Why Egypt Fell Apart. By Juan Cole.

Egypt’s Transition Has Failed: New Age of Military Dictatorship in Wake of Massacre. By Juan Cole. Informed Comment, August 15, 2013. Also at History News Network.

Cole:

The horrible bloodshed in Egypt on Wednesday marked a turning point in the country’s modern history, locking it in to years of authoritarian paternalism and possibly violent faction fighting. The country is ruled by an intolerant junta with no respect for human life. Neither the Brotherhood nor the military made the kind of bargain and compromises necessary for a successful democratic transition. It is true that some armed Brotherhood cadres killed some 50 troops and police, and that some 20 Coptic Christian churches were attacked, some burned. But the onus for the massacre lies with the Egyptian military. Mohamed Elbaradei, who resigned as interim vice president for foreign affairs, had urged that the Brotherhood sit-ins be gradually and peacefully whittled Way at. His plan was Egypt’s only hope of reconciliation. Now it has a feud.

 

Egypt began a possible transition to parliamentary democracy in February of 2011 after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Although the military had made a coup, the aged Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi was not interested in ruling himself and sought a civilian transitional government that the military could live with. He wanted guarantees that the new government would not interfere with the military’s own commercial enterprises and attempted to assert a veto over the new constitution lest it veer toward Muslim fundamentalism.

 

The major political forces said they were committed to free, fair and transparent parliamentary elections. The Muslim Brotherhood, the best organized political group, pledged not to run candidates in all constituencies so as to show they weren’t greedy for power, and said they would not run anyone for president lest they give the impression they were seeking control of all three branches of government. The Brotherhood said it wanted a consensual constitution.

 

Behind the scenes, generals like Omar Suleiman (d. 2012) were furious about the constraints being lifted from the Brotherhood, convinced that they had a secret armed militia and that they were angling to make a coup over time. His views turn out to be more widespread than was evident on the surface.

 

In 2011-2012, the revolutionary youth, the liberals and the Brotherhood made common cause to return the military to their barracks.

 

But then the Brotherhood broke all of its promises and threw a fright into everyone– youth, women, Coptic Christians, Liberals, leftists, workers, and the remnants of the old regime. The Brotherhood cheated in the parliamentary elections, running candidates for seats set aside for independents. Then they tried to pack the constitution-writing body with their parliamentarians, breaking another promise. They reneged on the pledge to have a consensual constitution.

 

Once Muhammad Morsi was elected president in June, 2012, he made a slow-motion coup.  He pushed through a Brotherhood constitution in December of 2012 in a referendum with about a 30% turnout in which it garnered only 63%– i.e. only a fifth of the country voted for it. The judges went on strike rather than oversee balloting, so the referendum did not meet international standards. When massive protests were staged he had them cleared out by the police, and on December 6, 2012, is alleged to have sent in Brotherhood paramilitary to attack leftist youth who were demonstrating. There were deaths and injuries.

 

Morsi then invented a legislature for himself, declaring by fiat that the ceremonial upper house was the parliament. He appointed many of its members; only 7% were elected. They passed a law changing the retirement age for judges from 70 to 60, which would have forced out a fourth of judges and allowed Morsi to start putting Brotherhood members on the bench to interpret his sectarian constitution. He was building a one party state. His economic policies hurt workers and ordinary folk. He began prosecuting youth who criticized him, his former allies against the military. 8 bloggers were indicted. Ahmad Maher of The April 6 youth group was charged with demonstrating (yes). Television channels were closed. Coptic school teachers were charged with blasphemy. Morsi ruled from his sectarian base and alienated everyone else. He over-reached.

 

In my view Morsi and the Brotherhood leadership bear a good deal of the blame for derailing the transition, since a democratic transition is a pact among various political forces, and he broke the pact. If Morsi was what democracy looked like, many Egyptians did not want it. Gallup polls trace this disillusionment.

 

But the Egyptian military bears the other part of the blame for the failed transition. Ambitious officers such as Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Morsi’s Minister of Defense, were secretly determined to undo Morsi’s victory at the polls. They said they wanted him to compromise with his political rivals, but it seems to me they wanted more, they wanted him neutered. When the revolutionary youth and the workers and even many peasants staged the June 30 demonstrations, al-Sisi took advantage of them to stage a coup. Ominously, he then asked for public acclamation to permit him to wage a war on terror, by which he means the Brotherhood. I tweeted at the time: “Dear General al-Sisi: when activists call for demonstrations, that is activism. When generals do, that is Peronism.”

 

Although al-Sisi said he recognized an interim civilian president, supreme court chief justice Adly Mansour, and although a civilian prime minister and cabinet was put in place to oversee a transition to new elections, al-Sisi is in charge. It is a junta, bent on uprooting the Muslim Brotherhood. Without buy-in from the Brotherhood, there can be no democratic transition in Egypt. And after Black Wednesday, there is unlikely to be such buy-in, perhaps for a very long time. Wednesday’s massacre may have been intended to forestall Brotherhood participation in civil politics. Perhaps the generals even hope the Brotherhood will turn to terrorism, providing a pretext for their destruction.

 

The military and the Brotherhood are two distinct status groups, with their own sources of wealth, which have claims on authority in Egypt. Those claims were incompatible.

Optimistic America Deludes Itself About Democracy. By Ted R. Bromund.

Optimistic America deludes itself about democracy. By Ted R. Bromund. Newsday, August 16, 2013.

