The Grand Scam: Spinning Egypt’s Military Coup

Exposing the Hypocrisy of ElBaradei and his Liberal Elites
The Grand Scam: Spinning Egypt’s Military Coup
by ESAM AL-AMIN – 19 July, 2013 – Counter Punch

Every coup d’état in history begins with a military General announcing the overthrow and arrest of the country’s leader, the suspension of the constitution, and the dissolution of the legislature. If people resist, it turns bloody. Egypt is no exception.

As the dust settles and the fog over the events unfolding across Egypt dissipates, the political scene becomes much clearer. Regardless of how one dresses the situation on the ground, the political and ideological battle that has been raging for over a year between the Islamist parties and their liberal and secular counterparts was decided because of a single decisive factor: military intervention by Egypt’s generals on behalf of the latter.

As I argued before in several of my articles (as have others), there is no doubt that President Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) committed political miscalculations and made numerous mistakes, especially by ignoring the demands of many of the revolutionary youth groups and abandoning their former opposition partners. They frequently behaved in a naïve and arrogant manner. But in any civilized and democratic society, the price of incompetence or narcissism is exacted politically at the ballot box.

Elections and Obstructionism: Do Elections Matter?

To their frustration, the liberal and secular opposition failed time and again to win the trust of the people as the Egyptian electorate exercised its free will when tens of millions went to the polls six times in two years. After overthrowing the Mubarak regime a month earlier, they voted in March 2011 by seventy seven percent for a referendum, favored by the Islamists that charted the future political roadmap. Between November 2011 and January 2012, they voted for the Islamist parties with overwhelming majorities in the lower (seventy three percent) and upper (eighty percent) houses of parliament. In June 2012, they elected, albeit narrowly, for the first time in their history, the civilian Muslim Brotherhood candidate as president in a free and fair election. Finally, last December the Egyptian people ratified by a sixty four percent majority the country’s new constitution. The next parliamentary elections were scheduled for this summer had not the Mubarak-appointed Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) intervened yet again and invalidated the new election laws.

From the standpoint of the MB and its Islamist allies the SCC played an obstructionist role throughout this process. To their consternation, in June 2012 the court dissolved the lower house of parliament within four months of its election on technical grounds. It was also aiming to dissolve the upper house of parliament as well as the Constitutional Constituent Assembly (CCA) – the body charged with writing the new constitution – days before it was to finish its work. This forced Morsi to intervene and issue his ill-fated constitutional decree on November 22, 2012, in order to protect the CCA from judicial nullification. In an attempt to force its collapse, all secular members of the CCA resigned en masse even though its formation and the parameters of the process were agreed upon in advance, as evidenced by an opposition member who announced it in April 2012.

However, Morsi’s declaration proved to be a watershed moment that galvanized the opposition, which predictably accused him of an authoritarian power grab. In turn, Morsi argued that his decree was necessary to build the democratic institutions of the state that were being dismantled by the SCC one by one. Under intense public pressure he backtracked and cancelled the decree within three weeks, but only after he ensured that the new constitution would be put to a referendum.

After a vigorous public campaign by the opposition to reject the constitution, it was approved by the public by almost two to one. The next constitutional step would have been parliamentary elections within sixty days. But even though the election laws were similar to the laws agreed upon by all parties in the 2012 elections, the opposition complained that the laws favored the Islamist parties and threatened to boycott the elections. Within four months, the SCC twice rejected and halted the elections on technical grounds, thus further solidifying the perception in the eyes of the Islamists that the Mubarak-appointed court continues to thwart the country’s budding democratic institutions.

Strange Bedfellows: The Unholy Trinity of Gulf Sheikhdoms, the Fulool, and Egypt’s Secular Opposition

On April 22, 2011, UAE Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed brought his intelligence and security chiefs to meet with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and his security officials to discuss the ramifications of the Arab Spring. Bin Zayed warned that unless the GCC countries developed a proactive policy to preempt the wave of popular uprisings sweeping the Arab World at the time, none of the region’s monarchs would survive. Three weeks later in an emergency summit meeting in Riyadh he delivered the same message to all the GCC heads of state. While Qatar remained indifferent to his message, the other five countries were receptive. Bin Zayed and Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief, were tasked with submitting an effective plan to counter the Arab Spring phenomenon in the region. Subsequently, King Abdullah solicited and received the help of King Abdullah II of Jordan to join this effort while Qatar was excluded from all future meetings.

For decades, the UAE had been very close to Mubarak and his cronies. Billions of dollars of ill-gotten fortunes looted from the country were deposited in banks in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. After the overthrow of Mubarak, dozens of security officials and corrupt businessmen quietly left Egypt and relocated to the UAE. When Mubarak’s last Prime Minister, Ahmad Shafiq lost the presidential elections to Morsi in June 2012, he also moved to the UAE. By the fall of 2012, it became evident that the UAE hosted a web of individuals who were plotting the overthrow of Morsi and the MB.

Within a few weeks of the formation of the new government, Shafiq supporter and spokesman for his political party Mohammad Abu Hamid, announced on August 21, 2012, fifteen demands culminating in the goal of toppling the “Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan Government.” He warned against the “ikhwanization” of the state, i.e. the appointments of MB members in crucial state positions, and blamed them for the lack of basic services to the public. Abu Hamid also called for subsequent mass protests in Tahrir Square as he accused Morsi of power grab, dictatorship, and judicial interference, long before the president issued his hapless constitutional decree three months later. He further demanded the banning of the MB and its political affiliate, as well as the arrest of its leaders, who he accused of treason. All of his demands would subsequently become the talking points of every opposition party and anti-Morsi media outlet. …more