Jean MacKenzie writes: It hardly pays to be the head of the most powerful nation on Earth any more — just ask President Barack Obama, whose semantic tightrope-walking over Egypt is gaining him new and powerful critics, even within his own party.

His government has signaled it will carry on delivering F-16 jets and other assistance to Egypt even after the North African country’s military ousted elected President Mohamed Morsi following mass protest against the Islamist leader.

Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood supporters call this a flat out military “coup.” The Obama administration does not.

“It’s clear that the Egyptian people have spoken,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters when asked whether Washington still considered Morsi the legitimate president.

But that’s not what some US legislators are saying.

On Tuesday, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) joined the growing chorus of lawmakers calling for Washington to restrict aid to Egypt in the wake of last week’s ouster of Morsi.

Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, was not hesitant to use the “c” word in discussing Egypt.

“It’s certainly a takeover. It’s certainly the removal of office from a sitting president, democratically elected,” Feinstein said. “It is a form of a coup. If it walks like a duck … it is.” [Continue reading…]

Images of millions of Egyptians taking to the streets helped solidify the notion that June 30 triggered a democratic coup, but now it’s not just the Muslim Brotherhood which claims the remnants of the Mubarak regime engineered the uprising.

The New York Times reports: The streets seethe with protests and government ministers are on the run or in jail, but since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi, life has somehow gotten better for many people across Egypt: Gas lines have disappeared, power cuts have stopped and the police have returned to the street.

The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 played a significant role — intentionally or not — in undermining the overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi.

And as the interim government struggles to unite a divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail. Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and frustration.

“This was preparing for the coup,” said Naser el-Farash, who served as the spokesman for the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade under Mr. Morsi. “Different circles in the state, from the storage facilities to the cars that transport petrol products to the gas stations, all participated in creating the crisis.”

Working behind the scenes, members of the old establishment, some of them close to Mr. Mubarak and the country’s top generals, also helped finance, advise and organize those determined to topple the Islamist leadership, including Naguib Sawiris, a billionaire and an outspoken foe of the Brotherhood; Tahani El-Gebali, a former judge on the Supreme Constitutional Court who is close to the ruling generals; and Shawki al-Sayed, a legal adviser to Ahmed Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, who lost the presidential race to Mr. Morsi.

But it is the police returning to the streets that offers the most blatant sign that the institutions once loyal to Mr. Mubarak held back while Mr. Morsi was in power. Throughout his one-year tenure, Mr. Morsi struggled to appease the police, even alienating his own supporters rather than trying to overhaul the Interior Ministry. But as crime increased and traffic clogged roads — undermining not only the quality of life, but the economy — the police refused to deploy fully. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: It has been one week, and nobody knows where the former president of Egypt is. Mohamed Morsi is being detained, along with at least seven of his top aides, held incommunicado. The authorities promise, “He is in a safe place.” But safe where? They refuse to say. He has not been charged with any crime.

Authorities have issued arrest warrants for hundreds of other Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters, including the group’s spiritual leader, known as the “supreme guide.” He and nine other senior Islamist officials were accused Wednesday of provoking the violence that led Egyptian security forces to fatally shoot more than 50 pro-Morsi demonstrators Monday.

The warrants come as authorities continue to round up the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, which saw its hold on the presidency and several top ministries end after 368 days when Morsi’s government was ousted last week in a military coup backed by millions of Egyptians who had taken to the streets.

The mass arrests and the continued detention of Morsi and his aides are exactly the type of behavior that the Obama administration has warned Egypt’s military leadership against. But the crackdown shows how little influence Washington has been able to exert here since the generals proved they remain the nation’s preeminent force.

Morsi himself was accused of selectively using the judicial system to prosecute opponents, as was his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in early 2011. Now human rights advocates say that Egypt’s new rulers may be doing the same. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Egypt’s top prosecutor has ordered the arrest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader and nine other top Islamist officials for allegedly instigating violence that led to the killing of more than 50 demonstrators Monday.

