Honor and Compromise in Middle East Leadership. By Harold Rhode.

Honor and Compromise in Middle East Leadership. By Harold Rhode. Gatestone Institute, July 10, 2013.

Rhode:

Why the U.S. administration believes it can persuade Mahmoud Abbas to sign an agreement guaranteeing Israel’s right to exist is astonishing. It is pointless for Western leaders to provide Middle Eastern leaders with incentives to reach compromises where, in Western eyes, all sides win, but in Middle Eastern eyes, their side loses. There, the winner takes all and the loser loses all.

 

Why couldn’t Egypt’s deposed President Morsi admit mistakes? Why couldn’t he “compromise” with the military and stay in power? And what can one learn from Morsi’s behavior about the concept of leadership in the Middle East?

 

In the Middle East, leaders almost never admit that they made mistakes: doing so would bring shame (in Arabic/Turkish/ and Persian – ‘Ayib/Ayyip/Ayb) on them. Shame in the Middle East is about what others say about you – not what you think of yourself. While to some extent this is true in Western culture, in general Westerners are more susceptible to feelings of guilt, rather than shame. The Western concept of compromise – each side conceding certain points to the other side in order to come to an agreement – does not exist in the Middle East. What is paramount is preserving one’s honor (in Arabic: sharaf or karama). People will go to any lengths to avoid shame; they are prepared to go to jail, risk death, and even kill family members (usually females) to uphold what they perceive as their honor and that of their family. The consequences of dishonor are always permanent and always collective, often extending to the entire family and even the entire clan.

 

This battle to avoid shame at all costs indicates why Morsi, Erdoğan, Saddam, Assad, Arafat, and Abu Mazen – when they either have painted themselves into a corner – or have been painted into one – can never back down.

 

If our policy-makers could understand this cultural imperative, they might better be able to understand why we constantly fail to achieve our policy goals, and how better to achieve them.

 

* * *

 

One of the reasons that leadership in the Middle East is so different from leadership in the West, is that in Western democracies, political parties are usually based on ideas or world views; in the Middle East, however, political parties are formed around strong leaders – usually strong men (and occasionally women), whose supporters are either extended family members or supplicants of some sort.

 

Westerners often succumb to “mirror-imaging” – assuming that “all people are alike, so whatever they say resembles what we say” – and assume that, as in the West, names of political parties in the Middle East reflect some sort of ideology. In reality, the ideologies for which parties supposedly stand are apparently mostly nothing more than words that the leader presumably hopes will enable him to justify his control over his people. Prime Minister Erdoğan and his clique, for example, belong to the AKP Party – Turkish initials for the “Justice and Development Party,” a name he may have chosen because it sounded positive, but which has little, if anything, to do with Erdoğan's subsequent actions: re-Islamizing the Turkish government and Turkish society. Egypt’s deposed President Morsi’s political party, the “Freedom and Justice Party,” also seems to have a name chosen simply because it sounded good. How can anyone oppose “freedom” and “justice?” But millions of Egyptians, as we are now witnessing, evidently thought it insufficiently concerned with either freedom or justice.

 

It is the leaders who, in the Middle East, grant protection and even citizenship at will to foreigners who do them favors, and they can take away that citizenship at will. Syria’s previous dictator Hafez Assad, for instance, took away Syrian citizenship from countless Syrian Kurds whom he decided opposed him. Western ideas of citizenship – people either born in a certain country or fulfill certain legal requirements to be able to belong to it – are mostly alien to the Middle East, and are among the reasons that, for instance, many Arabs who have lived in Kuwait for generations do not have Kuwaiti citizenship: they lack the appropriate connections with the leaders in the Kuwaiti government. Lebanese and Palestinian individuals, however, who have performed desired services for the Kuwaiti or Saudi rulers are often given citizenship as a reward. They remain, nonetheless, totally dependent on these rulers, who can and often do revoke those citizenships, if they think anyone is running afoul of them.

