed posted on IPS and LobeLog a month ago, I warned of the strong possibility of the military hijacking democracy in Egypt. The army did just that Wednesday, 44 days after it ousted Morsi from office.

Prominent liberal leaders who are currently serving in al-Sisi’s provisional government protested for months against the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or SCAF. Following the fall of Mubarak, the military under General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi engineered their return to power and defended their autocratic rule in the name of combating instability and chaos. They were forced out by street protests.

This time around, the military again used a similar argument to repeat the same pattern. In addition to the appointment of new governors, al- Sisi and interim President Adly Mansour have brought back rules and procedures as well as senior elements from the Mubarak era.

Once the military emasculates the revolution, the Egyptian people will be out in the streets demanding a return to genuine democracy. Because of civil strife, factional divisions, and rogue elements from the old regime, it might be too late to recapture the revolution of 2011.

The Barack Obama administration endeavored but failed to broker a deal between the military and the Morsi supporters, including releasing Muslim Brotherhood prisoners, and respecting the right to peaceful protests and assembly. The failure signals Washington’s diminishing influence over the Egyptian military despite the billions in foreign and military aid Egypt receives from the United States.

Whether in Egypt or Bahrain, the United States has been caught in the middle of deeply divided countries. According to media reports, some Egyptian revolutionaries and some pro-government Bahrainis are no longer interested in receiving U.S. aid.

In Egypt, U.S. aid is perceived as supporting military dictatorship. In Bahrain, U.S. military presence is perceived by pro-regime elements as empowering the pro-reform movement, including the Shia opposition, and restricting the government from cracking down on the opposition.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s statement condemning the bloody violence perpetrated by the military and police against peaceful sit-ins was forceful but ineffective. The military has already done its nasty deed without any fear of international condemnation.

The Egyptian military has co-opted most of the Egyptian media and is feverishly attempting to win over international media. The regime has restricted media activities and banned some international journalists from operating in the country.

Unfortunately, three international reporters were killed on Wednesday during the one-day bloody crackdown.

U.S. policymakers should ask what leverage, if any, Washington still has to influence events on the ground. Despite its perceived weakened position in the region, the United States continues to have a special relationship with the Egyptian military. If the Egyptian military wants to bring the country back from the brink, it should take several urgent steps. Washington most likely would stand ready to help if called upon.

First: The bloody confrontations with peaceful protesters, including the Muslim Brotherhood and other opponents of the recent coup, should stop immediately.

Second: A return to civilian rule through parliamentary and presidential elections should be accomplished within a few months. All political groups and parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, should have the opportunity to participate in these elections without fear or intimidation.

Third: All political prisoners, including deposed president Morsi and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, should be released immediately and be invited to participate in national reconciliation talks under the auspices of al-Azhar.

Fourth: The Egyptian military regime fully realises that a stable Egypt is pivotal to Middle East stability, but that enduring domestic stability cannot be imposed by the barrel of a gun. If Egypt does not return to civilian rule, descending into chaos, political violence, civil war, and possibly state failure is not unthinkable.

Emile Nakhleh, a former Senior Intelligence Service Officer, is a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico and author of “A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World and Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing Society.”

The Muslim Brotherhood has its own army of the young that will not easily be defeated. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS

By Hisham Allam
CAIRO, Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

The youth within the Muslim Brotherhood may become very difficult to restrain following the bloody killings in Cairo, senior party members say.

Former youth leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, Haytham Abu Khalil, told IPS that the Brotherhood youth are now in a state of anger, confusion and uncertainty. Given the killing of so many, bringing the militant among them round through intellectual and religious campaigns will now be very difficult.

“The bloody attack they suffered during the sit-ins has made them see themselves as oppressed. They think they must come together to overcome this,” Khalil said.

One consequence will be a revolt against moderate leadership within the party, he said. “After passing through the current plight, the young members will overthrow the current leadership to restore community trust in the group. But I do not expect this in the near term.”“They are using the youth as a fuel for violence, and will abandon them at the first turn.” -- Political analyst Dr. Wahid Abd-al-Majid

Defections to more militant groups are expected, said Khalil who is author of the fictional book Reformist Brothers. “But it will occur in the long term, because everyone now will work to maintain the organisation. We are a complicated group and not as easy to deal with as the military thinks.”

The more immediate danger may be the forming of splinter militant groups, he said. “I do not rule out that some angry members formulate armed groups individually without reference to the leaders.”

Any move by the military to ban political parties based on religion would only drive members to radical Islamic groups who would then adopt ideas of jihadist extremism, he warned.

Dr. Amr Hashem Rabie, head of the Egyptian studies department at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said a tendency may emerge within the group to get rid of the established principle of obedience. Such a step would create an imbalance within the Brotherhood because it would be certain to attract many of the youth.

“The young feel now they have been thrown into a bloody confrontation,” he said. “Those who reject the current leadership will abandon the Brotherhood, and either quit political work or join armed militias such as the Salafist Jihadi.”

Rabie said senior Brotherhood leaders want a political role for the party, and would not like to return to darkness again. But, he said, “the voice of neo-reformists will rise from within.”

The shape of the future of the Muslim Brotherhood itself is at stake after the massive killing in Cairo and the bloody clashes over a sit-in to demand reinstatement of Mohamed Morsi, removed by the military as president.

Many political analysts believe that the future of the Muslim Brotherhood will be determined by young people, several of whom have been taking to violence to hit back over what they see as religious persecution.

Political analyst Dr. Wahid Abd-al-Majid said the crackdown by the military is turning into a confrontation between the army and the police on one hand, and an increasingly armed Muslim Brotherhood on the other.

In the face of the bloody crackdown by the military, Abd-al-Majid pointed out that there has also been violence from an armed faction within the Muslim Brotherhood. Two divergent camps are emerging within the party, he told IPS.

“I have information that there are some senior leaders within the Brotherhood who reject the escalation method of the leading sit-in group,” he said, adding that have been instructed to not show this.

Abd-al-Majid said that some armed groups, led by young members who believe that change will come only through violence and jihad, have already emerged out of the Brotherhood, and that these were gaining strength. “They would kill for the sake of the Brotherhood and in the name of Allah and Islam.”

The Brotherhood youth has been diverging into two since the Jan. 25 revolution, Abd-al-Majid said. One side has been forming peaceful groups such as “Brothers Without Violence” and “Free Brothers”. Some have gathered around dissident Brotherhood leaders or joined political parties such as al-Wasat and Masr al-Qaweya. But these are relatively minor groups.

However, the militant Brotherhood group is more dominant, he said. They are immersed in an ideology of full obedience to party leaders – at present. Reformist leaders within the Brotherhood will now struggle to change the strategy of motivating the youth into aggressive opposition.

“They are using the youth as a fuel for violence, and will abandon them at the first turn.” The youth have not been given responsible roles inside the party. They were not represented for instance within the Shura Council, he said. This may only deepen divisions between moderate party leaders and an increasingly militant youth within the group.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 14 2013 (IPS)

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has refused to describe the Egyptian army’s ouster of a democratically-elected government last month as a “military coup”, lambasted the country’s security forces for Wednesday’s massacre of civilians in the streets of Cairo.

He condemned in the “strongest terms” the violence that occurred when the Egyptian military used force to clear Cairo of sit-ins and demonstrations."Disaster has befallen Egypt." -- Chris Toensing, editor of the Washington-based Middle East Report

“While the U.N. is still gathering precise information about today’s events, it appears that hundreds of people were killed or wounded in clashes between security forces and demonstrators,” he added.

Asked why Ban still refuses to describe the army takeover as a “coup”, U.N. associate spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS, “No real comment on that; I think the language of the statement speaks for itself.”

According to reports out of Cairo, the death toll was around 149 – and rising. The number of injured has been estimated at over 1,400.

Egypt’s acting Vice President Mohamed El-Baradei, Nobel Laureate and a former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has resigned.

“Disaster has befallen Egypt,” Chris Toensing, editor of the Washington-based Middle East Report, told IPS.

The country’s agony is a boon to the army, the secret police and other elements of the “deep state”, he added. Over the last two years, with the eager cooperation of state-run and private media, they have painted themselves as national saviours in the minds of a majority of Egyptians, Toensing said.

“Today’s massacres, sadly, will cement that image for the near future,” he said.

“It is the nastiest trick in the autocrat’s book. Cry ‘after us, the deluge’, then disappear from public view and watch the deluge occur, so as to ride back on a white horse,” said Toensing. “As for the shameful U.S. position, it simply proves that the real U.S. ally in Egypt is the army, as has been the case since Camp David, if not before.”

He said the meek calls for restraint from Washington, Europe and the United Nations are reminiscent of nothing so much as the similar pabulum issued when Israel mounts an assault on Gaza or the West Bank.

