CNN News just announced that Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi has been deposed by the military. The army gave him 48 hours to surrender power, which expired this morning. My email bulletin said this:
Egypt’s top military officer announces President Mohamed Morsy is no longer the leader of the country.
Gen. Abdel-Fatah El-Sisi said the head of the country’s constitutional court will serve as Egypt’s temporary president until a new constitution can be drawn up and new elections can be held.
Fireworks exploded over Cairo’s Tahrir Square after the announcement.
When Morsi was elected just over a year ago, I wrote a post called “Egypt is doomed,” foreseeing big trouble based on Morsi’s status as the candidate of the Muslim brotherhood. I was immediately reassured by several commenters that Morsi was just a figurehead, and no trouble would ensue. As one commenter said,
Jerry, calm down. The office of president in Egypt has very little real authority, and Moursi does not have a mandate from the people, so you can forget about Egypt becoming Iran-lite. The military, who are incredibly powerful, are violently anti-Muslim Brotherhood and extremely attached to secularism, so I do not expect Islamic law to be instituted there. What happened was simple: due to the way the elections work there, the two top candidates go to a run-off if no one wins an outright majority, and it happened to be Moursi against Ahmed Shafik, a former Mubarak cabinet member who promised a return to authoritarianism. Think of Moursi’s win as a blow struck against the old order rather than an endorsement of Islamism. I also think Egypt has way bigger problems right now than this mostly inconsequential election that most Egyptians seem to be fairly disgusted with.
Well, Morsi’s presidency did turn into an endorsement of Islamism, and many of the people don’t like it. Ergo, he’s gone, forced out by an army that, as in Turkey, doesn’t want an Islamic state. I’m a bit torn about this, as Morsi was elected democratically, but I suppose on the whole I’m not displeased. The problem is that any government, Muslim or secular, will encounter trouble.
Many Egyptians are yearning to enter modernity, and that means slipping the bonds of medieval religions. I weep for them, as I weep for the people of Turkey who are striving to keep their hard-won secular state.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that it would be a lot easier without Islam. If, as people like Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan maintain, Islam is a religion of peace, and not intrusive in people’s lives, then why are the people of Egypt and Turkey so agitated right now? It’s because they know better than Armstrong and Aslan: they know what’s in store if Muslims get the upper hand.
I’m cautiously, but fearfully, optimistic.
Egypt has just set a precedent whereby the military is the final arbiter of political decisions. That’s a very bad thing.
But the military is treading lightly and only where the people are asking them to tread, which is remarkable restraint and about the only not-horrific way for such to occur.
Good may come of this yet, but there’s still plenty of opportunity for things to go horribly awry.
b&
I think that military precedent was set some centuries ago.
concur
You misspelled “millenia”.
I think that military precedent was set some centuries ago.
….the military is the final arbiter of political decisions.
Not really. Let’s remember what happened:
1. Douche-Bag dictator thrown out by Army.
2. Free elections held.
3. Religious nut-job wins on pack of lies.
4. Starts acting like previous douche-bag.
5. Egyptian Army hits reset button.
It seems to me the army wants a real democracy and a real political process. Not another strong-man who will use his majoritarian position to crush minorities and the opposition.
The only message I get out of this is that if you’re elected President of Egypt and start acting as if the country is your ‘spoils of victory’ to do with as you please, you’re going to end-up out on your ass before you and cronies can truly destroy the country.
Morsi had his chance. Instead of trying to govern and build a democracy, he tried to be yet another Islamist Tin-Pot Dictator. And now he’s out.
I don’t disagree with your analysis.
My fear comes from the military being the one to press the reset button.
That’s exactly the type of power that, historically, generally leads very quickly to absolute corruption.
The Egyptian military may well be noble enough to resist the temptation. And I really hope they are.
But I think it’s quite foolish to trust that they won’t abuse this newfound power of theirs.
b&
Having the military act as a referee seems like one of the few feasible ways of transitioning from dictatorship to democracy.
In the US we were lucky not to have started out as a dictatorship, so the transition to democracy was fairly easy.