Bromund:

When Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned in 2011, President Barack Obama hailed the Egyptian people’s “hunger for change.” The death toll from the bloodbath in Egypt shows just how dangerous that hunger can be in illiberal societies.

 

As the saying goes, in a crisis, you should keep calm and carry on. But it’s telling that the saying is British. Americans aren’t good at carrying on. We want solutions. We don’t like to admit that many situations, like Afghanistan, have no ideal outcome. We don’t want to think that, sometimes, tragedy is inevitable.

 

In other words, the United States is an optimistic nation. Modern liberalism plays upon that optimism by preaching that deep-seated problems can be fixed if only the government does the right thing. It’s a profoundly elitist vision of government held by – and for – enlightened progressives.

 

But the United States was hoping for the best long before Theodore Roosevelt brought progressivism to the White House, and we often see the world in that image. Looking in the mirror, we think we’re looking out a window at foreign lands. We smile, the nice person smiles back, and we believe we understand each other. But all we’ve really seen is our own reflection.

 

Obama’s statement on Mubarak’s departure is a classic example of this delusion. It makes for painful reading. The president was “confident that the people of Egypt can find the answers, and do so peacefully, constructively, and in the spirit of unity. . . . [They] have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”

 

American presidents have to say this kind of thing whether they believe it or not. It would seem un-American to say something akin to the truth, which is that the Egyptian economy is close to collapse, its governing structures are deeply statist and corrupt, and there is no evidence that most Egyptians want democracy or liberty as we would define it.

 

A new book by Samuel Tadros, a genuine Egyptian democrat, sums up the problem. In the United States we drew on resistance to the British crown to make our Revolution. But liberalism in Egypt, as Tadros puts it, “was born with the rise of the civil-servant class in the mid-nineteenth century.”

 

Unlike the American founders, who emphasized the rights of the individual, the Egyptian civil servants looked to the rulers, who were “to impose modernity on a reluctant population.” This was an Egyptian progressivism akin to Woodrow Wilson’s. At least in the United States, we had the legacy of the founding to cushion the progressive blow. But Egypt, like many other nations, didn’t.

 

American enthusiasm for foreign upheaval is as old as Thomas Jefferson’s naive admiration of the French Revolution. But that led to the Reign of Terror, and then the Napoleonic Wars. We will be lucky if the Middle Eastern war spawned by the Arab Spring does not spread beyond Syria.

 

The first step toward a wiser American foreign policy, on both sides of the aisle, would be to recognize that the United States must stand for liberty, but ordered liberty. And that requires a liberal and orderly society, which is hard to discern but always slow to emerge.

 

Foreign policy is like piloting a ship on an endless sea. Problems are met and sometimes dealt with, but there is no revolutionary culmination. We would be less disappointed – though no less horrified – by events in Egypt if our own expectations of change were more realistic.

 

This doesn’t mean we should simply have sided with Mubarak: His regime was a dead end. But it does mean that in an illiberal society, revolution rarely produces liberty. We would understand the world better if we considered just how exceptional the American experience has been.

Egypt’s Once Chance for Democracy. By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Egypt’s Once Chance for Democracy. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, August 17, 2013.

McCarthy:

As Egypt began to implode, yet again, John Kerry inadvertently stumbled into something a lot closer to the truth than the delusional “Arab Spring” narrative that has guided Obama-administration policy. The secretary of state, tied in knots by congressional foolishness that mandates terminating U.S. aid when a foreign government is ousted by a coup d’état, rationalized that, quite contrary to a coup, the Egyptian military’s ejection of President Mohamed Morsi was an exercise in “restoring democracy.”

 

None of this was quite right, although that is to be expected. After all, the C-word on Kerry’s mind was not “coherence”; he was struggling to avoid saying “coup.” But let’s face it: Morsi was forcibly removed from power, and he is being detained, along with other major Muslim Brotherhood figures. That is a coup to most sensible people — people who are not paid to fret over the statutory ramifications of admitting reality, and who have no patience for fastidious distinctions like whether the generals have actually taken over the government or are “merely” backing the civilian technocrats they’ve put in place.

 

More to the point, Egypt has never had a “democracy,” so the military cannot be said to have “restored” one. Yet there was a welcome bit of common sense in Kerry’s declaration, even if it eluded the declarant.

 

The defining mission of the Muslim Brotherhood is the implementation of sharia, as noted for several years by a hardy few of us Islamophobes. An “Islamophobe,” by the way, is someone who takes seriously the things Muslim Brotherhood operatives say and the scriptures on which they rely; the Muslims who say the things that Islamophobes have the temerity to mention are called “moderates” — see how this works?

 

Sharia is Islam’s societal framework and legal code. Particularly as construed by Islamic supremacists, whose ideology dominates the Middle East, sharia is authoritarian, anti-liberty, anti-equality, and intolerant of minority rights. Indeed, in 1990, Islamic supremacists felt the need to issue their own “Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,” precisely because they cannot abide the aspirations laid out in the purportedly “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” promulgated by the United Nations in 1948. Human rights, for the Islamist, must bow to the repressive injunctions of sharia.

 

Consequently, in a couple of books that are largely about the history, ideology, methodology, and goals of the Muslim Brotherhood — The Grand Jihad and, last year, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy — I tried to establish two premises. The first is that Islamic supremacism is fundamentally anti-democratic. That proposition cannot be too Islamophobic since influential Islamic supremacists themselves freely concede that sharia cannot coexist with a secular civil society or with any system in which people are free to ignore sharia in enacting their own law.

 

The second is that elections do not equal democracy. To the contrary, democracy is a culture of governance committed to the protection of minority rights and equality of opportunity. Sharia abides neither of those principles.