The arrest warrants issued Wednesday for Brotherhood supreme guide Mohammed Badie and the others came a day after interim President Adly Mansour appointed a prime minister and vice president, moves designed to lend an air of normalcy to the country even as indications mounted that the president is little more than a civilian face for military rule. Mansour also has outlined a path to quick elections and a return to democracy after the July 3 coup that overthrew Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

Mansour’s plan was quickly condemned by Morsi’s supporters in the Brotherhood. It elicited a lukewarm response, at best, from key players in the loose alliance of politicians and activists who had lobbied for Morsi’s ouster.

The National Salvation Front, an umbrella group representing Morsi’s political opponents, said Wednesday that it did not agree with all of the road map’s plans — but stopped short of outright rejection.

The Tamarod, or “rebel,” group, also central to the anti-Morsi movement, said it had not been consulted on the plan but was proposing changes for Mansour to consider. The decree provides for few independent checks on the president’s power until a constitutional referendum and elections, which it calls for within six months. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Gulf states showered Cairo with $8 billion in aid on Tuesday, showing their support for the Egyptian army’s move to push the Muslim Brotherhood from power, a day after troops killed dozens of the movement’s supporters.

Military-backed interim head of state Adli Mansour named a liberal economist as acting prime minister and announced a faster-than-expected timetable for elections in six months.

Mansour’s army backers are under pressure to plot a path back to democracy less than a week after they overthrew Egypt’s first freely elected president, the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Mursi.

The country is now more divided than ever in its modern history after 55 people were killed when troops opened fire on Brotherhood supporters in the capital. The movement says the victims were praying in peace; the government blames the Islamists for provoking the violence by attacking the soldiers.

Mansour, a judge installed as acting president when the military removed Mursi, named Hazem el-Beblawi as interim prime minister. He served briefly as finance minister in 2011. Former U.N. diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, now a liberal party leader, is to be deputy president responsible for foreign affairs.

Importantly, the choice of Beblawi won the acceptance of the ultra-orthodox Islamist Nour Party – sometime ally of Mursi and the Brotherhood. Nour leaders have been courted by the interim authorities to show that Islamists need not be marginalized. [Continue reading…]

Michael Hanna writes: Despite inheriting intractable political, economic, and social problems, when Morsy ascended to power on June 30, 2012, he had choices — and he chose factional gain, zero-sum politics, and populist demagoguery. In a system without functioning checks and balances, those choices generated increasing levels of polarization, destroying trust and crippling the state. These decisions were a reflection of his hostility to criticism and his and the Muslim Brotherhood’s denigration of the opposition’s role in Egyptian society. In the period prior to this year’s June 30 mass protests on the first anniversary of Morsy’s swearing-in, when concessions and compromise might have found an orderly way out for Egypt, Morsy instead grudgingly offered airy promises and hollow gestures.

The fateful, misguided decisions made throughout his tenure and in the run-up and aftermath of the June 30 protests have now put Egypt on the cusp of civil strife and violent conflict. An intransigent, isolated president chose to ignore reality and set the country on the course for an undeniably unfortunate military intervention into civilian politics. While Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood will undoubtedly now assume their more familiar role as victims, significantly aided by the brutality and stupidity of a repressive Egyptian security sector, the primary responsibility for Morsy’s ouster and Egypt’s perilous state resides with the deposed president and his Brothers. None of this was inevitable.

This is not to suggest that the Brotherhood should now be ostracized, persecuted, or forced underground. The Muslim Brotherhood is an organic and deeply rooted religious, social, and political movement with a robust and resilient base. It must be a part of Egypt’s future. But its part in Egypt’s recent past has been an unmitigated disaster. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The doctor’s sorrow was twofold when he found his son in the back of an ambulance, waiting to be carried in to the morgue here with a bullet hole in his chest.

Not only was his youngest son among the scores of supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi who had been killed by security officers on Monday, but the doctor had spent the last months of his son’s life shouting at him about his politics.

“All the time there were fights between me, him, his mother, his brother — all about the Muslim Brotherhood,” said the doctor, Samer Assem, 59.

The military’s early-morning assault that left at least 54 people dead might have been expected to unite Egyptians in grief and anger. Instead, Egypt’s bloodiest day in more than two years of unrest appeared to intensify the scarring arguments about who should be ruling the country and who is responsible for its plunge into turmoil.

