Egypt Headed Toward Civil War

The Egyptian Armed Forces have given president Mohamed Morsi an ultimatum, resign or be removed. This from today's frontpage story written by David Kirkpatrick and Ben Hubbard:

The standoff threatened to roll back the clock to the day two years ago when the generals first seized power from Hosni Mubarak and to thrust Egypt into an extended period of instability and perhaps escalating violence. The military’s vow to intervene raised questions about whether Egypt’s revolution would fulfill its promise to build a new democracy at the heart of the Arab world. And the defiance of Mr. Morsi and his Brotherhood allies raised the specter of the bloody years of the 1990s when fringe Islamist groups used violence in an effort to overthrow the military government. 

Under the banner headline “removal or resignation,” Al Ahram reported that the generals would “abolish the controversial Constitution” and form a committee of experts to write a new charter, form an interim presidential council with three members led by the chief of the constitutional court, and put a military leader in charge of the executive branch as an interim prime minister. 

Citing an unidentified military official, the newspaper said that “to ensure the country’s security” the military and security services had already put some of Mr. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood allies under house arrest, and had issued orders for the arrest of “anybody who resists these decisions” for trial in special courts. 

Mr. Morsi refused to back down. In an impassioned, if at times rambling, midnight address broadcast on state television, he hinted that his removal would lead only to more violence. 

“The people empowered me, the people chose me, through a free and fair election,” he said. 

“Legitimacy is the only way to protect our country and prevent bloodshed, to move to a new phase,” Mr. Morsi said. “Legitimacy is the only thing that guarantees for all of us that there will not be any fighting and conflict, that there will not be bloodshed.” 

“If the price of protecting legitimacy is my blood, I’m willing to pay it,” he said. “And it would be a cheap price for the sake of protecting this country.”

It's hard to imagine a situation where this doesn't end up in civil war. The Muslim Brotherhood feels clean in the pursuit of martyrdom; they won the election fair and square. They see the military's demand as a coup. They feel as if they've been abandoned.

I wonder to what extent the Gulf Arab monarchies will support the Brotherhood once the shooting war really takes off. It seems as if the Saudis and Qataris are obsessed with toppling al-Assad and bringing sharia to Syria. A civil war in Egypt queers that pitch. The fact the Muslim Brotherhood is quoted repeatedly in today's paper saying that they've been abandoned leads one to believe that the advice they're getting from their benefactors in the Gulf is to stand down.

Certainly the United States, supplying the Egyptian military with $1.3 billion in aid annually, signed off on the plan to oust Morsi and rewrite the Constitution; it's a way to bring back a version of the Mubarak era.

The Brotherhood's pledge to go down fighting will definitely complicate things for the U.S. and its allies -- the old colonial powers, Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies -- and it will be a boon for Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Russia and China. The European markets, sensing this, are already down.

SAA is steadily grinding away at a disorganized mercenary Wahhabi opponent. A civil war in Egypt will potentially draw jihadi support away from the Syrian war zone as foreign fighters come to the aid of the Muslim Brotherhood. At the very least it will distract the war pigs who have been coordinating the assault on Syria as they have to focus their attention on salvaging their political formation in Egypt