 

* * *

 

Morsi was actually doomed from the start. He was faced with an impossible economic situation: an Egypt totally dependent on foreign subsidies, and having to import 55% of its food and much of its fuel. The military, who have in some way been ruling Egypt for almost 5,000 years, understood that if they had they taken over, they would have been blamed for Egypt’s economic and political failures during the past year and a half. Instead, they allowed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood [MB] to rule and thereby take the blame for Egypt’s impossible situation. Moreover, the Egyptian people also saw for themselves that the MB’s view of the world could not work. The organization's motto, “Islam is the Solution,” proved wanting, to say the least – exactly as the military assumed would happen.

 

The politically sophisticated military knew that Morsi and his MB could not solve Egypt’s problems. So the military engineered a “two-for-one” deal: The MB, finally in power, was shamed, and the military would avoid being blamed. As Morsi must avoid shame, he cannot compromise with the military, so his political career is probably over. The same is true for the MB – at least for now, even though its many supporters cannot be expected to accept defeat without a serious fight. The question is really how the military will react to the MB trying to stay in power? For now, it looks as if the military has the will to prevent the MB and Morsi from returning to power. Qatar, as part of its traditional anti-Saudi stance, also strongly backs the MB – as does the current Turkish government. Both Qatar and the current Turkish government are the big losers here, because the events of the past few days in Egypt demonstrate that the traditional Egyptian-Saudi (and anti-Qatar) alliance has re-emerged.

 

Whatever happens in Egypt, we should be careful not to see the defeat of the MB as a vote against all Islamists. Egypt’s Salafists are also Islamists but at the same time are anti-MB, and have, until yesterday, have backed the military, because the Salafists and the military are both backed by Saudi Arabia – most definitely not a force for democracy, freedom, and tolerance for non-Sunni Muslims – or any other non-Muslims, for that matter – in the Middle East.

 

* * *

 

Other Middle Eastern leaders find or have found themselves in the same position as Morsi. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for instance, faced with American orders, also could not back down either during the Kuwait war or the US liberation of Iraq. Unable, culturally, to compromise, Saddam had no choice other than to back himself into a corner and suffer defeat. An honorable defeat evidently seemed preferable to a dishonorable “success” – one in which Saddam’s honor might have appeared, to his citizens and fellow Arabs and Muslims, compromised.

 

Turkey: Lately, large numbers of Turkish citizens throughout the nation have been demonstrating against Erdoğan. Erdoğan, however, a classic Middle Eastern leader, cannot be seen to be compromising with the protestors, and thereby be seen as shamed. We see him and his people therefore belittling the demonstrators, and blaming others – most notably, foreign Jews – for his predicament. Of course it is not clear who will win this standoff; one outcome might be that his AKP party, which rules the country with an iron fist, might split into various factions, and Erdoğan fall from power. Potential rivals in his party are watching events like hawks, wondering when and how they might “move in for the kill.”

 

The Palestinians: Both Arafat and Abu Mazen, both of whom have led the Palestinian people, cannot sign any agreement with Israel to end the Israel-Palestinian conflict and recognize Israel as a Jewish state. When, at Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat 97% of everything said he wanted, Arafat jumped up and said that he could not sign such an agreement: he “didn't want to have tea with Sadat” – a reference to the Egyptian leader who had been assassinated at least partially for having signed an agreement with Israel. Arafat knew that had he signed, he would have been regarded as having backed down from a confrontation and therefore shamed; been considered a traitor by his people, and most likely killed.

 

U.S. President Clinton, in a display of how little he really understood about leadership and the values of the Middle East, looked on at Arafat's reaction in amazement. But no compromise would have been possible. Egypt, during its negotiations with Israel for the peace treaty signed in 1981, held out for 100% of what it asked for – and got it. Had Arafat gotten 100% of what we wanted, Israel would no longer exist.

