The latest round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians seems to be winding down with incoming rockets, helicopter gunships, fighter bombers and drones being replaced by the battle to control perceptions of who is right and wrong, who has gained and lost. The oft cited “fog of war” is being replaced by an equally opaque “mist of spin.”
Speculation about short and long term consequences of events can be pretty risky so I hope no one drags these notes up in six months or a year. Nonetheless, there are some things that I think can be said about what might be some implications for both the short and longer range.
Trying to describe events inevitably involves selectivity and some implicit bias. But let’s start with an outline anyway.
After Operation Cast Lead, the 2008 Israeli air and ground incursion into Gaza, Hamas [click here for a quick primer on Hamas and Gaza] declared a unilateral cease fire. A couple of weeks ago Hamas announced that it was ending it and small groups began launching rockets into southern Israel.
The initial Israeli response was the usual sort of tit for tat air strike that targeted a senior Hamas military commander.
But this series of attacks differed in two ways from the past. First, in addition to the short range rockets launched from Gaza of the past – not much more than big mortar shells with a range of just a few miles pointed in the general direction of some village in southern Israel – there were now longer range rockets, traveling up to 40 or 50 miles and launched in the general direction of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, threatening and personally involving the majority of the population of Israel. The second significant difference was the increasing deployment by Israel of batteries of anti-rocket missiles, the weapons system code named Iron Dome.
In the face of an increasing barrage of rockets and increasing public outcry, Israel expanded its response to include hundreds of air strikes aimed at people suspected of launching rockets, suspected storage depots for rockets and public buildings in Gaza, including the parliament building. And Israel made very public preparations for a ground assault on Gaza, a clear threat of major escalation if nothing changed.
Three days of negotiations led by Egyptian President Morsy culminated in the announcement of a cease fire by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Egyptian foreign minister Mohamed Kamel Amr. While it is not clear who promised what to whom, the agreement had the necessary ambiguity to permit both Israel and Hamas to declare that they had gotten exactly what they had wanted all along. Continuing negotiations, sponsored by Egypt and the U.S. will probably lead to some real easing of the Israeli blockade in exchange for pledges by Hamas (with assurances from Egypt and the U.S.) to curb rocket launchings.
On one hand there is a great temptation to announce winners and losers after a violent confrontation like this, as if it were a sporting match. (One often gets this odd image of a British announcer noting “Hamas are leading one nil after the first period.”) On the other hand there is the safe academic stance of “it’s too soon to tell.” (As in the probably apocryphal story of the British historian who had decided that the Roman era in Britain had been a generally positive time but it was still too early to tell about the Norman Conquest.) Perhaps we can do something in between.
Implications for the Future.
The Palestinians (click here for a brief overview of Hamas and the Gaza Strip)
Hamas has emerged from this round of violence in a much improved position.
They are widely perceived in the Middle East and elsewhere as winning a military victory against Israel.
They are seen as the undisputed leader of the Palestinian resistance, eclipsing the Fatah led government in Ramallah.
In exchange for promises to end rocket attacks, they seem likely to get major concessions on ending the blockade.
They have emerged as major negotiating partners of the U.S., Egypt, and Israel, even if everyone pretends they aren’t [it’s a stylized drama: offstage U.S. diplomats talk to Israelis; Egyptian officials talk to Hamas. The Americans and Egyptians talk to each other on stage then return to the wings to talk to Israelis and Hamas. After several scenes, the Egyptian and American diplomats announce an agreement and the curtain comes down, with no one having violated the tabu against talking to “those people.”]
The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, dominated by Fatah and ostensibly the government of both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has lost ground in its struggle with Hamas. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Abbas will try to present United Nations recognition of the Palestinians as a “non-member” state as a major victory.
Israel
If the primary goal of the attacks on Gaza was to stop the rocket attacks once and for all, I think it is fair to say that the operation was not very successful. There will be a period of calm during which the Hamas authorities will monitor the border more carefully and the smuggling of rockets and other weaponry will continue at a reduced pace. But ultimately the authorities in Gaza cannot completely control the bands of fighters who operate out of the refugee camps and slums of Gaza City and Rafah. At some point I think the rockets will resume. However, the lull in attacks will give Israel time to expand the deployment of the Iron Dome system which will further reduce the effectiveness of the rockets.
The violent confrontation with Hamas will play a role in the election next January but it is too early to say what that will be. Much may depend on whether people come to see the latest military adventure as a necessary step to defend civilians or see it as a mistake flowing from a larger reliance on military solutions to the problems posed by the situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In the longer run, it is possible that this will mark a turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Many observers believe that the status quo [add link] is unsustainable. The optimists wonder if 1973 is a precedent. In 1973 Egypt launched a surprise attack across the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula, driving Israeli forces back. After several days of fierce fighting, Israel gained the upper hand and, regaining all the territory it had lost and refraining from totally destroying the Egyptian army only because of the intervention of the United States and Soviet Union through UN mediated peace talks. But Anwar Sadat and other Arab leaders were able to portray the initial success as a great victory that shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility and Israeli confidence in their invulnerability to attack was shaken. The result was Sadat’s daring proposal for peace talks, met by Menachim Begin’s equally bold acceptance, that led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. The fact that Hamas and other Palestinian voices are calling their recent battle a victory and the apparent psychological effect of the otherwise ineffective rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Israeli public opinion may make both sides amenable to serious talks about their political future. That would be extremely unlikely to involve some dramatic breakthrough, but continuing discussions mediated by Egypt and the United Sates might be a way forward.
I do not think this has been another mindless spasm of violence in an interminable clash of people who have always hated each other. Nor do I think this is the turning point so often fervently sought that will lead to peace. But it may prove to be a small but significant step in the right direction.
Egypt
Because of its 1973 peace treaty with Israel and physical proximity to the Gaza Strip, Egypt has always been a major player. There were some worries in Israel and elsewhere that the replacement of Mubarak by Mohamed Morsy would mean a radical tilt towards groups like Hamas and hostility to Israel. But Egyptian diplomats proved both adept and reliable partners with the U.S. in achieving a cease fire. Egypt has maintained, if not actually improved, its position as an indispensable participant in whatever the future holds.
The United States
The United States, like Egypt, reasserted its status as an indispensable player. In fact I think the U.S. improved its position with both Egypt and Israel. Relations with the new Egyptian regime have not always been smooth. The fear that Egypt would tilt toward radical Islamists like Hamas and some worrying signs that President Morsy is more interested in building a regime based on political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood than one that is committed to democracy and inclusion of both secular Egyptians and Coptic Christians have caused some bumps in the road in the past year. Establishing an effective working partnership to end the violence in Gaza was a significant positive step. Egypt needs a good working relationship with the United States for economic support and the United States needs a good working relationship with Egypt for diplomatic and strategic reasons.
The recent events have also affected the U.S.-Israeli relationship. After the abject failure of Obama’s effort at peace making, the primary issue between the U.S. and Israel has been Iran, with the Israeli government trying to push the U.S. into a much more aggressive stance toward Tehran and the U.S. working hard to prevent a unilateral Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. It is an open secret that Obama and Netanyahu do not like each other and Netanyahu rather openly rooted for a Romney victory. (Netanyahu’s social and economic conservative views plus his personal liking for Romney led one commentator to note that Netanyahu speaks English with a Republican accent.) Republicans tried to make Obama’s difficult relationship with Netanyahu a campaign issue. Obama’s reelection victory and the fighting in Gaza changed all that. Netanyahu’s political opponents in Israel began to openly criticize him for alienating the President and sounding far too hawkish on Iran. Instead of the U.S. trying to persuade Israel to exercise restraint, the Israelis now found themselves asking the U.S. for help.
I think it is very clear that the real winners here are the ordinary people of the Gaza Strip because the blockade will be eased and their lives will be improved. We can only hope that there will be other positive results.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Sketch of Hamas and the Gaza Strip
Quick reminder of who Hamas is ... There are two physically separated areas where the Palestinians live: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The West Bank (of the Jordan river) lies between Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan in the Jordan River valley. It has some fertile agricultural land, a relatively well educated population, some developed cities such as Ramallah, and a small manufacturing base. The Gaza Strip is a narrow sliver of land on the Sinai peninsula between Israel and Egypt. Gaza City is the largest city but other significant areas include Rafah and several refugee camps. Rafah has been a center of trade and commerce for centuries. The Gaza Strip was created by the 1948 armistice between Israel and Egypt and occupied by Israel in the Six Day war of 1967 Egypt regained control in 1973. When the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt set formal boundaries, the border split the city of Rafah in half.
When the PLO, led by Yasir Arafat, established the Palestinian Authority, a government with headquarters in Ramallah (West Bank), there was another Palestinian movement already rooted in the Gaza Strip. Hamas had developed out of the Muslim Brotherhood and become the leading source of charity, health care and even education for the residents of Gaza City, especially the poor.
Attempts by the dominant political faction in the West Bank and Palestinian Authority, Fatah, to establish the government’s control over Gaza ran into local resistance. When Palestinians voted in legislative elections in 2006, Fatah easily won in the West Bank but Hamas surprised most observers by winning a large majority of parliamentary seats in Gaza.
