A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed "United Arab Republic" of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century "stability" of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood's brief, disastrous grip on power. Mark Steyn at his finest. As they say, RTWT.
Analysis piece from Ammon News and (apparently) the Guardian, though I can't find it on the latter's website. It's as good as any "inside" look as we're going to get until the dust settles, It's worth the read so as to be ready to counter the more simple-minded progressives who will say, "but he was elected!" Yes he was, and he then proceeded to behave with complete disregard to what democracy is all about.
The army chief came to President Mohammed Morsi with a simple demand: Step down on your own.
"Over my dead body!" Morsi replied to General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi on Monday, two days before the army eventually ousted him after a year in office.
In the end, Egypt's first freely elected president found himself isolated, abandoned by allies and no one in the army or police willing to support him.
Even his Republican Guards simply stepped away as army commandos came to take him to an undisclosed defence ministry facility, according to army, security and Muslim Brotherhood officials, who gave the Associated Press an account of Morsi's final hours in office.
The Muslim Brotherhood officials said they saw the end coming for Morsi as early as 23 June a week before the opposition planned its first big protest. The military gave the president seven days to work out his differences with the opposition.
In recent months, Morsi had been at odds with virtually every institution in the country, including leading Muslim and Christian clerics, the judiciary, the armed forces, the police and intelligence agencies. His political opponents fuelled popular anger that Morsi was giving too much power to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, and had failed to tackle Egypt's mounting economic problems.
There was such distrust between Morsi and the security agencies that they began withholding information from him deploying troops and armour in cities without his knowledge. Police also refused to protect Muslim Brotherhood offices that came under attack in the latest wave of protests.
Therefore, when Morsi was fighting for his survival, there was no one to turn to, except calling for outside help through western ambassadors and a small coterie of aides from the Brotherhood who could do little more than help him record two last-minute speeches.
So Morsi sounds like a rebel leader who suddenly finds himself in power and realizes that he's in way, way over his head. He thought it was all about issuing decrees, and didn't realize you have to convince people, work with people, and find some common ground. Then again, he was a rabble-rouser for the Brøderbünd, and leadership skills there weren't exactly transferable to running an impoverished country.
In those remarks, he emotionally emphasised his electoral legitimacy a topic that Morsi repeatedly raised in the talks with Sisi.
Which is all he had left...
Early this week, during two meetings in as many days, Morsi, Sisi and Hesham Kandil, the prime minister, sat down to discuss ways out of the crisis.
But Morsi kept returning to the mandate he won in the June 2012 balloting, according to one of the officials. He said Morsi wouldn't address the mass protests or any of the country's most pressing problems tenuous security, rising prices, unemployment, power cuts and traffic congestion.
His 24 hours a day were consumed with putting the Brøderbünd in charge of everything in Egypt, and therefore he had no time for such smaller matters of governance...
A Brotherhood spokesman, Murad Ali, said the military had already decided that Morsi had to go, and Sisi would not entertain any of the concessions that the president was prepared to make.
"We were naive ... We didn't imagine betrayal would go this far," Ali said. "It was like, 'either we put you in jail, or you come out and announce you are resigning.'"
Brotherhood officials said they saw the end coming.
"We knew it was over on 23 June. Western ambassadors told us that," said another Brotherhood spokesman. US ambassador Anne Patterson was one of the envoys, he added.
Morsi searched for allies in the army, ordering two top aides Asaad el-Sheikh and Rifaah el-Tahtawy to establish contact with potentially sympathetic officers in the 2nd Field Army based in Port Said and Ismailia on the Suez Canal. The objective was to find a bargaining chip to use with Sisi, security officials with firsthand knowledge of the contacts said.
There were no signs that Morsi's overtures had any effect, but Sisi, on learning of the contacts, took no chances. He issued directives to all unit commanders not to engage in any contacts with the presidential palace and, as a precaution, dispatched elite troops to units whose commanders had been contacted by Morsi's aides.
The end nears
On the surface, Morsi wanted to give the impression that the government was conducting business as usual. His offices released statements about meetings with cabinet ministers to discuss issues such as the availability of basic food items during Ramadan when Muslims feast on food after a day of dawn-to-dusk fasting. He had four cabinet ministers talk to TV reporters in the presidential palace about fuel shortages and power cuts.
The opposition had set its first mass protest for 30 June, the anniversary of his inauguration, but the demonstrations began early, and Morsi had to stop working at Ittihadiya palace on 26 June.
The next day, he and his family moved into the Cairo headquarters of the Republican Guards, an army branch that protects the president. Morsi worked at the Qasr El Qouba palace and continued to do so until 30 June, when the Republican Guards advised him to stay put at their headquarters.
