Airborne elephant watch: Egypt is still there, over to the left

Photo by Gregory Colbert.

Did I tell you? Did I tell you? Not here, perhaps, but over at BooMan's place, where the elevated tone often inspires me to non-snark: The "Egyptian military" consists of more than one phenomenon. The generals, who gladly threw Mubarak's person under the bus when he was no longer able to rule, continue to espouse his ideology, which [jump]

First casualty

The Egyptian army accuses the Muslim Brothers who were massacred yesterday morning outside the facility where Mohammad Morsi is being detained of being "terrorists". In so doing, they are really putting themselves in the position of President Assad, or President Putin, and it's pretty disappointing. The MB may be lousy at government, but they are not terrorists.

If the Brothers in turn are telling lies to portray the army as baby-killers that is pretty reprehensible too.

Min of propaganda vs propaganda? RT @iyad_elbaghdadi: Army spox: certain party showed pictures of dead babies from Syria as frm egypt
— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) July 8, 2013

But it seems we only have the army's word for it. Ugh.

Allegory of Truth, by Stefano Mulinari, 1774. Identified by the website,  Courtauld Institute, as "after Michelangelo" but I really can't see it and can't find any explanatory information.

Mental equipment in Egypt

Image via Rocco Marc McDonald.

Via Twitter account of the great Lyse Doucet:

I think we should stop worrying about Egypt right now.

Brooks: Mental equipment

David Brooks writes:

The debate on Egypt—I mean the debate in Washington, obviously, not anything they're talking about in Egypt, which could hardly be of an intellectual heft to interest my readers—is essentially between two different worldviews: those who believe in constitutional government and those who hate Muslims.

Constitutionalists say the main thing is that there is a constitution and that there has been an election* and that the government has the support of the people, as has been confirmed over and over.** Democratic institutions and the rule of law are tender plants that need loving care, indirect sunlight. Give them too much coup*** and they could drown.

*Although in point of fact the election (May 2012 for Parliament, June for the presidency) wasn't under the constitution (the following December).
**A poll last March found 82% in favor of the return of the military to power!
*** [sic]. Brooks seems to have decided that coup is a mass noun: "those who would destroy them through armed coup".

"O my brother! How are the poll numbers?"

[jump]

Bill and Coup

I swear that guy has a vuvuzela! Image by AP? via Channel 11 Atlanta.

Somebody I follow sent a Tweet around asking if there's ever been a good coup, or words to that effect, and I had one of those tip-of-the-tongue experiences: wasn't there... um... But I couldn't drag it out of the memory hole.

Until a couple of hours later, carrying some groceries through the rain, when it came to me: Egypt, back at the beginning in early 2011, when the military ultimately seemed serious about getting out of the business. No wonder I couldn't remember; the thesis seemed to be rewriting itself all day.

They were never serious to the point where you couldn't doubt it. They seemed to be particularly frightened of Morsi and anxious to undercut him any way they could: running him against a single "conservative" (Mubarak relic) candidate, dumping their own constitution on him. But Morsi invariably defeated them and they accepted their defeat fairly graciously.

This is a little of what folks always call "just semantics" (unless they're familiar with professional practice in that field, it which case they might call it "quibbling about words"), but since it's apparently a problem for the US State Department to know whether it's a coup or not, could we say it's just the Revolution, with the role of the army being to make a perimeter within which the real conversation can happen?

Officer says army is leaving, says they were there for protection but were unwanted. Cheering. pic.twitter.com/JZTYMilNKX
— Kareem Fahim (@kfahim) July 3, 2013

What a great motto for a military that would be!

Scare Quotes Alert

New York Times:

Egypt entered a perilous 48 hours on Monday when the military delivered an ultimatum to the country’s first democratically elected president, hundreds of thousands of protesters renewed calls to oust him from office and the president’s Islamists allies vowed to take to the streets to stop what they called “a military coup.”

Sorry, that's not a "military coup", that's a military coup. I'm not even condemning it, I just think it needs to be called by the right name.

The whole thing is pretty sad. It would have been so nice if Morsi had been able to succeed, in some degree, in establishing a general comfort level with constitutionality, and I thought Muslim Brothers' experience in providing social services would help. Power, as usual, corrupted. The MB insistence on writing the constitution on their own wasn't a good thing; they could have had a more Westminstery system, with some built-in instability, which makes it easier to get rid of an obnoxious Leader without tearing down the entire system, but that would have meant leaving doors open for all sorts of little parties.

