In yesterday’s N.Y. Times, the letters column showed strong reactions to David Brooks’
essay “Defending the Coup.” [N.Y.T. 7-5-13] Well the military claims it is not a coup, that
President Mohammed Morsi is under house arrest for his own protection, and that a civilian economist is running the country.
President Morsi is not an extremist. In his first year he has preserved the peace treaty with Israel and he has worked with Obama for the economic well being of Egypt. What Morsi has not done is provide constitutional protections and rights for minorities (women, Christians, labor unions, business alliances, and social groups). He has also tried to pack Egypt’s supreme court with
Iranian style religious clerics. What needs to be done now is call a convention to amend the constitution put forward by the Muslim Brotherhood . When the fundamental law (separation of powers plus “bill of rights”) has been approved by ballot, only then can President Morsi be reinstated.
Egypt does not have a SC, and IIRC, their constitutional court has 100’s of judges.
In don’t know what will happen, but the Military seems determined to act in a way which will at best lead to a low level insurgency and at worst to a full level civil war.
Of course Morsi is an extremist. He, the Muslim Brotherhood and the majority of the Egyptian people want a theocracy, not a democracy (a democracy has numerous protections for minorities). I don’t see any alternative to civil war.
The Egyptian people still need time to blow off steam. The Muslim Brotherhood is problematic, they’ve been around for a long time and feel they were the the cause and the winners of the revolution. They are wrong, but they won’t give up easily. The military has ruled Egypt for a long time and still does. The next chapter will be another military approved government, rinse, repeat.
Right. The Muslim brotherhood cannot put 17 million protesters on the street. The Egyptian military definitely leans in a secular direction. That partnership will prevail as it should.
The Saudis and other Arab States have announced $8 bn in aid since Morsi was deposed. Muslim Bro members can commit suicide as individuals and as an organization. That is their choice. But my money is on the moderate and military Alliance to prevail. Saudi billions to help them is a good sign. Maybe we can pass US aid through the Saudis or something like that to not be seen as meddling in Egyptian political and religious affairs.
The post is not a quote. Nothing is paraphrased from either columnist David Brooks
or from the letters to the editor. The title of the Brooks essay is quoted.
I did not read nor see the Brooks essay but evaluated it based on the NYT reader
reactions. This post is the same format I used in USENET, the idea being to
challenge the SDMB reader with a point of view grounded in factual events.
This format was rejected by a GOOGLE GROUPS sysop.
I posted this on one of the other Egypt threads. I think we as American observers should be as you saw well grounded in factual events as well as grounded in what the Egyptians believe and desire themselves.
This is to me the most ‘grounded’ expression about the revolution in Egypt.
Not the same situation.
Ceausescu was universally despised by 100% of the citizens in Romania, including the army. When he was killed, nobody mourned him.
As soon as Ceausescu was gone, Romanian society continued functioning pretty well, based on the common bonds of the Romanian people and the social contract which all stable cultures create.
Morsi is widely supported. If he gets killed, huge crowds will mourn him–violently. And Egyptian society is too fragmented to create a stable social contract.
Would it shock all the ‘civil war’ alarmists if the civil war does not arrive - again? Do you recall the events around September 11 last year where the western press flashed headlines that the entire Muslim world was ‘up in flames’… It all boils over and then the next eruption starts it all over again.
I suspect more Americans have been shot and killed in Chicago and Baltimore and a few other US Cities than have been killed in Egypt during this horrified expectation of “CIVIL WAR” the past week.
I do commend CBS for printing this however:
Watch what happens if this revolution continues relatively (by revolution standards) without a large scale civil war? Americans will lose interest again.
The first shore leave I had in Egypt, the port employees and soldiers spoke to me
in Russian. How surprising that a former British colony came so quickly under Soviet influence.
Presidents Ford and Carter wanted the Soviets out of Egypt. It had nothing to do with
the Jews. Democracy and the downfall of their dictator de jure was not our mission.
Winning over their military with nonpolitical weapons and surplus grain was the goal.
I worked on American ships carrying grain and weapons to Egypt from 1978 to 1990.
How could we have known then that in 2011 there would be 20 million Egyptians flooding
the streets screaming for democracy ?
Remember the Afghan warlord who was assassinated by Al Qaeda with a device that looked
like a camera? President Morsi has a price on his head because he is a moderate compared
to the extremists in the Brotherhood. What worries me now is that an
assassin may be embedded in either the Army or in a delegation that has been cleared to
meet with Morsi at the military guest house in Cairo.
And those organization were technically correct. The voting process went off pretty well and the election was close and the Islamists slightly prevailed. I don’t question their impression that the tools of an election worked. My point is that during the revolutionary upheaval of the events of 2011 an election so close could only truly determine that the will of the people was very strongly divided at best.
That all could have worked had Morsi recognized the significant historic power that he had acquired and his mandate was not to take his Bloc of support to establishment of his party rule as the mandate of the 2011 revolution.
It was the secularists revolt that brought the MB’s nemesis/Mubarak down. Morsi needed to pay some homage to the secular and moderate spirit of half the nation. They did not begin a revolution to go from a soft moderate tyranny to a strong Islamist tyranny that would crush the ideal of liberty and freedom and tolerance of religion for a new order of life run by the Aystollahs through a fundamentalist in a business suit like Morsi.
The Carter Center was right the election was legit as elections go. But this was far from an ordinary election and Morsi won it but he blew what he should have done with his slim win considering all the circumstances and the divided will of all the people.
Morsi blew it and deserved to be gone. Morsi even as a miderate was not showing that he was looking to establish and preserve an established democratic self-rule where the secular and non-Islamic rule would be kept separate.
There were other conservative blocs that opposed what Morsi was doing once he gained power. I think he was taking direction from the religious hierarchy, not and ideal of individual liberty. And he can’t crush the ideal of individual liberty, specifically when the military for selfish reasons if course, will not ever hand military power over to the Ayatollahs.
I appreciate your skepticism about Morsi. It is true to say Morsi is the
newest dictator of Egypt as well as the first democratically elected President
of Egypt. The Army probably knows that Egypt doesn’t have a lot of time to
prevent chaos: 90 million people, only 2 months food supply, $25 billion in
foreign debt, millions suffering from malnutrition.
It’s JMO that the Army has a better shot at civil order by promoting a ballot
on amending the Brotherhood Constitution rather than running a vote on an
appointed slate of government officials. This Islamist constitution is music to
50% of the people. The addition of “Division of Powers” and “minority bill of
rights” amendments can turn it into lemonade for the other, secular 50%.
But the Army will probably focus on rigged elections of party hacks from the
Mubarak era instead of selective changes in a constitution already acceptable
to half of Egypt’s voters.
(QUOTE) NotfooledbyW:
That all could have worked had Morsi recognized the significant historic power that he had acquired and his mandate was not to take his Bloc of support to establishment of his party rule as the mandate of the 2011 revolution.
The Carter Center was right the election was legit as elections go. But this was far from an ordinary election and Morsi won it but he blew what he should have done with his slim win considering all the circumstances and the divided will of all the people. (QUOTE)
This is slightly off-topic but let me just make the point that 51% or 52% of the
vote is a mandate but just barely. Mohammed Morsi did the same thing that
Bush II did in 2004 against Kerry. Bush barely defeated Kerry and yet he saw himself with a mandate to privatise Social Security. You may recalled this was
the very first item on the Bush agenda in 2005. Neither Bush II nor Morsi
received a landslide vote.