Betrayers in Egypt, betrayed in Syria: Liberalism’s Arab Winter

The sufferings of Egyptians and Syrians will go on for decades.   That will allow plenty of time for think tanks, graduate students, journalists, op-ed writers, scholars and security analysts to build or enhance their careers on the ‘lessons’ of these events.  This essay offers the one lesson that none of these efforts will produce.  It is that, if the Middle East has a future, it does not lie with freedom, democracy, ‘empowering’ this or that favored sector of society, investing in this or that or the other thing, shoring up anti-something efforts, or ‘standing up’ for something-or-other.  It lies, for better or however worse, with Islam.

This is not an Islamist claim.  It doesn’t really have a lot to do with the nature of Islam in any of its forms.  It has to do with the role of liberals in the so-called Arab Spring, and with the role of the political tendencies and institutions they hold dear.   The following will argue this from the conduct and motivations of liberals in Egypt and Syria, and from the record of secular government in the region.  To examine this conduct, you need to consider the nature of the events we’re dealing with.

Their very name invites distortion.   The term 'Arab Spring' reveals the delusions deliberately or, much more often, unthinkingly promoted by those who sympathise with the now-failed revolts in Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia (which won't be discussed here).  The spring in the name comes from the 1968 "Prague Spring", well-known as Czechoslovakia's nonviolent striving towards nice, Western, democratic ideals.  The idea was to portray the revolts in the same way:  nice, non-violent, pro-Western, pro-democracy, and 'democracy' in the Polly-Annish Western sense of a practice where only People Like Us get elected.

None of this applies to the revolts.

Even in Egypt, they were not non-violent: indeed this lie is also a grievous insult to the heroic Egyptians who fought police and snipers like lions.  The idea that only non-violent resisters should be held up for admiration pervades not only Western but middle class Middle Eastern propaganda.  Apparently, it is only in the West that fighting tyrants is acceptable.

As for nice ideals, that held for the leadership and much of the vanguard in the very first days of the revolts.  But this induces a misunderstanding:  that the vanguard was the heart and soul of these uprisings.

They were not.  Had this been true, the 'Arab Spring' would have been just another of the many pointless middle class cameos in the story of stagnant or dynamically monstrous Middle Eastern régimes.  There would have been some arrests and things would have got right back to normal.  But it was what's annoyingly called the 'Arab Street' that was out to finish what the middle class liberals started.  The ordinary Egyptians (and Syrians), the ones who didn't make themselves heard on web sites or social media, were not Prague Spring types.  (When the song Sout al horreya refers to hunger, it is not singing about the middle class.)  They were religious and had become increasingly so as the hopes raised by Nasser’s secularist vision faded.  Their religion, as it reached out to those trapped in poverty, inevitably acquired political overtones.  It affected their notions of freedom and democracy: Morsi’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, did not count as some dangerous threat to their version of those ideals.  Unlike the middle class, they wanted real social change, better lives, not institutional reform.  Some of them wanted power.   They felt their time had come, and their rule would not conform to a liberal, secularist model.

The recent history of resistance to the state testifies to this.  Those who died opposing the military in Egypt were, overwhelmingly, Muslim Brotherhood, and this after the middle class ushered in a military dictatorship in the name of liberal values.   In Syria, when resistance had to arm itself or perish, it was Islamist militias who increasingly dominated the middle class movements with their business-suited leaders in Turkey or Europe.  These Islamist movements were not the heart and soul of the demonstrations that are now reviewed with nostalgia.  But they were the heart, soul and muscle of resistance, when the going got really tough and rebel units, in the face of massacres outside the main urban centers, established themselves in the countryside & smaller cities.  And as usual, in the countryside, people were more conservative and less liberal.

What the middle class liberals started gained historic significance because it almost instantaneously drew in hundreds of thousands who were neither middle class nor liberal.  How did the liberals react?

The liberals’ conduct.

In Egypt, their reaction can be summed up in few words.   When Egypt’s first free and fair election brought in Mohamed Morsi, whom they considered an Islamist, they spun tales of how he was a sinister authoritarian in disguise.[i]  They poo-pooed the idea that democracy was as it had been defined for two thousand years, as majority rule, and decided it had to guarantee that liberal voices and ideologies predominated.  More important, they decided that yes, they actually preferred the murdering, torturing military to Morsi, who they feared was the thin edge of a Brotherhood wedge.  The very idea that they didn’t know what their prominent participation in Morsi’s overthrow would bring to Egypt is beneath contempt.

In Syria, it’s more complex.

The liberals fall into three categories – ex-officers in the Syrian armed forces, exile politicians, and highly literate activists.  Though middle class, they could not have behaved more differently from their Egyptian counterparts.   For the most part they steadfastly refused to abandon their Islamist allies, despite strong pressure from the US.

Perhaps the liberals relied on the Islamist forces to keep Assad at bay.   Perhaps, adequately supported by the US, they would have turned on the ‘extremist’ militias.   But the fact is, they never did.   This, however, proved the undoing of the Syrian revolution.

Here the fateful decision for the liberals was not so much with whom to ally domestically, but with whom to ally outside the country.  They chose, or tried to choose, the West.  They did not choose the region's counterpart to Morsi:  Erdogan, incessantly labeled an anti-liberal authoritarian.  To have chosen Erdogan would have meant, were the revolution to succeed, decisive Turkish involvement and influence.  This would mean, in turn, that the liberals were irreparably subordinated to the Islamist tendencies represented by Erdogan himself and by the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.  The liberals, it seems, were not dead set against alliance with such forces when it was a matter of physical survival.  But to accept Islamist leadership, if not immediately then in Syria's future, was something the liberals could not contemplate.   So they persisted in their dream that they were indeed fighting for Freedom and Democracy, and so was 'Syria' itself.

But those where not 'Syria's' objectives.   A large though unknown proportion of Syria's anti-Assad masses weren’t liberals; they were likely more conservative than the Muslim Brotherhood itself. (Indeed despite strenuous efforts to highlight the role of women in the demonstrations, the crowds were overwhelmingly male, to an extent that defies attempts to present the 2011 uprising as predominantly secularist.)  Many others, not Islamist or even conservative, turned to the Islamist militias as their best counter to Assad.   Western governments knew this and quickly soured on the revolution.  Long before the emergence of ISIS and ‘Al-Qaeda affiliated’ group, the West was nervous about the Muslim Brotherhood component of the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army.  Though it took some time to become apparent, once this happened, the game was up.

From the very start of its ‘efforts’, the US and denied the rebels anti-aircraft weapons they feared might fall into the hands of the rebels’ Islamist battlefield allies.  Without such weapons, the rebels couldn’t hang on to their territorial gains and couldn’t protect their civilian populations.  Soon arms deliveries slowed to a trickle.  The same fear of Islamist domination prompted the US to decide it didn’t, after all, want the revolution to succeed, nor even give it the support it needed to survive.  And it did not survive.   So the choice of the West over Erdogan was indeed fateful, and the liberals played a major role in making it.

By allying, not with Turkey but with 'the West', i.e. the US and its ever-serviceable partner, Jordan, the liberals had mired the Syrian uprising in false hopes and, eventually, worse, a partly successful attempt to convert the desperate revolutionary forces away from rebellion, to become mere Western proxies in the fight against ISIS.  It was also to invite the West to promote reliably anti-Islamist forces, the Kurdish PKK, in preference to the rebels and in sneaking, tacit alliance with Assad.

Turkey held the only promise of deposing Assad, because it held the only promise of an understanding between the anti-Assad forces, Russia and Iran.  Turkey couldn’t care less that Russia annexed the Crimea, nor that Russia wanted an expanded presence in the Mediterranean.  It didn’t care about Hezbollah and had important economic ties to Iran.  There was, then, a chance that Russia and Iran could be persuaded to sideline Assad in return for an important regional ally who would be fine with an expansion of Russian bases in the area.  On the other hand, a rebel-US alliance meant that potential allies, Iran and Russia, had to be enemies.

