Criticism Pours In After Military Crackdown In Egypt
Criticism was sharp, swift and almost universal in the wake of the Egyptian military's deadly crackdown on supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi and the declaration of a state of emergency. Many experts questioned whether Egypt would be able to return to anything resembling democracy in the near future.
"I don't think it's right for us to even talk about a democratic transition in Egypt," Shadi Hamid, director of research for the Brookings Doha Center, told NPR's Tell Me More. "The transition is over. And again, what we might be seeing is something worse than what happened under [former President Hosni] Mubarak."
Those sentiments were echoed by Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In a piece headlined "Mubarak Still Rules," Cook argued in Foreign Policy magazine that "the 'revolution' that really never was, is over."
"Just as Egypt's political system before the January 25 [2011] uprising was rigged in favor of Mubarak and his constituents, the Brothers sought to stack the new order in their favor, and today's winners will build a political system that reflects their interests. ... Although virtually all political actors have leveraged the language of political reform and espoused liberal ideas, they have nevertheless sought to wield power through exclusion. This has created an environment in which the losers do not process their grievances through elections, parliamentary debate, consensus-building, and compromise — but through military intervention and street protests. This plays into the hands of those powerful groups embedded within the state who have worked to restore the old order almost from the time that Hosni Mubarak stepped down into ignominy two and a half years ago."