Egypt: Islamists hit Christian churches

[FarrenH]

75. Not in terms of the value judgements you're making

Turkey has had several military coups that were immediately followed by the election of a civilian government. This is because Turkey has a secular democratic tradition ever since Kemal Ataturk and Islamist parties have come to power in the past that immediately tried to entrench Islamism in the democratic institutions. It wasn't because the military was anti-democracy and wanted to run the country.

In Algeria several years ago, Islamist parties ran on a platform that explicitly stated they would dismantle democracy. The military stepped in and prevented them from taking power. Obviously its just foolish to pretend that you can democratically get a mandate to dismantle the very democracy that elected you.

In Egypt, as Professor Cole pointed out, the Brotherhood were in the process of dismantling the very fledgling democracy that you're huffing about and quite overtly did several things their election did not legitimately allow them to do, like Morsi making laws by fiat and using the police to suppress political opposition. He was setting up Egypt to be a one party, Islamist state. The military shows no sign of actually wanting to rule Egypt, which is why they immediately appointed liberals not linked to the military in an interim government and promised a speedy return to democracy.

All of these are quite different from the military coup in Chile that deposed the government of Allende and set up a permanent military dictatorship. Not all military coups are the same and not everything is black and white.

You can huff and puff about it as much as you like but if you're not going to bother referencing facts that are peculiar to each situation, then rather than sounding like the voice of moral logic, your protestations come across as the most ineffectual kind of naive idealism. None of this, obviously, exonerates the Egyptian military for escalating the conflict the way they did. As Professor Cole points out in the article linked above, the Brotherhood were a threat to real democracy in Egypt AND the military screwed up horribly after getting rid of them. These things are not mutually exclusive.