The U.S. brokered the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, delivering billions of dollars’ worth of economic and military aid to both countries.

An Arab diplomat told IPS that Ban apparently is toeing the official U.S. line that last month’s military ouster of Egypt’s first freely-elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was an attempt to “restore democracy”.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters last week: “The (Egyptian) military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of people.

“The military did not take over, to the best of our judgment – so far,” he added.

If the administration of President Barack Obama had described the take over as a “coup”, it would have been forced to cut off all U.S. aid to Egypt, amounting to over 1.5 billion dollars annually, under current U.S. legislation.

The U.S. fear is that such a drastic step would further destabilise the country, which is already in the throes of a major political crisis.

Dr. Toby C. Jones, associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, described the U.S. position on Egypt as “hypocritical”.

“The U.S. primarily approaches its relationship with Egypt through the framework of security and strategic interests – thus the military, not human rights or democracy,” he told IPS.

He said the Obama administration has exactly who it wants in power in Cairo.

“Of course, American officials would prefer that they behave better and avoid the kind of violence that is taking place now, but not enough to denounce it strongly or consider political alternatives,” said Jones, who has a doctorate in Middle East history from Stanford University.

Asked about a proposal for Security Council intervention in Egypt, U.N. deputy spokesperson Eduardo del Buey told reporters Wednesday that would be a decision for the Council members to take. “The secretary-general will not opine on that,” he said.

In a statement released Wednesday, Ban said that only days ago, he renewed his call for all sides in Egypt to reconsider their actions in light of new political realities and the imperative to prevent further loss of life.

Ban said he regrets that Egyptian authorities chose instead to use force to respond to the ongoing demonstrations. He conveyed his condolences to the families of those killed and his wishes for a full and speedy recovery to those injured.

The secretary-general also said he is well aware that the vast majority of the Egyptian people, weary of disruptions to normal life caused by demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, want their country to go forward peacefully in an Egyptian-led process towards prosperity and democracy.

In the aftermath of today’s violence, he urged all Egyptians to concentrate their efforts on promoting genuinely inclusive reconciliation.

While recognising that political clocks do not run backwards, the secretary-general said he also believes firmly that violence and incitement from any side are not the answers to the challenges Egypt faces. With its rich history and diversity of views and experiences, it is not unusual for Egyptians to disagree on the best approach forward, he added.

What is in important, in the secretary-general’s view, is that differing views be expressed respectfully and peacefully.

To his regret, that is not what happened today.

Before an ultimatum to attack an anti-coup sit-in earlier this week, Egypt’s new strongman and coup leader Gen. Abdel Fatah Al-Sissi received one of his warmest endorsements ever – something that might have been torn right out of the steamy pages of the “Arabian Nights”.

Gen. Abdel Fatah Al-Sissi. Credit: U.S. State Department/public domain

A female secular columnist for the liberal, privately-owned daily Al-Masry Al-Youm wrote in support of his planned action, literally offering herself as “a sex slave”.

If this sounds like a typical example of how depraved Arab tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and Hafez Al-Assad strengthened their iron grip on their countries on the shoulders of compliant media and elites, it is because it is.

After all, this is the Middle East where more than two years after the Arab Spring, the elite, military and local media remain the world’s most skilled inventors of ruthless autocracies, from mad despots such as the deceased Muammer Gaddafi of Libya to brutal tribal monarchs such as the Al Saud royal family in Saudi Arabia and Al Nahian tribe in the United Arab Emirates.

It is through armies of similar cheerleaders who are willing to enslave and humiliate themselves that those rulers rise in tyranny and establish their unrivaled bloody hold on power. In Egypt, this is how pharaohs are made.

Hours after columnist Ghada Sherif offered her passionate physical backing, Sissi’s troops launched an overnight assault on his opponents. By daybreak, at least 82 people had been killed and dozens more injured, with many receiving sniper bullets in the head and neck.

The “sex slave” episode also shows the great lengths Sissi’s well- greased propaganda machine, backed by the treasures of the sprawling Egyptian military business complex and the riches of the country’s elite, will go to to catapult the 58-year old Sissi, or Super-Sissi as his fans call him, as Egypt’s saviour and next leader.

Sissi is backed by Egypt’s self-styled liberals, secularists and leaders of the Christian Orthodox minority who were routed and humiliated six consecutive times in fair and democratic elections at the hands of campaign-savvy Islamists during the country’s two-and-half year brush with democracy.

For them, tanks, assault rifles and military brass have become the only burrow they could ever dig to get close to office. To that end, they are showing utter disregard of law, human rights and respect for democracy.

As Sissi’s forces were slaughtering dozens of people and injuring many more in their overnight attack outside the Rabaa Mosque in Cairo Saturday morning, Pope Tawadros, leader of the country’s five million Christian Coptic minority, who detests Islamist parties, jubilantly tweeted: “Thank you to Egypt’s great military and its wonderful police force, for opening the doors of hope.”

Tawadros repeated “thank you” six times in his post.

And despite the bloodshed at the hands of Sissi’s military and police, the state-run Al-Ahram newspaper made splashing headlines of a report that one Egyptian man in the Red Sea city of Suez named his newborn child “Sissi”.

So thirsty for legitimacy and public acceptance of their coup outside of their supporters, the top commander of Egypt’s Third Army, who is supposedly busy fighting terrorism in Sinai, took time off to pay the parents a visit and hand them a reward for naming the new baby after the coup’s leader’s highly uncommon name. As expected, cameras were there to take pictures.

The Facebook page of the Egyptian military’s propaganda arm, the Morale Affairs, and other sympathetic Facebook pages widely believed to be run by intelligence officers entrusted with peddling Sissi to the public are lavishing pictures of tough, muscular and mustached officers in camouflaged uniforms, stamping a drooling kiss on portraits of Sissi.

The image-building gets even more ridiculous with attempts to create unsubstantiated heroic tales for Sissi.

A military Facebook page popular with Sissi’s fans and other obedient newspapers claimed that the U.S. Fifth Fleet was sent to Egypt’s shores last week to intervene in the turmoil only to be sternly told off by “Sissi the brave”.

The Americans tucked their tails between their legs and left the Mediterranean after Sissi’s thunderous warning, so the fable goes.

“Sissi threatened to annihilate the U.S. Fleet,” declared Al-Nahar newspaper of the story.

The signs are unmistakable. Such folk tales were a hallmark of Gaddafi’s 40-year rule, with his media inventing gallant military adventures for the consumption of gullible Libyans in a bid to legitimise his reign.

Over the past month, Sissi had displayed other megalomaniac traits a la Gaddafi, the touchstone of despotic tyranny in the region, who had a penchant for full military uniforms, sunglasses and extravagant medals. Sissi gave his last speech in identical dark eye shades, a full ornamental cap and a chest full of colorful medals.

But more ominous are the signs of how Sissi is concentrating power for his rule.

Egyptian prisons are filling up fast. Media outlets critical of the military are shuttered. Coup opponents face threats of confiscating their property and hurriedly cooked up criminal charges.

Ousted president Mohammed Morsi himself was held incommunicado for nearly a month before far-fetched accusations of espionage for the Palestinian group, Hamas, were conjured up.

Editors from the privately-owned pro-coup Shorouk newspapers banned articles by two writers, Wael Kandil and Ahmed Mansour, for questioning the coup leader’s ability to bring stability to Egypt. One of them, Kandil, later quipped that the incident made Hosni Mubarak sound like an angel as none of his harsh columns were censored before.

Worse, Gen. Sissi disbanded the elected Shura Council, revoked the constitution agreed upon by a whopping 64 percent vote in fair elections, and re-instated officers of the country’s repressive secret police, the country’s most hated and feared institution, who were fired after the Jan. 25, 2011 uprising against Mubarak for human rights abuses.

The secret police have powers to censor the media, screen applicants for government jobs, arrest opponents and hunt down dissidents with complete impunity.

Sissi’s reach hasn’t spared ordinary Egyptians either. Makeshift checkpoints manned by heavily-armed joint police and military units pepper Egypt’s streets, a scene not witnessed since the bloody era of Sissi’s role model, former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s.

Bearded men and women who choose the Islamic covering are stopped, arrested or abused based on their visible religious orientation. Those who are not visibly religious complain about the maltreatment at checkpoints and the return of non-optional bribes to traffic officers.

The rhetoric from the private media, owned by the country’s wealthy elite classes and members of the minority Christian Coptic church who both support Sissi, routinely encourage crackdowns against opponents. Examples include urging Sissi to cut off water and electricity from opposition sit-ins, flooding the sit-ins with sewage, and calls to shoot at “just their legs”, while all along showing fanatical devotion for their new Pharaoh, Sissi the Savior.