Hamas is a self-defined hard line Islamist party whose leaders have been noted for piety, Koranic knowledge, and a public refusal to acknowledge Israel but not political or administrative skills. The majority of Gazans are not Islamists, nor in favor of a socially conservative, restrictive government and more interested in economic development than an aggressive stance toward Israel, so one might ask, “What were they thinking?”
I think you can understand Hamas victory in 2006 as a neat case of strategic voting gone badly awry. The Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority officials and bureaucrats in Gaza were notorious for being high handedly dictatorial and seriously corrupt. It is plausible to think that many people in Gaza felt that they did not want a Hamas led government but they wanted to send a message to the folks in Ramallah to stop the stealing and pay attention to the needs of the people. Since they assumed that Fatah would win the election, they felt free to vote for Hamas as a protest against the bad behavior of Fatah ... and enough people made that calculation so that they ended up electing Hamas. A year later tension between Fatah in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza erupted into civil war and the Palestinian Authority was kicked out of Gaza. Technically the government in Ramallah is the government of Gaza, too, but the reality is different.
In the past 6 years Hamas has been unable to improve the economic condition of the people of Gaza, has tried to impose unpopular social restrictions and allowed private militias and various radical groups to proliferate. Hamas’ unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to control small bands bent on violence lead to a series of short range rocket attacks on Israeli towns within a few miles of the border. The result was the 2008-9 military operation code named “Cast Lead” that saw massive Israeli air power and a punishing ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. After inflicting serious casualties on both armed groups and ordinary civilians and substantial damage to both government and private buildings, the Israelis withdraw under international pressure and instituted a stringent blockade on the Gaza Strip. Hamas rule has become increasingly authoritarian and restrictive. A key factor in the economic stagnation in Gaza and the increasing frustration of the people has been the Israeli blockade of the territory, which has made importing and exporting almost everything -- including medicine and fuel oil to power electrical generators-- nearly impossible. In light of growing international pressure to deal with the hardships caused by the blockade, the government of Israel has begun to allow some material into Gaza.
Far more important than the trickle of goods allowed in by Israel has been the elaborate and sophisticated smuggling networks that have grown up in Gaza, featuring tunnels deep beneath the desert running from the city of Rafah in Gaza into the Sinai desert. After the 2006 Hamas electoral victory Israel imposed a blockade of the few border crossings into Gaza and restrictions on the use of the waters off the coast of Gaza. These restrictions were tightened even further after the 2008-9 violence. For reasons of its own, Egypt has cooperated with the Israeli blockade and closed the crossing at Rafah. In response, enterprising Gazans have dug a series of tunnels from their side of Rafah under the border into Egypt. Despite periodic raids by the Israeli air force to bomb tunnels and the dangers of cave ins from haphazard construction , the tunnels have made life in Gaza bearable. In addition to food, fuel and building materials, smugglers have done a brisk trade in weapons, especially the short range devices that can be launched by a couple of people and aimed in the general direction of Israeli settlements. In the past few weeks the arsenals have included rockets made in Iran that have a 40 mile range and are able to reach Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Israel has had a difficult enough time negotiating with Arafat and then his successor in the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas has repeatedly denied Israel’s right to exist and supported violence such as rocket attacks on civilians. The U.S. and most of Western Europe have followed Israel’s lead and declared Hamas a “terrorist” organization. While “terrorist” is as much as political term for people you really dislike as it is a term with an explicit empirical basis, the word has political and legal consequences. A major one is that governments resolutely claim they don’t negotiate with terrorists and U.S. law prohibits American citizens and diplomats from dealing with terrorist organizations.
When the PLO, led by Yasir Arafat, established the Palestinian Authority, a government with headquarters in Ramallah (West Bank), there was another Palestinian movement already rooted in the Gaza Strip. Hamas had developed out of the Muslim Brotherhood and become the leading source of charity, health care and even education for the residents of Gaza City, especially the poor.
Attempts by the dominant political faction in the West Bank and Palestinian Authority, Fatah, to establish the government’s control over Gaza ran into local resistance. When Palestinians voted in legislative elections in 2006, Fatah easily won in the West Bank but Hamas surprised most observers by winning a large majority of parliamentary seats in Gaza.
Hamas is a self-defined hard line Islamist party whose leaders have been noted for piety, Koranic knowledge, and a public refusal to acknowledge Israel but not political or administrative skills. The majority of Gazans are not Islamists, nor in favor of a socially conservative, restrictive government and more interested in economic development than an aggressive stance toward Israel, so one might ask, “What were they thinking?”
I think you can understand Hamas victory in 2006 as a neat case of strategic voting gone badly awry. The Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority officials and bureaucrats in Gaza were notorious for being high handedly dictatorial and seriously corrupt. It is plausible to think that many people in Gaza felt that they did not want a Hamas led government but they wanted to send a message to the folks in Ramallah to stop the stealing and pay attention to the needs of the people. Since they assumed that Fatah would win the election, they felt free to vote for Hamas as a protest against the bad behavior of Fatah ... and enough people made that calculation so that they ended up electing Hamas. A year later tension between Fatah in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza erupted into civil war and the Palestinian Authority was kicked out of Gaza. Technically the government in Ramallah is the government of Gaza, too, but the reality is different.
In the past 6 years Hamas has been unable to improve the economic condition of the people of Gaza, has tried to impose unpopular social restrictions and allowed private militias and various radical groups to proliferate. Hamas’ unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to control small bands bent on violence lead to a series of short range rocket attacks on Israeli towns within a few miles of the border. The result was the 2008-9 military operation code named “Cast Lead” that saw massive Israeli air power and a punishing ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. After inflicting serious casualties on both armed groups and ordinary civilians and substantial damage to both government and private buildings, the Israelis withdraw under international pressure and instituted a stringent blockade on the Gaza Strip. Hamas rule has become increasingly authoritarian and restrictive. A key factor in the economic stagnation in Gaza and the increasing frustration of the people has been the Israeli blockade of the territory, which has made importing and exporting almost everything -- including medicine and fuel oil to power electrical generators-- nearly impossible. In light of growing international pressure to deal with the hardships caused by the blockade, the government of Israel has begun to allow some material into Gaza.
Far more important than the trickle of goods allowed in by Israel has been the elaborate and sophisticated smuggling networks that have grown up in Gaza, featuring tunnels deep beneath the desert running from the city of Rafah in Gaza into the Sinai desert. After the 2006 Hamas electoral victory Israel imposed a blockade of the few border crossings into Gaza and restrictions on the use of the waters off the coast of Gaza. These restrictions were tightened even further after the 2008-9 violence. For reasons of its own, Egypt has cooperated with the Israeli blockade and closed the crossing at Rafah. In response, enterprising Gazans have dug a series of tunnels from their side of Rafah under the border into Egypt. Despite periodic raids by the Israeli air force to bomb tunnels and the dangers of cave ins from haphazard construction , the tunnels have made life in Gaza bearable. In addition to food, fuel and building materials, smugglers have done a brisk trade in weapons, especially the short range devices that can be launched by a couple of people and aimed in the general direction of Israeli settlements. In the past few weeks the arsenals have included rockets made in Iran that have a 40 mile range and are able to reach Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Israel has had a difficult enough time negotiating with Arafat and then his successor in the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas has repeatedly denied Israel’s right to exist and supported violence such as rocket attacks on civilians. The U.S. and most of Western Europe have followed Israel’s lead and declared Hamas a “terrorist” organization. While “terrorist” is as much as political term for people you really dislike as it is a term with an explicit empirical basis, the word has political and legal consequences. A major one is that governments resolutely claim they don’t negotiate with terrorists and U.S. law prohibits American citizens and diplomats from dealing with terrorist organizations.
Iron Dome
The Iron Dome system was developed by an Israeli defense contractor building, in part, on engineering and software advances from the U.S. Star Wars system.
[While the technology for linking radar to detect and track intercontinental missiles and the interceptor rockets that are meant to blast off and destroy the incoming warhead in outer space has yet to work as hoped (every test so far has loosely defined “success” using the horseshoe and dancing principle: close counts) knocking down slow moving short range rockets is easier. ]
The Iron Dome equipment is a major advance over the Patriot missile system that the U.S. developed in the late 1980s and first deployed against Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1990 Gulf War. By some accounts Iron Dome can destroy between 80 and 90% of its targets.
This has created an interesting “good news/bad news” situation. The good news is that most of the rockets aimed southern Israeli towns and the handful of longer range rockets fired at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv can be shot down. The bad news is 1) that is scant comfort to the citizens of those towns when the 10-20% that make it through blow up down the street; and 2) it weakens the perception of balance and proportionality between the harm done by Gaza launched rockets and the scope and severity of the Israeli response.
[While the technology for linking radar to detect and track intercontinental missiles and the interceptor rockets that are meant to blast off and destroy the incoming warhead in outer space has yet to work as hoped (every test so far has loosely defined “success” using the horseshoe and dancing principle: close counts) knocking down slow moving short range rockets is easier. ]
The Iron Dome equipment is a major advance over the Patriot missile system that the U.S. developed in the late 1980s and first deployed against Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1990 Gulf War. By some accounts Iron Dome can destroy between 80 and 90% of its targets.
