Inclusion is difficult

That’s clear enough from this morning’s news that the Salafist Nour party appears to have vetoed the already announced naming of liberal/secularist Mohamed ElBaradei as prime minister of Egypt’s interim government.  It is also apparent from the New York Times account of President Morsi’s fall, which included multiple efforts by the Americans and the army to convince him to broaden his government and include more of his opposition.  It was good advice then, and it is good advice now.

But it is difficult.  The basic problem is that Egyptians have not yet agreed on the rules of their political game.  Morsi rammed through an Islamist-leaning constitution, approved in a referendum, that the army has now suspended.  The Nour party, seeing an opening, has endorsed the coup and will want to take advantage of the interim period to try to ensure that the new constitution the army has promised will lean even more in the Islamist direction than Morsi’s ill-fated version.  ElBaradei is unlikely to let that happen, as he is a devoted secularist and constitutionalist, albeit one who was apparently prepared to ride to power on the back of a military coup.

Yes, I call it a coup.  It had ample popular support.  But that doesn’t change the facts:  the military deposed and arrested the elected president and installed the chief justice of the supreme court in his place.  The fact that American law requires an aid cutoff should not change what we call it:  the horse still has four legs even if we call its tail a leg.  If we want to avoid cutting off aid–and I think we should want to avoid cutting it off–we need to figure out how to relieve ourselves of the self-imposed restriction.  The military portion of the assistance was transferred in its entirety recently, so there is time to figure out what to do about that.  The economic assistance is relatively small.  The more important issue is whether the United States will block or encourage the $4.8 billion International Monetary Fund loan that Egypt has been negotiating.

The arrest and imprisonment of Morsi and several dozen Muslim Brotherhood leaders are key issues, however little discussed in the American press.  There can be no serious effort at inclusion so long as they remain in prison.  Yesterday’s violence is a harbinger of things to come if Morsi is kept under lock and key.  Prosecuting him and his “brothers” for acts committed while they were in official positions may be an attractive proposition to the judicial officials he marginalized and tried to force into retirement.  But it virtually guarantees escalation of protests that will inevitably lead to even more violence, which in turn will make inclusion even more difficult.

That might serve the purposes of the Muslim Brotherhood well.  They stand to gain if the interim government fails as badly as Morsi did.  But Chief Justice, now President, Mansour should lean over backwards to try to prevent the Brotherhood from gaining that advantage.  If that means abandoning ElBaradei as prime minister, so be it.  If it means finding a way to release Morsi, so be that too.  The right path now is one that minimizes violence and maximizes inclusion.  It won’t be easy.