But nobody has yet matched Sherif’s offer. “Sissi, all you have to do is just wink,” the liberal writer titled her column.

“He is a man that Egyptians are infatuated with. If he wants to take four wives, then we are at his bidding. If he wants just a sex slave, by God, we’ll not be hard to get either.”

Emad Mekay is a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He worked for The New York Times, Bloomberg News and Inter Press Service in the Middle East. He is the founder of America In Arabic News Agency. He covered most of the initial protests of the Arab Spring for The International Herald Tribune and for Inter Press Service.

Egypt’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has called for nationwide rallies to give the military a mandate to confront what he termed violence and terrorism following the removal of President Mohamed Morsi.

In a speech on Wednesday at a military graduation ceremony, Sisi called for the protests to be held on Friday, and denied accusations that he had betrayed Morsi.

“I ask … that next [upcoming] Friday all honest and trustworthy Egyptians must come out,” Sisi said in remarks broadcast live by state media. “Why come out? They come out to give me the mandate and order that I confront violence and potential terrorism.”

Sisi also vowed to stick to a political roadmap that laid the way for a reform of the constitution and new elections within some six months.

He said his appeal for protests was not a call for violence and expressed support for efforts for national reconciliation.

The Muslim Brotherhood reacted quickly, with senior member Essam al-Erian issuing a statement directed at Sisi saying: “Your threat will not prevent millions to rally against coup … You have been always in your office conspiring.”

In a press conference later, Egypt’s opposition Islamist coalition read out a list of its stipulations. They called for Sisi to be tried for crimes against humanity, and termed Friday’s rally “irresponsible” and “an announcement of civil war”.

They also called on their supporters to oppose Sisi’s call.

“[General Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi’s threats are an announcement of civil war,” said the Muslim Brotherhood-led coalition which has been demanding Morsi’s reinstatement ever since his overthrow in a Jul. 3 coup.

Violence continues

The military also reacted, declaring a ‘state of alert’. A source confirmed to Al Jazeera that the army would deploy in the coming hours additional troops in all streets and provinces and especially greater Cairo and the surrounding areas to secure them against any violence.

The source added that the armed forces will work on preventing any attempt to “incite violence or terrorism”.

The army chief’s speech came ahead of proposed “national reconciliation” sessions called for by the interim leader Adly Mansour, and followed renewed violence in and outside the capital Cairo, in which at least three people died.

Sisi offered condolences to the families of victims killed in such violence, which has been seen as recently as Wednesday morning.

Unknown gunmen who shot at Morsi supporters in Cairo killed at least two people, witnesses and health officials confirmed, adding to a death toll of more than 100 people since the president was removed by the military on Jul. 3.

In a separate development on the same day, a bomb exploded at a police station in a province north of Cairo, killing one conscript, and wounding more than 15 people, health officials said.

Reconciliation talks

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood has said it will boycott Mansour’s reconciliation talks.

A senior member of Al-Nour, Egypt’s most powerful Salafi party, told Al Jazeera that it will also not be attending.

“The Muslim Brotherhood rejected an invite to Wednesday’s national reconciliation meeting. For them, the legitimate president of Egypt is Mohamed Morsi,” said Al Jazeera’s Nadim Baba in Cairo.

Former presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, tweeted a warning against the talks.

“Military coup government failed to stop bloodshed and detains tens of peaceful protestors every day and besieges media and closes its channel. Which reconciliation are you calling for?” he wrote.

Earlier this week, Mansour renewed appeals for reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

“We want to turn a new page in the country’s book with no hatred, no malice, no division,” he said in a pre-recorded speech that also highlighted the importance of the army in Egypt’s history.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

An anti-Morsi protest in August 2012, almost a year before the former president's ouster. Credit: Gigi Ibrahim/CC by 2.0

By Hisham Allam
CAIRO, Jul 21 2013 (IPS)

The events of Jun. 30 have split Egyptians into two categories. For those in the first, what happened that day was an army-supported public uprising to fulfill the objectives of the revolution of Jan. 25, 2011 and topple a president who broke promises and worked only to benefit his own group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The second category sees the events as a military coup planned in advance, a crisis orchestrated by army leaders and Egyptian intelligence to provoke citizens’ wrath against a democratically elected president and give them reason to oust him and seize power.

As the situation continues to unfold in Egypt, the events of that day have become even more divisive as protests supporting or decrying varying sides take place throughout the streets of Cairo and analysts and experts offer a variety of explanations for Morsi’s ouster.

According to Muhamed Omara, a member of the Salafist Nour Party and Egypt’s Constituent Assembly, the Egyptian opposition has long called for democracy, and so whomever Egyptians elected as their leader should be respected and given the chance to lead.

The behaviour of the liberal opposition toward the military coup was completely disgraceful, according to Omara, and ousting the legal president, Mohamed Morsi, could not be defined as democratic, he added.

Omara, who is also a professor at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, believed that the liberal opposition refused to accept Morsi’s initiatives to cooperate in building a new Egyptian state and instead described him as a non-democratic president, even as they saw their alliance with the army to oust him as a democratic move.

Ultimately, Omara concluded, the elected president was betrayed.

A smart plot

Hisham al-Husseiny, a pro-Morsi business man, believes that what happened on Jun. 30 was premeditated and that the leaders of the armed forces had long been waiting for an opportunity for a coup against Morsi.

Army leaders and Egyptian intelligence masterminded the crises in fuel, electricity and traffic and created a deficit to incite people to protest and demand Morsi’s departure, Al-Husseiny believed.

Meanwhile, although people were angry, Morsi made decisions against his own interests, and so people lost sympathy for him , al-Husseiny said. He expected that the Muslim Brotherhood would not participate in the political arena again soon until it received a guarantee that election results would be implemented and protected.

No longer legitimate

Mohamed Abu Hamed, the former vice chairman of the Free Egyptians Party, which was founded after the 2011 revolution and supports a liberal, democratic and secular political order in post-Mubarak Egypt, said Morsi ignored public sentiment when Egyptians called for early elections, so the Brotherhood president had to be overthrown by force.

Abu Hamed told IPS that Morsi began losing legitimacy when he issued a constitutional declaration to expand his authority, mistakenly thinking that such a move would shield him from criticism from the opposition and prevent the legal repealing of his decrees.

On Nov. 22, 2012, Morsi announced that the president was authorised to take any measures he saw fit in order to preserve and safeguard the revolution, national unity or national security. According to the decree, all constitutional declarations, laws and decrees made since Morsi assumed power could not be appealed or cancelled by any individual or political or governmental body until the ratification of a new constitution and the election of a new parliament.

Abu Hamed, a former member of the post-revolutionary People’s Assembly said that the president’s actions left the public and the military with little choice. After millions took to the streets, the army had to support the people, he added.

Tarek Zidan, head of Egypt’s Revolution Party (Hizb Thawret Masr), founded after the January 2011 revolution and consisting of 11 political coalitions and movements with moderate religious backgrounds, told IPS that democracy does not mean simply a ballot box.

Rather, democracy is the promises and pledges made by the nominated candidate to voters, he said. If these promises are not carried out in the agreed amount of time, voters have the right to withdraw the candidate in a revolutionary form of democracy.

The concept of democracy, according to Zidan, means popular sovereignty. The people are the source of authority, and so laws and the constitution lose legitimacy in the face of public revolutions. Accordingly, the people alone are the main source of authority, not the ballot box, as claimed by Morsi supporters, Zidan said.

What happened on Jun. 30 was a real revolution, supported by the army, where millions demanded the departure of Morsi and his group, Zidan maintained. It was not a military coup but democracy in its loftiest sense where the army listened to people and established a revolutionary democracy, without gaining for itself, he insisted.

The Egyptian military’s removal of the democratically-elected President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from power upended the MB’s 20-year old political participation programme. If the new regime aims to achieve genuine reconciliation and political consensus, the MB and its supporters must be included in the restructuring of Egyptian politics.

The Egyptian military in the short-run might succeed in marginalising the MB but will not defeat or silence it."As vast majorities of Muslims worldwide reject the radical message and as Bin Ladin’s jihadism fades away, it’s more urgent than ever to continue engaging Muslim youth and other groups worldwide."

During his short tenure, Morsi was unable to move the country forward economically, politically, and socially. The Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, equally failed to transcend their narrow MB partisan ideology.

Elements from the old regime also conspired to make Morsi fail. Yet, political fracturing, which Morsi was accused of promoting, is likely to continue under the new regime.

The symbiotic military-liberal alliance, driven by a visceral dislike of the MB, is destined to be short-lived. Over the next year, the economy is not expected to improve measurably, food and energy prices would not go down noticeably, tourism would remain stagnant, and hundreds of thousands of youth would stay unemployed.

