“The streets seethe with protests and government ministers are on the run or in jail, but since the military ousted President Mohammed Morsi, life has somehow gotten better for many people across Egypt: Gas lines have disappeared, power cuts have stopped and the police have returned to the street. The seemingly miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 played a significant role — intentionally or not — in undermining the overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Morsi. And as the interim government struggles to unite a divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi’s supporters say the sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Morsi fail. Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and frustration. “This was preparing for the coup,”……………”

So electricity became sporadic in the heat of summer. Gas became scare with long lines forming. The police vanished so that looting, gang-rapes, and sectarian lynching went unpunished. Mubarak-appointed courts slowed things down. Mubarak’s bureaucrats messed things up. Mubarak’s generals hinted at taking action. Egypt’s secularists and funny liberals sided with Mubarak’s bureaucracy, his generals, and his Salafist allies against the elected Muslim brotherhood regime. Promises of Persian Gulf aid went unfulfilled. All waiting for the military coup they plotted.
After the fact, the US State Department yesterday announced that the Morsi regime was not, repeat not, democratic. As if the Saudi and UAE regimes that aided and abetted and now pay for the coup are democratic. How convenient.
Well, I suspect they got their wishes. The old regime is back, the so-called revolution of 2011 has been annulled by a coalition of Mubarak feloul, Mubark’s court, Mubarak’s military, secular liberals, Salafis, and Persian Gulf petroleum princes and absolute tribal potentates.
One Egyptian blogger naively tweeted “are the feloul that strong as this Times article claims?“. You bet they are.
Egypt’s generals now rule unquestionably supreme, and will continue to do so whoever is allowed by the military to “win” the next elections.

Cheers
mhg

       

“Egyptian state media have closed ranks in support of the military and its version of the removal of President Mohamed Morsi as well as Monday’s killing of 55 supporters of the deposed Islamist leader in a shooting at a protest in Cairo. In an atmosphere of extreme polarisation, the country’s state and many independent news organisations are now solidly backing the interim president Adly Mansour, who was installed by the army last week. TV channels sympathetic to Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood have been shut down. Foreign media outfits perceived as being sympathetic to Islamists are being attacked, with CNN and al-Jazeera TV singled out for hostility. The US news network has been vilified by protesters as being pro-Brotherhood, partly because it described the military’s move as a coup. In one very public display, al-Jazeera Arabic………………”

Egypt has changed in more than one way over the past week. During the Morsi term, Egyptian media and internet bloggers and social media made a lot of fun of Morsi and the Muslim brotherhood. Rightly so. They called him and his party all kinds of names and epithets: kharoof, “sheep” was one of their favorites, and they were not punished. Nowadays, if you stick your tongue at a photograph of General Sisi you could get beaten up, lynched, or worse. Egyptian media has fallen in line: they are like all beginning to resemble state media now. The Egyptian army, which lost almost every one of its wars with the possible exception of the War on Pigs in 2009, is treated like a bunch of gods. That is because it controls all political power and so much of the economy and it does not hesitate to wield both against the national interest in order to stay in power.
The generals in Egypt are almost like the ayatollahs in Iran. As long as Egyptians revere the generals, Egypt will not achieve democracy.

Cheers
mhg