 

The same holds true for the Palestinian Authority’s current leader, Abu Mazen, to whom, later, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert offered an even better deal than had been offered to Arafat. Condolezza Rice, like President Clinton, also look on in amazement at Mahmoud Abbas’s reaction. (For more on Rice’s views on Abbas, see her book No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington)

 

The same condition continues to hold true today. Why Secretary of State Kerry and the Obama administration believe they can persuade Abbas sign an agreement guaranteeing Israel’s right to exist in any form is astonishing. These leaders can lead only so long as they are not perceived as a shamed sell-out and traitor.

 

It is pointless, therefore, for Western and Israeli political leaders to try to provide Middle Eastern leaders with incentives to reach compromises where, in Western eyes all sides win, but in Middle Eastern eyes – to their fellow Arabs and Muslims – their side loses. Sadly, in the Middle East, there are only win-lose/lose-win resolutions – with the winner talking all and the loser losing all. One can hope there might in the future be an Islamic reformation to overturn this cultural demand, but so long as the Islamic Middle East does not truly believe it needs to change, a shift that deeply revolutionary is highly unlikely.

Getting the Muslim Brotherhood Wrong. By Michael J. Totten.

Getting the Muslim Brotherhood Wrong. By Michael J. Totten. World Affairs, July 11, 2013.

Totten:

Everybody got the Muslim Brotherhood wrong, including me, and starting with the Egyptian people themselves.

 

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammad Morsi won Egypt’s first free and fair election for its head of state. Picking him seemed like a good idea at the time to the typical Egyptian voter, but clearly it wasn’t since Egypt just vomited him and his party up into everyone’s lap.

 

I figured that would happen eventually, but I’m still astonished that it happened so quickly.

 

Genuine political liberals are thin on the ground in Egypt, but they do exist. I know several. Some are my friends. Most of them were wrong about the Brotherhood, too. They were right, of course, when they warned the rest of us that the Brothers would transform Egypt into a theocratic dictatorship, but they were wrong when they estimated how much support the Brotherhood had. Hardly any expected the Islamists to win most of the votes, though that’s exactly what happened.

 

American liberals made a different mistake. Despite warnings from secular Egyptians and former Islamists, the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate and democratic party became an article of faith here in the States, particularly among academics and journalists who should have known better. Even James Clapper—who, as the Director of National Intelligence, really should have known better—said the Muslim Brotherhood is “a largely secular organization.” Surely that ranks among the dumbest things ever said about the organization in all of its 85 years.

 

Look: the Muslim Brotherhood is not a mysterious new group that no one knows anything about. It was founded in 1928, for crying out loud, and its ideology has been documented exhaustively. Not for even five minutes has it been a democratic or moderate party. It has been struggling for theocracy since the day it was born, sometimes peaceably and sometimes by force. Every Sunni Islamist terrorist organization in the region is a spin-off of the Brotherhood or a spin-off of one of its spin-offs.

 

Western liberals should have spent a lot more time listening to their Egyptian counterparts and no time at all swallowing the lies of faith-based gangsters with a Pharaonic complex. This whole business quite frankly baffles me. An American Christian equivalent of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood would be denounced as fascist by every Western-born liberal on earth. We’d hear no end of comparisons to the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, General Franco’s Falangists, and the Crusades. And yet so many Westerners proved incapable of applying the same political analytical skills to Egypt that they use every day in the US and Europe. I’ll leave it to them to explain how that happened once they figure it out.

 

American conservatives always understood that the Muslim Brotherhood was bad news. Many also seemed to sense instinctively that the Muslim Brotherhood would win the election in Egypt. They were right on both counts.

 

But then the narrative among some parts of the American right went off the rails. Many argued that radical Islamists were bound to triumph everywhere in the Middle East since they had just triumphed in Egypt, as if nearly everyone who self-identifies as a Muslim yearns for political Islam as a matter of course. This point of view regularly appears in my comments section.

