Omar Robert Hamilton writes: I sit, for the 12th hour now, alone and struggling for what to do. For the first time since I got on a plane for Egypt on January 29, 2011, I am at a loss.

Worse days than today lie ahead of us.

Omar Robert Hamilton

We thought we could change the world. We know now that that feeling was not unique to us, that every revolutionary moment courses with the pulse of a manifest destiny. How different things feel today. I will not bury our convictions, but that feeling – youthful optimism? naiveté? idealism? foolishness? – is now truly and irrevocably dead.

I mourn the dead and I despise those killing them. I mourn the dead and I despise those sending them to their deaths. I mourn the dead and I despise those that excuse their murder. How did it come to this? How did we get here? What is this place?

It is February 12, 2011. Hosni Mubarak has fallen. In the morning I will fly to America to finish a job, before moving permanently to Cairo to help build the new country. I am sitting on my mother’s balcony. We are smoking cigarettes and drinking tea to keep out the cold and talking; about all that we’ve seen and done, about all that we’re going to do. Everything, on that night, was possible. Our conversation ranges from the grandiose of the global revolution to the practical re-thinking of ministerial appointments to the minutiae of the requirements of the film school that should be established. We talked through the night. I took notes.

It is, perhaps, this memory that hurts me the most.

By the time I return from America the army had cleared two sit-ins, begun court-martialing civilians en masse and assaulting women protestors with virginity tests. The revolution now is smaller, but serious, focused and under sustained attack. The un-fallen state, the deep state, the client state; once a month, every month, it attacks. It clears Tahrir in March, April, August and December. It attacks protestors at the Israeli Embassy. It envelopes downtown Cairo in a November mist of Pennsylvanian tear gas. It rains down rocks and Molotov cocktails from the roof of the Cabinet building. It welds shut the doors of the Port Said stadium deathtrap. Every month, people die fighting it.

There were moments when we could have broken the army’s grip on the country. We should have stayed in Tahrir after Mubarak was ousted. Tahrir was in the driving seat and hadn’t yet acquired the politicians to sell it out. But we left. Everyone said they would be back the next day and then, somehow, they weren’t. People wanted to shower and to sleep in their own beds. Then spontaneous cleaning brigades of earnest patriots spread through the city and by midday everything was nice and tidy and gone.

In November 2011 and in January 2012 the streets echoed with chants demanding the end of military rule. But now it had become the self-appointed role of the politicians to translate street action into political gain. Now, the army had people to talk to. Had all the forces that were supposedly against the military – the revolutionaries, the liberals, the Brotherhood and the Salafis – ever truly united where might we have been today? Dead, possibly. But maybe not. Maybe somewhere closer to a civilian state. [Continue reading…]

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: The Tamarrod movement (Rebellion) started a petition under the name “Stop Foreign Aid” aimed at rejecting U.S. aid and scrapping the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

On its website, Tamarrod said that the unduly meddling of the U.S. in Egyptian internal affairs and its support of terrorist groups prompted their calls to reject the U.S. aid and call off the peace treaty with Israel, so that Egypt would be at liberty to secure its borders as necessary.

The statement further explained that the aim of this initiative is to regain Egypt’s complete sovereignty and control over its internal affairs and to put an end to years of humiliation and political-dependency.

The New York Times reports: Western governments took a wait-and-see approach even after the military committed its first mass killing, shooting more than 60 supporters of Mr. Morsi at a sit-in on July 8. Western diplomats did not engage in earnest until July 24, when General Sisi, in dark sunglasses and military regalia, delivered a fiery speech asking the public to turn out for demonstrations giving him a “mandate” to take on the Islamists. Security forces killed 80 more Morsi supporters in their second mass shooting on the day of the demonstration.

The next morning, Morsi aides and Brotherhood leaders say, their phones began ringing with American and European diplomats fearing an imminent blood bath.

The administration enlisted players on opposite sides of the contest playing out in Egypt. Diplomats from Qatar, a regional patron of the Muslim Brotherhood, agreed to influence the Islamists. The United Arab Emirates, determined opponents of the Islamists, were brought in to help reach out to the new authorities.

But while the Qataris and Emiratis talked about “reconciliation” in front of the Americans, Western diplomats here said they believed the Emiratis were privately urging the Egyptian security forces to crack down.

Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the Emirati foreign minister, came to Washington last month and urged the Americans not to cut off aid. The emirates, along with Saudi Arabia, had swiftly supported the military takeover with a pledge of billions of dollars, undermining Western threats to cut off critical loans or aid.

The Israelis, whose military had close ties to General Sisi from his former post as head of military intelligence, were supporting the takeover as well. Western diplomats say that General Sisi and his circle appeared to be in heavy communication with Israeli colleagues, and the diplomats believed the Israelis were also undercutting the Western message by reassuring the Egyptians not to worry about American threats to cut off aid.

When Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, proposed an amendment halting military aid to Egypt, the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee sent a letter to senators on July 31 opposing it, saying it “could increase instability in Egypt and undermine important U.S. interests and negatively impact our Israeli ally.” Statements from influential lawmakers echoed the letter, and the Senate defeated the measure, 86 to 13, later that day. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Egypt’s prime minister has proposed disbanding the Muslim Brotherhood of ousted President Mohamed Mursi, the government said on Saturday, raising the stakes in a bloody struggle between the state and Islamists for control of the country.

Live television showed a gunman firing at soldiers and police from the minaret of a central Cairo mosque, with security forces shooting back at the building where Mursi followers had taken shelter. Reuters witnesses said Mursi supporters also exchanged gunfire with security forces inside the mosque.

The interior ministry said 173 people died in clashes across Egypt on Friday, bringing the death toll from three days of carnage to almost 800.

Among those killed was a son of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie, shot dead during a protest in Cairo’s huge Ramses Square where about 95 people died in an afternoon of gunfire and mayhem on Friday.

Egyptian authorities said they had rounded up more than 1,000 Islamists and surrounded Ramses Square following Friday’s “Day of Rage” called by the Brotherhood to denounce a lethal crackdown on its followers on Wednesday. [Continue reading…]

Shibley Telhami says that his polling indicates: Arabs want a combination of many things that Turkey’s model offered: a country that balances democracy and culture, but also a stable, strong, prosperous nation, and one that makes them feel proud on the world stage. Erdogan, who personally symbolized the mix of Islam and democracy in many Arab minds — at least until the recent upheavals in Turkey — was not selected by Arabs as the favorite leader until he was seen as standing up to Israel on the 2008-09 Gaza war.

Overall, the resonance of political Islam in the Arab world — and in Egypt in particular — has been exaggerated. To win the presidency last year, the Muslim Brotherhood could rely on its political machinery and the disarray of its opponents; it didn’t need to win the hearts of most Egyptians. But as Morsi learned too late, it couldn’t govern without broader public support.

However, if Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood overestimated the Islamists’ appeal, Egypt’s transitional rulers seem ready to dismiss it too easily. Public rejection of the Brotherhood does not translate into an embrace of the generals. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi’s popularity could be fleeting: Despite the Egyptian public’s long-held admiration of the military as an institution, especially immediately after the revolution, their opinion of the generals changed within months, with only 18 percent of Egyptians polled saying they had advanced the goals of the revolution by May 2012.

It is too early to measure the impact of the bloodshed on the generals’ public support, but the coalition around them has conflicting aims and values, even if they were united against Morsi — and it is beginning to fracture, most notably with the departure of Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei.

It was easy enough to use public disenchantment with Morsi and the muscle of the military to gain power. But in an era of heightened expectations and free-flowing information, a Mubarak-style regime cannot return. It is now impossible to govern Egypt by repressing the Brotherhood and its supporters, who have become indispensable parts of an empowered citizenry.

The bloody path chosen this past week takes Egypt into the unknown. What we do know is that all Egyptians are prepared to pay a price to have their voices heard. If that can no longer happen peacefully, Egypt must brace itself for the violent radicalization that makes democracy impossible.

Daniel Hannan writes: When I was four years old, a mob attacked our family farm. A crowd of men lit tyres and set them against our front gates, intending to burn their way in.

My mother took me by hand to the back entrance, a footpath leading into the hills. “We’re going to play a game,” she told me. “If we have to come this way again, we must do it without making a sound.”

My father was having none of it. He had an obligation to the farm workers, he said, and he wasn’t going to be pushed off his land by hooligans bussed in from the city. He was suffering, I remember, from one of those diseases that chronically afflict white men in the tropics, and he sat in his dressing gown loading his revolver with paper-thin hands. In the end, security guards managed to disperse the crowd with shots and, for us at least, the danger passed. Others were not so lucky: there were land invasions and confiscations all over the country.

This was Peru in the early 1970s, a country reduced to chaos and penury by the military government of General Juan Velasco, whose putsch, inevitably, ended up exacerbating all the problems that had justified it in the first place.

There is no such thing as a good coup, only bad coups and worse coups. All military regimes, in time, become tawdry and self-serving. Whatever intentions the army officers begin with, they end up as petty tyrants. An elected ruler is kept in check by the knowledge that he can be fired. Take that knowledge away and, however pure his motives, he will end up arranging the affairs of state around his personal convenience.

No doubt Velasco – who inspired Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez – genuinely thought he was standing up for the downtrodden masses against the oligarchs. No doubt, from the opposite end of the spectrum in neighbouring Chile, Augusto Pinochet genuinely thought he was saving his country from Communist meltdown. In both cases, there was a smidgen of truth in their self-justification. But, over time, both men became autocrats, repressing dissent and enriching themselves at state expense.

Ah, you say, but what if the alternative is even worse? Such is the justification used by every military regime in history, going back to Bonaparte, to Cromwell, to Sulla. It is being trotted out now to justify the dictatorship in Egypt, both by Western sophists and by local liberals who, having spent the Mubarak years demanding democracy, suddenly fear it. [Continue reading…]