 

Taken together, these two premises lead, inexorably, to this conclusion: In a sharia culture, popular elections inevitably empower anti-democrats. I began Spring Fever with a quip by Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that ought to be a lot more notorious: “Democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination.” Islamists step off the train at sharia station, which is a civilization’s distance away from liberty and equality. In a sharia society, “democracy” — taken to mean mere voting — is not a culture. It is just another means of imposing totalitarian sharia. To be sure, it is a means less brutal than violent jihad, but a means to the same sorry end.

 

Western commentators should thus stop mindlessly repeating the Brotherhood mantra that Mohamed Morsi is, or was, the “democratically elected” president. He was the popularly elected president of an overwhelmingly anti-democratic society — the same society whose citizens, only eight months ago, voted to approve a sharia constitution by a two-to-one landslide. The Brothers rhetorically tug at our pro-democracy heartstrings, but the fact remains that installing anti-democrats in positions of power, even if done by a popular vote, is the antithesis of real democracy.

 

That brings us to the aspect of coups most reviled in the West: military control of the government.

 

The United States has a democratic culture that long predates our national government. Our constitution, in fact, is a reflection of our core principle that fundamental minority rights must be safeguarded. The protection of minority rights is a far more reliable indicator of democracy than are elections. Even totalitarian states hold elections (Iran, for example, just had one). In a society that has an authentic democratic culture, the understanding that the people, not the government, are sovereign is basic. Therefore, civilian control of the armed forces is the mandatory state of affairs. The Constitution, in fact, limited congressional appropriations for a national army to two years precisely because many of the Framers considered permanent standing armies a threat to liberty.

 

But to break Spring Fever, we must finally stop projecting our values on other cultures as if they were “universal,” to borrow the U.N.’s supercilious claim. The Muslim Middle East is part of a different civilization and does not share our core beliefs. Adherent to supremacist Islam, it rejects equality under the law (the rights of non-Muslims are inferior to those of Muslims, and those of women to those of men). In Muslim countries, religious minorities are systematically oppressed and persecuted. The sovereign is deemed to be Allah, acting through the Muslim ruler or caliph. There are no “constituents” to “represent”; the people are subjects who owe the caliph obedience and whose only legitimate expectation of the caliph is his fidelity to sharia.

 

In such an anti-democratic society, a pro-Western military may be the best chance for sowing true democracy. Only capable armed forces can check the violent proclivities of Islamic supremacism. The Coptic Christian minority, which makes up a fast-diminishing 10 percent of Egypt’s population, supported the military’s ouster of Morsi not because Copts reject democracy but because only the armed forces can protect them. Under the governance of Islamic supremacists, and now in the crosshairs of incensed Brotherhood thugs, the Copts are targets of murder and mayhem while their churches are being torched across the country.

 

As I explained in a column earlier this week, sharia dictates the persecution and killing of gay people. Women, too, stood to lose human-rights protections under Egypt’s Islamic-supremacist rule. Putting aside the many other sharia provisions that reduce women to chattel, a prohibition against female genital mutilation, put in place by Mubarak’s military-backed dictatorship, was certain to be scrapped — mainstream constructions of sharia hold that “female circumcision” is mandatory, and even “more enlightened” interpretations call for it to be permitted and thus reject an outright ban.

 

Pace the secretary of state, Egypt has never had a democracy, so there is no “restoring” it. Pragmatically speaking, the country has two alternatives: (a) a rapid resort to popular elections, which are certain, once again, to empower Islamic supremacists (who have proved, in election after election, that they appeal to a significant majority of the populace); or (b) military rule through an appointed technocratic government. The former would crush any hope for real democracy. The latter, at least potentially, could force a new consensus constitution that requires equality under the law and respect for minority rights; that delays popular elections until secular democrats are better positioned to compete with Islamic supremacists; and that requires convincing acceptance of the new constitution and renunciation of violence as a precondition to participation in elections.

 

It might take a number of years, and the Egyptian military — like Turkey’s Kemalist army before it was gutted by Erdogan — would have to make clear its determination to uphold minority rights. But if we really care about promoting democracy, the coup against Morsi is Egypt’s only hope. Rule by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies leads to tyranny; the army’s removal of the Brotherhood government is a chance — and only a chance — for Egypt to stabilize, recover, and eventually prosper. It is a shame that there is any doubt about what side America is on.

Four Leading Arab Cities in Flames. By Rami G. Khouri.

A bad day for four leading Arab cities. By Rami G. Khouri. The Daily Star (Lebanon), August 17, 2013.

Khouri:

Thursday of this week was a bad day in modern Arab history. The four leading Arab cities of recent eras – Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo – were simultaneously engulfed in bombings or urban warfare, mostly carried out with brutal savagery and cruelty against civilians in urban settings. Even more problematic is that the carnage was predominantly the work of Arabs, not foreign invaders. Our four greatest modern Arab cities are now routinely depicted around the world with scenes of bomb craters, flames and rows of dead bodies. Other Arab lands, such as Libya, Yemen, Palestine, Tunisia, Bahrain, Algeria and Sudan, are only slightly less chaotic. This is a dramatic and telling moment, but a moment that tells us what, exactly? Have we collectively failed the test of statehood? Modernity? Civility? Democracy? Independence? Sovereignty? Secularism?

 

It is important at this moment of reckoning to avoid the temptation that engulfs so many analysts and writers around the world, which is to make definitive and cosmic historical judgments about the meaning of this moment, like The End of History, the End of Islamism, the End of Arab Liberalism, or the End of the Arab Spring.