 

It didn’t seem to register that non-Islamists and anti-Islamists frequently do well in elections in Muslim countries, even in Arab countries and even in the wake of the Arab Spring. Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda won less than fifty percent of the vote and was forced into a coalition government with secular parties that block it routinely. Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated party lost big. In Lebanon, secular parties have won most of the votes since the nation’s founding, and, except for the Israelis, the Lebanese have held more elections in the region than anyone else.

 

More recently, the citizens of Mali cheered the French as liberators when they invaded and routed Al Qaeda in the north. Mali, by the way, is not even close to being a largely atheist nation like the nominally Muslim countries of the former communist bloc.

 

Islamist victories happen sometimes, but they aren’t inevitable. Karl Marx cobbled together psuedo-scientific arguments for why socialism was destined to triumph over capitalism. He claimed history was teleological, that its endpoint could be delayed but not forever resisted, but that’s not how it worked out for communism, nor is it working that way for radical Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood slogan “Islam is the solution” is but one point of view among many. Sometimes its adherents win and sometimes they lose, just like the proponents of ideas everywhere else.

 

I got a few things wrong, too. Like Egypt’s liberals and America’s conservatives, I understood all along that the Muslim Brotherhood was theocratic and authoritarian. But I did not think they would win. I knew they’d do well—Egypt is the most Islamicized place I’ve ever been, after all—but I assumed they’d have a hard time breaking fifty percent.

 

Not only did the Muslim Brotherhood win, a huge percentage of Egyptians who voted against them went for the Salafists, the ideological brethren of Osama bin Laden. Egypt turned out to be even more politically Islamicized than I realized, and I knew it was bad.

 

Yet in the long sweep of Egyptian history, it lasted about as long as a hiccup.

 

I think it’s safe to say everyone, regardless of their political orientation and what they got right and wrong a year ago, was surprised by how quickly Egypt rejected the Brotherhood. The United States government has sound reasons for not describing what happened as a military coup, but that’s what it was. The rest of us shouldn’t kid ourselves. Yet it’s clear that the coup was a popular one. Morsi ended up more hated than Hosni Mubarak, and he achieved that dubious honor in one year instead of in thirty.

 

That ought to make American liberals rethink the notion that the Brotherhood is democratic and moderate. And it ought to show American conservatives that Muslims are perfectly capable of rejecting political Islam whether or not they’re secular Jeffersonian democrats. The Muslim Brotherhood might recover somewhat if the next government fails as badly as Morsi’s, but then again it might not.

 

No one can predict the future anywhere in the world. It’s even harder in the Middle East than in other places. History doesn’t move in straight lines over there. Sometimes it goes in circles. Other times it veers off in wild directions. Keen observers can figure out what’s happening now, but when it comes to the future, nobody really knows anything.

Defend Hannah Arendt, Demonize the Tea Party. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Defend Arendt, Demonize the Tea Party. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 10, 2013.

Egypt’s Deep State Dilemma. By Walter Russell Mead.

Egypt’s Deep State Dilemma. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 11, 2013.

Mead:

With political frustration running high during the holy month of Ramadan, the situation in Egypt still looks more like a gathering storm than any kind of transition to democracy. Muslim Brotherhood politicians are again being accused by the army of deliberately inciting violence, and there are reports that members of Egypt’s Christian minority, many of whom vocally supported the ouster of Morsi, are being attacked and lynched by enraged Islamist mobs. A very potent and poisonous brew is simmering on the banks of the Nile.

 

Yet an article in today’s NY Times seems to suggest that, despite it all, a kind of normalcy is returning to Egypt:

The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 played a significant role—intentionally or not—in undermining the overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi.

 

And as the interim government struggles to unite a divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail. Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and frustration.

