https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/352472608442290176
Eric Trager believes that, at this point, violence won’t do the Muslim Brotherhood any good:
[T]he Muslim Brotherhood has suggested it might organize its cadres into formations, and equip them with clubs and helmets. On Tuesday, these makeshift units ran laps around the Brotherhood’s main protest site at Rabaa El-Adawiya chanting, “Strength, determination, faith, Morsi’s men are everywhere!”
Yet far from projecting strength, the existence of these units only reinforces Morsi’s utter powerlessness. Moreover, the fact that some of the would-be combatants are armed with tree branches gives the entire operation a certain Lord of the Flies quality. But more importantly, these units—and the Brotherhood’s protests more broadly—are completely outnumbered given the massiveness of the opposition’s outpouring. So while violence is inevitable given what’s at stake for the Brotherhood, it will be hard for Morsi’s allies to leverage the kind of violence that ends the protests and thereby saves his presidency.
Shiraz Maher compares Egypt to Pakistan:
In many respects the country is beginning to resemble the failures of Pakistan. Its civic institutions are weak and, where functioning, are threadworn and riddled with corruption. The country itself is also deeply divided, fractured between urban elites and the rural poor, divided between secularists and religious fanatics.
Transcending all this is the army. Seen as a truly national institution that protects both the country and its people, the armed forces operate beyond the law, are unaccountable, and exercise greater power than the civilian administrations they ostensibly serve. A Zogby poll conducted in May revealed that the Egyptian army’s approval rating stood at 94 percent while Mursi’s had slumped to just 28.
Dalia Ziad comes out in favor of the military:
The people trust the military more than they trust any other institution in the country. This is partly because of the military’s historical legacy that has left it as the strongest in the region. Another important reason is that military officers, who are very much part of the fabric of the country, are very patriotic and loyal to no one but Egypt. Much of this is because the military has sustained a professionalism that has allowed it to be independent in making its own decisions. The interests of the military are not dependent on the interests of the regime or any supreme authority in Egypt.
That is why it was easy for the military to abandon Mubarak in 2011 in favor of the people, something that the police, for example, could not do because their existence relied heavily on the existence of the then regime. Mubarak’s Egypt was not a military state: rather it was a police state that abused the armed power of the police to fasten the regime’s grip on the neck of the opposition.
The Lede is live-blogging the situation. Recent updates on the Dish here and here.
The Dish 