This has created an interesting “good news/bad news” situation. The good news is that most of the rockets aimed southern Israeli towns and the handful of longer range rockets fired at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv can be shot down. The bad news is 1) that is scant comfort to the citizens of those towns when the 10-20% that make it through blow up down the street; and 2) it weakens the perception of balance and proportionality between the harm done by Gaza launched rockets and the scope and severity of the Israeli response.
Notes On the West Bank and Gaza
(Angels fear to tread in this area, but we’ll rush in anyway. The language used to discuss the situation is highly politicized. There are some Israelis who continue to refer to this area as Judea and Samaria and others who prefer “administered territories.” This is not idle word play. How you describe the situation forces you to take sides on some central issues.)
The status quo in the West Bank includes Palestinian governance of some areas and occupation and control of other areas by the Israel Defense Forces. The occupation is expensive and breeds resentment among West Bank Palestinians. There is a small but growing movement in Israel to call attention to the psychological toll of occupation duty on soldiers.
The West Bank is also home to over 300,000 Israeli citizens. Some of the settlements are suburbs of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem drawing inhabitants with subsidized housing and typical suburban amenities. Others are fortified camps surrounded by Palestinian farms and villages, created by young men and women, often recent immigrants to Israel from Russia or the United States, who are ideologically and religiously motivated to expand the Jewish presence. Some of the settlements are legal under Israeli law; some are not. Most experts consider them illegal under international law. The push for settlements in the West Bank began shortly after Israel occupied the area during the Six Day War of 1967. A network of Jewish settlements in the territories was promoted as a way of creating “facts on the ground” that would make it impossible to ever withdraw completely to the old borders of Israel.
The more ideologically and religiously motivated settlers are an important force supporting conservative parties that have (until very recently) been critical components of the Netanyahu government’s right of center majority coalition. Some of them have been at the center of controversial “price tag” assaults on Palestinian mosques, olive groves and villages. On a few occasions the government of Israel has moved to forcibly liquidate an illegal settlement. The images of Israeli soldiers and police officers dragging Jews from their homes broadcast on the TV news have disturbed many Israelis.
The growing settler based economy in the West Bank has become the target of an international campaign, especially in Western Europe. Israeli owned companies located in the West Bank settlements and Israeli companies that get components or materials from firms in the settlements stamp their goods “Made in Israel.” Some of the protestors want products relabelled to reflect their settlement origins; others want them banned from altogether.
Despite the problems posed by the occupation and the vagaries of politics, West Bank Palestinians have seen significant economic improvement in the past decade. The opposite is true in Gaza.
Particularly after the economic pressures exerted by Israel and foreign governments after the Hamas electoral victory in 2006 and de facto civil war with Fath in 2007, the Gaza economy has regressed and become almost totally dependent on UN humanitarian support for the refugee camps and smuggling.
Hamas leaders have not proven particularly adept at governance and some are now being accused of the same kind of corruption and high handedness that led to the rejection of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.
The status quo in the West Bank includes Palestinian governance of some areas and occupation and control of other areas by the Israel Defense Forces. The occupation is expensive and breeds resentment among West Bank Palestinians. There is a small but growing movement in Israel to call attention to the psychological toll of occupation duty on soldiers.
The West Bank is also home to over 300,000 Israeli citizens. Some of the settlements are suburbs of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem drawing inhabitants with subsidized housing and typical suburban amenities. Others are fortified camps surrounded by Palestinian farms and villages, created by young men and women, often recent immigrants to Israel from Russia or the United States, who are ideologically and religiously motivated to expand the Jewish presence. Some of the settlements are legal under Israeli law; some are not. Most experts consider them illegal under international law. The push for settlements in the West Bank began shortly after Israel occupied the area during the Six Day War of 1967. A network of Jewish settlements in the territories was promoted as a way of creating “facts on the ground” that would make it impossible to ever withdraw completely to the old borders of Israel.
The more ideologically and religiously motivated settlers are an important force supporting conservative parties that have (until very recently) been critical components of the Netanyahu government’s right of center majority coalition. Some of them have been at the center of controversial “price tag” assaults on Palestinian mosques, olive groves and villages. On a few occasions the government of Israel has moved to forcibly liquidate an illegal settlement. The images of Israeli soldiers and police officers dragging Jews from their homes broadcast on the TV news have disturbed many Israelis.
The growing settler based economy in the West Bank has become the target of an international campaign, especially in Western Europe. Israeli owned companies located in the West Bank settlements and Israeli companies that get components or materials from firms in the settlements stamp their goods “Made in Israel.” Some of the protestors want products relabelled to reflect their settlement origins; others want them banned from altogether.
Despite the problems posed by the occupation and the vagaries of politics, West Bank Palestinians have seen significant economic improvement in the past decade. The opposite is true in Gaza.
Particularly after the economic pressures exerted by Israel and foreign governments after the Hamas electoral victory in 2006 and de facto civil war with Fath in 2007, the Gaza economy has regressed and become almost totally dependent on UN humanitarian support for the refugee camps and smuggling.
Hamas leaders have not proven particularly adept at governance and some are now being accused of the same kind of corruption and high handedness that led to the rejection of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Power To The People?
Foreign policy will be the focus when Romney and Obama square off in their third debate on October 22. We will undoubtedly hear a good deal about American power, whether we have enough, use it wisely, or are losing it to China. And it is highly likely we’ll hear about hard power and soft power. As you read commentaries on foreign policy and world politics, and listen to everyday conversations, you’ll begin to sense that there seems to be two quite different meanings of the seemingly simple idea of power. Getting power right is not just important for the sake of clarity and precision in analysis but it has immense practical implications. You are much more likely to wield power effectively if you understand how it works. That is as true in everyday life as it is on the world stage.
Sometimes we talk as if power were like money in the bank. And sometimes we recognize that the most useful meaning of power is the ability to get somebody to do something they would not have done otherwise. (In Political Science jargon the someone who is trying to change behavior is often labeled the initiator and the party who is on the receiving end is the target.)
“Power comes from the barrel of a gun.” (Mao Tse Tung)
But I guess Gandhi didn’t get Mao’s memo. And ousting Imperial England from India was a much bigger accomplishment than ousting the corrupt and incompetent Chung Kai Shek regime.
“The United States is the most powerful country in the world.”
But if “most powerful” means the U.S. will always dominate, I can think of a whole raft of folks who didn’t get this memo, from Fidel Castro, to the government of Iraq, to the Canadians.
If you watch people or countries interacting, an important question is who is going to get what they want. (Who is going to get someone to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise.) Just looking at the resources each side has isn’t very helpful for three reasons.
1) Not all of your resources are available to be used in a given situation.
Close your eyes and imagine something that – or so it seems -- would make you really happy. Might be the coolest car made, might be a super. big screen HD TV, might be a significant contribution to your favorite charity ... But by the time you pay the mortgage, buy some food, pay utilities and all those other bills, that big pile of money has dwindled to a tiny stack. The U.S. Air Force has about 5600 planes of various types. But they are stationed at close to a hundred different bases in the U.S. and abroad and committed to a multitude of missions. The President can’t just decide to send 100 or planes to bomb someone.
2) Not all of your resources are relevant to a given situation, even if they are available.
I could go up to the checkout counter at the store with a six pack of beer and say, “What ho, my good man. I am Seth Thompson, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University, author of a blog on world politics, and I have a whole semester worth of PowerPoint slides on “power” and I’m not afraid to use them!” And the clerk will yawn and wait for me to hand over the $10 for the beer.
The U.S. has some fairly serious trade dissipates with Canada that we have been unable to resolve. The United States has 450 ICBMs with thermonuclear warheads; Canada has none. But Secretary of State Clinton has not summoned the Canadian ambassador to her office on the seventh floor of the State Department and said, “Listen Jack (his name is really Gary), either you guys stop exporting cheap hogs and logs and stop stealing our fish, or we’ll reduce Ottawa to a smoking pile of ash.”
3) Not all your threats or promises are credible.
As the late Flip Wilson used to say, “A lie is as good as the truth if you can get someone to believe it.” Credibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The credibility of a threat or promise hinges on the extent to which your target believes [1] you have the resources to carry it out; [2] what you’re threatening or promising seems proportional to what you want the target to do (we could nuke Canada but threatening to do it over shipping lumber from British Columbia into the U.S. is incredibly over the top); [3] you have a reputation for making good on your threats or promises.
Couple of side notes: credibility does not demand that you carry out every single threat or promise ... just most of them. And credibility explains why it is rational to carry out a punishment even if the threat has failed to deter someone.
Power is not resources, but resources are relevant to the exercise of power. Anything that might potentially be used to threaten or promise in an attempt to change someone’s behavior is a resource. What matters in a real situation are the resources that are available, relevant and credible: your capabilities. Exercising power, getting someone to do something they would not otherwise have done, depends the initiator’s capabilities compared to the target’s, each side’s goals and each side’s strategy. Back in 1968 some researchers gathered hard data on the military and economic resources of the United States and North Vietnam and fed them into a computer. After whirling and clanking for a while the computer printed out the news that the United States had won the Vietnam war six months earlier.