As I always say with reference to Egypt it's up to the liberals, once again, to give the poor and struggling majority some reason to vote for them. Last time they were too involved with white-girl problems; maybe this time the visible presence of the People in the protests will make a difference.

Photo by AP via Huffington Post.

Egypt: The next India or the next Israel?

Thomas P. Friedman, aka Thomas L. Friedman, the Erzschnurrbart of the Zeitgeist, has learned to his amazement and delight that India is a multiethnic and multireligious country in which members of non-majority groups frequently ascend to high political office, though only when the Congress Party is in power:

India’s prime minister and its army chief of staff today are both Sikhs, and India’s foreign minister and chief justice of the Supreme Court are both Muslims. It would be like Egypt appointing a Coptic Christian to be its army chief of staff.

“Preposterous,” you say.

I'd say it's more like Dublin having a Jewish mayor ("Only in America!" my dad liked to say), not all that preposterous, whereas Egypt having a Christian army chief would be pretty interesting. Still, why not? Iraq had a Christian deputy prime minister under the Baath party leadership, and my country, in which about 13% of the population is black, just re-elected its first black president.

Would it be preposterous for Egypt to have a Christian army chief?

Well, yes, that’s true today. But if it is still true in a decade or two, then we’ll know that democracy in Egypt failed. We will know that Egypt went the route of Pakistan and not India. That is, rather than becoming a democratic country where its citizens could realize their full potential, instead it became a Muslim country where the military and the Muslim Brotherhood fed off each other so both could remain in power indefinitely and “the people” were again spectators. Whether Egypt turns out more like Pakistan or India will impact the future of democracy in the whole Arab world.

I have no idea what makes Friedman bring up Pakistan in this context. No doubt it has become somewhat less comfortable for Christians than it was in the glory days of the 1960s, when A.R. Cornelius presided over the Supreme Court, but still. I expect it was a bizarre slip of the fingers when he meant Israel, where no Christian has ever served in the government, the little token minority positions in governments of the "left" being reserved for Muslims and Druze—and where Christians and Muslims alike are passed up for national service, under the assumption that they are naturally traitors.

Yes, of course that's it. Rather than becoming a democratic country where its citizens could realize their full potential, instead it became a Jewish state where the military and the Orthodox clergy fed off each other so both could remain in power indefinitely until somebody still more cynical came by and ate their lunch. And if Israel has a Christian foreign minister or a Druze running Mossad or maybe one Reconstructionist rabbi conducting weddings ten years from now, maybe democracy will be a success there too!

Theatrical release poster, 1928. From Wikipedia.

P.S. I should have taken a screen shot but now it's too late: the original version of Friedman's column referred to Amartya Sen as a "Noble Prize-winning economist".

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt! (addendum)

Eggs Definitely Look Better with Mustaches. By Ben at LikeCool.com.

 Friedman manages to admit his error, sort of:

I was critical of Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, for attending the Nonaligned Movement summit meeting in Iran. I argued that he was giving legitimacy to an Iranian regime that had crushed the very kind of democratic movement that brought Morsi to power. But Morsi surprised me, for the better, by using his visit to Tehran to call out the Iranian leadership for supporting Syria’s “oppressive” regime. The Iranians were livid. You can be sure that, on other days, Morsi will say and do things that will give us indigestion. We still need Egypt’s strategic support in the region. It still needs our economic aid. But a more democratic, Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt will not behave like the automatic ally it was before. We’ll need a new kind of relationship. It will be complicated.

Or, in the more spaciously crazy terms of his blog, Really Tom Friedman:

So it’s complicated. Which is why, last week, when I said Mohammed Morsi was handing the keys to the revolution over to the mullahs at the used-revolution dealership and it turned out he was just getting valet parking at a brand-new restaurant called Pimp Slap the Islamic Republic, I was mistaken. What Morsi took Iran to task about, well, who can remember?

The soldiers have turned down the Sidi Touré and explained that the Egypt-Iran kerfuffle was over Syria. Which I knew already, but have put my fingers in my ears to avoid hearing again.

I guess he really got face on his egg, heh-heh.

Découpage

Let's say about halfway through the natural course of the revolution the military steps in—not, according to them, as counterrevolution or more revolution, but as a kind of compromise between the two, an acceptance of the revolution and an effort to slow it down. The astonished old president, biting his lip purple, is put under arrest and charged with various crimes: murderous assault on the peaceful revolutionaries, massive corruption.

Elephant hang gliding. From Toys Period.

