A critical moment has arrived for Egypt. But in what way?
There
are three broad possibilities: the regime will fall; the opposition
will be repressed; or there will be an increasingly violent civil war.
The
regime will not fall due to these demonstrations. Remember what
happened to the previous, Mubarak regime. It fell for the following
reasons:
--The army would not defend it.
--The army then overthrew it.
--The Muslim Brotherhood-led opposition would not compromise.
--The West would not support the regime.
These
conditions, except possibly the first one, are not in place today.
Ultimately, Mubarak’s regime—not just Mubarak but the whole regime—fell
only because the army overthrew it. There is no sign of this happening
now. And the West, ironic as that might be, supports the Muslim
Brotherhood government, especially because it is willing to go ahead
with almost $10 billion in aid. And the Brotherhood will not give in to
the opposition on any substantive point, whatever cosmetic maneuvers it
makes.
Let’s
remember that Western, and particularly U.S. policy has spent the last
two years talking about how terrible it is to have a
dictatorship or military rule. The armed forces have been
systematically discouraged by the West from being in government.
By
definition, of course, the Brotherhood regime is supposedly not a
dictatorship because it won two elections and is probably about to win a
third one. So an elected regime cannot be a dictatorship? Yet this
regime has declared that it is above all court decisions and all
previous laws. Isn’t that a dictatorship? It intends to impose a highly
repressive law on its society. Isn’t that a dictatorship?
The
opposition thinks so; the West doesn’t. But what does the army think?
Well, it does not take a principled stance against having a
dictatorship. It is happy to live with a dictatorship that meets the
military’s conditions. These are:
--The army chooses its own leaders.
--The armed forces sets its own budget.
--Nobody interferes with the military’s vast economic holdings.
The
regime has already met the second and third conditions and to retain
the military’s backing would give in on the first as well. But the
regime
wants more: that the armed forces actively put down the demonstrations
and this is something that the generals are reluctant to do.
The
army doesn’t want to be hated, shoot down people, and set off a civil
war in which it has to round up hundreds of thousands of people and
launch scores of operations each day. True, the police are obedient and
will act against these demonstrations just as it formerly tried to
repress the anti-Mubarak demonstrations. But the police alone aren’t
sufficient.
What
happens, then, if the regime doesn’t give in and the army doesn’t stop
the demonstrations? The logical conclusion is that the Brotherhood and
Salafists will increasingly send violent vigilantes into the street to
defend their government. They want to ensure the Constitution is
adopted on December 15—whether the opposition boycotts the vote is
irrelevant to them—and afterward the Brotherhood regime can operate
under that Constitution.
Then, the opposition will be told: you’ve
lost, accept it; you have no choice. And besides, we are acting legally under this Constitution that the people accepted.
President
Mursi will have to decide whether to try to override the courts and
reinstate the previously elected parliament (almost 75 percent Islamist)
or make a concession and allow elections for a new parliament (that
might be only 55-60 percent Islamist).
Thus,
the key issues are how high the level of violence will rise and whether
the current conflicts will make the regime speed up or slow down the
fundamental transformation of Egypt into a Sharia state in which Islamic
law is strictly interpreted.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish
Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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