 

So my humble suggestion is that when you run into a phrase or headline describing the current Arab situation that starts with “the end of . . . ,” you should not bother to finish reading it, because it will probably tell you more about the psychology of the writer than about any significant trends within the Arab region. We have had few real endings in this region in the past 6,000 years of urban life, but only perpetual transformations and reconfigurations of how identity, power and governance mesh together and evolve slowly year after year.

 

For those who do like neat historical markers, though, Thursday could easily be seen as a symbolic moment that marked a serious pause, a slight shift and a momentary regression in the uprisings and transformations that began in December 2010 in Tunisia, but really had started a generation earlier. The old autocratic Arab order that had prevailed since the mid-20th century started to fray at the edges and atrophy in its center in the 1970s, as ruling elites turned into security regimes, and nationalist and developmental states turned into showcases of consumerism and corruption.

 

The overthrow or challenge of former regimes have not led to smooth transitions to democratic and pluralistic societies governed by the rule of law in any Arab country – yet. The moment of hope for a series of simultaneous Arab democratic transformations remains unfulfilled, due to different conditions in each country. This transitional phase will give way in due course to renewed efforts to build stable constitutional democracies that will reflect local values; but this will only happen after we get through this nation-building rite of passage.

 

The most important lesson we can learn from our messy transitions – this is the meaning of the suicide bombings or snipers’ bullets Thursday in Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo – is that the six dominant regional phenomena that have defined the modern Arab world are totally inappropriate for creating modern pluralistic democracies. These six are religion (mainly Islamism), armed forces, resistance, sectarianism, Arabism and tribalism. These powerful shapers of personal identity and immensely effective instruments for mass mobilization and street activism are also utter failures as entry points into stable democratic states.

 

Egypt’s striking lesson today is that its two most powerful, organized and trusted groups – the Muslim Brotherhood and the armed forces – both proved to be incompetent in the business of governance. This is not because they do not have capable individuals and smart and rational supporters; they have plenty of those. It is rather because the ways of soldiers and spirituality are designed for worlds other than governance and equitably providing services and opportunities for millions of people from different religions, ideologies and ethnicities.

 

Our societies probably must pass through these moments of seeing military, religious, tribal and other groups try their hand at governing, and then also fight each other politically and militarily. They must do this and fail, as the military and the Muslim Brothers are doing in Egypt, in order to confirm over and over again that none of them are qualified to govern, or, more importantly, mandated by a majority of their citizens to rule on their own. The lack of other organized and credible indigenous groups of citizens that can engage in the political process and shape new constitutional systems is largely a consequence of how military officers, members of tribes, and religious zealots have dominated Arab public life for decades.

 

So it is no surprise that Egypt and other Arab lands have moved very quickly from revolutionary moments to civil wars. From these events, new and more rational political actors ultimately will emerge who can shape more stable governing orders – after entire societies are frightened, embarrassed and then humbled by the experience of their homegrown killing sprees and political immaturity.

Israel Forgets Its Own Border. By Gershom Gorenberg.

Israel Forgets Its Own Border. By Gershom Gorenberg. The American Prospect, August 16, 2013.

The country’s leaders and much of its public have repressed memories of where pre-1967 national boundaries lie.

The obstacle of land swaps. By Zalman Shoval. Israel Hayom, August 13, 2013.

Map of the West Bank, 2008. University of Texas Library.

The Citizen of the World Presidency. By Elliott Abrams.

The Citizen of the World Presidency. By Elliott Abrams. Commentary, September 2013.

[link to article PDF when available]

Love and Betrayal. By Lee Habeeb.

Love and Betrayal. By Lee Habeeb. National Review Online, August 6, 2013.

How two words can help conservatives capture the heart of America.

The “To Hell with Them” Doctrine. By Jonah Goldberg.

The “To Hell with Them” Doctrine. By Jonah Goldberg. National Review Online, August 16, 2013.

The “To Hell with Them” Hawks. By Rich Lowry. National Review, March 27, 2006.

Israel Nervously Watching Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Israel Nervously Watching Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Video. Jamie Colby and Lisa Daftari. America Live. Fox News, August 16, 2013. YouTube. Also here.

Could Egypt become the new Syria? Video. Panel with Judith Miller. America Live. Fox News, August 16, 2013. YouTube.

Millennial Malaise. By Rush Limbaugh.

Young Caller Explains the Millennial Malaise. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 16, 2013.

A New American Dream for a New American Century. By Zachary Karabell. NJBR, July 27, 2013.

Al-Sisi’s Hammer, Obama’s Nine-Iron? By Adam Garfinkle.

Al-Sisi’s Hammer, Obama’s Nine-Iron? By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, August 15, 2013.

El-Sissi will not be deterred. By Avi Isaacharoff. The Times of Israel, August 16, 2013.


Garfinkle:

What happened in Egypt yesterday and is continuing to happen today is sad, disheartening and about as completely unsurprising as any such event can be. In Tuesday’s short post I referred in passing to “the impending street clashes in Cairo.” In my August 2 post I specified the epicenter of the violence to come, the Rabaa al-Adaweya mosque compound, and explained why it was coming:

The Egyptian military knows what it’s doing, or at least it thinks it does. It thinks that by showing strength at this early stage in what is bound to be a protracted conflict within Egyptian society, it reduces the likelihood of a civil war and massive domestic violence. Al-Sisi and company believe that if they seem weak now in the face of protests, it will encourage the Brotherhood and the Al-Nour Party salafis to take the next steps and organize for an insurgency.

