Possibly the least surprising development in the news lately has been Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s self-awarded promotion to dictator.
Morsi insists he’s not a dictator, as dictators always do, but with his recent decree that he can impose any law of his choosing on his people without any judicial constraint he meets any definition of the term. The decree has not been universally popular in Egypt, of course, with the more independent-minded judges voicing their disapproval in strongly worded letters, businessmen signaling their concerns with a disastrous drop in what’s left of the national economy, and the more recalcitrant citizens expressing their disdain with the traditional Egyptian rioting in Tahrir Square. None of it is likely to matter, though, as strongly worded letters have little effect on dictators, like all Islamists he cares just as little about economics, and his backers in the powerful Muslim Brotherhood will soon be sending a sufficient number of pro-dictatorship rioters to win the inevitable street brawls.
All of which was completely predictable. Morsi is a product of the Muslim Brotherhood, after all, and that organization has never made a secret that it prefers a religious dictatorship based on Islamic law to democracy. That Morsi and his allies would seek absolute power was not only predictable, it was widely predicted by numerous pundits and publications including this one.
It is alarming, therefore, that so many smart and powerful people failed to see it coming. The elite media all celebrated the demonstrations that unseated the unsavory but generally friendly dictator Hosni Mubarak and brought Morsi to power as an “Arab Spring” of democracy and modernity, even as one of their correspondents was being gang-raped by the mob of alleged democrats and modernists. Credentialed experts with the ear of the president assured that the Muslim Brotherhood were really a very reasonable bunch with democratic instincts, even though its motto states that “Allah is our objective, the Koran is our law, the Prophet is our leader, Jihad is our way, and death for the sake of All is the highest of our aspirations.” Apparently susceptible to such bad advice, President Obama called for Mubarak’s resignation despite warning that the Muslim Brotherhood would assume his power and more recently bolstered Morsi’s standing in the Islamic world by hailing his role in brokering a temporary and tactical cease-fire in Hamas’ terror war against Israel.
Which is not to say that anybody in America could have sustained Mubarak’s unpopular reign forever, or prevented the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendancy, but surely it would not have been too much to ask that they not ushered things along. Propping up Mubarak long enough to have helped Egypt’s pro-democracy forces might have worked, and even if it didn’t the Islamists wouldn’t enjoy the legitimacy of western support.
An Islamist Egypt is going to be an ongoing problem not only for the brutalized citizens of that unfortunate country but also for the rest of the world.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 