The liberals’ choice also hobbled Turkey.  The West’s bright idea for fixing Syria was to support the YPG, the Syrian branch of the Kurdish PKK.  They were Assad’s allies and Erdogan's military enemies.  On top of this, the West (and sometimes the liberals) consistently incited secularist rebel units against hard-line Islamist forces, so that the rebels were weakened still further.  Erdogan, beset by a pro-Assad opposition, potential Russian pushback and the US’ protection of the Kurds, could not provide the military muscle the rebels needed.  So the US betrayal was the end of the road.  Choosing the West meant, unwillingly, unknowingly but unavoidably, choosing Assad.  That was the terrible price for placing faith in Western democracies.

Why did the liberals make their choices?

Though the choices of Syrian and Egyptian liberals were radically different, their ultimate motivation was the same.  They found the prospect of an Islamist future intolerable.

It would be hard for those who have never seen Egypt to fathom the frustration experienced by liberals there, even under Mubarak’s secularist rule.   A Muslim librarian, gone to buy a washing machine, is berated by the salesman for not wearing a veil.  She complains that her assistants constantly slip religious tracts into her display cases.   Alcohol is bought and consumed semi-clandestinely, amid disapproval.  A woman is told that if she smokes on the street, "everyone will think you are a prostitute."  Even modestly dressed, women are subject to constant harassment - and sometimes they would rather not be modestly dressed.   You leave a famous antique shop to find the landing entirely occupied by devout employees at prayer.  You can't have bacon and eggs, or kiss on the street, or sign into a hotel with a male other than your husband.  To enter into a mixed marriage requires a high tolerance for outraged opposition.  The liberals, by and large wealthy enough to travel and even live partly abroad, find the country stifling.   These lifestyle preoccupations are pervasive, unceasing, and, the truth is, far, far more important to most liberals than whether they live under freedom and democracy.  They were much happier under Nasser's aggressively secularist dictatorship.

Maybe better to say this:  the liberals wanted cultural freedom, and, for some, the freedom to write political commentary linked to their media careers.  But they weren't interested in political freedom.  Though pretending otherwise, they viewed it with hostility when they saw it in operation.  Political freedom meant democracy and democracy meant the Brotherhood.

The liberals, bluntly put, view the Muslim Brotherhood and its followers with deep hatred.  They felt accommodation was impossible.  They were prepared to live in the 'pre-Spring' atmosphere, but feared that, with the Brotherhood in a governing position, life would become genuinely intolerable.  So the emergence of an Islamist government was seen as an existential threat - not to the existence of liberals, but to the existence of the lifestyle they worked hard to maintain.

The Syrian liberals' situation was almost the mirror-image of the Egyptians'.   Despite sincere hatred of Assad's Syria, liberals could well imagine that his overthrow would bring something much like what the Egyptian liberal experienced and very probably what they feared for the future.  Though the Assad régime was repugnant, though the course of events made armed revolution the only possible response, Syrian liberals were deeply concerned to retain control over the revolution's course.   This could not exclude alliance with conservative Islamist forces, but it had to involve some external constraint on the extent to which Islamists would dominate a post-Assad future.   That constraint could only come from close, fruitful alliance with the West, and, since the Europeans were far too timid to act on their own, with the US.   Unlike their Egyptian counterparts, the Syrian liberals never contemplated the betrayal of the revolution undertaken.  (Indeed the entire history of independent Syria indicated that any attempt by members of a liberal élite to rejoin the fold would end in torture and death.)  But they hoped against hope that US support would enable them to retain strong leadership of the anti-Assad forces.

So in Egypt and Syria alike, fear of Islamists pushed the liberals into decisions disastrous for their revolutions.   But did they really have an alternative?   If they did, was it anything more than an unappetizing choice of some supposedly lesser evil?

The future

Suppose that the liberals were completely justified in their attitudes towards political Islam.  Suppose they  had a deeply principled commitment to the values that happened to underwrite their lifestyle.  It hardly matters.  Political Islam is the only road to change left in the Middle East.  It might be a dead end or even a road to hell, but nothing will improve unless that road is taken.  It’s the only way to bring the sort of real change that sidelines the élites - often the 'notable families' who have run things since Ottoman times - who have so conspicuously failed to provide good government.

The reason Islam offers the only realistic hope for change is simple:  there are no plausible alternatives.  Sure, liberal democracy or some other secularist tendency might in theory offer some wonderful solution.  But they cannot offer a plausible solution because their record is so indelibly tainted, especially but not exclusively in the Middle East.

A rational observer of history has to conclude that, believe it or not, Islamism offers the safest alternative, because literally every major atrocity in recent history has been secularist, including the mass slaughters of Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Congo.   True, history also offers some good secular régimes, including liberal democracies, but these failed to ward off the horrors of, for example, Franco Hitler and Stalin, not to mention two world wars.  Someone might argue that, despite these unusual cases, secularist and in particular liberal democratic government offers rewards that outweigh the risks.   But that won’t work if, as a rational Middle Easterner would do, you focus the secularist record in the Middle East.

There we have just two régimes that might possibly be considered liberal democracies.   Israel, with its bloodshed and its dedication to racial sovereignty, can hardly attract emulation.  So there remains Lebanon, which even has a roughly Western-style economy.  But Lebanon’s civil war cost 175,000 lives, and no one suggests a repeat is out of the question.  Yet when we look at other secularist régimes, the record is even worse.

The secularist governments of the Middle East have included some non-disasters, countries where torture and repression are rife as the society slowly deteriorates – in Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco.  Otherwise, secularism has been a catastrophe.  There’s Saddam, the Assads, and the Shah of Iran.  There’s Iraq after the American occupation.  Gaddafi drifts into insanity after inflicting terrible suffering in Chad and Libya itself.   Secularist government brought Yemen nothing but war and starvation.  Algeria’s horrifying struggle with Islamists cost another 175,000 lives.

But it is not just the terrible record of secularism that make it an implausible solution.  Woven into these disasters is the West’s dogged resistance to every single secular or moderate ideology that gained some traction in the Middle East – as opposed to the gallery of dictators that have benefitted from Western support.  Communism wouldn't do.  Arab nationalism and Arab socialism weren't good enough either.  Their greatest and most successful exponent, Nasser, became a pariah among Western democracies; he was undone by the Western-sponsored and secularist state of Israel.  Moderate Islam, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, has labelled extremist and ruthlessly suppressed by the entrenched élites it threatened.   The West may not have overthrown Morsi, but they quickly accepted the coup and have been lavishing military and economic attention on the Sisi régime ever since.   Yet if a secularist project wanted to please the West and dedicated itself to repressing even moderate Islamist groups, it would have time and energy for nothing else.

With secularism offering no plausible promise of change, only Islam remains.  Even if what matters most is the defeat of political Islam, that will never happen unless Islamists are discredited.  To be discredited, they would have to be given a real, full chance to govern, free from the sort of deep state sabotage that marked Morsi's so-called reign in Egypt.  Only then will political Islam prove or disprove itself.  If it brings positive change, great.  If it doesn't, the secularists will get their new chance, without the encumbrance of a strong Islamist opposition.

 

Given the whole secularist record in the Middle East, I wouldn't be optimistic how that would turn out.  The abiding contemporary liberal stance is loud espousal of freedom and democracy.  But these only have to do with the forms and legal structures of government, not with policy.  They don't give people jobs or address climate change.  There is also, of course, commitment to diversity, which means we will all acquire full participation in our disastrous societies.  In the early days of liberalism, liberals at least offered laissez-faire capitalism, a bad program but a substantive program nonetheless.  Today they have nothing.  I can't see why they would be more likely than Islamists to find substantive solutions.

