Egypt
will hold its presidential election May 23-24 with a possible run-off
on June 16-17. It is impossible at this point to predict what’s going to
happen but I can make a good guess. Eight weeks from now Egypt will be
led by either a radical anti-American Islamist who wants to wipe Israel
off the map or by a radical anti-American nationalist who just hates
Israel passionately.
Let’s review the background and then analyze the likely events to come.
Since
Egypt’s revolution began a year ago five propositions have monopolized
the Western debate and coverage, all of which were wrong:
--That Egypt would become a real democratic state in which human rights and civil liberties would be respected.
--That this state would be dominated by moderate and modernist secular groups.
--That the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and a bulwark against the really radical Islamists.
--That
the army is simultaneously the main enemy of democracy in Egypt that
should be opposed and yet also the force that would keep Egypt stable
and pro-Western.
--That the new Egypt would remain an ally of the United States or at peace with Israel.
Only
the second has been reluctantly dropped by governments and mass media.
All the others are still in place today! Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood
has become the substitute moderate democratic hope. This blindness
ignores all the daily evidence to the contrary.
The
“moderate democratic” forces up until now have defined the military as
their main enemy. Perhaps they still do so. But they also woke up to
realize that a constitution written by a vast majority of Islamists
wouldn’t be a great thing for them. So they followed the classical Arab
mistake of boycotting the constitution-writing process, thus ensuring
that the Islamists will have even more power.
Two
Islamist candidates—the Brotherhood’s Khairat al-Shater and the
Salafists’ Hazem Salah Abu Ismail—and one secularist—Omar Suleiman—have
been disqualified. The Brotherhood simply substituted Muhammad Mursi,
leader of its Freedom and Justice Party, for al-Shater, who returned to
his job as deputy head of the Brotherhood. Morsy told a news
conference, “We intend to make the Palestinian issue our main issue.”
The
other main candidate is the radical nationalist Amr Moussa. His stances
have varied depending on whether he thought he could hope for the
Brotherhood’s backing. Since his main rival is the Brotherhood-backed
Morsy, Amr Moussa is in a relatively anti-Islamist phase. And that’s
not to say that Moussa, albeit the lesser of two evils, is any great
prize, though he is certainly preferable.
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