Reuters reports: Western allies warned Egypt’s military leaders right up to the last minute against using force to crush protest sit-ins by supporters of the ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi, arguing they could ill afford the political and economic damage.

A violent end to a six-week standoff between Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood and the armed forces that toppled Egypt’s first freely elected president seemed likely once the new authorities declared last week that foreign mediation had failed.

But the United States and the European Union continued to send coordinated messages to army commander General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Interim Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei during the four-day Eid al-Fitr Muslim holiday that ended on Sunday, pleading for a negotiated settlement, Western diplomats said.

“We had a political plan that was on the table, that had been accepted by the other side (the Muslim Brotherhood),” said EU envoy Bernardino Leon, who co-led the mediation effort with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.

“They could have taken this option. So all that has happened today was unnecessary,” Leon told Reuters in a telephone interview. The last plea was conveyed to the Egyptian authorities on Tuesday, hours before the crackdown was unleashed. [Continue reading…]

Marc Lynch writes: With blood in Egypt’s streets and a return to a state of emergency, it’s time for Washington to stop pretending. Its efforts to maintain its lines of communication with the Egyptian military, quietly mediate the crisis, and help lay the groundwork for some new, democratic political process have utterly failed. Egypt’s new military regime, and a sizable and vocal portion of the Egyptian population, have made it very clear that they just want the United States to leave it alone. For once, Washington should give them their wish. As long as Egypt remains on its current path, the Obama administration should suspend all aid, keep the embassy in Cairo closed, and refrain from treating the military regime as a legitimate government.

These steps won’t matter very much in the short term. Cairo has made it very clear that it doesn’t care what Washington thinks and the Gulf states will happily replace whatever cash stops flowing from U.S. coffers. Anti-American incitement will continue, along with the state of emergency, violence and polarization, the stripping away of the fig leaf of civilian government, and the disaster brewing in the Sinai. It won’t affect Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israel-Palestine peace talks and the Camp David accords will be fine, too; Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi can’t manage his own streets, and it’s unlikely he wants to mess with Israel right now.

The hard truth is that the United States has no real influence to lose right now anyway, and immediate impact isn’t the point. Taking a (much belated) stand is the only way for the United States to regain any credibility — with Cairo, with the region, and with its own tattered democratic rhetoric. [Continue reading…]

As the latest reports indicate that more than 278 people have been killed in violence across Egypt today, Issandr El Amrani looks at the wider picture:

You could ask a thousand questions about the violence that has shaken Egypt, from why police decided to move now against Islamist sit-ins and with such brutality after making so much of its careful planning in the last week, to whether the attacks on churches and Christians more generally that erupted in reaction are part of a pre-planned reaction or the uncontrollable sectarian direction political tensions take in moments of crisis. But the question that really bothers me is whether this escalation is planned to create a situation that will inevitably trigger more violence – that this is the desired goal.

The fundamental flaw of the July 3 coup, and the reason those demonstrators that came out on June 30 against the Morsi administration were wrong to welcome it, is that it was based on an illusion. That illusion, at least among the liberal camp which is getting so much flak these days, was that even a partial return of the old army-led order could offer a chance to reboot the transition that took such a wrong turn after the fall of Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011. This camp believed that gradual reform, even of a much less ambitious nature than they desired in 2011, would be more likely to come by accommodating the old order than by allowing what they perceived as an arrangement between the military and the Islamists to continue. Better to focus on fixing the country, notably its economy, and preventing Morsi from sinking it altogether, and take the risk that part of the old order could come back.

In this vision, a gradual transformation of the country could take place while preserving political stability through the armed forces. It would be negotiated and hard-fought, as so many democratic transitions in other parts of the world have been, but the old order would need the talent and competence of a new technocratic, and ultimately political, class to deliver and improve governance. Their hope was that the Islamists would understand that they had lost this round, and that they could be managed somehow while a new more liberal order emerged. This, in essence, was what Mohamed ElBaradei and other liberals bought into on July 3, no doubt earnestly, and what so many other outside of formal politics fervently hoped for: not the revolution radicals want, but a wiser, more tolerant, order in the country. [Continue reading…]

Is this the sign that Egypt’s experiment with democracy is well and truly over?