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[i] For a critical analysis of this claim, see Mohammed Fadel, “What killed Egyptian democracy?”, Boston Review, January 24, 2014, http://bostonreview.net/forum/mohammad-fadel-what-killed-egyptian-democracy

Should we worry about the Muslim Brotherhood?

Should we worry about the Muslim Brotherhood

Hassan Hassan warns that the Brotherhood is not moderate.  His warning is based entirely on the pronouncements of one associated cleric, Yussuf al Al Qaradawi.  This, frankly, is not only ill-founded but dangerous.

Al Qaradawi, not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said suicide bombing was "permissible for Palestinians".  He restricted the practice to groups, not individuals, but in 2014 extended the permission to "civil wars in the Middle East", in particular Syria.  Hassan Hassan said this let the genie out of the bottle.

Suicide bombing in the Arab world goes all the way back to the spectacular attack on the US marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983.  In Palestine it goes back at least to 1996, five years before Al Qaradawi's original fatwa, so the cause-effect relation doesn't even get started.  He could have made it more prevalent, or not; neither Hassan Hassan nor, anyone else has the slightest idea.  What we do know is that no member of the Muslim Brotherhood in its main contemporary incarnations, in Egypt and Tunisia, engaged in a Muslim Brotherhood suicide bombing campaign.  Since both Brotherhood movements renounced violence of any kind, it's a little hard to see how Al Qaradawi's dastardly influence operated within the Brotherhood framework.  Yet Hassan Hassan seemingly wants to blame the Brotherhood, not only for Al Qaradawi's pronouncements, but for suicide attacks all over the world, even in Bangladesh, where the organizations involved have nothing to do with the Brotherhood.

So we are asked to believe that all branches of the Brotherhood are scary because a cleric, not a member of the Brotherhood but an 'intellectual influence' on the Brotherhood, approved of suicide attacks. In support of this position, we are to note some suicide attacks which had no connection with the Brotherhood, some of which took place in parts of the world in which the Brotherhood has no presence.  We are to fear the Brotherhood because of a pronouncement of this cleric.  The pronouncement is fearful because his theology purportedly encourages suicide attacks which, however, are quite adequately explained as a weapon of the weak, not as a response to some johnny-come-lately theological pronouncement.  This is not reasoning but fear-mongering. 

It gets worse.  Though Al Qaradawi said suicide bombing was permitted in Palestine, he retracted the permission as, he said, conditions had changed.  Hassan Hassan warns that he did not "disapprove of the practice in general".  Apparently this is meant to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood is soft on terrorism, or covertly pro-terrorist, or something like that.  Yet today the majority of suicide bomb attacks  occur in Syria, a country to which Hassan Hassan draws our attention.  These attacks are carried out on military targets during assaults, which in turn are part of military offensive or even defensive operations.  They do not fit most definitions of terrorism.

If we are to be cautioned about the Brotherhood, how about this?  Their greatest success has been in Egypt, where they renounced violence almost forty years ago, where they were robbed of their electoral victory and then massacred.  In Tunisia, minus the massacre, something very similar happened.  Now the Brotherhood is hunted, persecuted.  Then analysts insist the Brotherhood is scary, dangerous:  they sign on to a demonisation that can only lead - we do live in the real world - to more arrests, more killings, more torture, all of it completely unjustified.  Ask yourself then, which pronouncements are likely to encourage 'radicalisation'?  Which counsels are likely to undermine moderation?  What warnings are likely to become self-fulfilling prophecies?

Egypt's Arab winter

The reflections on January 25th, the date of Egypt's failed revolution, are painful to read.  Far more painful the experience of those now entombed in the military's prisons.   Alaa, in a truly heart-rending piece, decides he has nothing more to say.   Few even try to be hopeful.

Perhaps one reason the situation today seems so utterly hopeless is that none of the commentators show any sign of having learned the one sure lesson of Egypt's 'Arab Spring'.  This is not at all for lack of insight.   It is because that insight itself is, for the secularist revolutionaries who write now, painful indeed.

I do not claim to know if Egypt's revolution could have succeeded.   I do know what, I am quite sure, every Egyptian knows.   There can be no real change in Egypt unless the army is defeated.   That may be impossible, but it is certainly impossible unless secularists are fully committed to supporting the main opposition in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Secularists deceived themselves when they could not make this hard choice.   They pretended there were other choices.  They can pretend no more.  The record of secularism in the Middle East, thanks in part to Western interference, has been abysmal.   Even today, bloodstained, stagnant Egypt is not the worst of the secularist bunch; it is probably among the best.

Lebanon and Algeria had civil wars in which over a 100,000 died.  Libya is in chaos.   Syria and Iraq experience catastrophic slaughter.  Jordan may have killed as many Palestinians as any other nation before abandoning its West Bank to Israel's tender mercies.  It retains some measure of stability largely due to its smug and total subservience to the US.  It is always ready to connive with Israel,  itself a disgrace to decency and 'democracy'.  Then there are the despairing societies of Morocco and Tunisia.  Those who still champion a secularist alternative are following their heart or their faith, but not the evidence.

Secularism may be the best solution everywhere, but nowhere do the populations of the Middle East have good reason to believe it - and they don't.   Change, if it comes, will be Islamist.   Those who don't accept this, might as well join the forces of repression.

Islamist 'majoritarianism': could dishonesty about Egypt do harm in Syria?

Shadi Hamid has explored the prospects of "illiberal democracy" in Temptations of Democracy, a masterful work of political science in which he assesses the agenda and fortunes of Islamists in the 'Arab Spring', especially in Egypt.  In a New York Times op-ed he identifies the challenge the events present to the West:

This poses a thorny question for Western observers: Do Arabs have the right to decide — through the democratic process — that they would rather not be liberal?

An important question but at the same time an odd one, because Western electorates have constantly decided - through the democratic process - that they would rather not be liberal as well.

Though there must have been times when the American electorate joyously endorsed liberal legislation, I can't think of a single instance.* The liberal tendencies of American politics were imposed on the people by the Bill  of Rights, not voted through their representatives.  The implementation of these rights generally involved the decisions of an unelected Supreme Court and a good deal of political horse-trading far removed from the electoral process.  Americans were virtually dragged kicking and screaming into liberal statutes on obscenity, the right to organize trade unions, the right of adults to their sexual preferences, and right to equal treatment for all races and sexes.  Never was their resistance termed undemocratic.

Defending the Bill of Rights has been the constant battle of one of the most unpopular organizations in the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union.  You might ask them how things have gone since 9-11.  Beyond this there are a constantly changing set of restrictions on private life that go beyond traditional criminal law, especially in the realm of pornography and sexual practices.    In Western Europe, illiberalism is much more prevalent, manifesting itself in strong restrictions on racist or holocaust denial utterances, religious dress and various forms of political advocacy.

Yet Hamid was quite right to ask his question, because alleged 'liberals' (especially in Egypt) have loosed a tide of obfuscation against the Islamist threat.  We hear the Islamists are undemocratic and that the liberals - who recently endorsed murderous, vicious repression - are the true defenders of democracy, even of 'freedom'.  However his is a work of political science, more concerned with political realities than with the distortion of that reality by ideologues.

What follows might serve as an appendix to his writings.  It sets out some very basic ideas about democracy and liberalism that used to be plain to everyone.  They have all but vanished due to wishful thinking, self-deception and outright dishonesty.  Restoring these ideas might make a dialogue between Islamists and their opponents a bit more feasible.  Perhaps more important, it could temper the obsession with Islamists in Syria, which has induced panic in Western policy makers.  This panic, through its tendency to choke off support for the Syrian revolution, is responsible for untold horror.