But in a country with the infrastructure of a dictatorship, there’s a strong chance that whoever takes charge becomes yet another dictator. Egypt may actually be fortunate that the most powerful entity seem to genuinly want democracy and recognizes that taking over itself is not the solution. In fact, this almost seems like the only way possible, short of miraculously getting a principled person in charge the first time.
Of course, not being an Egyptian, I may be quite naive about the military’s goals in egypt – I know it plays a unique social role there.
The precedent has not just been set. The military forces, especially the army, have been the most powerful group in Egypt for decades. It was obvious during the so-called Egyptian spring that it would go only as far as the army would let it. Army control has now been re-asserted. Whatever happens next will be whatever the army decides to allow. Nothing new here..
Egypt’s problem is a Malthusian one, that’s what is left out of pretty much all commentaries. It is importing most of its food and it became a net oil importer in the past decade. Its population increased by a factor of 8 over the last 100 years and is projected to double yet again (thanks to the dominant religion in the country)
Given these basic facts, there is basically no way the economy can improve.
These are problems that cannot be solved simply having a truly democratic government
The same factors are behind the Syria situation too, BTW
If I have my math right — and if you have your figures right — then that’s about a 5.6% annual rate of growth, with a doubling time of a dozen years or so.
Most people would think that a 5.6% growth rate is fantastic for a developing nation. The US has had a steady 2% economic growth rate for the past couple centuries — a growth rate in line with the increase in petroleum consumption, not coincidentally.
But, as you point out, exponential growth is ultimately unsustainable. The only question is when and how the growth stops. Does maturation and a steady state set in? If so, at what level? Or does growth simply continue until resource exhaustion occurs, followed by a catastrophic collapse?
Egypt’s problems are a foreshadowing of our own unless we figure out a better solution by the time our growing pains become intolerably acute.
b&
I am not sure you have your math correct, but the facts are that Egypt’s population was 11 million in 1910 and if you go even further back, it was less than 7 million in the first census in 1882.
Of course, now we have much improved agriculture, but even with that, they import more than half of their food.
This is indeed our future too though, and it’s in fact what collapse looks like though Syria probably serves as a better example. There the population was less 2.5 million before WW2 and is 22 million now (9-fold increase in some 80 years), oil production has peaked (and with it government revenues), they will soon be net importers too, add to that a volatile mixture of ethnic and religious tensions, a corrupt government. Then it’s a good idea to look at the end result and think about how many other places will meet all those conditions in the not so distant future…
You prompted me to do a bit of quick-and-dirty research.
According to the World Bank, Egypt’s population doubled from ~28M in 1960 to ~56M in 1990, which works out to basically a 2 1/4% annual growth rate. A chart of the data shows very consistent growth from 1960 to today. If that were to hold, their current population of ~50M would be expected to double in another thirty years to become ~100M by mid-century.
Short of a very aggressive immediate investment in solar power, I do not think that Egypt has any chance of domestically producing enough energy to power all the needs of a population that size in that timeframe especially considering how energy-intensive agriculture must be there. Yes, the Nile Crescent is historically one of the most fertile parts of the globe, but that type of population will demand water amounts that can only be met with desalinization, and growth rates that can only be met with fertilizers. Today, both mean lots of petroleum; but, as you note, they don’t even have enough of that to meet their current population’s needs.
Without discounting the cleverness and resourcefulness of the descendants of the inventors of civilization, today they’re not producing anything of enough value to the rest of the population to warrant trade exchanges to support such a deficit, and I can’t imagine anything they might have to offer decades from now that would.
It’s a simple question of basic energy equations, and the way they’re set to balance are not consistent with continued growth such as they’ve historically enjoyed.
Not that the picture is significantly better for any other nation….
Cheers,
b&
Exactly.
Also, one should keep in mind as I said below that it is a vicious cycle.
If you look globally, there are very few countries of significant size that import both their food and oil and that are in what can be described as good condition. Japan, South Korea, maybe some countries in Europe. But all those countries are exporting a lot of added value due to the technological expertise they acquired when they developed. But that in an era of abundant and cheap resources plus some support from the US due to Cold War politics.
Egypt has nothing of added value to offer to the world. It has tourism, but you cannot support 100 million people on tourism alone, while in order to become an exporter of added value, it needs an educated population, which it can only have if it has economic and political stability, the very things it has no chance of having given where things are right now.