Dissatisfied Egyptians would again hit the streets demanding change. When that happens, will Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi yet again find it necessary to impose military rule? While Islam might or might not be inimical to democracy, military dictatorship most certainly is. Deposing an elected leader by decree is not a harbinger for democracy. What will Egyptian liberals do when they wake up to this unpleasant reality?

It would be naïve for today’s Egyptian liberals and secularists to believe the military could stamp out Islamic ideology from Egyptian society. Forcing the MB out of politics will push many youthful MB supporters to become angry and alienated. As their frustration and disappointment with democratic politics grow, some of them would turn to violence, radicalism, and even terrorism.

Excluding MB ministers from the recently appointed interim cabinet is a formula for failure. The new cabinet would not be able to gain the trust of the Egyptian people if Islamic parties are not in the political mix.

Contrary to the opinions of so many Western talking heads and analysts, Morsi’s ouster does not signal the failure of political Islam or the demise of the MB. Nor does it signal the end of the “Arab Spring”.

“People power”, which toppled Hosni Mubarak and which played a role in toppling Morsi, is a new reality in today’s Egypt. The military was able to ride the popular wave in the Morsi case but should not count on a similar outcome in future power struggles.

The Egyptian MB is down but not out. Islam has deep roots in Egypt, which has underpinned local and national politics for decades, if not centuries. It can’t be wiped out so easily by a new brand of military-liberal secularism.

Nor can Islamic tendencies be muted by the billions of dollars of promised aid from Gulf countries, which for years promoted Islamism against Egyptian-led Arab nationalism and other secular ideologies. The cynical exploitation of Islam and Islamism by these regimes has always backfired on them over the years. It will not be different this time either.

Since its founding in 1928, the MB was in conflict with the Egyptian state for most of the past century. Some of its leaders were jailed, executed, or exiled. Others went underground. Many of its members became radicalised, especially during the Nasser era, and some resorted to violence and terrorism. Others went to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries where they were received with open arms.

In partnering with Saudi Salafis and Wahhabis, the anti-Nasser MB preachers and proselytisers who fled to the Gulf articulated a more radical, intolerant worldview of political Islam. Beginning in the late 1960s, these radicalisers embarked on a global plan of proselytisation or da’wa. The call for jihad against the “infidels” and the “enemies” of Islam was funded by Saudi Arabia.

While radical MB activists were busy in the Gulf and worldwide, their “mainstream” MB counterparts remained more active in Egypt, albeit in jail or underground. Despite massive suppression by Egyptian security services under the Mubarak regime, the movement did not fade away.

By the early 1990s, the Egyptian MB concluded it could not defeat the Mubarak regime through violence and opted instead to turn to politics. They refocused their efforts on Islamising society from below, arguing that if they could Islamise society, power would change at the top.

In a conversation with a U.S.-educated MB activist over 20 years ago about transforming society from within, he invoked the U.S. baseball field analogy. He said, “Build it, and they will come; change society from below, and the rest would follow!”

By the end of that decade, the MB had participated in parliamentary elections first as members of the Wafd Party, then as partners with the Labour Socialist Party. Finally, they ran as “independent” representatives. They had to play that game, they argued, because religious parties were banned under Mubarak.

MB spokesmen often reached out to U.S. officials in Cairo telling them repeatedly about their commitment to participate in national elections openly and freely if they were allowed to do so. My CIA analysts and I occasionally met with MB activists in Cairo during the 1990s.

The debate among U.S. policymakers on this issue was whether the MB’s shift from violence to politics was tactical or strategic. U.S. officials generally supported including political Islam in the political process, including elections, on the grounds that the performance of Islamic political parties in national legislatures, not their ideology, should be the litmus test for their long-term commitment to “human-made” democracy.

Numerous Sunni Islamic political parties with MB roots in the Arab world and across many Muslim countries have participated in politics for over two decades. They have served in legislatures in many countries, including in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Turkey, and others. Political Islam is here to stay regardless of the nature of the regime in which these parties operate.

The recent history of Islamic activism tells us including Islamic parties in national politics usually breeds pragmatism and political compromise. When they are forced underground, they become more radicalised, leading fringe elements to turn to violence and terrorism.

Engaging Muslim civil society communities, including political parties, has been the hallmark of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11, which was of course highlighted in President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech four years ago. As vast majorities of Muslims worldwide reject the radical message and as Bin Ladin’s jihadism fades away, it’s more urgent than ever to continue engaging Muslim youth and other groups worldwide.

U.S. officials should use their influence to persuade General al-Sisi to turn over the Egyptian political system to civilian control in which the MB would be free to participate. The alternative could bring more instability, violence, and chaos to Egypt, and of course to U.S. interests in the region.

*Emile Nakhleh, a former Senior Intelligence Service Officer, is a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico and author of “A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World”.

No doubt the administration of President Barack Obama had hoped that this week’s foreign policy news would be dominated by the high-level U.S.-China Strategic and Economic and Dialogue (S&ED) that just ended here Thursday.

That would have furthered the administration’s effort to “pivot” public attention, as well as serious policy-making, more towards the Asia/Pacific region which it sees as critical to Washington’s long-term geostrategic and economic future.

But, alas, as so many other times in the four-and-a-half years of Obama’s presidency, the administration found itself dealing instead with latest of a seemingly never-ending series of crises that have wreaked havoc with its larger strategic ambitions.

Of course, events in Egypt grabbed most of the headlines this week as the administration tried to cope with the aftermath of last week’s coup d’etat against the democratically elected government of President Mohamed Morsi.

In particular, its efforts both to avoid calling the putsch a “coup” – a word that would have automatically triggered a cut-off in some 1.3 billion dollars in military aid under U.S. law – and to dissuade the same military and its backers from cracking down hard against Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood and quickly restore some semblance of an inclusive civilian-led democratic transition appeared both clumsy and, thus far at least, largely ineffectual.

Meanwhile, the civil war in Syria – which emerged as the dominant foreign policy issue of this year’s spring season only to be displaced by the coup in Egypt at the end of last month– edged its way back onto the news this week in ways that were hardly helpful to the administration.

First, the administration’s plans to provide arms to the rebels, announced by the White House last month amidst growing pressure from lawmakers and after the intelligence community had confirmed the use on several occasions by Syrian government forces of small amounts of sarin gas against insurgents, have apparently stalled indefinitely.

Congress’ two intelligence committees objected to the plans advanced by the administration for the same reasons, ironically, that the administration itself had long resisted appeals to provide lethal aid to the rebels: both because U.S. officials could not guarantee that the arms would not fall into the “wrong” hands – that is, fighters associated with radical Islamist groups – and because of the fear that providing such assistance would be the first step down a “slippery slope” toward U.S. intervention in yet another Middle Eastern civil war.

“Primary for me is the concern that if we become an arms supplier…we’ll be sucked into another sectarian civil war,” Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the ‘Washington Post,’ echoing many of the same off-the-record arguments administration officials had been making for most of the past year.

“Providing a small amount won’t be enough to change the trajectory on the battlefield, and we’ll be called upon to give more, and more sophisticated weapons. …I think the risk is too great that once we get in, it will be very difficult to get out,” he said.

Adding to the bad news from Damascus this week were reports that growing and increasingly violent divisions between the radical Islamist groups – whose ranks keep growing as foreign fighters are reportedly pouring in at levels approaching those of Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation – and the Western-backed factions, notably the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Thursday’s assassination of a top FSA commander by an Al-Qaeda linked militia near Latakia, a region where government forces have increasingly taken the offensive, could signal a civil war within rebel ranks themselves, increasing the risks that weapons provided to the FSA could actually wind up in the hands of much more radical groups.

“The fact is, there is just no appetite whatsoever up here (in Congress) to get involved in another Middle East conflict,” one lobbyist who supports aid to the rebels told IPS last week.

Meanwhile, Monday’s resignation of Ghassan Hitto, the Syrian-American chosen by the Western-backed National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces to create an interim government, added to the sense of disarray and incoherence that has long afflicted rebel ranks.

Analysts here said his departure reflected the diminished influence of Qatar, which, along with Turkey, has backed figures associated with the Muslim Brotherhood across the region, including Egypt’s Morsi.

Indeed, both Hitto’s resignation and the coup in Egypt signalled to most analysts here the determination of the other Gulf kingdoms, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – both of which have long been hostile to the Brotherhood – to play a more assertive role.

In the wake of the coup, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, along with Kuwait, announced this week that they will provide the new Egyptian regime with 12 billion dollars in grants and loans to help it cope with its collapsing economy – four billion dollars more than what Qatar had provided to the Morsi government and nearly 10 times more than Washington’s total annual aid package for Cairo.

All of these developments have put Washington in an extremely delicate – if relatively powerless — position.