I'll look at three questions:  what is democracy, what is liberalism, and how does these relate to something dreamed up in recent years, 'majoritarianism'?  My spell-checker wonders was that means.

democracy

Democracy has been clearly defined for hundreds of years.  It is government according to the will of the people.  The will of the people is understood to be determined by voting.  It is what the majority decides.

Democracy, therefore, is a procedure for making decisions.  It is a form of politics.  There is nothing in democracy that guides those decisions towards wisdom or insanity, good or evil.  A terrible decision is every bit as democratic as a wonderful decision.

Pure democracies are of course rare but clear cases of democracy are not that rare.  Their purity isn't related to how respectful they are of individual rights.  It's a matter of how closely they adhere to the principle of majority rule.  There are many problems about this, most notably whether the people's will can really be expressed through its elected representatives.  Believers in democracy think it can.  These questions of purity have been of interest primarily to theorists.

Other questions have more practical importance.  It sometimes takes centuries for an electoral system to become democratic, and established democracies can corrupt themselves.  The corruption and the slow pace of democratization have to do with deviations from majority rule such as restricting the suffrage, or arranging electoral districts so that some voters have more say than others.  These practices are undemocratic.

liberalism

Another undemocratic practice is the implementation of a liberal agenda.

Liberalism defends the individual against 'the state' by promoting rights, especially to freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and a private sphere in which you can do as you like, provided you don't harm others.  Its progenitor, John Stuart Mill, was quite aware that in a democracy, the promotion of these rights would thwart the will of the majority.  That was his intention.  Liberalism is not only undemocratic, it is anti-democratic.

In other words, it is very odd indeed to ask if Islamists have a right to create an illiberal democracy.  If they don't, they don't have the right to democracy at all, but only to a system in which popular will, majority rule, is less than sovereign.  Advocates of democracy might better ask whether there can be a right to liberal democracy.  Does the majority have the right to decide what people are permitted to believe, to wear, to say, to do, perhaps on pain of death?   If your standard is accordance with 'democratic values', they certainly do.  Liberalism with its civil liberties is an external *constraint* on democracy.  That is its anti-democratic nature.

It this seems shocking or perverse, it indicates 'democratic' has become an empty honorific.  The more genuinely democratic a government, the less reason there is to assume its decisions are good.  This is a problem for rights advocates, including liberals, who can't bring themselves to say that they reject the central, the only democratic 'value', belief in the supremacy of the majority.  They believe that in many important cases, the majority should not reign supreme.   Typically they refuse to say that, even to themselves.

majoritarianism

From this dishonesty about the anti-democratic liberal agenda comes 'majoritarianism'.  It has two meanings.

The first is 'the ideology of a democracy I don't like'.  Liberals like liberalism, so if a majority were to enact anti-democratic liberal measures, that wouldn't be called impure democracy.  It would be celebrated as democracy in its purest, highest form, a far cry from anything as ignoble and vulgar as 'majoritarianism'.  But if an Islamist majority were to enact anti-liberal measures, that would be distasteful.  So as not to admit that such a government would be democratic, indeed far more democratic than a liberal government, it is called 'majoritarian'.  That means exactly and precisely the same thing as 'democratic', just as 'bitch' can mean exactly the same thing as 'woman'.  It is merely a pejorative that, unlike 'bitch', hides its pejorative function.

If this sense of 'majoritarian' is sleazy, its other sense is childishly absurd.  In Egypt, 'majoritarian' is often applied to democratically elected administrations that don't share power with the minority.   Please note this has absolutely nothing to do with the rights of *individuals* in the minority.  A majority might scrupulously defend all the civil rights of all those individuals.  It might never stray one micron from liberal principles.  No matter: it would still be 'majoritarian' in this second sense.  To avoid the label, it would have to give the minority *parties* a substantial say in government.

Never mind that it is common (though not universal) practice in Western democratic countries for an incoming administration to allocate to itself as many government positions as possible.   If it refrains from doing this it is praised as 'bipartisan'. It's praised because that's supererogatory:  it goes above and beyond the call of political duty.  No one calls a partisan administration 'majoritarian' or suggests that its practices are undemocratic.  But in Egypt, this silly suggestion passes for intelligence.  A Martian would find accusations of 'majoritarianism' as pathetically mortifying as the excesses of Sisi-worship that bring shame on Egypt.

No doubt the liberal secularists have legitimate concerns about Islamists, but being undemocratic isn't one of them.  So are liberals.  In Syria as in Egypt, it is wrong to demonize Islamists just because, like liberals, they 'don't believe in democracy'. Again, this applies equally well to liberals.

If a majority endorses an Islamist agenda, if it gives that agenda 'democratic legitimacy', then liberal opponents have a problem that isn't going to be addressed, much less solved, by talk about 'majoritarianism'.   Liberals concerned about Islamist rule will have to offer more than absurdities and special pleading.  With so bankrupt a response, the inevitable consequence is that liberals line up with violent repression of popular will.  In Syria, in Egypt, nonsense about who's democratic makes its own modest contribution to bloodshed.

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*maybe ending Prohibition, if it's liberal to want a drink...

To Sarah Carr, on Finkelstein and Morayef

Norman Finkelstein makes a fool of himself by suggesting you have been anything but forthrightly opposed to military rule from the word go.  He's over the top about Morayef as well.  That's a shame, because he might have made a more measured criticism of her that would lead, unfortunately, to a more measured criticism of you. I'm risking a furious reaction here because Morayef, I know, is all but sacred.  I take the risk because my reservations about your stance seem less unproductive than what Hellyer, sleazily, likes to call "the blame game".

Here's what you say à propos of Morayef.

As for his cheap little slur against Heba Morayef, I’ll let her respond to that should she choose to. The only point I want to make is that one can have crap politics and still be a good human rights monitor, just as one can have good politics and be a crap human being. A human rights monitor’s job is to monitor, as objectively and as neutrally as possible, regardless of his or her political views, and if Norman Finkelstein believe that Heba Morayef failed to do this, and if he is unaware that she is one of the few high profile Egyptians to have retained their professionalism, neutrality and humanity while the rest of the country went mad then he knows even less about Egypt and what happens here than I feared."

           

That's the response of a friend, but it's not accurate.   Professionalism and neutrality would not countenance Morayef's pronouncements against Morsi.  They go well beyond what you describe as her job: "to monitor, as objectively and as neutrally as possible, regardless of his or her political views".  They extend to very contestable analyses of Morsi's role and rule.

I contested them here and indirectly here.  Maybe I'm wrong about the alleged Morsi-SCAF alliance, but even then enough remains to establish that Morayef's comments impinge on her alleged professionalism.  It is not reasonable to see neutrality in a person so forthright in condemning Morsi yet so wishy-washy about condemning the coup, as she certainly was here:

EMMA ALBERICI: Tell us why is it that millions of people who fought so hard for democracy just a matter of a couple of years ago are now trying so hard to overthrow their first democratically elected government?

           

HEBA MORAYEF:  "Do ya know, I think that's not really the question. I think the question is: why did 14 million people turn out on June 30th. I think some of the coverage of this crisis in Egypt right now is oversimplifying it as a choice between democracy or the military and it's really far more complex than that. Because 14 million people is the biggest demonstration that Egypt has ever seen and that was not a pro-military demonstration. That was an anti-Morsi demonstration. So the question is: why have we got to a moment where 14 million people turn out in opposition to President Morsi's rule and what has he done in the last year to bring us to this moment? Now there are those at this point who would welcome the military in with other open arms. There are others who have deep reservations about a military - a return of the military to power. But I think the question is not purely one of legitimacy versus a coup. And in a sense, President Morsi's speech has framed it in that way. His speech last night spoke only of the legitimacy of his rule and addressed no concessions to the millions of Egyptians who are deeply, deeply dissatisfied with his rule."

