Under the title: “Egypt 's Coming Chaos,” Steven A.
Cook wrote a rambling article that is sad in its tone and wishful in its aim.
The sadness is expressed in the subtitle which reads: “The assassination of a
top official and a brazen attack by an Islamic State affiliate this week herald
a prolonged period of bloodshed.” The wistfulness is expressed by the title
itself, and again at the end by a remark that reads: “...it would mean breaking
the military – and when you do that, you break Egypt .” The article was published
on July 3, 2015 in Foreign Policy.
To go from the beginning to the end, Steven Cook unfurls a
kind of meandering presentation that is meaningless in some places and
contradictory in many others. He says: “Egypt is entering uncharted
territory” because Prosecutor Hisham Barakat was assassinated. But he says
right after that: “Barakat's assassination was just the most recent in a long
list of Egyptian officials killed at the hands of opponents.” He lists the
names of those who were assassinated “in the 1940s alone” and goes on to say:
“there are echos of that era in Egypt 's
current political dynamics.” He makes several more statements in that vein; all
contradicting what he said earlier about the territory being uncharted.
Having made the point that “it is hard to imagine how
Egyptians will avoid a prolonged period of bloodshed,” and having made the
parallel between the 1940s and now, he asks the question: “How did it all end
then?” and he answers: “With a coup.” But he says right after that: “While a
coup today seems unlikely...” Well, by now, you get the sense that his aim is
to badmouth the Egyptian military. To this end, he says: “Its goal has been to
rebuild, renovate, and re-engineer a system in which it can play a role … [but]
the violence that is bedeviling Egypt
reveals this effort to be a failure.” He does not explain why so but
contradicts himself right away.
While admitting: “History is not much of a guide,” he gives
two examples on how the military successfully subdued the extremists in the
past. First, there is this: “The uncertainty of that era ended when Gamal Abdel
Nasser deposed King Farouk in 1952.” Second, there is this: “In the 1990s,
terrorists attacked tourists, intellectuals, police and senior officials … when
terrorists murdered 58 tourists, the military hunted [to extinction] the
perpetrators of that attack.” He goes on to also belie what he said earlier
about Egypt
entering uncharted territory by adding this: “The violence came to an end
afterward … when the accumulation of arrests and killings took a toll on the
extremist groups.”
Steven Cook then demolishes his own thesis by making a
prediction: “These examples provide how the Egyptian government will manage the
current conflict,” which means the government (read the military) will be
successful. And yet he goes on to say, not so … and to explain, he contradicts
the contradiction with this: “For the military, the struggle is made more
difficult because the officers have spent the last 42 years equipping
themselves to fight a large land war that will never happen.”
And that's the clue which allows you to penetrate deep into
the soul of this man, where you discover what motivates him. He is saddened by
the idea that the Egyptian military has the capability to fight a large land
war ... Israel ,
for example. And he yearns for the day when the terrorists – working hand in
hand with the Muslim Brotherhood – will so humiliate that military, it will be
forced to switch philosophy and equip itself to fight the terrorists instead.
He is not sure how this will come about but fantasizes (over
several paragraphs) that because “the officers enjoy their prestige, conflict
undermines their preeminent place in the system … yet they do not seem to have
a choice. The Province of Sinai has made war on Egypt, promising to keep the
military out in the open … Adding vengeance to this dynamic will produce a
spiral of violence from which it will be hard to break out … In the present
conflict, it would mean, you break Egypt.”
He then makes the classic mistake of talking about
economics, not knowing what he is talking about. He says this: “the officers'
promise to the Egyptian people was that of prosperity borne out of stability.
It has not come to pass.” What he neglected to say is that it has only been a
year since the promise was made.
The truth is that the people of Egypt knew what the potential of
the country was, and knew it was being squandered under previous regimes, which
is why they revolted. When they elected Sisi, they did not expect miracles;
they expected to see a start on the projects that will add growth to the
economy and reduce unemployment. This came to pass.
Moreover, after only one year, the growth in the economy
more than doubled from 2.1 percent to 4.7 percent while the rate of
unemployment started to shrink rather than continue to grow like it used to.
And that's the miracle that the people of Egypt did not expect to see so
soon. They are happy with the progress, and are moving on with their lives.