And you can only export added value if there are buyers, of which there will be increasingly fewer given that more and more countries will fall in the same spiral of chaos as resources deplete globally
Egypt’s biggest export is Egyptians. 8 million of them live outside Egypt.
Pedants’ Corner: while the ancient Egyptians developed one of the earliest civilizations,they were not the originators.That distinction belongs to the Sumerians (or-just possibly- the Indus Valley people).But ancient Egypt did become the first large (and enduring) organised state.
One could have a lively debate on the question.
The Egyptians were probably the ones to perfect the art of brewing beer, which many would argue as the defining characteristic of true civilization.
Then again, it was the Chinese who figured out pasta, and long before the Europeans stole the secret from them….
b&
One most certainly could! I’m pretty sure the Sumerians were first with the beer too (not enough evidence for the relative perfection of the rival brews,I’m afraid)… As for pasta, I would favour the independent geographical origins hypothesis. No hostility in this disagreement btw…
stephen, even if I granted you all the points you’ve made so far — which I clearly don’t — the indisputable fact remains that the Egyptians were the first to recognize the true divine nature of cats.
And, with that trump card, I do believe the victory is mine.
Cheers,
b&
Lol- yep
Ben,were you to investigate the evidence for my points-regardless of your willingness to grant them- you would surely find that they had some merit. I must on this occasion,however, concede to the Ace of Trumps… 😉
But what’s the point of a trump card if not to bludgeon your foes into meek submission and prevent any uncouth commentary on the slanderous accusations of hypothetical inadequacies of the rest of your position?
b&
Quite so,Ben, I agree. 🙂 All the best- I enjoy your posts.
Actually, assuming the quoted figures are correct, it is a 2.1% annual growth rate (1.021¹⁰⁰ = 8). During the baby boom (1950 – 1960, for example), the US added about 18% to its population, or about 1.7% annually.
Ahh, but now I see what you did: he said the population increased by a factor of 8, not that it doubled 8 times – which would have been a 5.7% annual growth rate.
Yes, exactly.
And, in case you don’t know the “Rule of 70,” given a doubling time of 30 years, 70 / 30 = 2 1/3, which I rounded to 2 1/4.
Cheers,
b&
Women’s rights, women’s access to the workplace, and access to contraception will likely have a huge impact on the population growth rate, because that’s pretty much what did it in the west (IMO). So, to the exent that a ‘truly democratic’ government in Egypt can make thoes things happen, it will solve the malthusan problem.
I don’t think you understand the dynamics of the process well enough – improved education and women rights will bring down fertility but only very slowly. Given where things are right now, that might be the difference between a population of 160 million and 140 million in 2050. Right now it’s 85 million and it’s totally unsustainable. They import most of the their food and now they also import oil. This means there is no prospect for improvement of the economical situation because those factors, which are killing it now, are not going to improve and are in fact only going to get worse, because thy will be importing even more oil (due to declines in domestic production) and importing even more food (due to the continued increase in population).
This means the conditions that are destabilizing society will only worsen, which in turn means that it will be increasingly impossible to improve the status of women (because, even according to the theory you ascribe to, economic stability is a prerequisite for that).
It’s basically a downward spiral for here.
*from here
Seeing how no population follows malthusian predictions, it is easy to see that the problem isn’t “malthusian”.
And FWIW, Egypt has, as the rest of the world, improved its economy under a market economy. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Egypt ]
What part of infinite growth in a finite system being a physical impossibility is it too hard for you to understand?
I don’t think Morsi & the MB agree with the sentiment that he is done as president.
Pres. Morsy: Measures announced by Armed Forces leadership represent a full coup categorically rejected by all the free men of our nation
— Egyptian Presidency (@EgyPresidency) July 3, 2013
Events suggest that large numbers of free Egyptian people (as opposed to free men only) welcome the army’s intervention…
I’m not surprised that this has happened, and I had the same reaction as Jerry when Morsi was elected. I did not expect it would happen this soon, but Morsi proved to be more heavy-handed and less competent and governing (in an admittedly messy situation) than I had expected.
