Egypt's Secret Coup

Will people power or military might win the day?

With the whiff of revolution in the air across the Middle East this week, in the Globe and Mail Daoud Kuttab says that disenfranchised citizens aren’t the only ones drawing lessons from the uprising that toppled Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. “[W]hile Arab youths are learning from the actions of their compatriots, Arab rulers are learning from what happened to their fellow leaders,” he writes. Kuttab, a Palestinian who helped set up the Arab world’s first internet radio station ten years ago, says the success of any further uprisings will hinge on whether or not Arab leaders grant citizens the right to assembly and freedom of expression. That’s the thin edge of the wedge that reformers use to bring about change and as such Western nations should push for the guarantee of these rights not only in hostile nations like Iran and Syria, but in allies like Bahrain and Yemen.

Kuttab’s suggestion that Middle Eastern rulers learned from Hosni Mubarak what not to do is well-illustrated by this piece by Sayeh Hassan in the National Post. She describes how the Iranian regime managed to fend off the protests that usually mark the anniversary of the Islamic revolution every Feb. 11 by collaborating with reformers and compelling them to schedule demonstrations showing solidarity with Egypt on Feb. 14 instead. There were no protests this year on Feb. 11, and because the government was so well-informed about events on the 14th, security forces quickly moved into to crush signs of dissent. Proving yet again that if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad et. al are crazy, they are crazy like a fox. A murderous theocratic fox.

The Post’s George Jonas doesn’t want to spoil the party, but he doesn’t think the Egyptian protests were really the first steps towards democracy in the country. “What they did was lay down a smoke screen,” he writes. “They camouflaged a coup d’état by Egypt’s military.” He believes a group of opportunistic officers used the events to seize power, saving them the trouble of deposing Mubarak themselves or sorting out the messy scenario of him dying in office. If he’s right then the uprising was simply a changing of the guard and, the Newsroom would add, a major bummer.