One could add that someone who accepted without demur the military's crowd estimates doesn't inspire confidence as a neutral  observer.  But this isn't just about a lack of neutrality; it's also about the job of a director of Human Rights Watch.  If their job is merely "to monitor", Human Rights Watch doesn't seem to have got the message, because they very actively condemn régimes and developments that in their view harm the cause of human rights.

The coup was just such a development, and that was entirely obvious.  It was entirely obvious that cementing the military in power would be a far greater blow to the cause of human rights than Morsi's so-called administration, which was never 'his' in the first place. If nothing else, Morsi could never hope to acquire a tiny fraction of the repressive resources the military has always had at its disposal.  So if ever there was a time for Human Rights Watch to condemn, without ambiguity, a political change, it was in July.  This wasn't 'complex' and it wasn't time to talk about how dissatisfied people were with Morsi.  Failing to meet voter expectations isn't a violation  of human rights.  Everyone knew with absolute certainty that the army would systematically mutilate those rights, and a human rights 'professional' had an obligation to say so.  So Morayef both failed to be neutral and, beyond this, to fulfill her professional responsibilities.

Why did this happen?  Why have you insisted, contrary to the record, on her neutrality and professionalism?  The answer may lie in your own record.  You loathed Morsi and covered him with ridicule.   Sandmonkey* is sure that the ridicule from the circle of sophisticated liberal social media users, to which you belong, was incredibly damaging to Morsi, simply beyond comparison with anything visited on Sisi.  I doubt it was as damaging as all that but it represented a choice.  You and many others may claim clean hands because you were and are equally opposed to SCAF and to the Brotherhood, to Sisi and to Morsi.  But that's just why your hands don't seem very clean.  There is no doubt that Sisi is far worse, has far more blood and repression to his name.  It was utterly clear that this would be the case.  Your even-handedness - or if  you prefer, your insistence on nuance - took no account of this weighting.  That's a shame.

The Arabist* claims that Egyptians were naïve and could not see what June 30th would bring.  That's the excuse he might offer you, assuming you're as naïve as the average Egyptian is supposed to be.  But I cannot for one moment believe that the average Egyptian wasn't much more aware of the realities than those of us who predicted them.  I don't think this was or is about naïveté.

There is a more plausible and very simple explanation for the disastrous even-handedness of the 'principled' liberals and 'revolutionaries' who wrongly portrayed Morsi and the military as two equally bad alternatives.  It is a sort of anti-Islamist revulsion which does great political damage, even when it does not descend to the hatred against persons that you yourself have noted.

Secularists of all kinds cannot but detest the stifling, repressive norms that Islamists would impose on Egypt.  'Would' is wrong.  The Islamists have imposed these norms with increasing success since the start of the 1990s.   The visceral reaction of those whose lifestyles are under attack is natural.  But even a detestable régime bent on upholding detestable norms is far better than puffed-up military scum who smirk at torture and massacre.

Islamists can be fought with the framework of a democracy, even one with questionable constitutions and institutions.  The Egyptian military cannot be fought except by an alliance of secularists and Islamists.  It would indeed be naïve to expect such an alliance.  But if there is any hope at all for Egypt's future, it is in willingness to at least postpone the antagonism.

----------------------

*  twitter exchanges

Authoritarian liberalism: an option for Egypt?

Some suggest that a preoccupation with democracy can raise unrealistic expectations concerning the Middle East.  Before you have democracy, it's claimed, you must have constitutionalism and the rule of law.  It's said that this was the pattern in 18th and 19th Century Europe, where this sort of 'liberalism' preceded democracy.  This thesis fails because it does not account for significantly different social and political conditions.

The defining document of liberal authoritarianism is Kant's short essay, "What is Enlightenment?"(1784). In it he says:

...a ruler who is himself enlightened and has no fear of phantoms, yet who
likewise has at hand a well-disciplined and numerous army to guarantee public
security, may say what no republic would dare to say: Argue as much as you like
and about whatever you like, but obey!

Arguably there have been such rulers.  Kant had King Frederick II of Prussia in mind.  Napoleon is another example.  But in most of the modern world such figures, or their oligarchical counterparts, are not a live option.  That's because the nature of dissent and the threats to public order have changed fundamentally.

To see this it is necessary to glance at European history, where there was some variation in the relation between dissent, public order, liberalism and democracy.

Of England, where political dissent was far more mature than on the continent, it is not correct to say that liberal authoritarianism preceded democracy.  The development of the two went hand in hand.  It is true that in the 18th Century, England may have seemed liberal because it allowed more dissent in matters of faith, and afforded the Philosophes some refuge when their philosophical writings prompted repression in France and elsewhere.  And England did develop something resembling the rule of law somewhat before most of continental Europe.  But it also moved towards democracy much earlier, starting at least with the Puritan Revolution of the 17th Century and proceeding with the definitive overthrow of absolute monarchy in 1688, followed by the First and Second Reform Bills of 1832 and 1834, followed by periodic expansions of the suffrage.

Though today we would not count English institutions as democratic until the institution of truly universal suffrage in 1928, from the 17th Century on a steadily less restrictive notion of popular sovereignty was strongly established in English political institutions, roughly concurrent with the rise of liberal ideas.  The increasingly democratic character of British popular sovereignty is, over the decades, tangible and unmistakable.  So the example of England cannot support any constitutionalism-before-democracy thesis.

France and Germany are a different matter, because in both countries constitutionalism and the rule of law did indeed precede democracy.  But these countries experienced a much slower and less threatening development of political dissent.  That turns out to have crucial implications for the idea that constitutionalism and the rule of law can be established before democratic institutions.

In France and Germany significant and effective political dissent was, for a long time, aristocratic or at least not populist.  Even the French Revolution began as an aristocratic revolt, and lower-class resistance quickly dissipated when the Revolution was appropriated by the upper middle classes.  After a few years the main popular unrest was among the peasantry who supported, and took guidance from, the remnants of the Church and nobility.  For Napoleon, dissent was virtually no concern at all.  By the 1820s in France, revolts were conspiratorial affairs involving students and other members of the more comfortable classes, producing very manageable political changes.  Never again did peacetime French politics threaten to produce anything like far-reaching social upheaval.  So France could afford liberalism quite early on, and developed democracy later.  In Germany, and before it in Prussia, dissent was never a serious problem, so liberal constitutionalism could precede democracy by quite a distance.

Does this historical record hold any lessons for a country like, say, Egypt?  Could there be an authoritarian but constitutional government that imposed the rule of law before developing democracy?  It's hard to see how the European example affords any support for this idea.

In the Middle East, the problem of what Kant calls 'public security' was solved a long time ago.  Because political violence was unknown in his Prussia, Kant is referring primarily to criminal activity, which in 18th Century Europe existed at levels inconceivable in the contemporary Middle East:  the portly philosopher David Hume thought it natural to take a sword when going out of his house.  So this aspect of the rule of law, once considered the most important, is well established in Middle Eastern countries.  Notably missing is anything like the rule of law when dealing with what 18th Century European governments didn't need to deal with - popular political dissent.  And that makes all the difference when considering whether liberal constitutionalism can be imposed before democratic institutions are established.

In Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, there is massive, resilient, well-organized popular discontent, posing a serious threat to the state.  Rulers do not fail to develop constitutionalism and the rule of law, or the liberal's coveted civil liberties, because they're stupid or myopic.  They need repression to keep that massive popular opposition in line.  This is where the lessons from Europe lose relevance.

The comparative docility of the masses in 18th Century France and Germany, followed by the dominance of relatively genteel middle class 'revolutionaries' later, gave governments breathing room in which liberalism and constitutionalism could grow.  And so it is today.  Europeans and North Americans can say more or less what they like because their dissent never poses a threat to the state:  indeed contemporary anti-terror measures show how quickly liberalism gives way when governments imagine such a threat.

