Egypt had to be rid of the Muslim Brotherhood

Chronic political unrest in Egypt reflects a permanent vulnerability that is built in to the geography of the country. Modern experience has exacerbated these inherent geopolitical challenges and the ideological commitments of the Muslim Brotherhood have made a desperate situation much worse. There is unlikely ever to be a happy ending.

On a map Egypt is about the size of Alberta and Saskatchewan combined, but the population of inhabited Egypt is distributed along a strip of land on both sides of the Nile less than 30 kilometres wide, and in the delta. The river is largely un- navigable for any but small boats. The whole country, including the valley, is desert, which means all agriculture requires irrigation.

One result of its geography is that throughout its history Egypt has had to rely on land transportation and expensive infrastructure — on both banks. From the time of the pharaohs, Egypt has been plagued by inefficiencies, heavy expenditures, and poverty and has required a heavy-handed government necessarily reliant on the security apparatus to maintain order. For the past six decades, that has been the main task of the Egyptian army.

In antiquity Egypt was one of the few places in the Middle East that reliably produced grain for export, largely because of the annual floods that replenished the nutrients in the soil. During the 19th century land that had grown grain was used to produce cotton. Combined with a population increase of 50 per cent since 1990, Egypt today must import about 60 per cent of the wheat used to produce subsidized bread.

One consequence is that, in addition to being at the mercy of whomever controls the Mediterranean — today the U.S. Navy — Egypt is exceedingly vulnerable to international food markets. The possibility of food shortages and even famine is growing less remote each day.

In sum, modern Egypt is a poor and weak land power that is chronically short of capital.

None of that changed in 2011 with the so-called Arab Spring. Power remained centralized in the army and the army and the economy remained dependent on outsiders, chiefly Western taxpayers. What did change was the attempt by President Hosni Mubarak’s son, Gamal, to replace a military oligarchy with a dynastic one.

Not only did Mubarak challenge two generations of military rule, son Gamal was a lightweight who hadn’t even completed his military service.

Consequently Egypt’s Arab Spring was a joke. It was initiated by the military to prevent the aspirations of Mubarak and son from prospering. Then, with the anti-Mubarak demonstrations, the military claimed to mediate between the regime and the mobs in Tahrir Square.

But look at the numbers. At the height of the demonstrations in Cairo, less than one per cent of Egyptians were on the streets. In the genuine revolutions in Eastern Europe or even in Tehran when the Shah was removed, the percentages were 10 and 20 times greater. The conclusion is obvious: Mubarak was removed by a military coup, not by revolutionary agitation.

Much has been written of the “mistakes” of the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi and his team. They should not have attempted a power grab, critics say. They tried to move too quickly, say others.

This is nonsense. Any government that has as its motto “death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations” is already close to lunacy. If that were their highest aspiration, how could they do anything sensible?

Hence the importance to the Morsi government of repressing the Copts, the secularists, and women — they are not the Muslim Sisterhood after all. Hence the inability of the Morsi government to develop a prudent relationship with either the military or the judiciary.

The military acted as they had a couple of years ago, and likely will do so again. Then as now they had their own reasons to seek to preserve their hold on privilege. From the outside it was less an action taken against democracy than it was a perhaps futile attempt to preserve a minimum of order in the face of ideological fantasies.

Egypt had enough real problems that it could ill afford adding the ideological dreams of the Muslim Brotherhood to them.