Adonis Diaries

How to wreck a country in 369 days?  Blame it on Muhammad Morsy?

Note: The USA decided to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt when the Spring uprising was successful to bring Mubarak down. Since this movement was the only organized party, Obama and Hillary refused to delay the election so that their preferred choice gets elected.

MICHAEL WAHID HANNA published in Foreign Policy this JULY 8, 2013

Let’s make this abundantly clear: No one should be pleased with the division and bloodshed playing out in the streets of Cairo right now, particularly as military repression escalates.

But let’s also make this abundantly clear: One man bears the ultimate responsibility for the crisis of leadership — Mohamed Morsy

With Morsy now arbitrarily detained by the military following his July 3 ouster and Egyptian security forces indulging in violent, reckless repression, the former Egyptian president and his Muslim Brotherhood movement have legitimate grievances regarding their unjustifiable treatment.

But let’s not forget how we got to this grim point.

On the night of June 30, in the face of unprecedented, nationwide mass mobilization and protest, Morsy was politically wounded, his legitimacy undermined, his ability to govern Egypt irreparably damaged.

In response to the bottom-up, grassroots campaign that brought millions out into the streets, critical sectors of the state bureaucracy openly abandoned the president, leaving him with an illusory and nominal grip on power.

He faced a country dangerously polarized, its social fabric fraying. At that moment, Egypt had fleetingly few options for avoiding the grim possibility of civil strife — and all of them resided with Morsy.

Despite inheriting intractable political, economic, and social problems, when Morsy ascended to power on June 30, 2012, he had choices — and he chose factional gain, zero-sum politics, and populist demagoguery.

In a system without functioning checks and balances, those choices generated increasing levels of polarization, destroying trust and crippling the state. These decisions were a reflection of his hostility to criticism and his and the Muslim Brotherhood’s denigration of the opposition’s role in Egyptian society.

In the period prior to this year’s June 30 mass protests on the first anniversary of Morsy’s swearing-in, when concessions and compromise might have found an orderly way out for Egypt, Morsy instead grudgingly offered airy promises and hollow gestures.

The fateful, misguided decisions made throughout his tenure and in the run-up and aftermath of the June 30 protests have now put Egypt on the cusp of civil strife and violent conflict.

An intransigent, isolated President chose to ignore reality and set the country on the course for an undeniably unfortunate military intervention into civilian politics. (Egypt has been governed by the military since 1955)

While Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood will undoubtedly now assume their more familiar role as victims, significantly aided by the brutality and stupidity of a repressive Egyptian security sector, the primary responsibility for Morsy’s ouster and Egypt’s perilous state resides with the deposed president and his Brothers. None of this was inevitable.

This is not to suggest that the Brotherhood should now be ostracized, persecuted, or forced underground. The Muslim Brotherhood is an organic and deeply rooted religious, social, and political movement with a robust and resilient base. It must be a part of Egypt’s future. But its part in Egypt’s recent past has been an unmitigated disaster.

Morsy’s fatal final decisions confirmed his insular, factional worldview, which prioritized the Muslim Brotherhood before the nation. Simply put, he failed to comprehend that his secret society had no monopoly on Egypt and that their electoral victories were not an unlimited mandate. The Muslim Brotherhood believed that the series of elections throughout 2011 and 2012, which represented in many ways the last elections of Hosni Mubarak’s era, bespoke something essential about Egyptian society and the Brotherhood’s place within it.

These traits — bullheadedness, insularity, and paranoia — were on vivid display as Egypt careened toward June 30, but they had manifested themselves repeatedly over the course of the Brotherhood’s short, unhappy time in power.

Morsy’s 369 days in power were typified by a lack of reform, which alienated activists and reformists; a lack of reconciliation, which blocked any potential outreach to members of the former regime; and narrow, monopolistic governance, which alienated all political forces — including his erstwhile Islamist allies, particularly the al-Nour Party, which abandoned Morsy during his final hours. This reckless approach to power spurred alienation, paralyzed governance, and resulted in repression and discontent — and opposition grew.

The bill of particulars is damning and dates back to the immediate post-Mubarak period, when the Brotherhood chose to pursue a formalist procedural transition that saw elections alone as democracy, while ignoring substantive reform of a failing system.

The narrow window for confronting Mubarak’s police state and crony capitalism would have required a modicum of solidarity among the forces that propelled the uprising against Mubarak. But in the first of a series of betrayals, the Muslim Brotherhood set out on a course to retool Mubarak’s authoritarian state and co-opt its tools of repression, with the Brotherhood itself in the helm.

Not only did the Muslim Brotherhood help craft and endorse the interim military ruler’s flawed transitional road map, which was filled with gaps and omissions, but the Brotherhood  immediately set about stigmatizing its opponents on the basis of crude religious and sectarian demagoguery.

Reformist and activist forces who sought to challenge the emerging political order were tarred and treated as obstacles in the Brotherhood’s pursuit of factional gain. Hence was set in motion a substance-free transition whose sole defining feature was a grueling series of elections.

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