Ultimately, some faction of “Muslims” will gain the upper hand and form a coalition government, and muddle through to the next crisis. Will the next governing faction of “Muslims” include a large number of younger Egyptians with a mostly secular / liberal outlook (in other words, much like Reza Aslan)? I don’t know, but I hope so. Will they call themselves “Muslims”? Yes, most of them will. Never mind that some of these “Muslims” may feel at risk of being murdered for apostasy by Salafists and other Islamists, if it became generally known how they deviate from Sharia law and standard Muslim doctrine and traditions.
In a country like Egypt, one cannot get very far in politics without labeling oneself proudly as a Muslim, but one also cannot win the hearts and minds of the young and the secularists without distancing oneself from the Salafists and other Islamists.
What would U.S. politics look like if “conveniently Christian” and publicly pious politicians were targeted for murder as apostates and heretics whenever their actual day-to-day behaviors deviated signficantly from what the Southern Baptist Convention or the Westboro Baptist Church considered to be “true Christian” living?
I am in the middle of reading Why I am not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq. He says Islam has no tradition of separation of church and state, and not concept of human rights.
Not only that, it’s a design feature of Islam. One of my Moslem friends said that Islam only works well when it is the state religion, and he derided countries like Turkey which try to be secular, with a large Muslim population.
“Islam only works well when it is the state religion,”
Works well for whom? Certainly not women nor most people. Only for those who control others through intimidation and fear.
Like most people here, I have mixed feelings about the developments in Egypt. Religion and politics should be strictly separated, but also the military should be under civilian control.
Even though Morsi was elected (pseudo-) democratically, the last year saw him acting like a dictator, replacing everyone with Muslim Brotherhood extremists without any democratic process at all.
Dictators have been democratically elected before and turned on the people.
Yes. Overall, this is probably a good thing. Better to be the next Turkey than to be the next Iran.
Interested in following reader remarks. About a quarter of the population that is youthful male is not employed in this country that, as already noted, is resource deficient, and their discontent is exploitable. Authoritarian movements offer immediate opportunities for energy outlets by the high energy/relatively powerless, like that demographic, that a secular & long-range-goal democratic contingent must overcome if it is to prevent totalitarin government. Military authority is only as secularly benign as its leadership chooses, and history abounds with examples of abuse of the absolute power sufficient force yields.
Autocratic rule is in fact the only chance such a country has provided it is a sufficiently enlightened one. Only such a rule can enforce the kind of drastic unpleasant measures that can address the actual issue. The problem is enlightened autocrats are quite hard to find.
On thing is for sure, it is going to be rough no matter what. Transitional governments don’t fair well if history has anything to teach us.
Poor Turkey is always in a struggle to maintain itself as a secular state. I have a friend whose parents are from Turkey and were Muslims then became Jehovah Witnesses before abandoning churches altogether. How strange is that? She told me religious groups tend to prey on the disenfranchised in places like that (radical Islam or something else) because they offer to help you out where the government can’t.
Personally, I’m in awe of Egyptians. I don’t see myself as someone who could be in Tahrir square in the heat. I’m in Southern Spain and I didn’t go outside today because it was 30º.
Moursi promised unity and laws that would protect the individual’s right to choose his own way. Instead he delivered a thoroughly Islamic constitution whilst giving himself extraordinary powers. Fortunately the people have realized the power is theirs- they decide who stays and who goes.
sub
It is strange that a democratically elected President is overthrown in a military coup AT THE BEHEST of the people who voted him in. A friend in Turkey messaged me that “both Islamic and secularist people have desires” and must “create a consensus”. Good luck with that! Richard Engel has been posting the past couple days — 10 times a day! — with all the minutiae & mechanics of regime change (“The Army is now in charge of the state TV building with most of the staff being told to go home early”).
In countries without a democratic tradition, it is too often the case that the the first freely elected government mutates into a dictatorship, usually by fomenting fear that après moi le déluge. A crafty bastard like Mubarak parlayed this gambit into nearly 20 years of iron-fisted rule by playing on the fears of his domestic and western sponsors that the post-Hosni flood would drown the region in ready-to-export radical Islamists.
I wonder what Mubarek is thinking.