The Egyptian deep state was certainly working to undermine Morsi, and it will now try to make the new system work. We’ve actually written about this kind of sabotage in the past, and anyone thinking about Egypt’s future has to take these kinds of forces well into account. But the bigger question not explored in the Times piece is whether the passions unleashed over the past few months can be controlled by the army and the deep state, especially given that the lack of growth and the danger that instability will keep investment and tourists at bay.

 

The long term outlook is not pretty. The divisions between the Brotherhood and the rest of society will probably deepen, and Egyptian Islamism will curdle and sour while the army and its allies continue to make things work well enough to keep the peace…for a while. Polarization and authoritarianism, a “managed democracy”, Mubarakism without Mubarak—it’s what the army wanted all along. And the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates seem ready to grease the wheels with money for a while. They are rightly worried about what an Egyptian meltdown would do to the region.

 

However, it’s very important to remember that the old system that the deep staters want to restore was and is a profoundly dysfunctional one. It was crony capitalism for the rich and the high ranking, with large subsidies to keep the poor quiet and complacent—and thuggish torturers in jail for those who didn’t shut up. Public services were shambolic, the educational system was a disaster, and poorly paid make-work government jobs offered a pale imitation of middle class life for those lucky enough or connected enough to get them. For decades, this system hasn’t been able to prepare Egypt for anything better, and Egypt’s youth bulge has exacerbated all of these trends past the breaking point.

 

The danger facing the Egyptian deep state isn’t the kind of liberal revolution that the short sighted and uninformed once thought they spotted in Tahrir square. That’s the good kind of revolution, where a more advanced and developed society emerges from authoritarian rule like a butterfly hatching out of a cocoon. That’s Spain after Franco, Chile after Pinochet, Poland after Communism. That’s the crocuses bursting through the snowbanks as winter ends and spring begins. That’s not, by and large, what the Egyptian Revolution was about.

 

Egypt doesn’t face a Singapore-style tradeoff between a successful authoritarian order and the risks of democracy. (Would that it did.) Egypt must choose between an ineffective democracy and a dysfunctional authoritarianism. Probably right now most Egyptians prefer dysfunctional order to dysfunctional chaos, so the deep state has public opinion on its side. But unlike in Singapore or China, where an authoritarian regime is presiding over a period of massive growth, development, and rising living standards offering hope of profound social transformation for the better, Egyptian authoritarianism can at best promise to keep the lid on the mess for a while longer.

 

The military seems to be the only player that has gotten what it wanted out of the Egyptian Revolution so far: it wanted Mubarak gone, and it wanted military supremacy over civilian politicians reaffirmed. Check and check. Better still, the military top echelons probably think, some of the younger officers who used to sympathize with the Brotherhood have recognized the error of their ways. Those who don’t recoil from the Brotherhood will likely find promotions and plum assignments mysteriously delayed.

 

People worry whether Egypt will become another Algeria, with a long and bitter civil war between the military and the Islamists driven out of the political system. That’s conceivable but unlikely; the Brotherhood does not at this point seem to have what it takes to mount a national insurgency. Also, the Saudis are pumping money into an Islamist rival of the Brotherhood that will divide Egyptian Islamism and make it harder for a powerful armed resistance to emerge. Occasional acts of violence can’t be ruled out, but Egypt doesn’t seem headed for an Algerian style civil conflict, with 100,000 or more dead.

 

But in another sense, Egypt is already Algeria. In both countries the army is not just a powerful political force; it is a leading economic actor with tentacles extending throughout society. These are military republics, not to be confused with democratic ones. Turkey used to be a military republic; Pakistan still is one. They used to be common in Latin America.

 

In Iraq and Syria, military republics fell when a single individual mastered the state and transformed the military republic into a personal (and in the Syrian case, dynastic) dictatorship. That is what Mubarak tried and failed to do, and why the military allowed popular unrest to drive him from power. The Turkish military republic fell when a charismatic politician at the head of a majoritarian political movement was able to break its power. This is what Egyptian President Morsi thought he was doing until the guards ushered him out of his office.