In others words, al-Sisi and associates believe in the “strong horse” theory of political legitimacy, and they are now in the process of applying that theory to Egyptian realities. Might doesn’t necessarily make right—that’s not at all how Islamic jurisprudence on such matters reads—but it’s good enough for government work failing other, gentler institutional alternatives. The Middle East lacks the warm, fuzzy affection for the underdog that many Americans take to be second nature. The dominant view of what is still a patriarchal, hierarchical and still clingingly pre-modern set of Muslim Middle Eastern societies is that the weak deserve whatever depredations they suffer. It’s a kind of ur-Social Darwinism that has been at work for many centuries before Darwin himself ever saw light of day.

 

As I also said before, I think Egypt’s military leaders are right about this. And I suspect they recognized that the longer they waited to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood encampments the better prepared the MB would be to resist. And they have resisted, and are still doing so. Several score policemen are dead among the many hundreds of MB protestors in Cairo and around the country. So are hundreds of mostly innocent Copts, who have no recourse but to be on the wrong side of the Brotherhood’s murderous intolerance. Indeed, spending energy and resources to kill Coptic civilians and burn down their churches while Muslim police are bearing down on you with shotguns furnishes about the best example there can be of how MB fanaticism completely swamps its capacity for rational planning of any kind.

 

But I also said (in my July 4 post, just after the coup) that:

. . . if the Army tries to completely exclude the MB from the nation’s future political configuration, it is bound to sire a new generation of Islamist terrorists. Nothing about General al-Sisi suggests he is that foolish, however. So in a sense the limits of action within the ambit of Army-MB relations remain intact, at least in some form. But who knows? Making big mistakes is the one hallmark that, whatever their other differences, unifies recent Egyptian leaders.

Thus the question of the moment: Is al-Sisi now proving that he is “that foolish”?

 

Not necessarily. I still think that what we are seeing in Egypt is a kind of deck-clearing phase. I still think a new political modus vivendi between the military and Egypt’s variety of Islamists is possible and likely, once certain red lines are re-established. And I even still think the Egyptian military can and ultimately will play the role of Praetorian guard over the emergence of a more vital civil society, political pluralism and maybe, one day still far off, even something we in the West recognize as democracy—and I think that because of the significant liberalizing social changes in Egypt over the past generation or two that are deep, real and irreversible. But first the generals have to make the MB and the salafis to their “right” (these European terms limp badly applied to Egypt, admittedly) say “uncle.” That may take a few weeks, or months, it now seems—and of course all this is happening in the broader context of a near completely collapsed economy. But the odds are that the military will have its way; the MB will say “uncle.”

 

That said, if General al-Sisi and company insist on making huge, generative mistakes, if they overdo it so much as to pull down the tent on themselves as well as their enemies, all bets are off. Things are not yet out of hand, but they could be.

 

Consider that the development of liberal democracy in the West and elsewhere has been a complex, long-running and varied phenomenon. As my TAI colleague Frank Fukuyama has explained, it involves creating a competent post-patrimonial state (which Egypt lacks), genuine rule of law (which Egypt also lacks) and either procedural or substantive accountability (both of which Egypt now lacks. . . . so much, then, for those who were so quick to pronounce Egypt not only ready for democracy but actually a democracy just a few short years ago).

 

We can see in past developments leading to liberal democracy the dialectical relationships among technological changes, social mobilization, economic specialization and the sometimes derivative, sometimes independent power of political ideas. But what we also see in more cases than not is the outsized and unpredictable role of both happenstance and exotic personalities. Some places become democratic that shouldn’t, according to the lights of social science, and some don’t that should. At times like these analysts can therefore know oodles of history and social science and have ample reservoirs of area- and country expertise and still end up totally wrong because some jerk simply screws up. We’ll know pretty soon if al-Sisi deserves the description. The technical term for this is the “monkey-in-the-machine-room corollary” of political development.

The Downside to Giving Peace a Chance. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

The Downside to Giving Peace a Chance. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, August 13, 2013.

Tobin:

David Harris, the American Jewish Committee’s executive director, is taking some heat from critics on the right for his defense of the Middle East peace process. Writing in the Huffington Post, Harris gives three reasons for optimism, if not about the outcome of negotiations, then for feeling good about the process that is about to unfold. I’m a lot more skeptical than he is about what is happening, but I don’t have a major problem with his main arguments.

 

I don’t think he’s right about the status quo being unsustainable, yet that’s a complicated point. But he’s right that if peace really were possible, it would be best for Israel to have it negotiated by a tough leader of the right like Netanyahu rather than the left since that will make it easier to support the outcome. Moreover, I believe Netanyahu has the guts to say no to the U.S. if it came down to being forced to accept a deal that would harm Israel’s rights and security. And third, I don’t disagree when he says the Obama administration means well by pushing the process, though I think that’s not particularly germane to the question of whether any good can come of it. The president has demonstrated he’s not quite the enemy of Israel that many people feared him to be, but that doesn’t mean his desire to push a resolution of the conflict when there is no reason to think it can happen won’t have serious negative consequences.

 

That leads me to my one fundamental point of disagreement with Harris. He writes:

If the Palestinians once again prove they are unwilling partners, as they did in 2000-1 and again in 2008, let the world see who torpedoed a potential deal.

 

Sure, there’s that enabling pro-Palestinian community — diplomats, journalists, “human rights” activists, entertainers — who are willfully blind, for whom the problem always has been and will be Israel, but others will figure it out.

