======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
An excerpt from Gilbert Achcar's new book:
On 12 August 2012, [Mohamed Morsi] the new Egyptian president sent the
SCAF’s two most eminent members into retirement. Both of these military
men had been close associates of Hosni Mubarak: Hussein Tantawi, the
commander in chief of the armed forces and minister of defense without
interruption since 1991, and Sami Anan, chief of staff since 2005. This
operation was orchestrated with great fanfare in order to make the very
colorless Morsi out to be a forceful and, to boot, “revolutionary”
president, since he was supposedly fulfilling what had become the
popular movement’s main demand throughout the year preceding his
election: that the army go back to its barracks.
The Muslim Brothers promptly mobilized to sing the praises of the
president—a loyal follower of the Brotherhood’s leadership, just as the
Tunisian prime minister is a loyal follower of Ennahda’s chief and
Tunisia’s real president, Rached Ghannouchi. Presenting Morsi as the man
who has fulfilled the “revolution’s” wishes is all the more grotesque
for the fact that he has named the chief of military intelligence,
Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi, to replace Tantawi. Sisi had distinguished himself
in June 2011 by justifying the “virginity tests” that the SCAF had
inflicted, among other humiliations, on seventeen female demonstrators
who had been arrested on Tahrir Square in March. (Sisi’s declarations
were such an embarrassment that the SCAF was forced to publicly disavow
him.)
In actual fact, of all the dismissals of military leaders punctuating
the history of the Egyptian republic, the one for which Morsi was
responsible is the least dramatic. Compared with the dismissals of Amer,
Chazly, or Abu Ghazalah, engineered by Morsi’s three presidential
predecessors, his dismissal of Tantawi and Anan appears as an act of
broad consensus, so broad, indeed, that even those relieved of their
commands approved of it. The novelty, undoubtedly, is that Morsi is the
first Egyptian president not to have come from the army’s ranks. This
fact has been thrown into sharp relief by untold commentators who seem
to have forgotten that the Egyptian uprising cheated another civilian of
the presidency: Gamal Mubarak, Hosni’s son. Yet it is clearly because
Morsi is a civilian lacking prestige and professional authority in the
military’s eyes that he took care to confer with the upper echelons of
the armed forces, in order to secure their full approval before deciding
on dismissals, promotions, and appointments from their ranks, as has
been attested by both the military men themselves and numerous observers.
full:
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12712/morsi-and-the-army_the-illusive-power
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