On Syria, the plan to provide arms – and, in so doing, to assert its “leadership” among the external supporters of the insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad – appears now to have been put on hold, thus undermining Washington’s already-low credibility among the rebels’ other backers, as well as the FSA fighters in the field who may soon find themselves besieged on two fronts.

Assad’s departure or defeat – first demanded publicly by Obama more than two years ago – looks further away than ever.

In Egypt, the U.S. finds itself in a particularly invidious position. Before the coup, Washington was perceived by the millions of protesters who demanded Morsi’s ouster as backing the president and the Brotherhood.

Any move by the administration to indicate support for the coup now – including the continuation of military aid or suggestions by its officials that Morsi deserved to be overthrown – will be (and has already been) interpreted by Islamists, who undoubtedly remain a sizable force in the body politic, as a betrayal of Washington’s promises to support democracy in the region.

Although the administration has made clear that it hopes to use aid as a lever by which to coax them military into accepting a “democratic transition” that will include the Brotherhood and other Islamists, the scale of the promised assistance from the Gulf monarchies diminishes that leverage considerably.

Indeed, U.S. appeals not to crack down on the Brotherhood leadership, conveyed primarily from top Pentagon officials to their Egyptian counterparts, have so far proved almost entirely ineffective.

As pointed out by one Middle East expert, Marc Lynch, on his foreignpolicy.com blog Friday, the Gulf kingdoms have their own agenda – “to finally put the nail in the coffin of the detested Arab uprisings by re-establishing the old order in the most important of the transitional states.”

“Washington is now more trapped than ever between its professed hopes for democratic change in the region and its alliance with the anti-democratic regimes of the Gulf,” according to Lynch.

The State Department Friday called on Morsi to be released from military detention and charged that MB leaders have been subjected to “politically motivated arrests”. This, then, will be a test of U.S. influence.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Egypt’s prosecutor’s office has ordered the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie on charges of inciting violence outside the Republican Guard headquarters where 51 people were killed, the state news agency MENA has reported.

Other senior Brotherhood officials were also ordered on Wednesday to be detained, including Badie’s deputy Mahmoud Ezzat and party leaders Essam El-Erian and Mohamed el-Beltagy.

One day earlier, Egypt’s prosecutor general began investigating 650 people suspected of involvement in Monday’s violence, although it did not say who, exactly, was under investigation.

Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh, reporting from Cairo, said nine others are included in the arrest warrant.

The Muslim Brotherhood has called for an “uprising” to restore Morsi after Monday’s shootings.

Thousands of Brotherhood followers have been maintaining a vigil near a mosque in northeast Cairo demanding the reinstatement of President Mohamed Morsi, deposed last week in a coup.

Rageh said that the leaders who have arrest warrants against them are currently present at the vigil at Rabaa Adaweya mosque in northeast Cairo and that it will be difficult for the police to enter the large crowd of pro-Morsi supporters.

Cabinet offer rejected

The Muslim Brotherhood on Wednesday also rejected an offer to join Egypt’s transitional cabinet, as new interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi announced he would start work on forming an interim government once he meets liberal leaders.

Beblawi told the Reuters news agency on that he accepted that it would be difficult to win the unanimous support of Egyptians for his new government.

“Of course we respect the public opinion and we try to comply with the expectation of the people, but there is always a time of choice, there is more than one alternative, you cannot satisfy all of the people,” he said.

Meanwhile, Egypt’s main liberal coalition, the National Salvation Front, withdrew its earlier statement rejecting the transition plan for interim rule and issued a statement containing milder criticism, Reuters said.

Beblawi, a liberal economist and a former finance minister, was named the new prime minister on Tuesday.

Liberal opposition chief and Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei was also named vice president and head of foreign relations.

The appointments were followed by an announcement that ministerial posts in the new government would be offered to members of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, and to the Al-Nour Party.

Our corespondent, Rawya Rageh, said that some of the opposition groups like Tamarrod said that they were not consulted, and that the plans for the interim government was a rushed political process done secretly.

Also on Wednesday, the country’s new prosecutor general, Hisham Barakat, was sworn in by Mansour.

Political ‘manoeuvring’

The administration decisions come almost a week after the military overthrew Morsi and chose chief justice Adly Mansour to head the Arab world’s most populous country.

ElBaradei was initially tipped to lead the cabinet but his nomination was rejected by the Nour party. The head of the party added that it was still studying ElBaradei’s appointment as vice president.

Beblawi now faces the daunting task of trying to reunite a deeply divided country and rescue its battered economy.

Shortly after the Islamist parties made their statements, Egypt’s army chief went on state media to say that the military will not accept political “manoeuvring”.

Defence Minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said that “the future of the nation is too important and sacred for maneuvers or hindrance, whatever the justifications”.

The blueprint unveiled by Mansour is intended to replace the controversial Islamist-drafted constitution which he suspended following last week’s coup.

A committee will be set up to make final improvements to the draft before it is put to a referendum.

Parliamentary elections will then follow within three months and Mansour will announce a date for a presidential election once the new parliament has convened.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Protesters battle police in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the second anniversary of Egypt’s January 25 revolution. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

When the dust settles from the ongoing deadly confrontations between the Egyptian armed forces and thousands of Islamist protesters in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, the eventual winner will be the United States – specifically U.S.-made weapons systems in the hands of the country’s 440,000-strong military.

At last count, over 50 demonstrators were killed and more than 400 wounded in the military rampage Monday as the political crisis in Egypt spun out of control.

With massive firepower at its command, the Egyptian security forces are armed with a wide range of mostly U.S-supplied weapons, ranging from fighter planes, combat helicopters, warships and missiles to riot-controlled equipment such as armoured personnel carriers, recoilless rifles, sub-machine guns, rubber bullets, handguns and tear gas grenades.

Virtually all of these weapons have been provided under non-repayable, outright U.S. military grants ever since Egypt signed the U.S.-brokered Camp David Peace Treaty with Israel back in September 1978.

As the second largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, Egypt receives about 1.5 billion dollars in both military and economic aid annually, of which 1.3 billion dollars is earmarked for the armed forces.

Nicole Auger, a military analyst covering the Middle East and Africa at Forecast International, a leader in defence market intelligence and industry forecasting, told IPS the United States is “the overwhelming (arms) supplier to Egypt”.

She said about 35 percent of the 1.3 billion dollars in annual U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants is utilised each year for the purchase of new U.S. weapons systems.

Of the balance, about 30 percent is earmarked for the purchase and maintenance of U.S. equipment (including the procurement of ammunition for that equipment), with 20 percent covering the ongoing costs of programmes being implemented, and 15 percent being used to supplement and upgrade equipment currently in service.

Egypt is also eligible to receive surplus U.S. equipment under the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) programme, mostly on a cost-free basis, she pointed out.

Additionally, Egypt receives grants under the International Military Education and Training (IMET) programme, amounting to about 1.3 million to about 1.9 million dollars annually, plus about 250 million dollars annually in economic aid.

According to figures released by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Egypt received about 11.8 billion dollars worth of weapons from the United States during 2004-2011, followed by 900 million dollars each in arms from China and Russia, and 700 million dollars in arms from Europe.

Although for all intents and purposes, the upheaval in Egypt has been described as a military coup, the administration of President Barack Obama has shied away from that categorisation, arguing the military takeover was triggered by civilian demands.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times Monday, Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, wrote: “By stepping in to remove an unpopular president, the Egyptian army re-affirmed a despotic tradition in the Middle East: army officers decide what the country needs, and they always know best.”

Under current U.S. legislation, it is mandatory for the United States to cut off aid to any country where the military takes power and ousts a democratically elected government – as happened in previous years in Fiji, Cote d’Ivoire and the Central African Republic, among others.

After country-wide elections, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was sworn in as the country’s first democratically-elected president in June 2012.

But so far, the White House has refused to cut off aid to Egypt, hoping to use it as leverage to restore civilian rule.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Monday, “We are going to examine this and monitor this, and take the time necessary in making the determination in a manner that’s consistent with our policy objectives and our national security interests.

“But we do not believe that it is in our interests to make a precipitous decision or determination to change our assistance programme right away,” he said.

Still, there are several U.S. legislators, including Senators John McCain (Republican of Arizona), Patrick Leahy (Democrat of Vermont), and Carl Levin (Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee) who have called for a suspension of U.S. aid to Egypt until the restoration of democracy.

Prior to the Camp David peace treaty, Egypt was a long-time recipient of Soviet weaponry under a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Moscow. The Aswan Dam, a major economic showpiece, was built with financial assistance from the then Soviet Union.

But with the Camp David accords, Egypt switched its political and military loyalties from the Soviet Union to the United States.

Still, Egypt remains in the process of steadily weaning itself off former Soviet legacy hardware; prior to 1978, the Egyptian Army was largely equipped with Soviet weaponry.

During the decades when Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was a barely tolerated opposition party, it campaigned against the reigning secular autocrats under the banner “Islam is the solution.”

With the military’s removal on Jul. 3 of the Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, the region’s oldest exemplar of political Islam has lost its best and perhaps only chance to validate that slogan. Indeed, the rise and abrupt fall of the Morsi presidency are a timely comeuppance for a world view that, starting with Iran’s 1979 revolution, seemed to be gaining adherents throughout the Muslim world.

Political Islam has had a long arc, reviving in the modern era with the founding of the Brotherhood by Hassan al Banna in 1928 in opposition to a monarchy largely controlled by Western interests. Over the decades, monarchs and military-run governments of assorted Arab nationalist, socialist and capitalist hues have suppressed the Brotherhood and its various offshoots. Then came spring 2011.

While Islamic movements did not lead the rebellions against aging autocrats, they were well placed to benefit because of superior organisation, a history of providing social services to the poor and a record of repression by the state.

Once in power, however, these movements frequently overreached. Nowhere was this more evident than in Egypt, where the Brotherhood reneged on initial promises not to seek a parliamentary majority or the presidency – promises made to avoid provoking a backlash from secular forces.

Then, Morsi – a substitute for a more powerful Brotherhood official, Khairat el-Shater, who was disqualified from running – misinterpreted his narrow victory in a runoff a year ago as a mandate to  consolidate  power and essentially gut the Arab world’s most important democratic transition.

Given the magnitude of the problems Egypt faced after the removal of Hosni Mubarak, only a government that truly reached out beyond its political base stood a chance of succeeding.  Without that broad popular support, the Brotherhood was loathe to implement crucial economic reforms and incapable of concluding a bailout agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

The constitution rammed through by the Brotherhood last spring disappointed those looking for major improvements from the Mubarak era.  Morsi was also tone-deaf  in many of his appointments, going so far as to name a member of the once-violent Gamaa al-Islamiya that had massacred foreigners in Luxor to govern one of Egypt’s most important tourism hubs.

The Brotherhood mistook the piety and religiosity of ordinary Egyptians for allegiance to a largely one-party religious government. This is a common mistake among Islamists. Many people in the Middle East might like to have a pious Muslim as a president but even more, they want competent leaders who will listen to others and forge constructive relations with the outside world.

Morsi’s removal is a warning that Islamic parties cannot count on religious identity alone to govern successfully and need to work constructively with others. This lesson seems to have been internalised by the Al-Nour party, a nominally more hard-line group that supported Morsi’s ouster and pushed for a consensus choice for prime minister instead of Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and champion of secular forces.

The fate of the Brotherhood experiment in Egypt has important ramifications throughout the region – for Tunisia, still struggling to write a constitution, and for Syria, whose opposition includes numerous Islamic groups and whose regime is banking on the support of religious minorities terrified by the notion of Islamic rule.

Morsi’s fall is also a sobering lesson for Iran, the world’s only theocracy, and Turkey, whose ruling AK Party has strong Islamist roots. Both initially welcomed the Brotherhood victory but instead of validating an Islamic world view, the events in Egypt have underlined its limitations.

In Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan is still reeling from protests in Istanbul and other major cities against his government’s authoritarianism and creeping efforts to legislate Islamic morality. Erdogan’s behaviour in recent years has contrasted with the AKP’s tolerance of opposing views when it first came to power a decade ago. Increasingly, Erdogan has come to resemble previous Turkish autocrats with an Islamic veneer.

In Iran, meanwhile, the 1979 Islamic Revolution died years ago. Iran is now one of the least religious countries in the Middle East, a place where Muslim holidays such as Ramadan are barely observed compared to ancient Persian celebrations such as Nowruz.

In urging Iranians to vote in last month’s presidential elections, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had to resort to appealing to the electorate’s patriotism as Iranians, not their religious identity as Shiite Muslims – a telling sign that he recognises how unpopular the system has become. Iranians promptly chose the least hard-line candidate allowed to run, Hassan Rouhani. One of the reasons his victory was surprising is because he is a cleric and clerics are notoriously unpopular among the citizens of the Islamic Republic.

In a speech shortly after his election, Rouhani indicated that he understands that religious ideology is no substitute for competence and accountability. He promised to listen to the “majority of Iranians” who voted for him and added:

“In our region, there were some countries who miscalculated their positions, and you have witnessed what happened to them…The world is in a transitional mood, and a new order has yet to be established. If we miscalculate our national situation, it will be detrimental for us.”

Two days after a military coup ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, Washington appeared deeply divided over how to respond to what most experts believe is a critical moment for future relations between the U.S. and political Islam both in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.

On the one hand, some analysts are arguing that the U.S. must try hard to dispel the notion that it supported or now accepts the coup, lest it persuade Islamist parties, including Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, that its purported promotion of democracy worldwide does not apply to them.“Those who, out of their distaste for anything Islamist, are welcoming the Egyptian military coup, ought to be careful what they wish for." -- CIA veteran Paul Pillar

“The Obama administration would be wise to distance itself from the army’s actions and use its leverage, particularly the promise of financial assistance, to pressure the military to respect the rights of Islamists,” warned Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, in an op-ed published Friday by the New York Times.

Like many other experts, he noted that the current moment recalled Washington’s acquiescence in the Algerian military’s last-minute cancellation of the 1992 elections which the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to sweep – an action that resulted in a civil war in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed and that radicalised a generation of Islamists.

On the other hand, other analysts – many of them neo-conservatives and others closely associated with the Israel lobby — have greeted the coup in Egypt more positively, urging the Obama administration to accept the coup, continue aid, and work closely with the generals, who are now seen as in control despite their nominal transfer of power to the chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court, to ensure a return to democratic rule.

“(A)ctually cutting off the aid now would be highly counterproductive, turning the United States into the adversary of the very actors we now depend upon to return Egypt to a democratic path,” according to Martin Indyk, vice president of the Brookings Institution and founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).

Any distancing by the administration from the Egyptian military risked alienating U.S. allies in the Gulf who supported the coup, he wrote on foreignpolicy.com, and by Israeli leaders whose relations with the military “have grown much stronger since (former President Hosni) Mubarak’s overthrow; cutting U.S. aid is the last they will want.”

For itself, the Obama administration has maintained a studied silence since its initial reaction to Wednesday’s coup issued in Obama’s name several hours later.

“(W)e are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy and suspend the Egyptian constitution,” Obama said.

He also called on the military “to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters” – a request that appears already to have been disregarded, as Morsi, as well as hundreds of other Brotherhood leaders, have reportedly been taken into custody.

Obama also directed the relevant U.S. agencies to “review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance” to Egypt – a reference to laws dating back nearly 30 years that require the government to suspend military and most economic aid whenever a democratically elected government is overthrown in a military coup d’etat or decree.

To most observers, Obama’s decision to apply the law would be the most dramatic way of distancing Washington from the coup and demonstrating to the Brotherhood and other Islamist parties that it is not applying “double standards” in the Middle East, as was already suggested during the George W. Bush administration when U.S. officials insisted on a Western diplomatic and aid boycott of Hamas, a Brotherhood affiliate, after it swept Palestinian elections in 2006, and then supported a failed coup against Hamas’ government in Gaza.

“…(T)here should be no question that under a law passed by Congress, U.S. aid to Egypt – including the 1.3 billion dollar annual grant to the military – must be suspended,” according to the lead editorial in Friday’s Washington Post, which argued that “if it does not provoke the eruption of violent conflict, this coup may well ensure that Islamist forces, including more radical groups, grow stronger.”

Some analysts gave voice to that fear even before the coup. “If the Brotherhood’s tenure in office is abruptly ended due to pressure from a secular military, opposition, media and judiciary,” warned Ed Husain, an expert on political Islam at the Council on Foreign Relations in another Times op-ed posted Wednesday, “then the more extremist Islamists in the Arab world will say: ‘We told you so. Democracy does not work. The only way to create an Islamist state is through armed struggle.’”

“Those who, out of their distaste for anything Islamist, are welcoming the Egyptian military coup, ought to be careful what they wish for,” noted Paul Pillar, a CIA veteran who headed U.S. intelligence analysis on the Middle East from 2000 to 2005.

“They may wind up with something that is not just distasteful but dangerous,” he added, recalling how some insurgents in the Algerian civil war have since mutated into Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Still, others, such as a former top Obama Mideast adviser, WINEP counsellor Dennis Ross, said the huge public anti-Morsi demonstrations that preceded the coup made Egypt different from Algeria and that what limited influence Washington still had in the country should be used to prod the military in the desirable direction.

“The last thing we want is for Egypt to become a failed state…” he wrote in a USA Today column Friday.