Unfortunately, history shows us that Israel not only never gets credit for being reasonable and making concessions, it actually suffers from the process.

 

If we look back honestly on the last 20 years since the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House Lawn, even the most ardent fans of the peace process must admit that Israel’s position in the world has suffered terribly. While there was no shortage of Israel haters in the international community, the United Nations, and Europe, there is simply no comparison between its position then and where things stand today. The level of vituperation against Zionism and virtually every Israeli measure of self-defense is far more extreme than it was in 1993. Far from Israel’s willingness to give up territory and empower the Palestinians leading to its critics viewing it in a better light, doing so has actually emboldened anti-Zionists to treat it as a thief that must be forced to surrender stolen property.

 

As Harris rightly notes, Israel has made the Palestinians three separate offers of statehood involving a massive withdrawal from the West Bank, the dismantlement of settlements, and even a share of Jerusalem. The Palestinians turned them all down. But not only did that not hurt their standing in the world, they are actually viewed more sympathetically today than they were before saying no.

 

Similarly, Israel’s retreat from Gaza in which it removed every single soldier, settler, and settlement did nothing to prove to the world either Israel’s good will or the bad will of Palestinians who converted that territory into a giant missile-launching site.

 

Back in 2000, only months after the Camp David fiasco at which Israel’s government had made its first statehood offer and just after Yasir Arafat replied by launching a terrorist war of attrition, I heard then Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami tell me and a group of reporters that the Palestinians’ actions had changed forever Israel’s foreign image. Never again, he said, could anyone be in doubt as to which side wanted peace and which side wanted war. Looking back on that prediction, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

 

The status quo in the Middle East isn’t good, but sustainable or not (and given that it has persisted for 46 years, waiting for the Palestinians culture of violence and hatred for Israel to change before embarking on another round of negotiations doesn’t seem an unreasonable proposal), the majority of Israelis may feel that it is better than repeating the mistake of Gaza in the far larger and more strategic West Bank. More to the point, they know, even if some in the United States don’t, that no matter how badly the Palestinians behave, Israel won’t get credit for trying to make peace. Indeed, the more it negotiates about giving up land, the more the world thinks it has no rights to bargain away. So when, as is likely, the Palestinians’ unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn leads to another outbreak of violence, it will be Israel that gets the blame.

 

Peace would be great for everyone. But giving this process “a chance” without any reason to believe it could succeed has costs that shouldn’t be ignored.

Are You Addicted to the Net? By Bill O’Reilly.

Are You Addicted to the Net? By Bill O’Reilly. Video. Talking Points Memo. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, August 15, 2013.

The True Nature of a Coup Revealed. By Fouad Ajami.

The True Nature of a Coup Revealed. By Fouad Ajami. Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2013.

It’s official, military chief Sisi is new king of Egypt. By Ariel Ben Solomon. Jerusalem Post, August 15, 2013.

Military Matters in Cairo. Kathryn Jean Lopez interview with Michael Rubin. National Review Online, August 15, 2013.

Muslim Brotherhood’s “Urban Jihad” Wages Terror War on Egypt's Secular Revolution. By Walid Phares. History News Network, August 14, 2013.

Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Egypt: Compare and Contrast. By Ira Chernus. History News Network, August 15, 2013.

Speak Softly and Carry No Stick: Welcome to the Obama Doctrine in Egypt. By James Traub. Foreign Policy, August 15, 2013. Also here.

Mubarak Still Rules. By Steven A. Cook. Foreign Policy, August 14, 2013. Also here.

Michael Walzer: Blame the Liberals for Social Inequality. By Guy Rolnik.

Michael Walzer tells Haaretz: Blame the liberals for social inequality. By Guy Rolnik. Haaretz, August 15, 2013. Also here.

What Prompted the Egyptian Army to Act? By Ron Ben-Yishai.

Street battles in Cairo, and the Israeli connection. By Ron Ben-Yishai. Ynet News, August 14, 2013.

To Get An Israeli-Palestinian Agreement, the U.S. Needs to Re-engage in the Mideast. By Michael Singh.

To Get an Israeli-Palestinian Agreement, U.S. Needs to Re-engage in the Mideast. By Michael Singh. Foreign Policy, August 13, 2013. Also here.

Muslim Brotherhood “Reprisals” and “Enemies of Islam.” By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Muslim Brotherhood “Reprisals” and “Enemies of Islam.” By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, August 14, 2013.

McCarthy:

More on what Nina Shea and yours truly noted earlier today: The Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamic supremacist allies – portrayed in the mainstream media as “peaceful protesters” subjected to unprovoked violence by Egyptian security forces – continue their jihad against Christians. And that jihad continues to be portrayed in the mainstream media as “reprisal” attacks, as if it were the Copts rather than the armed forces who had ousted the Brotherhood from power.

 

The Asia News (h/t Robert Spencer) describes a “reprisal [that] occurred immediately after last night’s clashes” in which security forces bulldozed camps that the Brotherhood refused evacuate:

The Muslim Brotherhood’s anger for the forced evacuation of the pro-Mohamed Morsi sit-ins has been unleashed against Christians. In the last few hours, the Islamists have attacked seven Catholic churches and afull fifteen religious structures of the Coptic-Orthodox Church and the Protestant church. The attacks took place in Cairo and in the governorate of Sohag (Upper Egypt). The news was announced by Fr. Rafic Greiche, spokesperson for the Egyptian Catholic Church, who underlined the fact that the Western media has remained silent about the attacks. At the moment it is unclear whether any persons have been injured or killed.