Egyptians who not long ago were protesting side by side, even members of the same family, now rely on different sources of information, offer widely divergent accounts of what caused Monday’s carnage and argue that they are the true defenders of the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Rival camps both claim that the United States is offering concrete support to their opponents.

This week, the son of the powerhouse cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi publicly criticized his father for declaring his support for Mr. Morsi and calling on Egyptians to do the same.

“Beloved Father,” Abdul Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi wrote, calling Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood “men greedy to seize power at any cost.”

The ruptures have marked Cairo’s geography, with pro- and anti-Morsi camps occupying different squares and intersections, blocking traffic, erecting tents and rigging up loudspeakers to blast their messages.

Tahrir Square, the emotional center of the anti-Mubarak uprising and home to protests against the country’s rulers ever since, feels different from the way it did even a week ago, transformed from a place where people celebrated their collective power against the authorities to a wellspring of sympathy for the military. The anger directed at the ousted Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood was unabated by the killings on Monday.

Young men searching people entering the square gave visitors red cards reading, “Game over.” Stickers were distributed that read, “No to Terrorism,” a direct swipe at the Islamists. On the edges of the square, protesters warned about foreigners. [Continue reading…]

Evan Hill writes: It was around 3:30 a.m. in Cairo on Monday morning and time for fajr, the first of the day’s five Muslim prayers. In an hour and a half, the sun would rise. Now, it was still dark. On a wide boulevard running in front of the heavily guarded gates of the Republican Guard club, a few hundred protesters were entering the fourth day of a sit-in demanding the reinstatement of ousted President Mohamed Morsy. They had been waiting, sleeping in sparse shade through the hot days, believing their president was held inside the compound. On Monday morning, they formed into lines, their backs turned to the soldiers guarding the gate, and began to pray.

Less than two thousand feet away, in a high-rise apartment on the other side of the sprawling club, Salah and his family awoke. They prepared for fajr. Then they heard gunshots.

Salah rushed to the window, turned on his phone and began to film. The shots cracked through the pre-dawn darkness, followed by more — a rapid series of single blasts that sounded like they came from rifles. There was distant and incoherent shouting. Something that look liked black smoke drifted upward, and then more shots. Down below, inside the club, Salah watched soldiers throw on flak jackets, jump into vehicles and drive toward the commotion.

“There is no God but God,” he muttered in trepidation.

On the streets in front of the club, something terrible was happening. How it began, too, is shrouded in darkness. But how it ended was clear: at least 51 dead protesters, a dead soldier and a dead policeman. It was the worst act of state violence since the 2011 uprising, a “massacre” that threatened to push the huge but temporarily defeated Muslim Brotherhood even further from reconciliation with a new government they view as completely illegitimate. [Continue reading…]

Madawi Al-Rasheed writes: Hours after the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, was deposed, the Saudi regime hurried to congratulate newly appointed interim president Adly Mansour. The Saudis must have felt comfortable with the quick downfall of a political Islamist party that found itself in power after several decades in the opposition.

It is ironic that a regime that prides itself on ruling according to divine law fears most the rise of Islamism to power. It must be said that like most Western governments, Saudi Arabia was more than confortable coexisting with the Egyptian military dictatorship under deposed President Hosni Mubarak. But when a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president was sworn into office in 2012, Riyadh was alarmed. Saudi Arabia had always had a troubled relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood version of Islamism, its organizational capacity and its increasingly accepted message that combined Islam with an eagerness to engage with the democratic process.

