Unless things go dramatically downhill under Morsi, I think the Army will not prevail, they will be consumed. The opportunity to take back Egypt will be short and perhaps it will not come at all.
One question, is the Army infiltrated by islamists to the extent say, Pakistan's is? I would venture that they are and it's only a matter of time before Morsi or another Islamist consolidates power and removes obstacles as occurred in Venezela and now Turkey and likely Pakistan. In Pakistan, they caved to the Islamists; they're doomed.
Read every word of this. The Islamists have reached the tipping point, imo. I could feel this Islamist wave coming, this is not good. And this is why we must stop Muslim immigration. It's only a matter of time that our aging population succumbs to them, if we are not vigilent. We appease and strengthen them.
I suppose when it gets down to it, Hillary's dealing with enemies (MB) because there is no choice. Hard to envision how to turn this around. Maybe demographics will do it, maybe their own civil wars, maybe chaos. Maybe it will be Turkey vs. Iran vs. Saudis vs. Egypt and each of their sphere's of influence. Or, worse case, they may band up against the West. There are already way too many countries seemingly making nice with Iran and Russia.
Beware Putin. Iran needs taking care of before it's too late.
Worst-case scenario comes true
Martin Kramer
Posted: 26 Jun 2012 01:07 AM PDT
Did I predict the “Arab Spring”?
The short answer is “no.” I didn’t foresee that the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor would set off a wave of popular unrest that would bring down the rulers of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, plunge Syria deep into civil conflict, and roil Bahrain.
The long answer is a bit more interesting. In 2004, I did a study (under contract and as part of a team) on the prospects for regime change, transition, and survival in the Middle East. The results were circulated exactly seven years ago, in June 2005. I have an aversion to making predictions—in public. Private predictions are another matter, and in this study, I explicitly laid out three future long-term scenarios and my estimate of their likelihood. Read the study here (pdf).
The first point to note is that the phrase “Arab Spring” was being used even then, to refer to a series of developments triggered by Lebanon’s so-called “Ceder Revolution.” It’s a recurring trope—the Western expression of the hope-springs-eternal attitude towards Arab politics. My assignment was to visit the region and see whether I could find the drivers of such change.
So what did I find? I came away with the impression that Arab regimes were losing their grip (see my “Trend 3: Weakening Regimes”). Their own “reform” policies were falling short, and they were being undermined by Bush administration rhetoric about democracy. Here’s where I finally came down, in my “Scenario Summary”:
Reforms have been insufficient to overcome the fundamental problem of the state: its inability to generate growth. There is a paradox here: preservation of the status quo requires reform, but every reform undermines the status quo in some way large or small. And as pressure builds from within and without, reforms must become more extensive, threatening the status quo still further. The situation is reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire and Qajar lran a century ago, when a succession of reforms in stagnant political orders ultimately produced a snowball effect, culminating in constitutional revolutions. We believe that the reformed status quo can still buy the regimes some time, but it takes more and more reform to buy less and less time. In other words, reform is a depreciated coin and one that has lost much credibility over the past decade. We believe it is possible that a few regimes could see their reform strategy fail.
But my study was highly skeptical about the prospect of liberal democratization. The liberals whom I met admitted to me that they had no social base, and “in meetings held in Egypt and Jordan in preparation of this paper, every interlocutor admitted that throwing open the system today would mean an Islamist surge.” Hence this conclusion:
The chief beneficiary of any crisis will be the Islamists.… It seems quite likely that in this coming decade one or more Islamist movements will be positioned to assume power or a predominant share of power, particularly in places where the state is chronically weak. Weak states include Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and (increasingly) Syria. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are stronger, but their regimes increasingly suffer from deficits of legitimacy. Where states are weak, Islamists are likely to make outright bids for power. Where states are strong, there is a distinct possibility that regimes will strike deals with lslamists, gradually expanding the space for Islamist action while preserving the political status quo. In some ways, this is the opposite of reform and will send these states into trajectories of creeping Islamization.
In summation, we see liberal democratic transformation as unlikely. We believe the contest is bipolar, between regimes and Islamists, with the former less and less able to resist Islamist entreaties and encroachments. We believe that the coming decade will see more power ceded to Islamists, who will be wooed by regimes, the secular opposition and foreign powers alike. As elections allow them to demonstrate their appeal, they will increasingly become the fulcrum of politics.
This seems to me an all-too-accurate description of where we are, seven years into the “coming decade.” I didn’t foresee the details of how we would get here, and I didn’t exactly pinpoint the weakest links. (The study didn’t even include Tunisia and Libya.) But I wasn’t knocked off my feet when the “reform” strategies of some Arab regimes failed, when a “snowball” of “constitutional revolutions” followed, and—most importantly—when Islamists became the chief beneficiaries of the whole process.
That’s why I was baffled by the enthusiasm of those analysts who swooned to the romance of Tahrir Square. As I wrote in 2005, “The rise of Islamism to political prominence or dominance is a worst-case scenario for U.S. policy, and it is also the most likely scenario in every setting that moves toward genuine political pluralism and free elections.” True then, true now, and (so I predict again) true in the future to come.
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