It is worth noting, for the bipartisan Beltway clerisy that thinks the solution here is to move immediately to elections (i.e., the “democracy” approach — democratic process without democratic culture — that has gotten us to this point), that the reason for the Brotherhood’s smashing electoral successes after Mubarak’s ouster was its savvy in portraying all contests as “Islam versus the enemies of Islam.” As much as we wish to imagine the Egyptian population as secular and democratic, it is today exactly the same population that only eight months ago voted overwhelmingly for a sharia constitution (after overwhelming voting Islamic supremacists into control of parliament and electing Morsi president). The attacks on the Copts are not just a continuation of jihad as usual. They are a strategic effort to link the Copts in the public mind with the armed forces that carried out the coup (as well as the minority secularists who took to the streets to demand it). The military is a revered institution, but the most significant fact of life in Egypt is Islam. If the generals are seen as partners of the Copts, they end up on the “enemies of Islam” side of the narrative spun by Islamic supremacists. As we’ve seen again and again since 2011, that is the wrong side to be on in Egypt’s “democracy.”

 

And isn’t it just ducky that the Obama administration, instead of discrediting the toxic “enemies of Islam” narrative, has now adopted it in State Department pronouncements.

 

Ralph Peters on the Violence and Crackdown in Egypt.

How should the White House respond to the violence raging in Egypt? Video. Col. Ralph Peters with Martha MacCallum. America Live. Fox News, August 14, 2013. YouTube, YouTube, YouTube.

Christians “collateral damage” or targets in Egypt? Video. Col. Ralph Peters with Alisyn Camerota. America Live. Fox News, August 15, 2013. YouTube, YouTube.

This blood is on the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, August 15, 2013.

Peters (August 14 video):

We need to get over our narcissism and recognize what’s going on in Egypt isn’t about us. It is about the people in Egypt and other peoples throughout the Middle East struggling against the fundamentalist extremists who are our enemies too; people struggling to build modern, decent, tolerant societies. And so far the Obama administration’s helped the wrong people by and large. . . .

 

The bottom line is: we cannot determine Egypt’s future. The Egyptian people have to determine that. We can only play on the margins and we should try to play constructively, and not automatically assume “ooh military bad, peaceful protesters who happen to be thugs good.” I’m appalled by hearing so many Western commentators condemning the military and seemingly siding with the Brotherhood, when the Muslim Brotherhood would put these people in jail or far worse.

 

The Egyptian people want a little bit of freedom. The Muslim Brotherhood came to power and tried to take that little bit of hard won freedom away, and now you’re seeing the reaction. Again, I don’t like military coups but the real coup was what Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood did to that fledgling Egyptian democracy.

 

We need to get our priorities straight. And our priorities should be on the side of modernity, tolerance, progress, economic growth, decency. Not on the side of bigoted, medieval, primitive, hate-filled religion directed against peaceful Muslims above all. Because we should remember that the victims of radical fanatical Islam have overwhelmingly been decent everyday Muslims.

Entrepreneurs Turn Oligarchs. By Joel Kotkin.

Entrepreneurs Turn Oligarchs. By Joel Kotkin. New Geography, August 12, 2013. Also at JoelKotkin.com.

Kotkin:

For a generation, most Americans, whatever their politics, have largely admired Silicon Valley as an exemplar of enlightened free-market capitalism. Yet, increasingly, the one-time folk heroes are beginning to appear more like a digital version of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” In terms of threats to freedom and privacy, we now may have more to fear from techies in Palo Alto than the infinitely less-competent retro-Reds in North Korea.

 

Once, we saw the potential unsurpassed human liberation available through information technology. However, Silicon Valley, as shown in the NSA scandal, increasingly has become intimately tied to the surveillance state. Technology has enabled powerful firms – including Verizon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google – to channel everyone's email and cellphone calls to the national security apparatus.

 

“It’s as bad as reading your diary,” Joss Wright, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute, recently told the Associated Press, adding, “It’s far worse than reading your diary. Because you don’t write everything in your diary.”

 

Nor does the snooping relate only to national security. If my emails to friends and family arguably constitute a potential threat to national security, that’s one thing. The massive monitoring and largely unapproved tapping into our data for profit is quite another.

 

Google, which, in the first half of 2012, took in more advertising dollars than all U.S. magazines and newspapers combined, has amassed an impressive list of privacy violations, notes the Huffington Post. Even the innocent-seeming Gmail service is used to collect and sell information; Google’s crew in Palo Alto may know more about the casual user than most of us suspect.

 

Even Apple, arguably the most iconic Silicon Valley firm, has been hauled in front of courts for alleged privacy violations. For its part, Consumer Reports recently detailed Facebook’s pervasive privacy breaches, including misuse of information as detailed as health conditions, details an insurer could use against you, when someone is going out of town (convenient for burglars), as well as information pertaining to everything from sexual orientation to religious and ethnic affiliation.

 

Despite ritual denials about such invasions of privacy, the new communications moguls have little reason to stop, and lots of financial reasons to continue. As for concerns over privacy, the new oligarchs take something of a blasé attitude. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, in 2009 responded to concerns over privacy with this gem: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

 

First came the engineers

 

These autocratic sentiments have evolved over time. Initially, Silicon Valley was dominated by engineers whose primary obsession was using information technology to make the physical world work better. Many of them from Midwestern schools, that early workforce came to the Santa Clara Valley for the same suburban, middle-class lifestyle that earlier brought millions to the aerospace hubs of the Los Angeles Basin and Long Island. They may have been nerds, but not a class apart.