Saudi Arabia hosted Arab Muslim Brotherhood exiles during the repression of the 1950 and 1960s. They came not only from Egypt but also from Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries where they had been prosecuted. Brotherhood cadres played a pivotal role in Saudi educational institutions and later the transnational organizations set up by King Faisal to counter the spread of Arab nationalism and leftist movements. Saudis used the exiled Islamists as tools to weaken such movements and undermine their credibility, while emphasizing their un-Islamic character. During the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s, Saudis used the worldwide networks established by the Brotherhood to inflame the imagination of its youth and channel aid and weapons. Yet Saudi Arabia never allowed the Brotherhood to establish branches there as they did in other Arab countries and in the West. [Continue reading…]

Sarah Carr (who is not a Morsi supporter but voted for him to keep out Ahmed Shafiq) writes: [M]y position on events pre-30 June has not been changed by events since: the Muslim Brotherhood should have been left to fail as they had not (yet) committed an act justifying Morsi’s removal by the military. The price Egypt has paid and will pay for the consequences of this decision are too high. It has created a generation of Islamists who genuinely believe that democracy does not include them. The post-30 June fallout reaffirms this belief, especially with Islamist channels and newspapers closed down as well as leaders detained and held incommunicado, apparently pursuant to an executive decision. For thirty years, Mubarak told them that due process is not for them, and a popular revolution is confirming that. It is Egyptian society that will pay the price of the grievances this causes, and the fact that, with a silenced media and no coverage from independent outlets they have been left with virtually no channels to get their voice heard.

I will not weigh in on the coup/revolution debate other than to say millions of Egyptians were on the ground demanding Morsi be removed while military jets drew hearts in the skies above them and then Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi announced that Morsi had (forcibly) buggered off. Nothing has changed. The real revolution will happen when army involvement in politics is a distant relic of history.

In any case the debate is semantic and tedious and the nomenclature will not be decided now. The only aspect of the wider argument that interests me is the notion that an elected president’s legitimacy falls when millions take to the streets. If this is a precedent, then it means shaky times ahead when the masses’ interests do not coincide with those of the army.

Zenobia Azeem writes: It may be a stretch, but after the removal of President Mohammed Morsi by a popularly instigated coup, there was a small window of time where the army and the opposition could have adopted a genuinely reconciliatory tone, since they had the upper hand in how events were going to play out. While the nature, history and general interests of the army can be blamed for preventing the army from doing so, the opposition — or at the least the “revolutionary core” of pro-democracy youth activists — could have struggled harder to push the new military and civilian leadership to begin shaping the new order on democratic values.

This is not to say that anything can appease the Muslim Brotherhood at this point and push it to reintegrate into the political system, nor to ignore the fractures in the loosely strung-together opposition.

If this is truthfully a continuation of the revolution, and not just an attack on the vilified Brotherhood, where are the continued cries demanding protection of human rights, rule of law, political freedom and political pluralism?

Correction: This post originally appeared with a video showing gunmen opening fire on a prayer gathering. This was not the gathering reported below but one that took place in the city of Arish, in the Egyptian Sinai peninsula.

The New York Times reports: Soldiers and police officers fired on hundreds of supporters of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s ousted Islamist president, as they prayed before dawn on Monday during a protest outside the facility where he is believed to be detained, sharply escalating the nearly week-old crisis convulsing the country and further dimming any hope for a political reconciliation.

At least 51 civilian demonstrators were killed and more than 300 were wounded, all or almost all of them by gunfire, health officials said. Dozens of witnesses said the soldiers and police officers had opened fire unprovoked, an assertion that was immediately challenged by the military authorities.

Spokesmen for the army and the police said in a news conference held to defend their use of deadly force that they were attacked first, and that two soldiers and two policemen had also been killed, although witnesses said one of the policemen was killed by a soldier’s gunfire.

It was by far the deadliest violence here since the final days of President Hosni Mubarak in January 2011 when his riot police fought their last stand against the protesters demanding his ouster.

But whereas that battle signaled the fall of a dictator, the significance of Monday’s carnage was as bitterly contested as the future of Egypt has now become since military commanders deposed Mr. Morsi last Wednesday after one year in office. [Continue reading…]

Egyptian media (Al-Ahram, Al-Masry Al-Youm, and Egypt Daily News) refer to “clashes” between the army and Morsi supporters, yet it seems clear from the video above that the deadly shots were being fired into a crowd of peaceful worshipers.

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: The Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, called on the international community and international organizations, as well as “the free people of the world,” to intervene to stop the “massacres taking place in Egypt”.

It called for “uncovering the truth about military rule so that there will not be another Syria in the region,” following clashes that broke out between supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsy on the one hand and police and army forces on the other near the Republican Guard headquarters in Salah Salem.

