Oy veh, Egypt

The facts are reasonably clear:  the army is attacking demonstrators who want to remove it from power.  The demonstrators, focused for the last couple of days on the cabinet office that houses the army’s recently appointed civilian but retrograde government, lack nonviolent discipline.  Somehow the notion has grown that hurling stones and Molotov cocktails is consistent with nonviolence.  It isn’t.  It incites responses in kind (but amplified in severity) from the security forces and limits the number of people who will join in street protests.  The protesters may not cause a lot of harm to the soldiers, but they are doing serious damage to their cause.  A lot of Egyptians either support the army or just want the disorder to stop.

Stepping back from daily events, the main political tug of war is between the Muslim Brotherhood (now represented politically by the Freedom and Justice Party, or FJP) and the military.  The FJP is doing well in Egypt’s ongoing parliamentary elections.  But it will likely need allies to get over 50% of the seats and in any event won’t want to try to govern on its own.  It will find coalition partners either among the more extreme Islamists (the Salafists are also doing well, though not as well as originally imagined) or among the non-Islamists.  But the non-Islamists are fractious.  Some will even prefer to keep the army in power–or at least use it to limit the sway of the Islamists–rather than ally with the the FJP.

The Americans are leaning on the army to transfer power to civilians as soon as possible.  The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is no doubt responding that they would like to do so but cannot in an atmosphere of disorder that extremists the Americans don’t like might exploit.  When the complicated elections conclude in mid-January, the FJP–disciplined and well-organized–will offer itself as the logical and democratically validated alternative.  But the parliament whose majority the FJP is likely to lead will have few powers–the main one is to choose a committee that will write a new constitution.  Whether the army will allow it to do even that without severe constraints is not clear.  Presidential elections are due by next July.

Egypt will be fortunate to get that far without further upheavals.  There is no guarantee the revolution of 2011 will end in a democracy.  The demonstrators made a profound errorentrusting their fate to the army, which is using its power to preserve is prerogatives and limit Islamist gains.  As distasteful as it may be, the best bet for non-Islamists now is to throw in their lot with the Islamists, aiming to establish a truly democratic framework that will enable them eventually to gain power after a period of Islamist rule.  But I know from the Middle East Institute conference session at which Esraa Abdel Fattah, one of the originators of the April 6 Movement that sparked Egypt’s revolution, spoke last month how deep the distrust and distaste for the Islamists is.

I don’t envy the difficult choices that Egyptians now have to make.  The euphoria of deposing Hosni Mubarak has long since evaporated.  They are now engaged in a long, hard slog that has no better than even odds of coming out in a truly democratic direction.  Even in the best of circumstances, that will take years more to create.  Meanwhile the economy is deteriorating, religious and other social divisions are exacerbating, and extremists are recruiting.  The country desperately needs improved leadership, more money and a healthy dose of common sense.  It is unlikely to get any of those in time.