The military commissions a constitution, stages a couple of elections, for a parliament and a president. The most popular party wins, not the one the military likes, or the one the old president likes, or the ones (dozens, of course) the revolutionaries like, but the one ordinary people, not thinking too hard about it, incline to.

The military appears to be having second thoughts, being quite nervous about this winning party, which is sort of religious: they sack the constitution-writing committee, dismiss the new parliament, constitute a cabinet in which they play the principal roles, announce an emergency. The old president is convicted of murder, or something like it, but they drop the corruption charges.

The new president then calls the parliament into session, just to say hello, and appoints his own defense minister and what not, sending the semi-dictators into an unexpected elder statesmanship, all very politely. Younger officers (who have been complaining all along about waiting for promotions and witnessing corruption) join the cabinet. The semi-dictators don't even whine; they just do as they're told.

So what is the opposite of a coup?

One thing, Thomas P. Friedman's head must be exploding. No wonder he's on vacation. He could tell himself it's the education problem—with no decent schools, the Egyptians don't have a clue what's normal (i.e., what Thomas P. Friedman expects), so they're doing everything backwards. But don't worry, Tom, Bahrain's going according to plan!

Leaf Elephant. Atelier Pour Enfants.

What a swell party this is!

Mélenchon remplit sa plage! Today's rally in Marseille for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, French presidential candidate of the Front de Gauche, drew a crowd of 120,000—looks like holding it on the beach was a smart idea. What a swell party this is.

A bit of a setback in Egypt in the news that the Supreme Presidential Election Commission, presumably military-run, has barred ten candidates from the election, including some we don't like—the hard-line Salafist Hazem Abu Ismail whose mother became a US citizen before she died, and the Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. No reasons were given, according to the Guardian, but the New York Times speculates that in the cases of the likewise barred Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat el-Shater and the classy old liberal Ayman Nour it was their prison records.

And how did they get prison records? Jailed by Mubarak, of course, for political activity. They can't run for president because the disgraced criminal ex-dictator didn't like their politics! Looks like premature anti-fascism is still a crime, and that can't be good news.

From The Albinophant blog.

Here's another depressing little irony: Guess who doesn't like austerity, in Italy and Ireland? Small-business owners and entrepreneurs, and it's not very funny, either, because they're killing themselves: unable to pay their debts in County Cork (190 suicides from 2008 to 2011), creditors of a deadbeat government in the Veneto (more than 30 small-business suicides in the past three years). All those job creators just need to man up a little, I guess. Look at Mitt Romney! He doesn't whine.

Why is this man smiling? Photo by Sean Gardner/Reuters.

The presumptive Republican presidential candidate couldn't get his taxes done on time, though!  He's filed an extension, the same day Barack Obama and Joe Biden publicly released their 2011 returns. Luckily, he'll totally get it done before the election.

"Earlier this year, Gov. Romney released his 2010 tax return and an estimate of his 2011 income and taxes.  This is an extension for filing his 2011 actual return, similar to what he has done in prior years," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement. "Sometime in the next six months, and prior to the election, Gov. Romney will file and release the 2011 return when there is sufficient information to provide an accurate return."

The Romneys estimate a total tax liability of $3,226,623 for 2011, according to Saul. They made payments of $3,434,411 in 2011. They made an estimated payment of $887,000 for 2012.

Naturally Obama has it easier—he works for the government, doesn't he? Just goes to show how out of touch Obama really is.

Thar she trumpets!

From Beyond Dots.

Another elephant or two got off the ground in Egypt, where Juan Cole notes that an administrative court has struck down the assembly writing the new constitution on the grounds that it's stacked with conservatives and hence unrepresentative:

The court relied on a 1994 law stipulating that sitting judges and parliamentarians may not be involved in constitutional revisions, lest they misuse their position to give themselves more power.

Assuming the decision stands, this means the constitution will have to wait until after the presidential election next month, meaning that the new president will take power under the old Mubarak constitution, which could mean a lot of power indeed. That could be a matter of concern, especially since there's no predicting who that president will be (another court has declared that the ultraconservative Hazem Salah Abu Ismail is qualified to run even though his mother was a US citizen because nobody had officially informed the Egyptian government about it, but this decision could easily not survive).

I'd still keep arguing that it's not the end of the world if the Muslim Brotherhood dictates the constitution (their main goal seems to be to make the presidency weak); but it has to be heartening that liberals will be more involved, especially since they seem to be acting more effective at last:

Ahmad Baha’ al-Din Shaaban, founder of the Egyptian Socialist Party, said that the country’s leftists and secularists would continue to agitate for a fair constitution whether the ruling was upheld or not.