The undemocratic rulers of 18th and 19th Century Europe allowed dissent and a measure of civil rights because they faced only manageable political dissent.  The undemocratic governments of the Middle East understandably fear that civil liberties could strengthen already powerful popular movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.  That's why the authority of even liberally-inclined elites can be maintained only through bloody repression, designed to ward off even bloodier catastrophe like the Algerian and Syrian conflicts.  In these circumstances, undemocratic regimes simply cannot afford to institute real civil liberties.  Constitutionalism and the rule of law will not and cannot precede democracy, because only democracy has a chance of tempering the truly explosive, deeply popular political dissent that the European authoritarians never encountered.

Did the Muslim Brotherhood make mistakes in Egypt?

Well of course it did, and the idea is popular with those who reject SCAF but want at the same time to deny the Muslim Brotherhood - or Morsi - legitimacy.  What follows is a mere suggestion why this might not be the case - to be amplified later if good evidence for the suggestion emerges.

The two most substantial accusations against the Brotherhood are (a) that it was undemocratic, because it trampled on minority rights, and (b) that it essentially deserved what it got, because it was in cahoots with the military.

The accusation that the Muslim Brotherhood did not respect minority rights has been addressed, in part, in another post.  It is just false that the Brotherhood's failure to include minority parties or the 'liberal opposition' in government was undemocratic.  Most governments considered fully democratic would fail this bizarre test.  In the first place, majorities are no doubt unjustified in failing to honour minority rights, but this doesn't make them the tiniest bit less democratic.  In the second place, supposing the opposition has rights to be included in a government simply confuses the rights of minorities with the rights of minority parties to some piece of the pie.  That's important, because the former rights exist, and the latter don't.  The Muslim Brotherhood certainly didn't go nearly far enough to honour the rights of minorities such as Christians and - well, not really a minority - women.   That was unjustified, but it was also the will of their constituency and doesn't deprive the Morsi régime of democratic legitimacy.  If you don't like that, you need to take a stand against democracy, not just the Brotherhood.

What then of the claim that Morsi or the Brotherhood were 'in bed' with the military, or 'cozied up' to them?  Once we get away from metaphors, the substance of this accusation gets very thin.

Probably the reproach begins with bitterness about the Brotherhood's very late arrival in demonstrations against the régime.   Since the demonstrations themselves took on the aspect of an army-people love-in, this really has nothing to do with the 'cozying up' accusation, but it's also not very telling.  Unlike almost all the other demonstrators, the Brotherhood had spent decades paying with their freedom and their lives for opposing the régime, and that with almost no support from liberals or secularists. Indeed the opposition contained a significant number of Nasserists who could well be understood to have supported Nasser's murder and torture of Brotherhood militants.  In these circumstances it's hardly surprising that the Brotherhood wouldn't want to stick their necks out before seeing a good chance of being on the winning side.  So bitterness about Brotherhood is a bit overdone here.

It's said that the Brotherhood and the military made a 'tactical alliance', and that they 'supported' one another.  Well, if they made a tactical alliance, it's only in the some very tenuous sense of the expression, because the army and the Brotherhood did NOT support one another.   The Brotherhood really had no support to offer, even if they'd wanted to, and the army gave the Brotherhood no support.  To suppose otherwise is to give far too much significance to words and gestures, a fatal mistake in politics.

The Brotherhood's fine phrases in praise of the military have been examined elsewhere.  So have its cabinet appointments and the general claim that Morsi had real executive power that could have benefited the military.  These items aside, the most important alleged example of collusion seems to be the Brotherhood's backing of the March 2011 referendum, which approved constitutional amendments sponsored by the military.  In what sense was this a 'tactical alliance'?

The Brotherhood backed the referendum in part because it would help them to power:  the consensus was that, the sooner real elections occurred, the greater the chances of the Brotherhood emerging victorious.   But winning the election, as we've seen, didn't and, in my opinion, wasn't expected to bring the Brotherhood to power all on its own.  To do that, there had to be a strong civilian state, with the military reduced to its normal role in modern democracies, a meticulously apolitical fighting force concerned only to counter external threats.  Otherwise, as everyone knew (link to blog), the military would certainly rule Egypt, with no more than electoral window-dressing.

This strategy implies something many political analysts have a hard time accepting - that in revolutionary times, laws, agreements, even constitutions are mere words.  I believe this was the Brotherhood's view.  They were willing to concede, verbally or in writing, anything the military liked, until the time they were strong enough to unsay what had been said, until popular or democratic legitimacy enabled them to do so.  For them, whatever prestige and paper reinforcement the March referendum might give the military was of little consequence.  There was a choice:  to accept a referendum on the military's terms or to prolong a period of instability in which the position of the military, as the guardian of order, could only strengthen.  This was far more of a menace than that the opposition, which showed no sign of organizational competence, would use more time to form a serious political threat, rather than to fragment even further.

We have evidence that the army, from the very start, intended to crush the Brotherhood.  SCAF was simply biding its time.  To suppose that the Brotherhood wanted anything but to crush the army is to suppose them impossibly naïve. This was no Hitler-Stalin pact. The army did nothing for the Brotherhood; it stymied its attempts to govern at every turn.  The Brotherhood did nothing for the army; having no power, it had nothing to offer, and had the Brotherhood rejected the referendum, the army would have been at least as strong as before. Nor did the army at any time need the Brotherhood's support.   It had the gun; it had  the love of the people; it had no rival that could impose order on society, let alone its will on the army.  All the army wanted was some makeup, a light concealer for its dictatorial power, something to keep the Americans happy.  The idea that it reached out to the Brotherhood for succor rests on the false assumption that the army was ever in trouble.

So in what sense did the Brotherhood 'cozy up' to the army?  The two combatants didn't even agree on a time and place of combat - only that the time was not now.  The secular opposition certainly agreed on this as well; they didn't want to confront the army at that time either.  The only difference, as we've learned, is that most of the opposition didn't ever want to confront the army.  So by that token, the opposition cozied up to the army too.

The 'support' the Brotherhood gave to the army is not comparable to the liberals' support.   The Brotherhood gave the army nothing, not even time.  The liberals actively connived to legitimize the army's rule and to de-legitimize civilian rule.  The liberals actually wanted to army to overthrow the government, and said so; they went into the streets to affirm their stance.  It would be absurd to place this vigorous collusion in the same category as the Brotherhood's attempts to placate the army until they could destroy it.

The Brotherhood did make a mistake.  It thought it could gain broad popular legitimacy. It did not realize the depth of hatred - now all too plain - that most secularists held for Islamists:  so much for the complaint that the Brotherhood did not 'reach out' enough.  It did not imagine that the liberals would prefer military dictatorship to civilian Islamic rule.  But to make this mistake was to try to make a genuine revolution.  No one can now accuse the liberals of that.

Some of the preceding is, for now, more of a scenario than an account:  it's what may have happened.   But that's already enough to undermine the alleged evidence for Brotherhood-army collusion.

No Third Way in Egypt

Suppose there's a car parked outside a house.  The owner has left the country for a week and is out of touch.  There is a dog inside the car.  It is ferociously hot; the car is locked.  Some favor breaking a window to get the dog out.  Some are opposed to this destruction of property.  You suggest writing the owner's uncle a letter; perhaps the uncle knows where the owner is staying.

You advocate a useless step whose consequences are all too clear.  You protest that you favor neither letting the dog die, nor destroying the owner's property.  But your middle way is no way at all.

When it comes to what can actually happen, your suggestion amounts to letting the dog die.  Your choice is not a real choice and your preference is not a real preference.  You are simply expressing your distaste for a hard choice that, in fact, you have already made.

So it is with those who insist they favor neither SCAF not the Muslim Brotherhood.  This expresses their tastes; it is not a political position.  It would be too generous even to call it a preference: you do not prefer to write the uncle any more than I prefer to get to work by soaring through the air.  There is no third way in Egypt.  It's SCAF or, at least initially, the Brotherhood.  To say this is not to 'tell Egyptians' anything.  The reasons are obvious and known to all.  To pretend otherwise is either a cynical pretense or the most vigorous self-delusion.