Similarly, the top Republican and Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a joint statement Friday suggesting that Washington give the military the benefit of the doubt before taking action.

“It is now up to the Egyptian military to demonstrate that the new transitional government can and will govern in a transparent manner and work to return the country to democratic rule,” said Republican Rep. Ed Royce and Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel – both of whom are close to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“We are encouraged that a broad cross-section of Egyptians will gather to rewrite the constitution,” they added.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s hard-line neo-conservative editorial board stressed Washington had too much at stake to disassociate itself in any way from the military, insisting that “cutting (military aid) off now would be a mistake. Unpopular as America is in Egypt, 1.3 billion dollars in annual military aid buys access with the generals. U.S. support for Cairo is written into the Camp David peace accords with Israel,” according to its lead editorial Friday.

It added that Egyptians “would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet…”

Other pro-Israel neo-conservatives insisted that Morsi’s tenure proved that Washington had been mistaken in engaging the Brotherhood or political Islam.

“(T)he lesson from Egypt is that democracy may be a blessing for people capable of self-government, but it’s a curse for those who are not,” wrote the Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, on the eve of the coup. “There is a reason Egypt has been governed by pharaohs, caliphs, pashas and strongmen for 6,000 years.”

Added the New York Times columnist David Brooks even more broadly, in a column entitled “Defending the Coup”: “It has become clear – in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza, and elsewhere – that radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. …It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.”

More moderately, Bush’s senior democracy and Mideast adviser, Elliott Abrams, called in nationalreview.com for suspending aid pursuant to the law, but noted that, because most of that assistance is already obligated, “…an interruption of aid for several months is no tragedy, so long as during those months we give good advice, stay close to the generals, continue counter-terrorism cooperation, and avoid further actions that create the impression we were on Morsi’s side.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

The military’s removal of democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi poses a serious challenge to Washington’s pro-democracy agenda and its ability to influence events in Egypt and the rest of the region.

The Barack Obama administration should make it clear to Egyptian Secretary of Defence Abdel Fattah al-Sisi the coup cannot stand, and Egypt’s unsteady march toward democracy should continue."Washington should be clear: Al-Sisi should know the era of military dictatorship in the Arab world has run its course."

Although senior religious and opposition leaders were present on the stage, General al-Sisi’s military action to depose Morsi, suspend the constitution, and appoint an acting president was a major blow to the January 2011 revolution.

Toppling Morsi by the military in the name of national security makes a mockery of the principles of freedom, justice, and the rule of law for which millions demonstrated 30 months ago.

It is deeply disturbing that many within the Egyptian opposition who fought against the Mubarak regime are now welcoming the military’s intervention.

Long gas lines, high unemployment, exorbitant food prices, and pervasive corruption might explain people’s anger, but do the millions of protesters who called for Morsi’s head expect the post-Morsi government to solve these problems within a year or two? What will the new civilian government do about the military’s massive control of the economy and their opaque “black box” budget?

Al-Sisi’s brazen “in your face” action speaks volumes of perceived, and some say actual, U.S. impotence in the region. His temerity was largely driven by Washington’s timidity to prevent a coup or to denounce it after it happened.

To many Egyptians, Washington played a marginal role at the advent of the Arab Spring and has been equally indecisive in the latest crisis.

Because of U.S. strategic interests in the region, its ongoing concerns about Syria, Iran, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement, and Egypt’s pivotal role in the region, Washington cannot abandon Cairo. The Egyptian military, however, must be made to understand this is a two-way street.

It’s time for U.S. policymakers to act boldly and decisively in support of democratic transitions and in opposition to reprehensible human rights violations across the region. They should stand firm against Arab militaries’ ever-present temptation to usurp the political process in Egypt and elsewhere.

Morsi inherited a dictatorial, military top-heavy, corrupt regime and a stalled economy. Several groups and centres of power in Egyptian society – including the military, the police, remnants of the old regime, secularists, and radical Salafis – opposed his election and refused to be governed by a Muslim Brotherhood man. They were bent on defeating him and brought out millions in the streets to do just that.

Ironically, this is not dissimilar to how some U.S. politicians have felt about President Obama’s election. Those who were bent on defeating President Obama have used the courts, state legislatures, the Republican controlled Congress, and the ballot box to advance their agenda.

Egyptian oppositionists, by contrast, have gone to the streets despite their seeming initial acceptance of the results of the election.

Yet, incompetence, insensitivity toward minorities and other groups that do not share the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, reticence to consult with his cabinet, and an inability to revive the economy marred Morsi’s one-year tenure.

When he came to office, Morsi promised to be president of all of Egypt. He failed to deliver. As a majority in the parliament, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood showed no inclination to form alliances with other parties and groups.

While he halted the downward spiral of the economy and successfully sought international loans, the daily life of the average Egyptian has gotten much worse. In the past year, Egyptians have suffered from a lack of personal security and high unemployment.

Egyptian women under the new regime have been subjected to widespread personal attacks, sexual abuse, and humiliation. Morsi and his government failed to combat the pervasive terror against women meaningfully and convincingly.

Lawlessness and joblessness are rampant. Thuggery and fear have replaced civility and hope.

Let’s be clear. These conditions and Morsi’s demise resulted from the failure of a particular Islamic party in power and a particular leader. They do not signal the defeat of Arab democracy or a failure of political Islam.

Rachid Ghannouchi and al-Nahda, by contrast, have successfully created an inclusive, tolerant, and workable political governing model in Tunisia.

Washington should actively encourage the Egyptian military to take several immediate steps. First, urge the newly appointed Acting President Adly Mansour to form a national unity government and set a date certain for parliamentary and presidential elections within six months.

Second, in light of President Obama’s recent statements, urge the military to free Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood and other top leaders, who have been detained in the past few days. These leaders should not be tried on trumped-up charges or for political vendettas.

Third, urge the Egyptian military to allow the acting president a free hand to establish civilian rule and for the military to return to the barracks.

Fourth, urge the acting president to proceed with national reconciliation by including representatives from all political parties and civil society organisations. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice party, of course, should be included.

These steps do not necessarily guarantee saving Egypt from total collapse or preventing a possible civil war. They do offer, however, a civilian-managed “roadmap,” that could be embraced by all Egyptians.

Washington should be clear: Al-Sisi should know the era of military dictatorship in the Arab world has run its course. Such excuses as “foreign armed groups,” “Shia terrorism,” and now “Muslim Brotherhood plots” to justify a military takeover are stale and no longer believable.

If al-Sisi and his generals doubt that, let them take another look at Tahrir Square.

*Emile Nakhleh, a former director of the CIA Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, is a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico and author of “A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World”.

Top judge Mansour has been sworn in as Egypt’s interim president, hours after Mohamed Morsi was overthrown in a military coup following huge protests against his one-year rule.

Adly Mansour took the oath of interim president on Thursday, as his democratically elected predecessor, Morsi, was held in an unspecified military barracks along with senior aides.
Before the constitutional court, Mansour said: “I swear by God to uphold the Republican system and respect the constitution and law… and safeguard the people and protect the nation.”

“The revolutionaries of Egypt are everywhere and we salute them all, those who prove to the world that they are strong enough, the brave youth of Egypt, who were the leaders of this revolution.”

Separately, Mansour was made head of the supreme constitutional court – a position he was due to take on Jun. 30, when protests against Morsi’s one year in power began in earnest.

“Morsi and the entire presidential team are under house arrest in the Presidential Republican Guards Club,” Gehad El-Haddad, the son of a top Morsi aide, told AFP news agency on Thursday. Haddad’s father, Essam El-Haddad, widely seen as Morsi’s right-hand man, was among those held, he added.

Brotherhood rounded up

Less than an hour after Mansour was sworn in, Egyptian prosecutors issued arrest warrants for the Brotherhood’s top leader, Mohamed Badie, and his deputy, Khairat el-Shater, judicial and army sources told Reuters news agency.

Shater was the group’s first choice candidate to run in last year’s presidential election. He was disqualified from the race due to past convictions.

Hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood officials were also reported to have been arrested, with many senior leaders being held in the Torah prison in Cairo – the same prison holding Hosni Mubarak, who was himself deposed in the 2011 revolution.

In a televised broadcast, flanked by military leaders, religious authorities and political figures, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi effectively declared the removal of Morsi.

Sisi called for presidential and parliamentary elections, a panel to review the constitution and a national reconciliation committee that would include youth movements. He said the roadmap had been agreed by a range of political groups.

Islamist supporters of Morsi who have gathered in a Cairo suburb reacted angrily to the announcement by the army.

Some broke up paving stones, forming piles of rocks. Muslim Brotherhood security guards in hard hats and holding sticks formed a cordon around the encampment, close to a mosque. Men and women wept and chanted.