In an official statement on Monday, the party said, “We call on the great Egyptian people to rise against those who want to abduct their revolution with their tanks and armored vehicles even if they have to do so on the dead bodies of the people.”

The New York Times reports: A party of ultraconservative Islamists that emerged as an unexpected political kingmaker in Egypt after the military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi said on Monday that it was suspending its participation in efforts to form an interim government.

A spokesman for the Al Nour party said its decision was a reaction to a “massacre” hours earlier at an officers’ club here in which security officials said more than 30 people had been killed. The decision brought new complexities and unanswered questions to the effort to create a transitional political order.

The Al Nour party was the only Islamist party to support removing Mr. Morsi, despite his ties to the more moderate Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the sight of Al Nour’s bearded sheik, standing behind the general who announced the takeover on television, was the only signal to Egyptian voters that the move had not been an attack on Islam, as some of the ousted president’s supporters are saying.

The party played a starring role in the military’s choreographed presentation of its takeover as the chance to reunify a country on the brink of civil war between opponents and supporters of Mr. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. But while Al Nour’s leaders say they intend to build bridges, some liberals say the party is pushing potentially divisive demands, from picking a new prime minister to keeping Islam prominent in any new constitution.

Over the weekend, Al Nour tested its leverage for the first time to force the retraction of an announced plan to name a liberal icon, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, as interim prime minister.

“You just can’t do something like that, after we had appeared right next to you on the scene” at the televised announcement, Younis Makhyoun, a Nour party leader, said on Sunday. “We have grass roots,” Mr. Makhyoun added, “and they don’t agree on the choice of ElBaradei.”

Instead, state news media outlets reported on Sunday that the interim government was close to naming as acting prime minister Ziad Bahaa el-Din, a former head of Egypt’s investment authority. A Nour leader blessed him in a radio interview as “one of the liberal figures that we greatly respect.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The United States is unlikely to pull its $1.5 billion in mostly military aid to Egypt any time soon, U.S. lawmakers said on Sunday, despite the Egyptian military takeover of the government in what the opposition has called a coup.

“We should continue to support the military, the one stabilizing force in Egypt that I think can temper down the political feuding,” U.S. Representative Mike Rogers said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, called instead on Washington to “help a process that will allow for more multiple factions of parties and beliefs to participate.”

Other lawmakers agreed Washington should use caution in responding to the turmoil in Egypt as it tries to transition to a democratic government.

While U.S. law calls for aid to be suspended if a country’s military ousts a democratically elected leader, the U.S. lawmakers appeared reluctant to do so.

Egypt’s powerful military ousted elected President Mohamed Mursi last week after massive street protests turned violent, blaming Mursi’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood for the clashes.

The Brotherhood, which called for additional protests on Sunday, has called Mursi’s ouster a coup and pledged to keep protesting until he is restored.

“What we should be doing right now is urging calmness, and asking the Muslim Brotherhood to act with some degree of responsibility as it relates to what is happening,” Senator Bob Corker, the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told “Fox News Sunday.”

Neither Corker nor Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat, agreed with a recent statement by Republican colleague John McCain that the United States should suspend aid.

Corker said there would be “plenty of time to assess the aid issue” and the focus should be on the peaceful transition to a democratic government.

The New York Times reports: As President Mohamed Morsi huddled in his guard’s quarters during his last hours as Egypt’s first elected leader, he received a call from an Arab foreign minister with a final offer to end a standoff with the country’s top generals, senior advisers with the president said.

The foreign minister said he was acting as an emissary of Washington, the advisers said, and he asked if Mr. Morsi would accept the appointment of a new prime minister and cabinet, one that would take over all legislative powers and replace his chosen provincial governors.

The aides said they already knew what Mr. Morsi’s answer would be. He had responded to a similar proposal by pointing at his neck. “This before that,” he had told his aides, repeating a vow to die before accepting what he considered a de facto coup and thus a crippling blow to Egyptian democracy.

His top foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, then left the room to call the United States ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, to say that Mr. Morsi refused. When he returned, he said he had spoken to Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and that the military takeover was about to begin, senior aides said.