Here are some of the reasons.  They all point to the same thing:  that SCAF is much too powerful to be overcome by anything but an alliance in which the Brotherhood would, at least for a good while, dominate.

First, the Army (and through it the other 'security services') have an economic power hardly ever matched.  Its economic interests, described as 'vast' and 'sprawling', may perhaps be rivaled in Pakistan and China - but then no one expects the Chinese or Pakistani peoples to be able to overcome their militaries.  It is rare indeed that an army has such extensive roles in fundamental economic sectors such as manufacturing and construction.

This economic power translates into great political power backed, ultimately, by the gun.  Elsewhere even the most powerful militaries face considerable obstacles to the exercise of sovereignty.  In China, the army appears largely to be subordinate the the Communist Party, and in any case central authority is limited by the vastness and diversity of the country.  In Pakistan, the army has great difficulty dealing with numerous armed insurgencies, and must face a constant menace from India.  In Egypt, with the politically unimportant exception of the Sinai, the population is tightly packed into very small, very manageable areas.  The army enjoys excellent relations with Israel, so it faces no external threat.  No force, anywhere in the country except the Sinai, can prevent the army from doing exactly as it pleases.

The army is also immune from international pressure.  The US cannot afford to withdraw its extensive support, both because of the influence it would lose in the Middle East and because of the economic damage withdrawal would cause in the US economy.  But at least as important as all of this put together, the army is deeply loved by a very large segment of the population.

This love is not admiration for military prowess. It is faith in an institution that regularly intervenes in politics - when, that is, it is not openly running the country.  The military's 'justice' system, the murder and torture it practices, these are well known and accepted.  Since it is believed that the army acts in the best interests of the nation, there is no effective way to criticize this adulation.  After all, what the army does is in the army's interests, and what serves the army, serves Egypt.

I am not aware of any comparably strong military ousted by civilian opposition.  Even in Turkey, the army's episodic interventions and pervasive influence run up against civilian restraint:  the electorate has strongly rejected military-backed candidates.  Moreover, as the Kurdish insurgency demonstrates, the Turkish army has far less physical control.  On the international scene, it has no faithful patron like the US, eager to finance it and overlook its transgressions.  Most decisively, its enormous 15 billion dollar economic kingdom is dwarfed by the Egyptian army's 60 billion dollar economic empire, four times the size and as much as ten times the share of national GDP.  Since the 1980s Turkey's army has even lost support from big business.  Its fall from power followed an Islamist electoral win accepted as legal by the opposition, who allowed the Islamists to govern within a mutually accepted institutional framework.

All the evidence suggests that an army as strong and popular as Egypt's could never be overthrown by a secular opposition functioning within a largely Islamist population - unless those secularists allowed the Islamists to govern.  This conclusion is not just a matter of comparisons.  The secular opposition has never shown the tiniest ability to challenge the army; for the most part it hasn't even shown the inclination to do so.  The political factions that explicitly reject both the army and the Brotherhood appear as rounding errors in any political poll or electoral contest.  The coup has not grown their strength into anything perceptible and they have no powerful backers.  "No to the Brotherhood and military rule" expresses a desire, but you would have to be a fantasist to advance this in good faith as a genuine political agenda.

There is, then, no third way.  Given this reality, to oppose the Moslem Brotherhood is to support the army.  It does not matter how vociferously someone protests that they 'oppose' army rule as well, or that they also criticize SCAF.  That person is supporting the army, because weakening the Brotherhood inevitably, predictably, does exactly that - and accomplishes nothing else.

Genuine opposition to both the army and the Brotherhood would require 'allying' with the Brotherhood against the army.  With the army out of the way, secularists could work at out-organizing the Brotherhood, which is no stronger than its popular support.  With the Brotherhood out of the way, the army is more powerful than ever:  there can be no change.  If Egypt is to have a political future, the army has to go.

In this context the term 'alliance' can mislead.  An alliance does not mean buying into an Islamist agenda.  It means two things: supporting the Brotherhood whenever the Brotherhood moves against the army, and accepting the Brotherhood's attempts to replace the old 'deep state' with its own administration.  Otherwise, any push against the army is bound to fail.

Is such an alliance impossible, now that the entire secular opposition has in fact supported the armed forces?  Not quite.  It's possible if the entire secular leadership, which had discredited itself beyond redemption, is replaced.  That is unlikely, but it is the only way forward.

Morayef, Morsi, and alliances in Egypt

Sounding quite put-upon, Heba Morayef (Human Rights Watch's Egypt director, Middle East and North Africa division) announces on twitter that she is

Getting v tired of all this “return of the police state” narrative. Police state was alive and kicking with Morsy’s blessing throughout.

...not just with Morsi's blessing, it seems.  Morsi was an ally:

In conclusion: Morsy chose to ally himself with the police as opposed to "pro-rev" forces calling for accountability & police reform.

Between the announcement and the 'conclusion' comes what I take to be the evidence.  It's odd.  An ally is normally one who helps you do things.  But Morsi is accused almost entirely of verbal crimes, if that:  some incidents are reported where no connection between Morsi and the incident is even alleged.  This apart, there is a failure to publicize a report on abuses, which of course hardly facilitated the abuses - nor has any report by anyone even slowed them down.  Mostly it's about 'endorsement'.  Morsi said this nice thing about the police! he said that nice thing! Well, I endorse the FSA in Syria; that hardly makes me an ally.  Not once is it even alleged that Morsi, as an ally might, made any substantive contribution to police abuse.

Sure, when a president endorses something, that's supposed to be different.  It puts the might of the state behind the thing endorsed.  Oh wait.  It was the might of the state that Morsi was supposed to be endorsing.  What could this mean?

For one thing, it means that Morsi stood at some distance from the power of the state.  The army and police were doing - and not doing - what they pleased.  It's quite a feat of self-deception, in the face of this virtually uncontested fact, to suppose that Morsi could have had any substantial responsibility for the conduct of the security forces, merely through statements and reports.

For another, to hold up Morsi's verbal activities with great indignation is at best posturing, at worst childish.  Adults know that when people say nice things, they sometimes don't mean it.  They realize this applies to politics as well.  Morsi had no power.  He was hoping to acquire some.  Meanwhile, he paid a high price to avoid confrontation with the police and army.  Why?  Because, to repeat what his critics studiously ignore, he had no power.*  He would have lost.

Has anyone in the know confirmed this diagnosis? Yes, very much so - the army and the police.  Not being children, they did not actually believe that Morsi thought them heroes of the revolution.  They did not believe he was sincere in his professed desire to get along with them.  They did not think that he bottled up criticism of them because he was on their side.  In fact, that's why they overthrew him.  They knew him for what he was, a man just out of their prisons, who was unlikely to look on them with deepest love.  They knew he belonged to a movement long dedicated to destroying their privileges and their sovereignty.  Though it is the security forces who most obviously qualify for the epithet Orwellian, Orwellian too is the cynical corruption of mind that manages to blind itself to such glaring realities.

One wonders what political effect Morayef can possibly expect her diatribe to have.

The army and police, after all, are genuine allies.  No doubt diligent research could discover nice things they had said about one another, but here there are more than verbal ties.  The police benefit the army by murdering and torturing people the army dislikes.   The army does some of the same for the police, but also lends its immense domestic prestige to their activities - not to mention the ever-present menace of massive armed force should anyone seriously challenge the alliance.  The army and police now enjoy almost hysterical popular support.  Foreign powers are spineless in their reaction to the coup.  Yet human rights advocacy didn't give SCAF so much as a flea-bite even before they reached this pinnacle of power.  So Morayef would have to be an almost pathological fantasist if she expected her words to help SCAF's victims.  It would be almost as crazy to suppose Morsi's words could have made any difference.