Denouncing military chief Sisi, some shouted: “Sisi is void! Islam is coming! We will not leave!”

At least 14 people were killed when opponents and supporters of Morsi clashed after the army announced his removal, officials said. Eight of those died in the northern city of Marsa Matrouh, including two members of the security forces.

Three people were killed and at least 50 wounded in Alexandria, state news agency MENA reported; a woman stabbed in the stomach, and two men killed by birdshot.

Three people were also killed and 14 wounded in the southern city of Minya, including two police, MENA said.

‘Revolution re-launched’

Speaking shortly after Sisi’s announcement, liberal opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei said the “2011 revolution was re-launched” and that the roadmap meets the demand of the protesters.

Egypt’s leading Muslim and Christian clerics also backed the army-sponsored roadmap. Pope Tawadros, the head of the Coptic Church, said the plan offered a political vision and would ensure security for all Egyptians, about 10 percent of whom are Christian. Egypt’s second largest Islamist group, the Nour party, said in a statement that it agreed to the army roadmap in order to avoid further conflict.

Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president,came under heavy pressure in the run-up to Sunday’s anniversary of his maiden year in office, with his opponents accusing him of failing the 2011 revolution by concentrating power in Islamist hands.

The embattled 62-year-old proposed a “consensus government” as a way out of the crisis. That was not enough for the army, and Mansour, a previously little known judge, was installed as the country’s interim leader.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Protests have been building against Morsi in Cairo since last summer. Credit: Gigi Ibrahim/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

Wednesday’s coup d’etat against the elected government of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has placed the administration of President Barack Obama in an uncomfortable position on a number of fronts.

Most immediately, it will be pressed to decide whether Morsi’s ouster constituted the kind of military coup that requires a suspension of some 1.6 billion dollars in U.S. military and economic assistance under U.S. law – a matter that is already being hotly debated both within and outside the administration now.“I think it would be very naïve to assume that this announcement today would necessarily move Egypt back to a democratic trajectory." -- Stephen McInerney of the Project on Middle East Democracy

But U.S. officials are also very concerned about the possibility of a violent reaction to the coup by Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, which, despite its dramatic decline in public popularity during Morsi’s one-year rule, remains Egypt’s most well organised institution, besides the military. Independent analysts have even suggested that conflict of the kind that wracked Algeria during much of the 1990s cannot be ruled out.

On the home front, the administration is also concerned that it will add ammunition to hawkish Republicans who have argued that Obama’s handling of the “Arab Spring” has been an abject failure and that his alleged “coddling” of the Brotherhood and other Islamist parties that swept elections in the region has backfired to the detriment of U.S. security interests.

Even as the current crisis began to crest Monday when, in the wake of massive anti-government demonstrations Sunday, the military issued an ultimatum for Morsi to work out a power-sharing agreement with his political foes, Republicans were already on the attack.

“The Egyptian turmoil stems from the Morsi government’s predictable power grab, which the Obama administration has been far too accepting of,” House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Republican Ed Royce told the cable blog on foreignpolicy.com. “U.S. aid has failed to compel the Morsi government to undertake the political and economic reforms needed to avert this crisis.”

Hours after the military’s announcement that the Constitution had been suspended and Morsi replaced by an interim government to be headed by the head of the Constitutional Court, the White House issued a statement in Obama’s name stressing that Washington “does not support particular individuals or political parties, but we are committed to the democratic process and respect for the rule of law.”

“(W)e are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy and suspend the Egyptian constitution,” the statement said. “I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters.”

Under U.S. law, the president must suspend all military and most economic aid whenever a “duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.” In Egypt’s case, a not inconsiderable 1.3 billion dollars a year in military aid and another 300 million dollars in economic assistance could be at stake pending the installation of a new democratically elected government.

In his statement, Obama said he had directed the relevant U.S. agencies to review the legal implications on U.S. aid of Wednesday’s events.

But it may be difficult for the administration to avoid enforcing the ban. Indeed, the Honduran army followed precisely that scenario after ousting President Jose Manuel Zelaya in 2009, and, despite protests by Republicans and the Pentagon, the administration labelled it a coup and suspended aid.

Washington has much more at stake in Egypt, whose military leaders, with whom the U.S. wants to retain as much influence as possible, have already taken great pains to deny that their action amounted to a coup.

“I think it’s just better to say this was a government that lost its legitimacy in a failed (democratic) transition,” said Robert Springborg, an Egypt expert at the Naval Post-Graduate School.

But whether the military will do so remains a big question, particularly given its previous record, most recently during the failed 17-month rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) that took power after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak.

The administration should “make it clear to (Egyptian Defence Minister Gen. Abdel Fattah al-) Sisi that Washington would not support the return of the military to politics under the guise of national security and stability. We’ve heard this song before,” said Emile Nakhleh, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Political Islam Strategic Analysis programme.

“I think it would be very naïve to assume that this announcement today would necessarily move Egypt back to a democratic trajectory,” said Stephen McInerney, the head of the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), which had been strongly critical of the administration’s failure to press Morsi earlier to compromise with his secular opposition or publicly criticise unilateral actions by the ousted president that curbed civil liberties or polarised the country.

“I think there’s reason to really fear a serious escalation of violence in the short term,” McInerney told IPS. “And there are real questions about the rights of Islamists who feel their opportunity to participate in the political process has been undemocratically taken away from them, and the inclusion of the Brotherhood in any future government is an enormously important question.”

His concerns were echoed by the International Crisis Group, which said in a release Wednesday, “The forceful removal of the nation’s first democratically-elected civilian president risks sending a message to Islamists that they have no place in the political order; sowing fears among them that they will suffer yet another blood crackdown; and thus potentially prompting violent, event desperate resistance by Morsi’s followers.”

Obama made much the same point. “The United States continues to believe firmly that the best foundation for lasting stability in Egypt is a democratic political order with participation from all sides and all political parties – secular and religious, civilian and military.

“…The voices of all those who have protested peacefully must be heard – including those who welcomed today’s developments, and those who have supported President Morsy,” his statement said.

Springborg also expressed concern that the reaction of the Brotherhood, many of whose headquarters around the country have been burned down by anti-government protestors in recent days, could be critical.

“The thing that can run this off the rails would be if the Brothers go for the Samson-wrecking option, (although) I don’t think they have that power or the will to do it, because they have too much to lose organisationally and financially,” he said.

In his view, the new leaders must deal with the economic crisis most urgently by appointing civilian technocrats to finalise a long-pending 4.6 billion dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). That, in turn, would spur Saudi Arabia to provide major financial support that it has withheld in part because of its traditional distrust of the Brotherhood.

“When the Saudis come forward, then everyone else will, too,” he said, offering some real momentum to an economy that has spiralled downward under both the SCAF and Morsi.

*The story moved on Jul. 4, 2013 incorrectly quoted Nathan Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as saying: “(I)f it is clear that what the military has just done in Egypt has ended the career of an anti-democratic leader and the military is materially supporting democratising moves – including, importantly, the stepping aside of the military and genuine transfer of power to a legitimately elected civilian leadership by a certain date – then the United States should support those moves in the most concrete way possible by not interrupting aid.”

Those words were written by David Rothkopf in an article that appeared on the foreignpolicy.com website on Jul. 3, 2013, and were mistakenly attributed to Dr. Brown. IPS apologises for the mistake.

General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi declared the removal of elected Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. Credit: Al Jazeera

By AJ Correspondents
QATAR, Jul 3 2013 (Al Jazeera)

The Egyptian army has overthrown President Mohamed Morsi, announcing a roadmap for the country’s political future that will be implemented by a national reconciliation committee.

The head of Egypt’s armed forces issued a declaration on Wednesday evening suspending the constitution and appointing the head of the constitutional court as interim head of state.

Morsi’s presidential Facebook page quoted the disposed president as saying he rejected the army statement as a military coup.

In a televised broadcast, flanked by military leaders, religious authorities and political figures, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi effectively declared the removal of  Morsi.

Sisi called for presidential and parliamentary elections, a panel to review the constitution and a national reconciliation committee that would include youth movements. He said the roadmap had been agreed by a range of political groups.

Speaking shortly after al-Sisi’s announcement, liberal opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei said the 2011 revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak was relaunched and that the roadmap meets the demand of the protesters for early presidential elections.

Egypt’s leading Muslim and Christian clerics also backed the army-sponsored roadmap.

Ahmed al-Tayeb, Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Cairo’s ancient seat of Muslim learning, and Pope Tawadros, the head of the Coptic Church, both made brief statements following the announcement by the head of the armed forces.

Tawadros said the plan offered a political vision and would ensure security for all Egyptians, about 10 percent of whom are Christian.

Published under agreement with Al Jazeera.