His foreign policy aide, Essam el-Haddad, telephoned western governments to put an optimistic spin on events, according to a military official. Haddad was also issuing statements in English to the foreign media, saying that the millions out on the streets did not represent all Egyptians, and that the military intervention amounted to a textbook coup.
According to the usually authoritative newspaper Al-Ahram, Morsi was offered safe passage to Turkey, Libya or elsewhere, but he declined. He also was offered immunity from prosecution if he voluntarily stepped down.
Morsi gave a speech late on Tuesday in which he vowed to stay in power and urged supporters to fight to protect his legitimacy.
Soon after, Sisi placed him under "confinement" in the Republican Guard headquarters. The next day the military's deadline to Morsi expired. At 5am troops began deploying across major cities and the military posted videos of the movements to its Facebook page in a bid to reassure the public. Republican Guards assigned to the president and his aides walked away at midday and army commandos arrived.
There was no commotion and Morsi went quietly. That evening, Sisi announced Morsi's removal.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013 00:00 ||
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#6
"I won" devolved to "winning" in short order in both cases...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/07/2013 15:40 Comments ||
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Morsi probably thought the public elected him to be emperor.
Not emperor. Sultan. A pity that, for all his knowledge, he'd forgotten that Egypt has belonged to the Mamluks for most of its Muslim history -- and they were soldiers, not engineering professors.
Good summary of what the news media is saying about the military coup in Egypt by David Gerstman at Legal Insurrection. Through the citation of several sources he makes a compelling point: a lot of people of Egypt voted Muhammed Morsi in 18 months ago (he ended up with 51% of the vote, the rest going either to Salafists or to the military-backed puppet) not because they believed that the Muslim Brøderbünd had the answers for Egypt, but because they couldn't bring themselves to vote for either the puppet or the crazies. They thought that the responsibilities of governance would force Mr. Morsi and the Brøderbünd to be pragmatic and govern from the center.
They were wrong. The leopard does not change his spots. The scorpion stings even when it is against its own interests because that's what it does.
That's a lesson to be learned here at home as well: when a hard-left presidential candidate tells you that of course he's going to govern from the center...
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013 00:00 ||
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I guess Arab countries don't have a default "Mickey Mouse" protest voting option.
Set aside all the politics over the War on Terror and then ask what Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have in common.
All three are arrogant and unstable men filled with aimless grievances and animated by the sense that they never received the things that they really wanted out of life. They are in short exactly the sort of people that foreign intelligence agencies recruit when trying to spot weak links in the security chain.
Foreign intelligence agencies look for people with security clearances who go through a lot of money in short periods of time, who simmer with grudges and grievances, who are rootless and dissatisfied. Those descriptions adequately cover Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning; two men who should never have been given any kind of clearance whatsoever on personality alone.
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Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain ||
07/07/2013 00:00 ||
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At last, good news from the Middle East. Democracy has been overthrown in Egypt. The generals taking over promise new elections in a few months, but with any luck they are lying.
...And that is the beauty of military dictatorship. If we must have a republic, I recommend the banana variety. Generals, in the main, are men of little imagination, & simple tastes. They love order, to be sure, but in the balance of public vices, a little order is seldom a bad thing. They are not easily infected by ideology, or any other form of intellectual ambition; even those who acquire some may lose it after a while. They dont much care what one is doing, so long as it will not threaten the peace, or otherwise interfere with their breakfast. Should the general be smart enough to fully understand his need to avoid free elections, he will become unobtrusive. He wont go out of his way to antagonize anyone. He may line his own pockets, & those of his friends for as Valéry said, Power without abuse loses its charm. But the odd billion into a Swiss bank account is a small price to pay for freedom.
It is the officer who may not be lining his own pockets whom we need to fear; the one possessed by revolutionary zeal, associated from the start with Party. Those, let me admit, give Generalissimos a bad name. No, it is only the career general Im proposing to push forward: the sort already used to giving orders & having them obeyed; who will not feel the need to redesign his own uniform. Real generals, a little on the plump side, & entirely without charisma: thats where to turn in a pinch. Not to hothead colonels.
...For a real general is a man with a trade. He understands the value of elementary professionalism. Hell appoint boring accountants to the budget office, prosecuting attorneys to every judicial bench the sort of men who have some vague idea what they are doing. They wont be like the czars in the Obama administration. A few technocrats here & there wont do much harm. Better them than the bug-eyed idealists.
Granted, real generals have their foibles, too, that go with the tendency to be stupid. Alas, perfection is not available in this world. But while they may be rough & somewhat brutish in their ways, may eat ice cream with a fork & so on, there is usually some underlying decency in them.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
