Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Egyptian Revolution Derailed, Contained
By Nicola Nasser*
A fourth wave of the Egyptian revolution seems
inevitable, until the revolution changes the regime or the regime emerges
victorious, pending another revolution.
The January 25
revolution in Egypt, which removed the former president Hosni Mubarak from
power in 2011 and, in its second wave, overwhelmed the first anniversary of his
elected successor Mohammad Morsi on June 30, 2013 with millions over millions
of anti - Muslim Brotherhood protesters until the military intervened to remove
him in turn three days later, is now entering its third stage without yet being
completed, fulfilled or finished.
In a statement issued on July 27, 2013, US Egypt
Years
ago, John C. Campbel, in “Foreign Policy,” had described the Middle East as “a
house of containment built on shifting sands,” from the perspective of the
United States, and his description still applies today, no better than to the
current state of affairs in Egypt, where the state has become more like a house
of cards.
So
far, Egypt
This
rotation of power has so far proved an effective mechanism in containing the
revolution and derailing it away from evolving into a new order. The political
polarization along these lines is another mechanism; Mazda Majidi on July 20
wrote on the Web site of the U.S. Party of Socialism and Liberation: “A long confrontation
with the military on one side and Brotherhood supporters on the other could
yield a situation where the people in the streets right now will be sidelined,” and consequently their revolution aborted.
Answering
his question whether the removal of Morsi was a U.S.-engineered coup, Majidi wrote
that “Washington would have had no incentive to orchestrate a military coup to
overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood (MB);” Morsi “worked well with the U.S.,”
“played a key role” in brokering a truce between Israel and Hamas in late 2012,”
and in the conflict in Syria, he and the MB “were solidly behind the U.S.
effort to overthrow the Syrian state;” accordingly, “Washington could live with
Morsi, but it obviously has no problems with Egypt's military,” who are the
most committed to the strategic ties with the U.S. and the best guardians of
the peace treaty with Israel.
Maintaining
or discarding those ties and that treaty will undoubtedly be the most vital
dividing line externally between fulfilling the Egyptian revolution and
derailing it away from disturbing the regional balance of power and status quo,
which both the U.S and the Israeli beneficiaries thereof have nurtured during the
past more than three decades as their “holy cow.”
No
surprise, therefore, that the internal threats to this status quo have become
the concern of the U.S. and
Israeli allies, but Israel
Within this context monitors could interpret the U.S. refusal to label the Egyptian military
latest intervention on July 3 as a coup, lest the Barak Obama administration become
obliged by law to cut the U.S.
aid to Egypt Qatar , which had
sponsored the Morsi –led MB government, would not withdraw its ($7b) support to
Egypt
Any U.S. Israeli “Marshall Plan,” however, will only
be another mechanism to maintain and reinforce the status quo and will not
change the regime in Egypt
Beneficiaries of the status quo are keen
to prove to the revolting masses that their revolution has thus far made their
bad situation worse: Economically, significant capital fled abroad, Egypt’s
debt is a staggering 88 percent of its GDP, tourism collapsed, agriculture hit
hard, foreign investment declined, labor unrest spread, unemployment on the
rise, inflation soars, economic growth plunged, public finances deteriorated,
value of Egyptian pound fell, purchase power of salaries eroded, half of
Egyptians live at or below poverty line, etc., and personal safety and public
security have become a daily headache, with the harassment of women becoming a
social phenomenon.
And in the name of democracy, according to Jon Lee Anderson, writing in The New Yorker on July 5, “the devils long
contained in Egypt ’s
national Pandora’s box having been loosened from their chains,” so “as if
everything in Egypt
* Nicola Nasser is a
veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
