Egypt 2007-2016 (merged thread)

[carl]

Do you think it might go the way of Algeria, sort of? I know the people and the geography are vastly different but what I mean is going the way of Algeria in the sense of the Islamists who lost their power going the insurgency route.

[jcustis]

Perhaps. I do not fully understand their agenda or allegiances, but there are militants in the Sinai who give the security apparatus problems. Cairo is different terrain though.
The Mubarak regime had a significant apparatus to watch and control those discontents, so I think it would be hard for any hardline, radical opponents to take action without it ratcheting up to pretty open conflicy very quickly. Egypt is not some burgeoning state. Its security forces would be fairly capable of controlling a critical situation unless you're talking about a very wide sort of insurgency, which I do not see this expanding to.

I will say this though...Egypt's current state of affairs is a complex problem and the issues are not black and white. What's even more interesting is the fact that you won't be able to pull tribal identity out of the average man on the street like you might an Afghan farmer from Helmand or Khandahar.

[davidbfpo]

Jcustis remarked in Post 26 partly about:

We can pick up a few clues of the nature of the response, from the footage and stills that are out there of the crack down. One specific one that comes to mind are the sequence of pics of the armored 4-wheel vehicle spilling off of the 4-story overpass.

I've only seen headlines about this incident, so EA Worldview provide a very short video clip before the 'spilling off' and this commentary:

One of the dramatic stories during Wednesday’s mass killings in Egypt was that anti-regime protesters had pushed a police vehicle off a bridge in a Cairo suburb of Nasr City, near the sit-in that was being attacked by security forces.

We featured a picture of the incident, which supposedly killed several officers, and video which showed the vehicle on the ground as clashes raged around it.

This morning, however, a video has been posted which appears to give a very different version of the event — amid congestion on the 6 October Bridge in Nasr City, the police vehicle hits a bus. It then reverses and skids off the bridge.

While men are following the police van as it backs up, they are not close enough to have “pushed” the vehicle.

Link:http://eaworldview.com/2013/08/egypt...-on-wednesday/

[TheCurmudgeon]

I thought this might be appropriate here too ...

From and article entitled "Egypt’s Military: Doing What Germany’s Should Have Done in 1933"

Sudanese writer Al-Hajj Warraq, got it exactly right in an Egyptian television interview last year. He said:

Democracy is about more than just the ballot box. Democracy is a culture engraved upon the cerebral box before it is the ballot box. One cannot talk about freedom in the absence of free minds. The tragedy of the Arab Spring is that when the tyrannical regimes fell, the fruits were reaped by movements that preach closed-mindedness, rather than free thinking. The outcome will be regimes that are worse than those that were toppled.

Apparently, the Egyptian people – at least the 30 million who were in the streets marching against Morsi – agreed with him.

[jcustis]

David,

There is video out now from a ground level POV, and itt is chilling to watch the vehicle slam to the ground on its roof. The occupants likely died on impact.

I never believed the descriptions that the crowd pushed it off the bridge. Bad driving was of course the less obvious cause.

[Bob's World]

Revolution is the ugliest, most brutal form of democracy. All the more reason for governments to open legal venues to their people to express their political discontent. This is the essence of our own bill of rights. But Kings cling to power tightly, typically only turning loose of total control as their head strikes the cobblestones.

[davidbfpo]

Egyptian police General Amr in an interview:

We are 90 million Egyptians and there are only 3 million Muslim Brotherhood We need six months for. liquidate or imprison all this is not a problem, as we have already done in the 1990s.

Link to Le Monde, French newspaper, to a IMO badly structured article, which includes this quote:http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/articl...3103_3212.html

No wonder some speculate the 'Algerian model' maybe followed:http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/midd...erian-playbook