Al Jazeera reports: A state of emergency has been declared across Egypt, as security forces and supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi continue to clash around the country.

The announcement on Wednesday came amid a deadly crackdown by security forces on two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo.

The health ministry said at least 149 people had been killed in clashes around the country, but some members of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood said the death toll was much higher.

Is the United States about to take any punitive measures against Egypt’s military rulers? Not likely. President Obama is “monitoring what’s happening” — translation: he has no intention of taking any action.

The Wall Street Journal reports: The White House once again called for “restraint” in Egypt and said the administration opposes the state-of-emergency law and continues to review U.S. aid to the country.

“The United States strongly condemns the use of violence against protesters in Egypt,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Wednesday. “The violence will only make it more difficult to move Egypt forward.”

Mr. Earnest said the U.S. will hold the interim government accountable for its promise to speed up the transition to a democratic government. Senior U.S. officials are in touch with their counterparts in Egypt, he said.

“The world is watching what’s happening in Cairo,” Mr. Earnest said, adding that U.S. officials are still trying to determine the specifics of events.

President Barack Obama, on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, was briefed Wednesday morning on developments by National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

“He is closely monitoring what’s happening,” Mr. Earnest said.

The Guardian: Egyptian security forces have launched a deadly assault on protest sites backing the ousted president Mohamed Morsi, clearing one and besieging another.

The crackdown on Wednesday has left scores of people dead and many more wounded, and has sparked clashes in other parts of the country.

The dawn raids in Cairo at the sites on either side of the Nile came after two weeks of ever more bellicose warnings from the military-led government that replaced Morsi after he was toppled almost six weeks ago.

Sky Correspondent: Egypt violence is not a crowd clearing operation, it is a major military assault largely on unarmed civilians

— Sky News Newsdesk (@SkyNewsBreak) August 14, 2013

Inside Rabaa now – scenes of utter chaos and huge numbers of dead. Field hospitals full of bodies and extreme injuries

— Tom Rayner (@RaynerSkyNews) August 14, 2013

#Egypt-based journos on Twitter report army/police firing at reporters, confiscating gear/deleting photos, threatening them with violence.

— Erin Cunningham (@erinmcunningham) August 14, 2013

Sky News cameraman Mick Deane has been shot and killed in Egypt this morning. Mick had worked for Sky for 15 years, based in Washington and then Jerusalem.

Michael Mansfield and Tayab Ali write: Just over a year ago, Egypt threw off the shackles of its military dictatorship and took on the mantle of a civil democracy, becoming for a short period, the torchbearer of liberty and equality throughout the Arab world. On 24 June 2012, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party won the country’s first contested election. It was the first time that an Egyptian president had been freely elected from outside of the military establishment.

By 3 July 2013, President Morsi had been ousted in a coup d’etat. The uprising against the previous Mubarak regime resulted in the free and fair election of President Morsi – a new dawn of democracy and human rights for Egypt. The current spate of protests have seen the rapid destruction of that new promise and an excuse for the military to regain control.

The immediate aftermath of the July coup reminds us what Egypt is without its democracy and that cannot have been what the many who were angry at President Morsi’s government had in mind when they chose to (and were allowed to) vocalise their discontent in street protests.

Everyone in Egypt should now be concerned about the legality and consequences of the military overturning its first democratically elected government. Whatever the stated justification, disenchantment with a democratically elected leader cannot legitimise the use of force and should never be used to remove a democratically elected government.

We can see where Egypt has descended to in the aftermath of the coup. The new military-installed regime does not appear to be interested in safeguarding Egypt’s democracy. The hallmarks of a democratic state have vanished almost immediately. Morsi has been detained in a secret location along with much of his administration. Suddenly dubious and historic criminal charges have surfaced and been levelled against them. So far these detainees have not had access to their families or legal teams. How they are being treated is anyone’s guess. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Egypt’s interim president named at least 18 new provincial governors on Tuesday, half of them retired generals, in a shake-up that restored the influence of men from army and police backgrounds and flushed out Muslim Brotherhood members.

Deposed President Mohamed Mursi had appointed a number of civilians as provincial governors during his one year in office. Many of them were members of the Brotherhood. That marked a break with the Hosni Mubarak era, when the posts typically went to retired army and police officers.

