If the Egyptians had voted for Ahmed Shafiq, Amr Moussa, Mohamed ElBaradei or Hamdeen Sabahi, any of these men would have been a better president than Mohamed Morsi for all of Egypt. My point is implicit in the phrase “all of Egypt", because those honest Egyptians I mentioned do not represent one party, or one president who wants to seize control of the entire country and its citizens, not just to rule them. I believe that the Egyptians had indeed chosen Ahmed Shafiq as president, but that the Military Council (SCAF) cowered before the ability of the Muslim Brotherhood to mobilize the street. I think Field Marshal Mohammed Tantawi, Lt. Gen. Sami Annan and their colleagues thought they could win over the Muslim Brotherhood by declaring Dr. Morsi the winner, after that press conference which took a long time for some mysterious reason, on Monday, June 18. The senior members of SCAF proved Maj. Gen. Omar Suleiman right. In his last interview with me, he told me, word for word: There was injustice against SCAF because it was never political. It only led a transitional phase after Mubarak, and its goal was to preserve what was still standing. But SCAF is ill aware of the maneuvers and the guile of the Muslim Brotherhood. SCAF was fooled by the Brotherhood, believing it to be a strong organization that can be compliant. But the Brotherhood's goal was to create favorable circumstances to obtain legitimacy, and for this to be the sole legitimacy in Egypt. I sat down with Maj. Gen. Omar Suleiman at his home in Heliopolis on May 16, 2012, and this turned out to be the last interview he ever gave to the press. He passed away on July 17, 2012, and four months after his death, we find out that he knew SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood only too well, having predicted the problems that followed and the current ones. If Ahmed Shafiq was elected president, Mohamed Morsi would not be facing trumped-up court cases, one after the other, to suppress and restrict his freedom and prevent him from playing any role in Egyptian political life. If dear friend Amr Moussa, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, or brother Hamdeen Sabahi were elected, then the new president would have sought, from day one, to bring the Egyptians together, and to find common grounds among all segments of the people in order to join their efforts together. What happened soon after a Muslim Brotherhood president took office, was that he initiated a series of measures aimed at consolidating the Islamist group's power alone, and to eliminate opposition. Although he was dealt a painful lesson when he backtracked on his decision to sack the Egyptian Public Prosecutor Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud, the opposition's uproar had barely subsided when he came back with a power grab via the Constitutional Declaration. This step has no other meaning except that the Muslim Brotherhood is attempting to replicate the previous military dictatorship, so to speak, with a dictatorship of the Brotherhood. In truth, the president's decrees have proven that all claims about imposing the Islamist group's ideology on all of Egypt were not the delusions of liberals, leftists and infidels, but a fact supported by evidence. I said, about the president's error with Councilor Abdel Meguid, that there is no school that teaches a president how to do the job, but that instead, he has to learn by trial and error. A smart person is someone who learns quickly, and does not repeat the same mistake. Well, President Morsi made a bigger mistake of the same kind, because the Constitutional Decree that has been rejected by the people is an explicit form of dictatorship. If the president manages to endure the popular backlash, and impose his view on people by force, then there will be only two possibilities next: Either a revolution against the revolution to topple the regime; or the demise of democracy in Egypt for years, if not decades. In the meantime, the Egyptian economy is in tatters, and the Muslim Brotherhood is in a mess. The International Monetary Fund is now reluctant to go ahead with the plan to offer a conditional loan to Egypt at $ 4.8 billion, although this loan was offered in the past without any conditions. This is happening while the Egyptians need 300 million loaves of bread every day, and providing this is nothing short of a miracle even when the time of miracles has long been gone. The people of Egypt deserve better rulers. Every Arab is a citizen in his country and an Egyptian too, and we were awaiting an Egyptian leadership that would pave for the Arabs a way to the future. Now, we fear that we may soon feel nostalgic to what stood before. [email protected]