“Mother just told us that we will stop playing in one hour,” an aide texted an associate, playing on a sarcastic Egyptian expression for the country’s Western patron, “Mother America.” [Continue reading…]

Sumita Pahwa writes: Egyptians are fiercely divided on whether the recent army intervention to depose the increasingly unpopular president Morsi was a step forward or backward for democracy. Those who flooded Tahrir Square to cheer a ‘second revolution’ argued that the Morsi-led government may have been elected but that it had lost legitimacy with its exclusionist, illiberal exercise of power. The Brothers had stoked fears of electoral authoritarianism in the past year: their demonstration of bad faith in going back on assurances that Morsi would appoint a consensus cabinet including opposition figures, their signalling of hegemonic intent in trying to circumvent the courts with constitutional declarations, in attempting to stack institutions of state with loyalists and most importantly in pushing through a narrowly partisan constitution against the protests of the non-Islamist opposition, and their willingness to clamp down on civil society by punishing critical voices and tarring NGOs as foreign agents, revived old fears that Islamists merely saw elections as a means to an illiberal end.

Yet while a military intervention offers a chance to start over, it also entrenches anti-democratic norms and incentives in the following ways:

1) By allowing the military to cast the deciding ballot in political deadlocks, and to determine what the “voice of the people” is and to execute “the popular will,” this intervention reduces the incentive for parties to invest in electoral and political organization and to woo the army instead. This keeps praetorianism going instead of encouraging all political actors to respect democracy as the only game in town.

2) This also reduces pressure on all actors to negotiate compromises and encourages them to use protest rather than elections as a path to achieve political change. The MB-led government’s refusal to acknowledge just how fragile a mandate it had and to offer their critics and more sceptical allies channels for ongoing input and feedback was the first step in this direction: by not channeling opposition institutionally, they left anti-system protest politics as the only effective tool for the opposition. But the opposition was also largely unconvinced of the importance of party organization, seeing it as a dreary process that was stacked against them to begin with. The lesson of military intervention is: if you don’t like your government, wait till you can overthrow it. [Continue reading…]

Omar Ashour writes: ‘Down with military rule” was once the most popular chant in Tahrir Square, during the time when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was ruling. Not any more. A few days ago, the place that symbolised Arab struggle for democracy and freedom celebrated a military coup. One part of Egypt was celebrating the repression of the other part. So what happened? And why do large segments of the society support a coup against Egypt’s first ever democratically elected president?

Any analysis of Egypt’s crisis won’t make sense before dissecting the anti-Morsi camp. To simplify, the camp is composed of four main players: the army, the police force, the felol (the term used for remnants of Mubarak’s status quo) and what we might call “non-Islamist revolutionary forces”.

The most powerful actor in this camp is the army, followed by the police. And indeed their intervention tilted the balance of power towards the anti-presidential forces. The felol come in third, with their tremendous wealth and resources, media outlets, connections in state institutions (which in many ways they are still part of) and powerful regional and international allies. At the bottom of the food chain lie the non-Islamist revolutionary forces; relatively limited in terms of resources, wealth and arms but not in terms of enthusiasm and energy.

Let’s go back a bit. In September 2011, I was among a group of these people, the majority of whom are liberals. The common dirty phrase then was “military rule” and the common red line was a state dominated by generals. The aim was to push the arms out of Egypt’s politics, and the strategy was to gather seven presidential candidates with one message to the army: hand over power to an elected civilian.

The initiative included moral and procedural demands: no politician would resort to arms or armed institutions to oust another politician and presidential elections should be held no later than February 2012. When the initiative was sent to the ruling generals, they ignored it and never replied.

I am telling this story for two reasons. The first is to show how belittling the army commanders were/are towards civilian politicians. Back then, candidates together had more than 90% of the votes. Despite that, they were ignored by the generals, regardless of their ideological backgrounds. The second is to show how far the situation deteriorated; from revolutionary red lines such as “no to military rule” and “no constitution under military rule” to cheering for a junta.

Why the change of heart? Three main reasons: incompetence, unmet expectations and powerful allies. [Continue reading…]