He was a dictator but, as another poster said, Morsi has for all practical purposes been a dictator, democratically-elected. I gather that the Muslim Brotherhood is nominally preferable to the Salafists. Mubarek was supported by the U.S., what with all that military aid mention in an NPR segment today. Do I correctly recall that Mubarek was at least nominally secular?
Sympathy for Turkey secularists has been expressed here. I’m reasonably sympathetic myself. I would be more sympathetic if Turkey acknowledged the Armenian genocide, which I gather is that a fiction.
“which I gather is NOT a fiction?”
As if all the other existing and looming Egyptian economic challenges are not sufficient, rising sea levels sometime before the turn of this century will begin transforming the Nile Delta (the Mekong and Ganges as well) into salt marsh.
And add to this litany Egypt’s reliance on the Nile, which is vulnerable to diversions by up-basin states, notably Ethiopia, with Malthusian predicaments of their own.
Most of the world’s population growth in this century will be in Africa, chiefly in states stretching to keep food supplies rising and one by one becoming unsustainable.
concur
Along with South and Central America, the Middle East wrote the book on malevolent dictatorship. As long as the muslim brotherhood or some other religion-based political party continue to replace these monster-despots in the process termed the “Muslim-Spring”, the region is doomed. I say good riddance to Morsi and his cleric-cronies.
It is true that that Morsi was acting like a dictator and the country was evolving into a theocracy based on Islam but there is no question that a military coup destroys democracy. The military will not give up power and you will be back to square one. They may say this temporary but Egypt will have another figure head without any attempt to institute fair elections.
What evidence can you adduce to support the assertions of your second and third sentences?
Though I agree it is rare, this same Egyptian military has already done what you say will never happen once already in the recent past. It therefore seems reasonable to suppose that they may do so again. It has happened a few other times throughout history as well.
Why is it that when things like this happen that a “new constitution” has to be drawn up? What necessitates the making of a “new constitution?”
Possibly that the old one had too much religious meddling in it, although I am basing this on what I read in the anemic US media.
Eyes on Tunisia now…
We often tend to say “the people” oppose this guy or that guy , where by “the people” we mean people who live in the cities, are middle-class (for their) country), speak enough English to get on CNN, and can articulate what we in the West want to hear.
Then you get an election, and all those grungy peasants out in the countryside vote for the person that everybody interviewed by Wolf Blitzer assured us was a horrible dictator.
Essentially my observation, too. When we in the west urge “democracy” in what is essentially tribal societies, we forget that this essentially means “majority rule”, often without protections of minority factions we in a republic so often take for granted. The urban/rural split is much more marked in such societies (and there’s a hell of a divide right here at home in the US).
of the 85 million Egyptians, 20 million live in the Cairo metropolitan area, another 7.5 million live in next three largest cities.
Egypt is soooo screwed.
While a military coup may sound like a “solution” compared to a Morsi government, that is not what Egypt needs for the long run. Military rule will bring Egypt back to where it was after the election when the military, under Tantawi, refused to hand power over to an interim civilian authority.
May be through the military, the US may eventually be able to ensure another puppet regime that does not serve the interests of the Egyptian people.
For western powers, it ultimately does not matter who rules Egypt—secular or Islamist—as long as the leadership allies with their economic and geo-political interests and agendas.
It is likely that the US and Israel will eventually attempt to influence the policies and direction of the nation through the military, and beyond.
In the face of this, Egypt needs a truly revolutionary, grass roots opposition; it requires a coalition of oppositional forces that can band together to address Egypt’s internal issues while avoiding the pitfalls of being Israel’s largest neighbour.
What Egypt needs is an oppositional force that is truly revolutionary, is concerned with the poor, unemployed and the working class and is not beholden to, or a puppet of, western powers.
Getting there will be no easy task but the people of Egypt have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate an unwillingness to go backwards. That is something to celebrate even if the immediate future is somewhat perilous.
Yeah, cos “truly revolutionary” movements claiming to represent the working class always work out so well, don’t they?