 

The Egyptian military republic is stronger and better run than Pakistan’s, but it has never been as successful in modernizing Egypt as Atatürk and his successors were in Turkey. Without the oil that lubricates military rule in Algeria, Egypt’s rulers face stark social and economic problems, and the ossified, pharaonic bureaucracy that is Egypt’s curse and government today has no hope of solving these, ever.

 

What Egypt’s deep state has to worry about is what Pakistan’s deep state has to worry about: the progressive meltdown of the authoritarian structures on which the system depends. In Pakistan, society’s infrastructure is rusting away as society gradually degrades and order progressively gets less orderly—a social implosion rather than social explosion is what we see there.

 

The question is whether Egypt will slither down that slippery slope. Egypt’s government structures are probably more bureaucratic and less competently staffed than many offices in Pakistan, but Pakistan’s ethnic, religious and regional differences make it a harder country to govern minimally well. Also, one must note that Egypt’s military has succeeded at one big thing that the Pakistani army hasn’t done: Egypt made peace with Israel on a basis that satisfied its territorial claims; Pakistan hasn’t made peace with India on any terms and is far from resolving its claims.

 

Nevertheless, Egypt could start looking more like Pakistan. Unfortunately, Egypt gets harder to govern as its population grows and becomes more demanding. Implosion more than explosion is what we should worry about in the largest country in the Arab world. The danger is real, and it is growing.

Egypt at the Edge. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Egypt at the Edge. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, July 9, 2013.

Friedman:

In every civil war there is a moment before all hell breaks loose when there is still a chance to prevent a total descent into the abyss. Egypt is at that moment.

 

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan starts this week, and it can’t come too soon. One can only hope that the traditional time for getting family and friends together will provide a moment for all the actors in Egypt to reflect on how badly they’ve behaved — all sides — and opt for the only sensible pathway forward: national reconciliation. I was a student at the American University in Cairo in the early 1970s and have been a regular visitor since. I’ve never witnessed the depth of hatred that has infected Egypt in recent months: Muslim Brotherhood activists throwing a young opponent off a roof; anti-Islamist activists on Twitter praising the Egyptian army for mercilessly gunning down supporters of the Brotherhood in prayer. In the wake of all this violent turmoil, it is no longer who rules Egypt that it is at stake. It is Egypt that is at stake. This is an existential crisis.

 

Can Egypt hold together and move forward as a unified country or will it be torn asunder by its own people, like Syria? Nothing is more important in the Middle East today, because when the stability of modern Egypt is at stake — sitting as it does astride the Suez Canal, the linchpin of any Arab peace with Israel and knitting together North Africa, Africa and the Middle East — the stability of the whole region is at stake.

 

I appreciate the anger of non-Islamist, secular and liberal Egyptians with President Mohamed Morsi. He never would have become president without their votes, but, once in office, instead of being inclusive, at every turn he grabbed for more power. With Egypt’s economy in a tailspin, I also appreciate the impatience of many Egyptians with Morsi’s rule. But in the Arab world’s long transition to democracy, something valuable was lost when the military ousted Morsi’s government and did not wait for the Egyptian people to do it in October’s parliamentary elections or the presidential elections three years down the road. It gives the Muslim Brothers a perfect excuse not to reflect on their mistakes and change, which is an essential ingredient for Egypt to build a stable political center.

 

But Egypt’s non-Islamists, secular and liberal groups need to get their act together, too. The Egyptian opposition has been great at mobilizing protests but incapable of coalescing around a single leader’s agenda, while the Brotherhood has been great at winning elections but incapable of governing.

 

So now there is only one way for Egypt to avoid the abyss: the military, the only authority in Egypt today, has to make clear that it ousted the Muslim Brotherhood for the purpose of a “reset,” not for the purposes of “revenge” — for the purpose of starting over and getting the transition to democracy right this time, not for the purpose of eliminating the Brotherhood from politics. (It is not clear that the “interim constitution” issued Tuesday by Egypt’s transitional government will give the Brotherhood a fair shot at contesting power. It bans parties based on religion, but that ban was in place under Hosni Mubarak, and the Brotherhood got around it by running as independents.) Egypt will not be stable if the Brotherhood is excluded.