 

The early Valley deserved our admiration for taking new technologies – semiconductors, in particular – and applying them to practical concerns ranging from machine tools to spacecraft and defense. The Internet itself was not invented by swashbuckling entrepreneurs but evolved from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA. Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg did not pay to build the Internet; the taxpayers did.

 

The new Valley elite are simply the latest to refine and exploit information technology for their own, often enormous, personal benefit. Nothing wrong with making money, to be sure, but this ambition is no different than those of Cornelius Vanderbilt, E.H. Harriman, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Thomas Watson. Each innovated in a key industry, established oligarchic control and became fantastically rich.

 

But even by the standards of bygone moguls, the new oligarchs’ wealth has not been widely shared. Big Oil and the Big Three automakers created hundreds of thousands of jobs for a wide range of workers. In contrast, the tech oligarchs’ contributions to American employment are relatively negligible.

 

Google, for example, employs 50,000 people; Facebook, 4,600; Twitter, less than a thousand, while GM employs 200,000; Ford, 164,000; and Exxon, more than 100,000. Even in the current boom, new job creation has been relatively insipid. From 1959-71, Silicon Valley produced 100,000 tech jobs; by 1990 it generated an additional 150,000 and, in the 1990s boom, another 170,000. After losing more than 108,000 high-tech jobs from 2000-08, there has been a net gain of no more than 20,000 to 30,000 positions since 2007.

 

The geographical area enriched by the oligarchs has also narrowed. In previous Silicon Valley booms, outlying areas such as Sacramento and Oakland also benefited; not so much this time. Nor is the population expanding much, as one would expect from an economic boom. Although the massive outflow of domestic migrants over past decade – more than 20,000 annually – has slowed, still, more domestic migrants are leaving than coming. Part of this has to do with having the nation’s highest housing prices relative to income, more than twice that of competitor regions like Austin, Texas, Raleigh, N.C., or Salt Lake City.

 

Rather than a place of aspiration, the Valley increasingly resembles an extremely expensive gated community, with prices set impossibly high particularly for all but the most affluent new entrants.

 

What Needs to Be Done?

 

Americans need to wake up to the reality of this new, and increasingly ambitious, ruling class. “The sovereigns of cyberspace,” like the all-powerful Skynet computer system in the “Terminator” series, are only recently focused on politics, and have concentrated largely in the Democratic Party (where the price of admission tends to be cheaper than in the old-money-dominated GOP). And it’s not just money they are throwing at the game, but also the skillful political use of technology, as amply demonstrated in President Obama’s re-election.

 

Like the moguls of the early 20th century, who bought and sold senators like so many cabbages, the new elite constitute a basic threat to democracy. They dominate their industries with market shares that would make the old moguls blush. Google, for example, controls some 80 percent of search, while Google and Apple provide the operating system software for almost 90 percent of smartphones. Similarly, more than half of Americans, and 60 percent of Europeans, use Facebook, making it easily the world's dominant social media site. In contrast, the world’s top 10 oil companies account for barely 40 percent of the world’s oil production.

 

Like the Gilded Age moguls, the tech oligarchs also personally dominate their companies. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, for example, control roughly two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Brin and Page each is worth more $20 billion. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, owns just under 23 percent of his company; worth $41 billion, Forbes ranked him the country's third-richest person. Bill Gates, the richest, is worth a cool $66 billion and still controls 7 percent of his firm. Newcomer Mark Zuckerberg’s 29.3 percent stake in Facebook was worth $16 billion as of July 25, according to Bloomberg.

 

This combination of market and ownership concentration needs to be curbed. Taking a page from the Progressive Era, author and historian Michael Lind suggests that companies like Google, given their enormous market share, should be regulated like utilities. Others, within the European Union and elsewhere, look to apply antitrust legislation, once used to break up Standard Oil. One innovative approach, as Jaron Lanier suggests in his new book, “Who Owns the Future,” includes forcing companies to pay for the privilege of using your data, thereby “spreading the wealth” from a few hegemons to the wider populace.

 

Threat is bipartisan

 

These changes will require both Left and Right to change their attitudes. Progressives, for example, have tended to embrace the Valley’s population for its generally “liberal” views on social issues and the environment. They have largely ignored the industry’s poor record on hiring non-Asian minorities and the lavish, energy-consuming lifestyles of the oligarchs themselves.

 

Some on the left are seeing the light. Britain’s left-leaning Guardian newspaper has been in the forefront unveiling the NSA scandals and the complicity in them of the tech giants. Credit belongs to the EU, which, particularly in contrast with our government, has been asking the toughest questions about loss of privacy and the dangers of oligopolistic control. With Barack Obama secure in the White House, some American leftists have also begun to recognize the extreme inequality that has accompanied, and likely been worsened by, the ascendency of the digital aristocracy.

 

Conservatives, for their part, can only face up to the new “axis of evil” by stepping outside their ideology strictures and instinctive embrace of wealth. The increasingly monopolistic nature of the high-tech community, and its widespread disregard for the privacy of the individual, should concern conservatives, as it would have the framers of the Constitution.

 

What needs to be accepted, by both conservatives and liberals, is that privacy matters, as does the threat posed to democracy by oligarchy. Until people focus on the potential for evil before us and discuss ways to curb abuses, this small and largely irresponsible class, likely in league with government, will usher in not the promised cornucopia but a gilded-age reign of Big Brother.