When people talk about “hard power” they typically mean military resources. “Soft power” usually refers to less tangible things like culture, prestige, and business opportunities. This use of the word “power” is misleading because it equates power and resources. And since military capabilities almost always involve inflicting pain and damage on the target and the other dimensions of resources seem much more useful in making promises or providing rewards, this language runs the risk of reinforcing another misleading notion of power. Some folks talk as if “power” meant coercion, crushing your victim’s will, dragging her or him kicking and screaming to do your bidding, while “persuasion” is the softer, wimpier tactic of asking nicely or incentivising behavior.
By the way, I find it interesting that we offer incentives or encouragement to persuade people we like to do the right thing but resent offering bribes or rewarding bad behavior to persuade people we don’t like. And we find it very easy to punish our enemies but it feels wrong to threaten or punish our friends. It may feel good to be nice to the nice and nasty to the nasty, but it is not good strategy.
So it seems to me that the distinction between “hard” and “soft” power is not only not useful; it is non-sensical. For almost all foreign policy issues, the most effective strategy is going to be a mix of threats and promises. The critical question is what can you use to make threats (if you don’t do what I want, you’ll be sorry) and promises (if you do what I want you’ll be better off) that are large enough and credible enough to convince your target to go along. Question is not rock hard or squishy soft; but, does it work?
All this is more, I think, than a semantic quibble. Thinking clearly and usefully about means in foreign policy is as important as thinking clearly about ends. I find it a little disconcerting that the person we will choose to sit in the Oval Office might not be clear about the tools he’s got to pursue American interests and how to use them.
Sometimes we talk as if power were like money in the bank. And sometimes we recognize that the most useful meaning of power is the ability to get somebody to do something they would not have done otherwise. (In Political Science jargon the someone who is trying to change behavior is often labeled the initiator and the party who is on the receiving end is the target.)
“Power comes from the barrel of a gun.” (Mao Tse Tung)
But I guess Gandhi didn’t get Mao’s memo. And ousting Imperial England from India was a much bigger accomplishment than ousting the corrupt and incompetent Chung Kai Shek regime.
“The United States is the most powerful country in the world.”
But if “most powerful” means the U.S. will always dominate, I can think of a whole raft of folks who didn’t get this memo, from Fidel Castro, to the government of Iraq, to the Canadians.
If you watch people or countries interacting, an important question is who is going to get what they want. (Who is going to get someone to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise.) Just looking at the resources each side has isn’t very helpful for three reasons.
1) Not all of your resources are available to be used in a given situation.
Close your eyes and imagine something that – or so it seems -- would make you really happy. Might be the coolest car made, might be a super. big screen HD TV, might be a significant contribution to your favorite charity ... But by the time you pay the mortgage, buy some food, pay utilities and all those other bills, that big pile of money has dwindled to a tiny stack. The U.S. Air Force has about 5600 planes of various types. But they are stationed at close to a hundred different bases in the U.S. and abroad and committed to a multitude of missions. The President can’t just decide to send 100 or planes to bomb someone.
2) Not all of your resources are relevant to a given situation, even if they are available.
I could go up to the checkout counter at the store with a six pack of beer and say, “What ho, my good man. I am Seth Thompson, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University, author of a blog on world politics, and I have a whole semester worth of PowerPoint slides on “power” and I’m not afraid to use them!” And the clerk will yawn and wait for me to hand over the $10 for the beer.
The U.S. has some fairly serious trade dissipates with Canada that we have been unable to resolve. The United States has 450 ICBMs with thermonuclear warheads; Canada has none. But Secretary of State Clinton has not summoned the Canadian ambassador to her office on the seventh floor of the State Department and said, “Listen Jack (his name is really Gary), either you guys stop exporting cheap hogs and logs and stop stealing our fish, or we’ll reduce Ottawa to a smoking pile of ash.”
3) Not all your threats or promises are credible.
As the late Flip Wilson used to say, “A lie is as good as the truth if you can get someone to believe it.” Credibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The credibility of a threat or promise hinges on the extent to which your target believes [1] you have the resources to carry it out; [2] what you’re threatening or promising seems proportional to what you want the target to do (we could nuke Canada but threatening to do it over shipping lumber from British Columbia into the U.S. is incredibly over the top); [3] you have a reputation for making good on your threats or promises.
Couple of side notes: credibility does not demand that you carry out every single threat or promise ... just most of them. And credibility explains why it is rational to carry out a punishment even if the threat has failed to deter someone.
Power is not resources, but resources are relevant to the exercise of power. Anything that might potentially be used to threaten or promise in an attempt to change someone’s behavior is a resource. What matters in a real situation are the resources that are available, relevant and credible: your capabilities. Exercising power, getting someone to do something they would not otherwise have done, depends the initiator’s capabilities compared to the target’s, each side’s goals and each side’s strategy. Back in 1968 some researchers gathered hard data on the military and economic resources of the United States and North Vietnam and fed them into a computer. After whirling and clanking for a while the computer printed out the news that the United States had won the Vietnam war six months earlier.
When people talk about “hard power” they typically mean military resources. “Soft power” usually refers to less tangible things like culture, prestige, and business opportunities. This use of the word “power” is misleading because it equates power and resources. And since military capabilities almost always involve inflicting pain and damage on the target and the other dimensions of resources seem much more useful in making promises or providing rewards, this language runs the risk of reinforcing another misleading notion of power. Some folks talk as if “power” meant coercion, crushing your victim’s will, dragging her or him kicking and screaming to do your bidding, while “persuasion” is the softer, wimpier tactic of asking nicely or incentivising behavior.
By the way, I find it interesting that we offer incentives or encouragement to persuade people we like to do the right thing but resent offering bribes or rewarding bad behavior to persuade people we don’t like. And we find it very easy to punish our enemies but it feels wrong to threaten or punish our friends. It may feel good to be nice to the nice and nasty to the nasty, but it is not good strategy.
So it seems to me that the distinction between “hard” and “soft” power is not only not useful; it is non-sensical. For almost all foreign policy issues, the most effective strategy is going to be a mix of threats and promises. The critical question is what can you use to make threats (if you don’t do what I want, you’ll be sorry) and promises (if you do what I want you’ll be better off) that are large enough and credible enough to convince your target to go along. Question is not rock hard or squishy soft; but, does it work?
All this is more, I think, than a semantic quibble. Thinking clearly and usefully about means in foreign policy is as important as thinking clearly about ends. I find it a little disconcerting that the person we will choose to sit in the Oval Office might not be clear about the tools he’s got to pursue American interests and how to use them.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Why Are They Mad At Us?
Four Americans killed in a brutal assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
U.S. embassy in Cairo attacked and invaded ... angry anti-American demonstrations in Taher square
Enraged mobs in Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, even India ...
The wave of vehement, often violent, anti-American protests is deeply disturbing and very hard to understand for a lot of people.
Many of us feel betrayed as well as profoundly puzzled. Why are they so mad at us when we didn’t do anything? It wasn’t you and I who made some cheap, tacky movie. We condemn hatred and prejudice and don’t blame an entire group of people for the outrageous actions of a few nut cases. We don’t join murderous mobs or support violent protests. We try to live by our principles and values and try to be tolerant and understanding of other people. We support the right of free speech even for slimeballs and idiots who say disgusting things. So why are they so mad at us?
It’s even harder to take the anger and insults when we shared the joy and exhilaration of the Arab Spring. We were emotionally with the protestors in Tahir Square who brought down the Mubarak dictatorship. We agonize over the innocent casualties of the Syrian civil war and hope that somehow Assad can be ousted. We felt solidarity with the people of Iran in 2009 when their “green revolution” was ruthlessly crushed. We’re on the side of the people ... how can they treat us like enemies?
I do not intend to argue with anyone’s feelings of anger and betrayal. To suggest ways we might understand these events is not, even implicitly, to justify or explain them away. It is not cultural imperialism or insensitive ethnocentrism to say these reactions are way over the top and wrong.
I think there is a real danger that for many of us the positive image of people in the Middle East and elsewhere as being pretty much like us with some understandable difference will be replaced by the dark image of “The Other”: irrational, reactionary, seething with hatred and barely repressed violence. Perhaps some analysis of the politics and psychology involved in this and similar mass reactions will be useful.
Among many possible questions these seem to me to be particularly important:
What are the protests really about?
Who are the protestors (and who isn’t protesting?)
Doesn’t this mean that those who warned us about an Islamist capture of the Arab Spring were right and we are in for a very dark time?
What are the protests about?
To phrase the question that way is lead us on a wild goose chase through the underbrush searching in vain for the “real” reason. The simple answer that goes something like, “people saw or heard about this movie that grossly insulted the Prophet Mohammed and rationally (or irrationally) got very angry” is no help because it can’t explain why almost all the roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world did NOT rush into the streets to chant “Death to America” at the nearest U.S. embassy.
Data from the several waves of the World Values Survey and from the 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims around the world suggest that widely held attitudes toward the West in general and the United States in particular include two sets of ambivalent perceptions. One common dichotomy is the juxtaposition of good American people and bad American government. A second dimension of ambivalence is the evaluation of the material and moral quality of life in the U.S. On the one hand, our technology, material standard of living, political and personal freedoms are admired and applauded and envied; on the other hand our technology and wealth are a reminder (or product) of their comparative backwardness and poverty and our liberty looks more like indulgent license and immorality. The more strongly a person holds the negative half of those dimensions, the more likely rumors of insults to Islam can become symbols that evoke these broader and deeper negative feelings about the U.S. or the West.
