Egypt in chaos as the military seizes control

What happened

Egypt’s brief experiment with democracy was on the verge of collapse this week, after the military ousted the country’s Islamist president, and security forces shot dead at least 51 of his Muslim Brotherhood supporters. As Islamist demonstrators staged a sit-in outside a military building where they believed President Mohammed Mursi was being held, government soldiers began shooting into the crowd. “They opened fire on us while we were praying,” said one protester. “They are criminals.” Security officials said they only responded after a “terrorist group” tried to storm the building, and issued an arrest warrant for Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie, claiming he had incited the violence.

The military overthrew the government on July 3 after at least 14 million Egyptians and as many as 30 million staged anti-Mursi protests in cities around the country—perhaps the largest protest in world history. The protesters, many of them secular and young, objected to the Muslim Brotherhood’s strong-arm governance and Mursi’s failure to revive a broken economy. This week, the interim government attempted to reassure Egyptians and the world about its democratic intentions, by unveiling a plan to amend the country’s Islamist-authored constitution and hold elections within six months. The Muslim Brotherhood rejected the roadmap, and called on Egyptians to “rise up against those who want to steal their revolution with tanks and armored vehicles.”

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What the editorials said

“There is no ambiguity about what happened in Egypt,” said The Washington Post. A president “who won 51 percent of the vote in a free and fair election” was ousted and arrested by soldiers on orders of generals. That, by definition, is a military coup. So why is President Obama defying the federal law that requires the U.S. to cut off aid to any nation where there’s a military coup? If the U.S. truly believes in democracy, we must suspend our $1.3 billion in aid unless the generals prove that new elections will include “all peaceful political forces, including the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Ending aid to Egypt would be a huge mistake, said The Wall Street Journal. The Obama administration has never exerted any real influence over Egypt, failing to persuade Mubarak to institute even modest democratic reforms, and then failing to restrain Mursi when he tried to build an Islamist dictatorship. “The U.S. now has a second chance to use its leverage to shape a better outcome.” But if Obama cuts our only source of influence with the generals, we won’t be able to stop them from reinstituting a Mubarak-style military dictatorship.

What the columnists said

Mursi’s downfall has proved once again that Islamist ideology is incompatible with democracy, said Michael Hirsh in NationalJournal.com. Mursi—“the first elected Islamist head of state in Arab history”—forced through an unpopular sharia-inspired constitution, cracked down on women’s rights, and arrested opposition activists who dared oppose his will. Outraged by Mursi’s authoritarianism, millions of Egyptians issued their own “Declaration of Independence” by demanding his removal. The generals rightly intervened on their behalf.

Popular or not, this coup sends a dangerous message, said Shadi Hamid in The New York Times. Islamists across the Middle East who renounced terrorism and sought change through politics will now “ask, with good reason, whether democracy has anything to offer them.” Many may decide that the radicals are right, and that change “can’t come through the democracy of ‘unbelievers’; violence is the only path.”

Mursi was ousted primarily because of his incompetence, not his Islamic ideology, said Evelyn Gordon in CommentaryMagazine.com. He did nothing to reverse a 33 percent unemployment rate, revive the ailing tourist industry, or tackle fuel shortages or soaring inflation. And if the next government can’t solve those economic issues, it’ll face similar mass protests. No political party in Egypt—not the liberals or the Islamists—has a serious proposal on how to revive Egypt’s economy, said Walter Russell Mead in The-American-Interest.com. But “Egypt must be governed even if it can’t be governed well.” So the next stage of Egypt’s revolution will be the construction of a “government without hope.” Right now, the army is the only institution capable of this task. When “hope fades, force is what remains.”