But words do, of course, at times matter.  Morayef is almost venerated in the West. (In 2013 she was nominated for Time's 100 most influential people in the world.)  Her words may be pointlessly ineffectual, but if they're not, they can only discredit Morsi in Western eyes.  So if the West ever does contemplate acquiring a spine, Morayef may play some small part in weakening international support for Morsi.  Weakening Morsi strengthens SCAF.  So the likeliest political effect of Morayef's words is to support the very murderers and torturers she contrives to smear Morsi with.

Words which help SCAF do not, of course, make for an alliance.  But if Morayef wanted to wax indignant about SCAF's allies, she might have let loose against real allies of SCAF, Respected Sirs such as El Baradei and Egypt's coup-sanctioned prime minister, Hazem Al Beblawi.  He played a major role in bringing hundreds of thousands to the army and police sponsored love-in that - again predictably - resulted in the army coup and the murder of many innocent people.   But El Baradei and Beblawi, who bring with them substantial support for the regime, don't attract Morayef's ire as much as a jailed president and his bloodied movement.

===========================

*  This is why it's so wrong-headed to speak of police abuse persisting 'under' Morsi.   It's a bit like saying that British police continued to abuse suspects 'under' Queen Elizabeth.

An image for the Egyptian opposition

I'm posting this image as a small reminder of just what sort of people the opposition has chosen to rule over Egypt.  Of course this is just a sample.  Many have, over the years, met similar fates.

Khaled Saïd after beating

By 'the opposition' I mean every last person who had a hand in overthrowing Morsi.  This includes all those who trumpet their hatred of military rule; all those who say the struggle is against both the Moslem Brotherhood and SCAF; all those who say they simply want to defend freedom or, incredibly, democracy; all those who say all sorts of nice things.  In short, I mean all those who fail to acknowledge that, for whatever reason, they've chosen murderers and torturers as their rulers.

All these people, indeed every adult Egyptian, knew the army and police hadn't changed. I'm not predicting the future.  For all I know, the army and police will change tomorrow and, just as some claim, step back from power, ushering in an era of freedom and democracy.  Maybe all will turn out to be peace and love.

What I do know beyond any doubt is that no one has any rational grounds for believing in these rosy prospects.  The opposition, the whole opposition, has made the same old bullies stronger than ever. The generals who swept Morsi aside with hardly more than a gesture have nothing to fear from a far more fragmented opposition.  Its endorsement of SCAF almost certainly enhanced the military's already wide and deep popular support.  The army and police have no conceivable reason for relinquishing power or changing their ways.  And to believe otherwise is to be in the grip of a delusion so outlandish that it must be willfully self-induced, a device to conceal the enormity of a shameful choice.

Too bad this won't reduce the flow of 'revolutionaries', 'socialists', liberals and earnest bloggers making excuses for what they've done.

A 'legitimate' coup in Egypt?

H.A. Hellyer tells us that the Egyptian army's coup had popular legitimacy:

"The most honest and accurate way to describe this was a popularly called-for, and thus popularly legitimate, coup."

He seems to connect this claim to crowds:

"... no other option was going to be acceptable to the crowds that came out onto the streets except his removal."

The notion of popular legitimacy seems very popular these days.  Maybe it has popular legitimacy.  But the kindest thing one can say about Hellyer's use of it is that he is an expert on the Middle East, not on legitimacy.

Here's the claim as I understand it.  There was a really huge crowd, which according to rough unofficial estimates had to be so very large that, while it wasn't actually a majority of the adult population, had to represent that majority.  It called for something.  Therefore that something was 'popularly legitimate'.

Apparently 'popularly legitimate' means that the something called for was ok.  'Legitimacy' has to have some force like that.  It's not just descriptive, like "real popular at that moment".  So we get

If it's endorsed by a huge crowd representing a majority, it's in some sense legitimate, ok.

As they say, what could possibly go wrong?  If it's endorsed, it's legitimate.  Doesn't matter what 'it' is.  Endorsement confers legitimacy on whatever it is that's endorsed.

Really?  So if the huge crowd endorsed slavery, or the torture and execution of dissidents, or ethnic cleansing, these endorsed items would have 'popular legitimacy'.  Absolutely, according to Hellyer's rule, and he's got a right to define the term as he likes.  But we can still ask if that has the slightest, tiniest tendency to make these things ok.

The examples are hardly far-fetched.  At many times and places, from the Confederate States of America (which itself would very likely have had 'popular legitimacy') to 19th century Ukraine and its pogroms, to 21st century Burma, it wouldn't be too hard to get the requisite huge crowd to endorse these things.  But why go that far?  The trouble with huge crowd endorsements is, it's never too clear exactly what's being endorsed.  What was endorsed in Egypt, on June 30th?

Not just any sort of leadership change, says Hellyer, but a coup.  Suppose he's right.  That means at a minimum that Egypt's military, embodied in SCAF, would take power, abrogate the constitution and depose the president.  You'd also pretty well have to expect that there would be a lot of arrests of the Islamists who had held 'power' (they didn't really, since the military, police and 'deep state' did pretty much as they pleased).  That's what happens in a coup and, as is so often the case, we'd have to expect that the police would be extensively involved.

Now it's beyond the slightest controversy that the Egyptian army and police have a record of murder and torture stretching back decades.  It's beyond controversy that their independence from oversight, well-nigh absolute before the fall of Mubarak, has only increased.  That also means, of course, that they haven't been subjected to any reform.  We might add that no force in Egypt has shown the slightest ability to restrain them.  From all this any even vaguely rational person would have the strongest reason to suspect that this 'popularly legitimate' coup would come with a good dose of torture and murder.  Unless the crowd was borderline insane or mentally deficient - which might possibly bear on the legitimacy thing - it would have to expect that the coup to include this spate of torture and murder just as firmly as it would have to expect that there would be troops moving through Cairo.

Well if I endorse a cancer treatment that I have every reason to expect includes excising a tumor, I can be understood to endorse excising the tumor.  Indeed dictators often justify their torture and murder using exactly this comparison.  But in the case of the coup, Hellyer tells us, endorsement confers 'popular legitimacy'.  So someone could certainly argue that the torture and murder had popular legitimacy as well.

Well, maybe something did go wrong after all.  Maybe, if we want a notion of popular legitimacy that makes something ok, we need to consider not just the endorsing but what's endorsed.  The notion will always have problems because what a huge crowd endorses is never entirely clear. But when Mubarak was overthrown, it wasn't a matter of huge crowds who'd already been told by the Ministry of Interior that it was open season on the headquarters of the governing party.  Though some common soldiers broke ranks, it wasn't a police and army love-in with Egyptian flags dropped from military helicopters.  In fact it wasn't a matter of one huge crowd celebrating on one security-forces-approved night.

It was a drawn-out desperate struggle in which young and old died in the streets under the fire of police snipers and agonized in army torture sessions.  So despite the chants of 'the people and the army, one hand', it's reasonable to conclude that the huge crowd wasn't endorsing the replacement of Mubarak by a murdering, torturing military junta: "down, down, with military rule".  On the contrary it seems the crowds were demanding an end to such practices and a measure of freedom - whatever that meant to whoever demanded it - for everyone, secularists and Islamists alike.  They weren't endorsing the destruction at gunpoint of a democratically elected though largely impotent government.

The different objectives of the crowds can't just be ignored when evaluating the legitimacy of their demands.  If Hellyer wants to argue that Morsi himself lacked popular legitimacy, he is welcome to do so.  But his argument for the coup - no, it wasn't just an 'analysis' - relies on an idea of popular legitimacy that would be disgusting if it weren't so absurd.  Maybe he should reconsider his whitewash.