“Culture” is a sloppy and slippery term that resists clear or precise definition. Nonetheless, there are three very common elements in the political culture of the Middle East and North Africa that make negative images and attitudes toward the U.S. easier to evoke. Neither is unique to this setting but both seem to be more common here than other parts of the world.
The first element, held with varying degrees of strength, is a sense of being besieged by the outside world. A recurrent theme in both formal education and popular cultured is 1200 years of Christian attempts to contain and thwart Islam and 300 years of oppression by Western imperialism.
The second element in the Middle Eastern political culture is a tendency to see powerful, often malignant forces behind events. “Sh*t Happens” bumper stickers are very rare. It is closer to “common sense”, easier to believe, that there are powerful forces acting behind the scenes to at least permit, if not instigate negative events. Freud was not alone when he said there were no accidents.
The third element is a general and diffuse sense of frustration and disappointment with life. The idea of relative deprivation , the gap between what you feel you’re entitled to and what you have, is pretty well understood in political and social psychology. It is not that people are grindingly poor ... people who are living on the edge of physical survival are not at all easy to mobilize for politics. But people who feel that live has not been fair, that they have less than they deserve, tend to have an (unconscious) reservoir of resentment that can be manipulated and channeled.
So, for those who responded, when the video was described in highly provocative terms it became what could be called a condensation symbol -- an act of event that could tap into one or more underlying, deeper sources of anger and frustration. The protests are about the video and they are about far more.
Who are the protesters?
The analysis above and what we know about this kind of political participation in general would lead us to expect that the majority of participants would be young men who were psychologically available to be mobilized because of their attitudes. An additional factor is social: people who are members of a group, especially a small, face to face group, that shares and reinforces beliefs and attitudes are far more likely to engage in political action.
This emphasis on the fact that the vast majority of protestors have been people who were predisposed to respond to an opportunity to express frustration and discontent becomes even more important for understanding the meaning of their actions when we realize that most of the participants have NOT seen the video but only heard about it from someone else. Only about a quarter of the people in Egypt have access to the internet and, not surprisingly, they’re the wealthier, better educated Egyptian business owners and professionals, along with university students. Except for the students, these are the people least likely to recruited for a large, potentially violent demonstration.
The most critical players in mobilizing demonstrations are the imams. Imams play the same roles that rabbis or ministers do in the U.S., leading religious services and preaching sermons, presiding over marriages and funerals, visiting the sick, offering advice and comfort to the confused and afflicted. Particularly in working class or poor neighborhoods, the mosque is not just where you go on Friday to pray but the center of social and cultural activity. Imams are trained and credentialed by recognized institutions. Some countries, for example Egypt and Iran, have well developed and historically renowned centers for clerical education. As you might expect, the curriculum is narrowly focused on theology and law and heavily imbued with very conservative social values. Other, smaller countries, do not have many locally trained imams and rely on importing imams from abroad. A critical source of foreign trained imams for most of the Middle East and North Africa and, indeed, most of the broader Muslim world, is Saudi Arabia. This is an important factor in understanding why and how mosques can become focal points for mobilizing protests and demonstrations against the U.S. and the West.
As some of the readers already know, Islam in Saudi Arabia has a distinctive tenor. The Wahabbi religious movement that began in the 18th Century was a highly puritanical, deeply fundamentalist reform movement on the Arabian Peninsula. The Wahabbis combined calls for sinners to repent and be saved with the image of Muhammad and his followers as the model of a perfect Islamic society. If life in 19th Century Arabia seemed decadent and sinful to the early Wahabbis; 21st Century Saudi Arabia is even more sinful and immoral. And beyond Saudi Arabia, the world gets worse and worse until one comes to the unimaginable cess pit of the West. Saudi religious authorities feel a positive duty to send Wahabbi trained imams as missionaries to Muslims throughout the world.
I don’t mean to imply that all imams are ignorant of physical and social science, history and geography, or that all imams have a very limited education. But many, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, do have a shallow and simplistic view of the world and little knowledge about anything outside their immediate experience.
Islam is not a hierarchical religion with a structure of authority. There is no equivalent of the Pope or the Southern Baptist Convention that provides authoritative guidance to members of a particular group. There are distinctions among imams, based on perceived knowledge of law and theology, and the imam of the local mosque will look to a well known and respected man whose views he finds compatible for direction and leadership. Relationships among those perceived leading imams can often be highly competitive and feature a certain amount of jockeying for position and efforts to maintain and expand one’s circle of followers.
Here is a central dynamic in protests. Imams who are leaders of other imams can seize upon an event or person, frame it as a cause for great concern or celebration, and use it to rally and energize their followers. (Huge caveat: the fact that this is what it looks like to you and me as an observer does NOT mean that people are necessarily cynical manipulators rather than honest and sincere interpreters of reality as they see it.)
Thus an event like the notorious 12 minute YouTube video or the news reports earlier of American soldiers (accidently) defiling Korans, or the wacky Florida pastor’s promise of a Koranic bonfire, can be presented as a mobilizing symbol through the social dynamics of the mosque.
More insight into the political and social psychological dynamics of the protests comes from looking at who did not participate. I’m thinking of enormous number of quite traditionally devout Muslims whose lives are reasonably stable and secure. It is not that they are indifferent to insults to their religion and culture, but their reaction is not loaded with a lot of intensity and anger from other underlying issues.
As far as we can tell at the moment, the killing of four Americans in Benghazi is a completely different phenomenon from the widespread demonstrations throughout the Middle East. All the evidence suggests that an armed group more or less loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, planned a murderous assault on the American consulate and simply took advantage of a demonstration (that they may have had a hand in organizing.)
Does this mean the Arab Spring has taken a terrible wrong turn?
Some people fear that the forces behind these demonstrations are part of a broader movement to replace the bad old dictators like Mubarak with bad new, Islamist dictators, much as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did. Some people believe that all politicians who look to Islam for values and guidance in running a country are part of an ominous “Islamist” movement that is inherently anti-democratic, anti-Western and hell bent on imposing theocracy in the Middle East and North Africa. These are people who see no real differences between so-called moderates like the current President of Egypt and “salafis” more hard core, reactionary forces. The passions and slogans of these demonstrations show that their political leaders are not interested in democracy, reject Western values, and are happily using elections to seize power and abolish elections. Fortunately these claims do not stand up to scrutiny.
There are real and enduring differences between the wide range of people and parties marching under the banner of “Political Islam” and outpourings of what looks on the surface like religious emotionalism are not the prelude to the abject failure of these early stirrings of democracy, as I discussed earlier http://ir-comments.blogspot.com/2011/07/is-polticial-islam-really-so-scary.html
The great threat to political progress in the region remains what it has already been: failure to deal with economic stagnation and threats to peoples’ ability to achieve a minimally acceptable standard of living. Economic development does not necessarily cause democracy but a democratic regime that does not improve peoples’ lives is extremely vulnerable to the siren call of some rigid and simplistic ideology. The real threat to a democratic future in Egypt is the immense economic challenges facing the government.
Some people worry that these outbursts will make it impossible for local governments, primarily Egypt, to continue cooperating with the United States. Certainly a government that has to pay attention to the anti-American and anti-Western feelings of some of its population is going to be more constrained to avoid the appearance of cooperating with the U.S. But the most important area of cooperation is countering terrorism and it is in the self interest of all the governments in the Middle East except Iran to act against Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda look alikes.
And some people are worried that these demonstrations reveal a deeply rooted, pervasive anti-American sentiment. Even those of us who know that “they all hate us” is a grotesque over simplification, are likely to be disturbed by the idea that millions of people -- many more than actually protested – do not like us. Here there is, I think, bad news and good news.
The bad news is that attitudes are not likely to change very quickly and, if the analysis here is close to the mark, we will see more incidents of apparent rage and searing expressions of dislike. It is not that Middle Easterners or Muslims are more sensitive to insults than you and I nor is it that the United States pursues policies that are consistently opposed to the interests of the people of the Middle East (or the less developed world in general) or make their lives worse. (I realize that goes well beyond the original goal of explaining events without a political slant but I think I can defend the assertion that, on the whole, U.S. foreign policy is more often than not on the right track.) But if a central dynamic is the existence of a significant number of people who can be mobilized to load their underlying discontent and sorrow onto “bad America” as a symbol, that dynamic is not likely to change very soon.
The good news is that heated and dramatic cultural or religious conflict between you and me and our counterparts in the Middle East is not inevitable. Forty years ago (yes, I know for some readers I might as well have written “Once upon a time, along time ago ...” but others will remember) Latin America was often rocked by anti-American demonstrations and we heard the same fears that if there were more democracy there would be more opposition to the United States and more open rejection of us and our values.
What happened? I think the quick answer is economic development. Standards of living have improved in Latin American countries. There are still a large number of poor people but they are a smaller and smaller proportion of the population in the various countries and even the poor have some reason to expect that their lives, or at least the lives of their children, will improve over time.
If things go well for the Middle East, meaning a combination of good policies on the part of governments and favorable dynamics in the global economy, one can see a Middle East more integrated into the global economy and experiencing sustained growth over a number of years. That will lead to less frustration and less friction and more weight given to the positive aspects of images of the U.S. and the West. It will also expand the possibilities for serifs dialog and clarification of the areas where Muslim and Judeo-Christian conceptions of the good person, the good life and peoples’ relation to God coincide and areas where there are deep and fundamental differences.