What Egypt actually needs is for its people to drop their “blame Israel/the West for all our problems” mindset. At the moment, the aid provided by “western powers” is the only thing keeping the country’s economy from total collapse. If they’d prefer not to be beholden to us for that, and they’d rather starve in a revolutionary utopia, that’s their choice. It’s fine by me. I think they’d be much better off with a government of dull, secular technocrats who’d shove the mullahs back into their mosques,restore law and order to tempt the tourists back, re-affirm their peace treaty with Israel and work alongside the Israelis to develop joint economic projects that would benefit everyone in the region. If they follow your advice and head down the class war route, the outcome will be as disastrous as it’s been everywhere else that such experiments have been tried.
agree
Some good news. Our passports arrived back from the Egyptian Consulate only three working days after we’d posted our visa applications.
Oh, wait…
/@
Noone seems to have picked on Morsi’s stupidity here. In history, a “warning for a coup” that provoked no self-defence reaction from the threatened authority was unheard of. Antique or recent coups have all worked on base of secrecy, and were beaten up as soon as discovered.
Here, he just said “it is not fair” & waited for being couped. I’m, errrrm, surprised, to say the least.
Egypt has massive social & economic problems but overpopulation is the biggest.
A few things should be said. No one knows what will happen but this is probably bad news. For a long time the Muslim brotherhood was thought by many to be competent and non corrupt. More and more people were beginning to see how bad they were. One more year and they wouldn’t have anyone’s support and it is almost certain the MB would become a discredited small force.
With this coup, it is obvious that that the rule of law is meaningless. More extreme portions of the MB will clearly see that and the salafis will certainly gain importance. Possible scenario: perhaps Algeria in the 1990’s. But of one thing we can be almost sure, a more exstreme MB will probably reappear will claim, for sure, that they failed their first time because of conspiracies and sabotage ( by the way, now it is difficult to prove them wrong).
As to who executed the coup, check this out:
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/07/04/Saudi-king-congratulates-Egypt-new-interim-president.html
I can not imagine a circumstance where Saudi Arabia represents progress. It is a very safe bet that whatever SA supports is bad.
Before anyone says that this support from SA is only diplomacy, remember that the general who carried out the coup was a military attache to SA and the “interim” president was a lawyer who represented Saudi interests.
Progress indeed…
I have to love this opinion column in today’s al Arabiya you linked to: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2013/07/04/Arabs-need-a-U-S-like-First-Amendment.html
indeed.
If I were a Taliban leader sitting down to negotiate with the US right now, and hearing:
“Put down your weapons and join the democratic process- after all your rights to free elections will be guaranteed by the army we built, trained, paid, and supplied these many years.”
Hezbollah may be thinking the same thing, too.
Don’t get me wrong- I agree that things would be better if the views of big-city progressives were the only ones taken into account.
Canada run by Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, with those yahoos from Alberta safely ignored.
America where demos in New York and LA could drive George Bush from office, and the votes of religious conservatives in Oklahoma and Alabama could be discounted….
Your commenter was 100% right. He didn’t mean Morsi wouldn’t endorse Islamism, but that the country wouldn’t. And based on what happened, it didn’t.
“I weep for Egyptians”? Only David Brooks is more condescending.
There is a majority of conservative Muslims in Egypt, so you have to choose between democracy and a Western-style secular state. I’m guessing you we’re not displeased with Mubarek’s 30 year repressive secular state.
Thanks for the snark and the insult. You’ve violated the rules here by insulting the host (“condescending”, really?) and assuming I favor repression, so unless your next post is an apology, I suggest you frequent some other website.
Pompous git, you are.
Interesting reaction? It seems that Salafists, Jihadists of all persuasion are interested in the methodical control of the Middle East in this particular virulent form of Islam – it is a clearly stated goal. Listening to Muslim Brotherhood or Palestinian Authority double-speak is instructive as to their true goal. No better place for the Salafists to start than the systematic hatred that is being taught to the children of this region. Is it a bit naive and airy of you to hold your precious notion of democracy over an area of the world that has only a nascent hold on concepts like freedom, equality, justice, or liberty? Let alone folks that demonstrate compassion for that people’s struggle to be free of religiously inspired political hatred. I lived in Turkey fr 3 years – a beautiful country with sensible, warm and proud people – slowly and systematically being throttled by Islamic fundamentalists. I feel for those wonderful people. It is painful. As to your condescension. The children suffer and are used almost cynically I think.
Try this.
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=844&page=2