The military under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s leadership is
seeking to rebuild the Nasserist bully state, which was itself in many
ways a reconstruction of Muhammad Ali’s version of the same. Maybe it
will be a case of third time lucky, but that is unlikely, and not only
because military state building has twice failed. The constraints on
military state building in 2015 are much greater and the opportunities
much fewer than in 1952, to say nothing of 1805. Projection of Egyptian
power into the region is not only far more difficult, but as polls show,
now opposed by the majority of Egyptians, at least as regards sending
expeditionary forces into either Libya or Yemen.
Assertion of a
breast-beating independence à la Nasser is similarly difficult for Sisi
when the national economy is kept afloat by the Saudis, Emiratis, and
Kuwaitis. Flirting with Moscow now seems weak rather than bold. Rumors
of discontent with Sisi’s leadership within the military grow as the
economy flounders and the political system remains in deep freeze. There
is and can be no equivalent to the Nasserist ideological agenda. The
officer republic has so hollowed out civilian state institutions that
they barely function.
In way over its head, the military is simultaneously trying to manage
the economy, reconstruct the political system, conduct a
counterinsurgency campaign, modernize its own forces, and devise a
consistent foreign policy, all without substantial civilian
input….Visibly in charge of the state, the economy, public security, and
indeed, everything, the military will be held to account for the ever
more evident shortcomings. As state decay under military tutelage
progresses, onetime terrorists are morphing into insurgents, claiming to
be inspired by the Islamic State’s dream of establishing an alternative
to the Egyptian state, an unthinkable proposition even for the radical
jihadis of the 1990s, to say nothing of the Muslim Brothers.
More than two centuries of Egyptian state building is now under
threat. External support for the Egyptian military only perpetuates the
inappropriate model it has perpetrated, further encouraging it to
dismiss civilians and to pursue rents rather than to attempt to build a
state based on a ruler-ruled relationship that both generates economic
surplus and legitimates its extraction.
The relationship between the
Egyptian military and state is turned on its head, with the latter
reporting to the former rather than vice versa. The task facing Egypt is
thus to reverse this relationship and so terminate once and for all the
national myth of military as state builder.
Guaranteed to magically transform subscribers into superior intellectuals, worldly, pious, witty, cool, fun to be with, irresistable, au courant and all together with it. Amaze friends, confound enemies and revel in the envy and righteous respect of peers.
Annoying, arrogant, audacious, bloodthirsty, conniving, cool, cruel, deceitfully sweet, discombobulated, flirtacious, jealous, hedonistic, lazy, machiavellian, manipulative, militaristic, self absorbed, self aggrandizing, self centered, semi charmed, semi retarded, shallow, spoiled, stuck up, high maintainance ne'er do well pixie with a penchant for immense libraries, depleting strategic cash reserves and wrecking cars every 10 months. Super saavy history and current events. My superior intellect and easy going smartassticness armed with a chaotic emotion meter gave me a formidable ability to be independently dependent. Currently exiled in Hillbillyland, I wield a vocabulary far above my tiny tiny weight class and have traveled widely including Europe, the Middle East and Alabama. I like Am Ex, Carte Blanche, Discover, Mastercard, Ray Bans, Visa, premium moonshine camouflaged in water bottles, nicotine gum and devouring American Dollars in alarming quantities.
0 comments:
Post a Comment