U.S. embassy in Cairo attacked and invaded ... angry anti-American demonstrations in Taher square
Enraged mobs in Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, even India ...
The wave of vehement, often violent, anti-American protests is deeply disturbing and very hard to understand for a lot of people.
Many of us feel betrayed as well as profoundly puzzled. Why are they so mad at us when we didn’t do anything? It wasn’t you and I who made some cheap, tacky movie. We condemn hatred and prejudice and don’t blame an entire group of people for the outrageous actions of a few nut cases. We don’t join murderous mobs or support violent protests. We try to live by our principles and values and try to be tolerant and understanding of other people. We support the right of free speech even for slimeballs and idiots who say disgusting things. So why are they so mad at us?
It’s even harder to take the anger and insults when we shared the joy and exhilaration of the Arab Spring. We were emotionally with the protestors in Tahir Square who brought down the Mubarak dictatorship. We agonize over the innocent casualties of the Syrian civil war and hope that somehow Assad can be ousted. We felt solidarity with the people of Iran in 2009 when their “green revolution” was ruthlessly crushed. We’re on the side of the people ... how can they treat us like enemies?
I do not intend to argue with anyone’s feelings of anger and betrayal. To suggest ways we might understand these events is not, even implicitly, to justify or explain them away. It is not cultural imperialism or insensitive ethnocentrism to say these reactions are way over the top and wrong.
I think there is a real danger that for many of us the positive image of people in the Middle East and elsewhere as being pretty much like us with some understandable difference will be replaced by the dark image of “The Other”: irrational, reactionary, seething with hatred and barely repressed violence. Perhaps some analysis of the politics and psychology involved in this and similar mass reactions will be useful.
Among many possible questions these seem to me to be particularly important:
What are the protests really about?
Who are the protestors (and who isn’t protesting?)
Doesn’t this mean that those who warned us about an Islamist capture of the Arab Spring were right and we are in for a very dark time?
What are the protests about?
To phrase the question that way is lead us on a wild goose chase through the underbrush searching in vain for the “real” reason. The simple answer that goes something like, “people saw or heard about this movie that grossly insulted the Prophet Mohammed and rationally (or irrationally) got very angry” is no help because it can’t explain why almost all the roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world did NOT rush into the streets to chant “Death to America” at the nearest U.S. embassy.
Data from the several waves of the World Values Survey and from the 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims around the world suggest that widely held attitudes toward the West in general and the United States in particular include two sets of ambivalent perceptions. One common dichotomy is the juxtaposition of good American people and bad American government. A second dimension of ambivalence is the evaluation of the material and moral quality of life in the U.S. On the one hand, our technology, material standard of living, political and personal freedoms are admired and applauded and envied; on the other hand our technology and wealth are a reminder (or product) of their comparative backwardness and poverty and our liberty looks more like indulgent license and immorality. The more strongly a person holds the negative half of those dimensions, the more likely rumors of insults to Islam can become symbols that evoke these broader and deeper negative feelings about the U.S. or the West.
“Culture” is a sloppy and slippery term that resists clear or precise definition. Nonetheless, there are three very common elements in the political culture of the Middle East and North Africa that make negative images and attitudes toward the U.S. easier to evoke. Neither is unique to this setting but both seem to be more common here than other parts of the world.
The first element, held with varying degrees of strength, is a sense of being besieged by the outside world. A recurrent theme in both formal education and popular cultured is 1200 years of Christian attempts to contain and thwart Islam and 300 years of oppression by Western imperialism.
The second element in the Middle Eastern political culture is a tendency to see powerful, often malignant forces behind events. “Sh*t Happens” bumper stickers are very rare. It is closer to “common sense”, easier to believe, that there are powerful forces acting behind the scenes to at least permit, if not instigate negative events. Freud was not alone when he said there were no accidents.
The third element is a general and diffuse sense of frustration and disappointment with life. The idea of relative deprivation , the gap between what you feel you’re entitled to and what you have, is pretty well understood in political and social psychology. It is not that people are grindingly poor ... people who are living on the edge of physical survival are not at all easy to mobilize for politics. But people who feel that live has not been fair, that they have less than they deserve, tend to have an (unconscious) reservoir of resentment that can be manipulated and channeled.
So, for those who responded, when the video was described in highly provocative terms it became what could be called a condensation symbol -- an act of event that could tap into one or more underlying, deeper sources of anger and frustration. The protests are about the video and they are about far more.
Who are the protesters?
The analysis above and what we know about this kind of political participation in general would lead us to expect that the majority of participants would be young men who were psychologically available to be mobilized because of their attitudes. An additional factor is social: people who are members of a group, especially a small, face to face group, that shares and reinforces beliefs and attitudes are far more likely to engage in political action.
This emphasis on the fact that the vast majority of protestors have been people who were predisposed to respond to an opportunity to express frustration and discontent becomes even more important for understanding the meaning of their actions when we realize that most of the participants have NOT seen the video but only heard about it from someone else. Only about a quarter of the people in Egypt have access to the internet and, not surprisingly, they’re the wealthier, better educated Egyptian business owners and professionals, along with university students. Except for the students, these are the people least likely to recruited for a large, potentially violent demonstration.
The most critical players in mobilizing demonstrations are the imams. Imams play the same roles that rabbis or ministers do in the U.S., leading religious services and preaching sermons, presiding over marriages and funerals, visiting the sick, offering advice and comfort to the confused and afflicted. Particularly in working class or poor neighborhoods, the mosque is not just where you go on Friday to pray but the center of social and cultural activity. Imams are trained and credentialed by recognized institutions. Some countries, for example Egypt and Iran, have well developed and historically renowned centers for clerical education. As you might expect, the curriculum is narrowly focused on theology and law and heavily imbued with very conservative social values. Other, smaller countries, do not have many locally trained imams and rely on importing imams from abroad. A critical source of foreign trained imams for most of the Middle East and North Africa and, indeed, most of the broader Muslim world, is Saudi Arabia. This is an important factor in understanding why and how mosques can become focal points for mobilizing protests and demonstrations against the U.S. and the West.
As some of the readers already know, Islam in Saudi Arabia has a distinctive tenor. The Wahabbi religious movement that began in the 18th Century was a highly puritanical, deeply fundamentalist reform movement on the Arabian Peninsula. The Wahabbis combined calls for sinners to repent and be saved with the image of Muhammad and his followers as the model of a perfect Islamic society. If life in 19th Century Arabia seemed decadent and sinful to the early Wahabbis; 21st Century Saudi Arabia is even more sinful and immoral. And beyond Saudi Arabia, the world gets worse and worse until one comes to the unimaginable cess pit of the West. Saudi religious authorities feel a positive duty to send Wahabbi trained imams as missionaries to Muslims throughout the world.
I don’t mean to imply that all imams are ignorant of physical and social science, history and geography, or that all imams have a very limited education. But many, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, do have a shallow and simplistic view of the world and little knowledge about anything outside their immediate experience.
Islam is not a hierarchical religion with a structure of authority. There is no equivalent of the Pope or the Southern Baptist Convention that provides authoritative guidance to members of a particular group. There are distinctions among imams, based on perceived knowledge of law and theology, and the imam of the local mosque will look to a well known and respected man whose views he finds compatible for direction and leadership. Relationships among those perceived leading imams can often be highly competitive and feature a certain amount of jockeying for position and efforts to maintain and expand one’s circle of followers.
Here is a central dynamic in protests. Imams who are leaders of other imams can seize upon an event or person, frame it as a cause for great concern or celebration, and use it to rally and energize their followers. (Huge caveat: the fact that this is what it looks like to you and me as an observer does NOT mean that people are necessarily cynical manipulators rather than honest and sincere interpreters of reality as they see it.)
Thus an event like the notorious 12 minute YouTube video or the news reports earlier of American soldiers (accidently) defiling Korans, or the wacky Florida pastor’s promise of a Koranic bonfire, can be presented as a mobilizing symbol through the social dynamics of the mosque.
More insight into the political and social psychological dynamics of the protests comes from looking at who did not participate. I’m thinking of enormous number of quite traditionally devout Muslims whose lives are reasonably stable and secure. It is not that they are indifferent to insults to their religion and culture, but their reaction is not loaded with a lot of intensity and anger from other underlying issues.
As far as we can tell at the moment, the killing of four Americans in Benghazi is a completely different phenomenon from the widespread demonstrations throughout the Middle East. All the evidence suggests that an armed group more or less loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, planned a murderous assault on the American consulate and simply took advantage of a demonstration (that they may have had a hand in organizing.)
Does this mean the Arab Spring has taken a terrible wrong turn?
Some people fear that the forces behind these demonstrations are part of a broader movement to replace the bad old dictators like Mubarak with bad new, Islamist dictators, much as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did. Some people believe that all politicians who look to Islam for values and guidance in running a country are part of an ominous “Islamist” movement that is inherently anti-democratic, anti-Western and hell bent on imposing theocracy in the Middle East and North Africa. These are people who see no real differences between so-called moderates like the current President of Egypt and “salafis” more hard core, reactionary forces. The passions and slogans of these demonstrations show that their political leaders are not interested in democracy, reject Western values, and are happily using elections to seize power and abolish elections. Fortunately these claims do not stand up to scrutiny.