 

Dalia Mogahed, the C.E.O. of Mogahed Consulting and a longtime pollster in the Middle East, remarked to me that the original 2011 revolution that overthrew Mubarak was mounted by “young people, leftists, liberals, Islamists, united for a better future. The division was between those revolutionaries and the status quo. The revolution wasn’t owned by the secularists or the liberals or the Islamists. That’s why it worked.” Democracy in Egypt “only has a chance when revolutionaries again see the status quo as their enemy, not each other.”

 

She is right: Muslim Brothers can kill more secularists; the military can kill more Muslim Brothers; but another decade of the status quo in Egypt will kill them all. The country will be a human development disaster. With the absence of a true party of reform — that blends respect for religion with a strategy of modernization as the great 19th-century Egyptian reformers did — Egyptians today are being forced to choose not a better way, but between bad ideas.

 

The Brotherhood posits that “Islam is the answer.” The military favors a return to the deep state of old. But more religion alone is not the answer for Egypt today and while the military-dominated deep state may provide law and order and keep Islamists down, it can’t provide the kind of fresh thinking and educational, entrepreneurial, social and legal reforms needed to empower and unleash Egypt’s considerable human talent and brainpower. In truth, the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report is the answer, which, by the way, was mostly written by Egyptian scholars. It called on Egyptians to focus on building a politics that can overcome their debilitating deficits of freedom, education and women’s empowerment. That is the pathway Egypt needs to pursue — not Mubarakism, Morsi-ism or military rule — and the job of Egypt’s friends now is not to cut off aid and censure, but to help it gradually but steadily find that moderate path.

The Cohabitation Expectation Divide. By Bradford Wilcox.

Men and Women Often Expect Different Things When They Move In Together. By Bradford Wilcox. The Atlantic, July 8, 2013.

Cohabitation and Marriage Intensity: Consolidation, Intimacy, and Commitment. By Michael Pollard and Kathleen Mullan Harris. RAND Working Paper, June 2013.

Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment. By Scott M. Stanley, Galena K. Rhoades, and Sarah W. Whitton. Journal of Family Theory and Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (December 2010).

The Role of Cohabitation in Family Formation: The United States in Comparative Perspective. By Patrick Heuveline and Jeffrey M. Timberlake. Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 66, No. 5 (December 2004).

Heterosexual Cohabitation in the United States: Motives for Living Together among Young Men and Women. By Pamela J. Smock, Penelope Huang, Wendy D. Manning, and Cara A. Bergstrom. Population Studies Center, August 2006.

Sliding Versus Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect. By Scott M. Stanley, Galena Kline Rhoades, and Howard J. Markman. Family Relations, Vol. 55, No. 4 (October 2006).

The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage. By Meg Jay. New York Times, April 14, 2012.

The Timing of Cohabitation and Engagement: The Impact on First and Second Marriages. By Scott M. Stanley, Galena K. Rhoades, Paul R. Amato, Howard J. Markman, and Christine A. Johnson. Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 72, No. 4 (August 2010).

The Pre-Engagement Cohabitation Effect: A Replication and Extension of Previous Findings. By Galena K. Rhoades, Scott M. Stanley, and Howard J. Markman. Journal of Family Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 2009).

Of Untreated Sewage and Peace Talks. By Evelyn Gordon.

Of Untreated Sewage and Peace Talks. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, July 10, 2013.

Sarah Palin Should Make a Run for the Senate. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Run, Sarah, Run and Keep Running. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 10, 2013.

How Big Government Erodes Quality of Life. By Seth Mandel.

How Big Government Erodes Quality of Life. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, July 10, 2013.