The new appointees were sworn in by interim President Adli Mansour, head of the army-backed government which replaced the Mursi administration that was removed from power last month after mass protests against Brotherhood rule.

Critics said the line-up announced on Tuesday was a step backwards.

“It is Mubarak’s days,” prominent blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah wrote on his Twitter feed. “Down down with every Mubarak. Sisi is Mubarak,” he added, referring to General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the army chief who deposed Mursi.

The New York Times reports: Reaching the heavily sandbagged entrance to the sprawling protest camp in the northeast of this city requires navigating past makeshift brick walls and stepping around circles of stone marking the places where “martyrs” shot by the government fell dead.

Once there, visitors must submit to ID checks and pat-downs by bearded men with orange vests, hard hats and clubs. Signs on a towering new tent read “Children against the coup.”

And then, stretching into the distance is the camp, where tens of thousands of people have built what amounts to a well-equipped community in what was once a traffic-clogged intersection. There are tents with electricity, televisions and Internet access, some of them two stories tall. There are a hospital, communal kitchens, latrines and showers.

This and a smaller camp across town are the front lines in Egypt’s dangerous political stalemate between a military-installed government and the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies who support the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi. The new government accuses them of gathering weapons and says they must leave or it will evict them by force.

But breaking up the camps will be difficult because of the crowds they have amassed, the infrastructure they have built, and the religious fervor the protesters bring to the fight. The military and the police have already killed dozens of people, and human rights groups have reported cases in which Mr. Morsi’s supporters have detained and tortured opponents. But instead of scaring the protesters into going home, the crackdowns have reinforced their conviction to stay. [Continue reading…]

Sheri Berman writes: Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. He had in mind the Revolution of 1848, when a democratic uprising against the French monarchy collapsed into a Bonapartist dictatorship just as the French Revolution had six decades earlier.

In 1848, workers joined with liberals in a democratic revolt to overthrow the French monarchy. However, almost as soon as the old order collapsed, the opposition fell apart, as liberals grew increasingly alarmed by what they saw as “radical” working class demands. Conservatives were able to co-opt fearful liberals and reinstall new forms of dictatorship.

Those same patterns are playing out in Egypt today — with liberals and authoritarians playing themselves, and Islamists playing the role of socialists. Once again, an inexperienced and impatient mass movement has overreached after gaining power. Once again, liberals have been frightened by the changes their former partners want to enact and have come crawling back to the old regime for protection. And as in 1848, authoritarians have been happy to take back the reins of power. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera reports: Efforts by foreign envoys to solve the crisis in Egypt have failed and the Muslim Brotherhood is responsible, the interim government has said.

The presidency announced that Wednesday marks the end of the first phase of diplomatic attempts to resolve the turmoil, which has been spiralling since July 3 when the military removed president Mohamed Morsi.

In a statement carried on state news agency MENA, it said: “Today ends the phase of diplomatic efforts, which began more than 10 days ago.

“The Egyptian state … holds the Muslim Brotherhood fully responsible for the failure of those efforts [by foreign envoys] and what may be the consequences of this failure.” [Continue reading…]

Deepak Tripathi writes: A society in which important actors live in denial of each other’s interests and legitimacy is a society threatened by the abyss. There is ample evidence of this destructive phenomenon through the history of the Middle East, as elsewhere.

One of the biggest casualties of the phenomenon of Arab awakening was Egypt’s ruler Hosni Mubarak, whose fall in February 2011 looked like a pivotal event strong enough to accelerate democratic change across the region. Two years on, the prospects are bleak. After the recent military coup, Egypt is in the midst of a civil conflict which is bloodier and more repressive. The continuing violence and schism are more depressing than the final weeks and months of the Mubarak regime.

Authoritarian rule, rebellion and repression have shaped mindsets throughout Egypt’s social hierarchy. The collapse of Mubarak’s autocratic rule had sparked new hopes of an open and enlightened era, free of corruption and mismanagement. But those with power to control and coerce have a strong instinct to reassert themselves when they see their grip weakening. An essential feature of that instinct is to dismiss the legitimate existence and interests of others. It is by denying the legitimacy of the others that powerful actors’ claim their own legitimacy. [Continue reading…]