There are real and enduring differences between the wide range of people and parties marching under the banner of “Political Islam” and outpourings of what looks on the surface like religious emotionalism are not the prelude to the abject failure of these early stirrings of democracy, as I discussed earlier http://ir-comments.blogspot.com/2011/07/is-polticial-islam-really-so-scary.html
The great threat to political progress in the region remains what it has already been: failure to deal with economic stagnation and threats to peoples’ ability to achieve a minimally acceptable standard of living. Economic development does not necessarily cause democracy but a democratic regime that does not improve peoples’ lives is extremely vulnerable to the siren call of some rigid and simplistic ideology. The real threat to a democratic future in Egypt is the immense economic challenges facing the government.
Some people worry that these outbursts will make it impossible for local governments, primarily Egypt, to continue cooperating with the United States. Certainly a government that has to pay attention to the anti-American and anti-Western feelings of some of its population is going to be more constrained to avoid the appearance of cooperating with the U.S. But the most important area of cooperation is countering terrorism and it is in the self interest of all the governments in the Middle East except Iran to act against Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda look alikes.
And some people are worried that these demonstrations reveal a deeply rooted, pervasive anti-American sentiment. Even those of us who know that “they all hate us” is a grotesque over simplification, are likely to be disturbed by the idea that millions of people -- many more than actually protested – do not like us. Here there is, I think, bad news and good news.
The bad news is that attitudes are not likely to change very quickly and, if the analysis here is close to the mark, we will see more incidents of apparent rage and searing expressions of dislike. It is not that Middle Easterners or Muslims are more sensitive to insults than you and I nor is it that the United States pursues policies that are consistently opposed to the interests of the people of the Middle East (or the less developed world in general) or make their lives worse. (I realize that goes well beyond the original goal of explaining events without a political slant but I think I can defend the assertion that, on the whole, U.S. foreign policy is more often than not on the right track.) But if a central dynamic is the existence of a significant number of people who can be mobilized to load their underlying discontent and sorrow onto “bad America” as a symbol, that dynamic is not likely to change very soon.
The good news is that heated and dramatic cultural or religious conflict between you and me and our counterparts in the Middle East is not inevitable. Forty years ago (yes, I know for some readers I might as well have written “Once upon a time, along time ago ...” but others will remember) Latin America was often rocked by anti-American demonstrations and we heard the same fears that if there were more democracy there would be more opposition to the United States and more open rejection of us and our values.
What happened? I think the quick answer is economic development. Standards of living have improved in Latin American countries. There are still a large number of poor people but they are a smaller and smaller proportion of the population in the various countries and even the poor have some reason to expect that their lives, or at least the lives of their children, will improve over time.
If things go well for the Middle East, meaning a combination of good policies on the part of governments and favorable dynamics in the global economy, one can see a Middle East more integrated into the global economy and experiencing sustained growth over a number of years. That will lead to less frustration and less friction and more weight given to the positive aspects of images of the U.S. and the West. It will also expand the possibilities for serifs dialog and clarification of the areas where Muslim and Judeo-Christian conceptions of the good person, the good life and peoples’ relation to God coincide and areas where there are deep and fundamental differences.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
The Revoluton Starts Now?
Egypt is in a crisis at least as momentous as January 2011. But the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Tahir Square are gone, so there are no gripping videos. The simple story line – brave young (media savvy) Egyptians versus stodgy old dictator -- has been replaced by a confusing cast of characters who are complicated mixes of interests and motives. The result, to paraphrase the 70's protest song, is that the revolution is not being televised.
The dramatic events of the Arab Spring, culminating in the departure of Hosni Mubarak were prologue; this is the revolutionary moment in Egypt, when the broad outlines of the future will be determined.
Perhaps a brief reminder of the major events of the recent past will help set the stage. When Mubarak was ousted by his former close allies in the military the 20 member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assumed control. SCAF oversaw drafting a series of new laws, most notably provisions for parliamentary elections last November. It should not have surprised anyone that the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, was the single biggest winner in the elections and when allied with more fundamentalist and conservative Islamist parties, commanded a two thirds majority. The SCAF also established a procedure for Presidential elections. Part of the process involved review of potential candidates by SCAF and the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court (all of whose members were appointed by the Mubarak government) which led to the disqualification or withdrawal of a fairly large number of candidates. The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood broke its public pledge not to sponsor a Presidential candidate and when their first choice was disqualified, nominated Mohamed Morsi. Ahmed Shafik, former Air Force general and Mubarak’s last prime minister, emerged as the other major contender after the first round of voting in early June.
Ten days before the presidential election the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled on legal challenges to the parliamentary elections and decided that as many as one third of the members elected in November had run illegally. Almost immediately the SCAF issued a series of decrees that dissolved parliament, claimed all legislative authority, prevented the not yet elected president from interfering with the military (including cutting its budget.) So Egyptians went to the polls on June 19 to vote for a president whose authority was unclear and whose specific powers were to be determined by SCAF or some other body at some unknown date.
For many Egyptians the Presidential choice was difficult. During the campaign Mohamed Morsi found himself walking a tightrope between the expectations of his social and religiously conservative base and the need to reassure more secular and liberal voters that he was fully committed to democracy and tolerance. Ahmed Shafik could run a campaign based on who he was not -- an Islamist -- without too many awkward questions about his ties to the military or his role in the old regime. He presented himself as the safe candidate, disinclined to change the social order and more likely to get the economy going again both because he knew how to run a modern bureaucracy and because he would not frighten tourists away.
Ten days after parliament was dissolved Morsi won the presidency. A week later he challenged the military by convening the dissolved parliament. Some of the liberal and secular members boycotted the session which they saw as a flexing of Islamist political muscle, but the large majority of members were there for a very brief session that charged a committee with pursuing legal avenues to counter the Supreme Constitutional Court’s decision and adjourned. (Somewhat disingenuously the speaker of the parliament insisted that the session and its decision were not defying the Court’s authority but were trying to find ways to implement the Court’s decision.)
So if it is not a simple fairy tale of good guys and bad guys, what is going on? For most politically active Egyptians there are two examples in the Middle East of how the future might look. One is relatively democratic Turkey, where an Islamist party moderated its positions over a couple of decades and has not used its electoral victory to radically upset the society or economy and the military has increasingly moved away from its old dominance. The other is autocratic Saudi Arabia where the government and semi-official committees for the promotion of virtue and suppression of vice vigorously enforce a very narrow and restrictive version of Islam. Each example inspires hope in some Egyptians and dread in others.
There are three major players whose decisions will interact with each other and define Egypt’s future: the Muslim Brotherhood, the senior military officers, and the secular or liberal politicians. Each of them has reasons to oppose and support the others and each of them is in turn internally divided.
In simple (dangerously close to overly simplistic) terms, the interests and challenges of each include:
For the Muslim Brotherhood, the primary interest is in achieving power in Egypt to reform the country. There is a wide variety of views within the Brotherhood itself and among its supporters about the nature of that reform. For some the goal is to use persuasion and the democratic process to improve social morals and reduce the influence of secular, Western ideas and practices. Turkey is the example. For others, it is to use the state apparatus to force people to conform to conservative religious ideals and behaviors and Saudi Arabia is a positive example. The Brotherhood was an opponent of the Egyptian regime at its founding in the days of the monarch and was the most forceful and visible opponent of the regime initiated by Gamal Nasser in the 1950s that ended with Mubarak’s ouster.
The Brotherhood is viewed favorably by many Egyptians for its consistent opposition to repression. But it is feared for its roots in Islamic fundamentalism and episodes of violence in its history. The decision to run a candidate for president paid off in a short term victory; it is hard to tell how much damage it did to the Brotherhood’s long term credibility and legitimacy. Secular liberal Egyptians and the military hope the constraints of governance and the more democratic elements within the Brotherhood will move it toward the Turkish model but fear that even apparently moderate members secretly long for Saudi Arabia and repressive righteousness.
For the senior military officers there are two primary interests: maintaining order and stability in Egypt and maintaining the uniquely privileged position of the officer corps in the Egyptian economy and society. The military has worked very hard to counter the Muslim Brotherhood over the decades, outlawing it, jailing its leaders from time to time, portraying it as a threat to ordinary Egyptians to justify continued military rule, and making strenuous efforts to inoculate the officer corps against Islamist tendencies. The 20 members of SCAF have vivid personal memories of the Islamists who gunned down Anwar Sadat in 1981. The leadership of the Brotherhood is not tied into the modern economy in the ways that the leaders of many secular liberal parties are nor are they likely to be tolerant of the military's largely autonomous network of businesses. At the same time, assuming direct rule as way of preventing the Brotherhood from coming to power is a very unpalatable alternative. Far better to have people applaud you for guarding the country against all enemies foreign and domestic than have people blame you for high unemployment and inflation.