Leftists have been mounting street protests against the constituent assembly, and gradually everyone from the Coptic Christians to the traditional clergy of al-Azhar seminary to labor unions and secularists have dissociated themselves from it. The court’s decision is the right one, and most Egyptians are breathing a sigh of relief....

Polling does not find that most Egyptians are fundamentalists, and, indeed, there is evidence that they have become more secular in the past year. Mansour Moaddel’s polls find half of Egyptians now say they are Egyptians first and Muslims second, up from 8% only a few years ago.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt again

Well, Egypt is a pretty big country, after all. And a lot of things happen there, especially just now. And today's Thomas Friedman surrogate mashing up the distinct and mutually hostile parties into one terrifying "Islamist" majority is the normally unpanicked Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, on Morning Edition:

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in Egypt are flexing their growing political muscle. They control the legislative agenda in parliament, and in recent weeks introduced controversial proposals to curb social freedoms and legal rights.

Islamist lawmakers also handpicked a 100-member panel that began meeting this week to write a new constitution, which is widely expected to enshrine Islamic law.

Clouds 2 Elephant. Uncredited photo from The Magnifying Glass.

Only not exactly. As usual. Because the controversial proposals—the revival of traditional punishments like cutting thieves' hands off,  elimination of foreign language instruction [jump]

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt

Today's visitation from the things that go bump in Thomas P. Friedman's night is our old friend the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose officials are telling the Times that they have been telling their daughter organization Hamas to moderate its stances a bit and try to find more common ground with the atheist Fatah, by way of forming more of a common front in negotiations with Israel.

Elephant rope dancing. From Percy J. Billinghurst, A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals (London, 1901).

Brotherhood officials say that they are pulling back from their previous embrace of Hamas and its commitment to armed struggle against Israel in order to open new channels of communications with Fatah, which the Brotherhood had [jump]

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt

And it's time for another of our irregularly scheduled discussions of things that are undreamt of in Thomas Friedman's philosophy or, as his next book is likely to call them, Flying Elephants.

From Squidoo.com.

Today's case starts with the Egyptian minister of planning and international cooperation, and an old pal of Suzanne Mubarak's, Fayza Abul Naga, who is said to be the person mainly responsible [jump]

Airborne elephant watch

Alas, the Times and the BBC both headline their Egypt election stories with the announcement that "Islamists" have won.  Once again, that's just not exactly what happened, which is what you read in Al Jazeera or Voice of America: The Muslim Brotherhood–linked Freedom and Justice Party is the winner, with 47% of the seats in the People's Assembly, a "sweeping victory" but not a majority; their Islamist rivals Al-Nur finished second, with 29% of the seats, and the liberal Al-Wafd third, with about 7%—enough to enable them to form a majority coalition with the MB, if that's how things work out, which is no less likely than some kind of "Islamic front".

Reconstruction from the late 16th century of an automaton by Heron of Alexandria (10-70 C.E.), a mathematician of uncertain ethnicity who invented the steam engine. From here. When Hercules whacks the dragon on the head, the dragon shoots water in the hero's face.

Airborne elephant watch

Among those unpanicked by the Friedman Fear of Egypt's being overrun by Islamic fanatics, count the Google person turned revolutionary Wael Ghonim, currently on a well-deserved book tour; asked by NPR's Steve Inskeep if it didn't upset him that the Muslim Brotherhood had won the elections by working door to door while he and his fellow liberals were online, he replied something like, "Yes, perfect--we should learn from them."

Watching elephants write op-ed pieces

Don't look now, but Thomas Friedman has locked on a new idiotic metaphor. None of us can predict the title of his next book, but I'll bet a good bookie can give you decent odds on Watching Elephants Fly. Tell 'em I sent you.

Flying elephants--if he wore a mustache, wouldn't he look a little like--OMG!

Watching elephants fly is a trope for coming across a totally unexpected story (like, "Amazingly, it took more than six months!"). Friedman uses it in particular as a description of how he felt [jump]

Muslim traditional values voters?

Nicholas Kristof in today's Times, on the success of the Islamist parties in the Egyptian elections, brings up a supremely important point that we Americans seem utterly unaware of: a big part of the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups is in the way they provide real political value to the public long before they even consider getting elected:

[their] offices are social service agencies. Citizens dropped in to ask for blankets for the winter, and the party handed them out — along with campaign brochures. Several people asked for help paying medical bills, and they got it. In the evening, women arrived to take a free class about science.

But then he misinterprets his observations in a way that makes them less useful: