For decades, the United States has been locked in a race to the bottom with political Islam. The Iranian revolution established the zero-sum nature of the conflict between US interests and the empowerment in the Middle East of political parties claiming divine sanction for their policies. Algeria in the last decade of the 20th century and Palestine today stand as examples of Washington’s enduring enmity toward those who in the name of Islam successfully contest the old order, even by popular, democratic demand.
The Egyptian revolution has shattered this model. Two years after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, Washington is discovering that there just may be a way to live with political Islam.
The balance now being struck between the government led by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and the US administration of President Barack Obama remains tenuous. Every day is still a new day in Egypt. But Mubarak is gone, and in his place remains the popular and unavoidable prospect of revolutionary change. The character of Egyptian politics in the post-Mubarak era is becoming defined by the clash of institutions — courts, police and security — and competing tests of political power, often in the streets and too frequently violent. Two years of struggle and what seems to be constant polling have stopped Egypt far short of a revolution akin to Iran’s and the repudiation of ties with Washington that formed such a vital component of Iran’s revolutionary narrative. Egyptians have instead transformed what threatened to be a wholesale assault upon the old order into a struggle for the power to reform it and a chance to shape its successor.
The Obama administration should be able to live with the messy, chaotic style of Egyptian politics. It addresses Washington’s interest in incremental reform — removing the harsh edges of Egypt’s newly endorsed constitution, protecting women, improving the economy — while accommodating, and to some degree enhancing for Egyptian rather than American reasons, the power and prerogatives of the “deep state.”
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