For secular liberals, the primary interest is preserving and extending the modern sectors of Egypt. It is close enough to the truth to say that there is an observable class division in Egypt. On one side are urban, western educated, upper and middle class business people and professionals and recent college graduates, living or hoping to live much the same sort of life you do. On the other side are rural or urban slum dwellers, not well educated or having only a religious education, small farmers or traditional artisans, making the best of meager resources and often feeling vaguely threatened by an alien world. The fondest hope of the secular liberal parties is that they can play a broker’s role between the Brotherhood and the military and avoid the Scylla of a return to dictatorship and the Charybdis of reactionary religiosity. The greatest fear is that the Brotherhood will be able to mobilize its base in rural Egypt and the slums and use democratic forms to destroy both democracy and secularism.
Adding to the volatile mix is a high level of distrust and suspicion in Egyptian political life. Conspiracy theories are hardly unique to Egypt and the Middle East, but they seem more common than in the U.S. There is a pervasive suspicion that powerful forces are manipulating events behind the scenes. For example, President’s Morsi’s attempt to reconvene parliament is seen by some as a bold confrontation of the military; others are sure that Morsi and the military had collaborated on the script for the drama. Political opponents are suspected of colluding to thwart your interests and your allies may be tempted to make a deal behind your back. The culture of distrust makes it hard for politicians and groups to forge long term cooperative relationships and to take statements of positions or pledges of support at face value.
The current drama will probably not have a sudden, obvious outcome. Unless the Brotherhood leadership grossly miscalculates or Cairo erupts in riots, the military is not likely to send tanks into the streets and declare the democratic experiment dead. President Morsi and the parliamentary majority are unlikely to try to establish an overtly Islamic state and unleash a reign of terror on loose women and MINOs (Muslim in Name Only.)
The more likely outcome is a two steps forward, one back, messy and halting movement toward a hybrid system that can maintain order while addressing Egypt’s glaring economic problems. If everyday Egyptians do not feel personally secure and the economy gets even worse over the next year, then the military might well decide (as have militaries in many other countries) that the civilians have failed and it is time for direct rule by men who know how to get things done ...
The dramatic events of the Arab Spring, culminating in the departure of Hosni Mubarak were prologue; this is the revolutionary moment in Egypt, when the broad outlines of the future will be determined.
Perhaps a brief reminder of the major events of the recent past will help set the stage. When Mubarak was ousted by his former close allies in the military the 20 member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assumed control. SCAF oversaw drafting a series of new laws, most notably provisions for parliamentary elections last November. It should not have surprised anyone that the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, was the single biggest winner in the elections and when allied with more fundamentalist and conservative Islamist parties, commanded a two thirds majority. The SCAF also established a procedure for Presidential elections. Part of the process involved review of potential candidates by SCAF and the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court (all of whose members were appointed by the Mubarak government) which led to the disqualification or withdrawal of a fairly large number of candidates. The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood broke its public pledge not to sponsor a Presidential candidate and when their first choice was disqualified, nominated Mohamed Morsi. Ahmed Shafik, former Air Force general and Mubarak’s last prime minister, emerged as the other major contender after the first round of voting in early June.
Ten days before the presidential election the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled on legal challenges to the parliamentary elections and decided that as many as one third of the members elected in November had run illegally. Almost immediately the SCAF issued a series of decrees that dissolved parliament, claimed all legislative authority, prevented the not yet elected president from interfering with the military (including cutting its budget.) So Egyptians went to the polls on June 19 to vote for a president whose authority was unclear and whose specific powers were to be determined by SCAF or some other body at some unknown date.
For many Egyptians the Presidential choice was difficult. During the campaign Mohamed Morsi found himself walking a tightrope between the expectations of his social and religiously conservative base and the need to reassure more secular and liberal voters that he was fully committed to democracy and tolerance. Ahmed Shafik could run a campaign based on who he was not -- an Islamist -- without too many awkward questions about his ties to the military or his role in the old regime. He presented himself as the safe candidate, disinclined to change the social order and more likely to get the economy going again both because he knew how to run a modern bureaucracy and because he would not frighten tourists away.
Ten days after parliament was dissolved Morsi won the presidency. A week later he challenged the military by convening the dissolved parliament. Some of the liberal and secular members boycotted the session which they saw as a flexing of Islamist political muscle, but the large majority of members were there for a very brief session that charged a committee with pursuing legal avenues to counter the Supreme Constitutional Court’s decision and adjourned. (Somewhat disingenuously the speaker of the parliament insisted that the session and its decision were not defying the Court’s authority but were trying to find ways to implement the Court’s decision.)
So if it is not a simple fairy tale of good guys and bad guys, what is going on? For most politically active Egyptians there are two examples in the Middle East of how the future might look. One is relatively democratic Turkey, where an Islamist party moderated its positions over a couple of decades and has not used its electoral victory to radically upset the society or economy and the military has increasingly moved away from its old dominance. The other is autocratic Saudi Arabia where the government and semi-official committees for the promotion of virtue and suppression of vice vigorously enforce a very narrow and restrictive version of Islam. Each example inspires hope in some Egyptians and dread in others.
There are three major players whose decisions will interact with each other and define Egypt’s future: the Muslim Brotherhood, the senior military officers, and the secular or liberal politicians. Each of them has reasons to oppose and support the others and each of them is in turn internally divided.
In simple (dangerously close to overly simplistic) terms, the interests and challenges of each include:
For the Muslim Brotherhood, the primary interest is in achieving power in Egypt to reform the country. There is a wide variety of views within the Brotherhood itself and among its supporters about the nature of that reform. For some the goal is to use persuasion and the democratic process to improve social morals and reduce the influence of secular, Western ideas and practices. Turkey is the example. For others, it is to use the state apparatus to force people to conform to conservative religious ideals and behaviors and Saudi Arabia is a positive example. The Brotherhood was an opponent of the Egyptian regime at its founding in the days of the monarch and was the most forceful and visible opponent of the regime initiated by Gamal Nasser in the 1950s that ended with Mubarak’s ouster.
The Brotherhood is viewed favorably by many Egyptians for its consistent opposition to repression. But it is feared for its roots in Islamic fundamentalism and episodes of violence in its history. The decision to run a candidate for president paid off in a short term victory; it is hard to tell how much damage it did to the Brotherhood’s long term credibility and legitimacy. Secular liberal Egyptians and the military hope the constraints of governance and the more democratic elements within the Brotherhood will move it toward the Turkish model but fear that even apparently moderate members secretly long for Saudi Arabia and repressive righteousness.
For the senior military officers there are two primary interests: maintaining order and stability in Egypt and maintaining the uniquely privileged position of the officer corps in the Egyptian economy and society. The military has worked very hard to counter the Muslim Brotherhood over the decades, outlawing it, jailing its leaders from time to time, portraying it as a threat to ordinary Egyptians to justify continued military rule, and making strenuous efforts to inoculate the officer corps against Islamist tendencies. The 20 members of SCAF have vivid personal memories of the Islamists who gunned down Anwar Sadat in 1981. The leadership of the Brotherhood is not tied into the modern economy in the ways that the leaders of many secular liberal parties are nor are they likely to be tolerant of the military's largely autonomous network of businesses. At the same time, assuming direct rule as way of preventing the Brotherhood from coming to power is a very unpalatable alternative. Far better to have people applaud you for guarding the country against all enemies foreign and domestic than have people blame you for high unemployment and inflation.
For secular liberals, the primary interest is preserving and extending the modern sectors of Egypt. It is close enough to the truth to say that there is an observable class division in Egypt. On one side are urban, western educated, upper and middle class business people and professionals and recent college graduates, living or hoping to live much the same sort of life you do. On the other side are rural or urban slum dwellers, not well educated or having only a religious education, small farmers or traditional artisans, making the best of meager resources and often feeling vaguely threatened by an alien world. The fondest hope of the secular liberal parties is that they can play a broker’s role between the Brotherhood and the military and avoid the Scylla of a return to dictatorship and the Charybdis of reactionary religiosity. The greatest fear is that the Brotherhood will be able to mobilize its base in rural Egypt and the slums and use democratic forms to destroy both democracy and secularism.
Adding to the volatile mix is a high level of distrust and suspicion in Egyptian political life. Conspiracy theories are hardly unique to Egypt and the Middle East, but they seem more common than in the U.S. There is a pervasive suspicion that powerful forces are manipulating events behind the scenes. For example, President’s Morsi’s attempt to reconvene parliament is seen by some as a bold confrontation of the military; others are sure that Morsi and the military had collaborated on the script for the drama. Political opponents are suspected of colluding to thwart your interests and your allies may be tempted to make a deal behind your back. The culture of distrust makes it hard for politicians and groups to forge long term cooperative relationships and to take statements of positions or pledges of support at face value.
The current drama will probably not have a sudden, obvious outcome. Unless the Brotherhood leadership grossly miscalculates or Cairo erupts in riots, the military is not likely to send tanks into the streets and declare the democratic experiment dead. President Morsi and the parliamentary majority are unlikely to try to establish an overtly Islamic state and unleash a reign of terror on loose women and MINOs (Muslim in Name Only.)
The more likely outcome is a two steps forward, one back, messy and halting movement toward a hybrid system that can maintain order while addressing Egypt’s glaring economic problems. If everyday Egyptians do not feel personally secure and the economy gets even worse over the next year, then the military might well decide (as have militaries in many other countries) that the civilians have failed and it is time for direct rule by men who know how to get things done ...
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