During the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi troops managed a 2:1 kill ratio against Iran's troops and popular levies. One figure of kill ratios out of Egypt is closer to war than to a massacre of innocent protesters.
These are government statistics, but they tell a story of battle more than massacre:
Egypt's Health Ministry also announced that 173 protesters and 57 policemen had been killed since early Friday. One of those reported dead was the son of Brotherhood supreme leader Mohammed Badie.
This is just one part of an article about military-supported militias arming up in Egypt. But a 3:1 kill ratio in favor of government forces looks more like war than repression.
I won't pretend that the military-backed coup is ideal. Or good. Or even particularly moral.
But it is better than the prospect of the Moslem Brotherhood embedding itself in Egypt's government and society for the next couple generations. Don't make the mistake of thinking that accepting the overthrow of Mursi's government rejects "democracy" just because Mursi was voted into power. So was Hamas in Gaza. So was Hitler, as it is commonly noted. Iran and Russia hold elections, too. Are they really democracies?
I don't think Egypt is the result of wrong-headed support of democracy in the Middle East. Supporting Mursi, as the Obama administration did, wasn't the same as supporting democracy, and accepting the coup--even grudgingly--isn't a rejection of democracy. As I've written many times in different contexts, democracy certainly requires honest voting. But that is only the most visible tip of the iceberg.
Democracy rests on rule of law that ensures future fair elections, means laws apply to everyone (hey, I'm talking to you, Obamacare exemptions), means corruption and favoritism is limited, and means minority rights are protected. Otherwise voting just provides a facade of respectability for mob rule. It is so vast here--even with apparent weakening under the strain of a vast and growing federal government--that we easily forget about the importance of rule of law when we talk about promoting democracy abroad.
Democracy will take time. Until Egyptians can build their version of it, we can at least hope things don't regress to Islamism.
Our choices in Egypt are bad. It's a sad fact of life that the main opposition to the Moslem Brotherhood isn't the Cairo branch of the League of Women Voters. But that's the way it is.
UPDATE: Yes, this is a battle and don't be shy about banning the Moslem Brotherhood in Egyptian electoral politics while promoting democracy (and rule of law). Said the British ambassador to Egypt:
"There is no difference with what David Cameron did to deal with the demonstrations here in London," he said. "If the demonstrators don't have any weapons, the police could have reached them and taken them into custody. Nobody would have been hurt. But when the demonstrators have pistols and guns and the police are lined up with guns pointing at them, the authorities have to defend themselves. That is the difference."
Speaking in Egypt's embassy in a Mayfair townhouse, Mr Kholy compared the one-year rule of Mr Morsi to the Islamist takeover of the Iranian state after the 1979 revolution and said that, like Nazism, the Muslim Brotherhood ideology sought to dominate Egyptian society.
"Morsi was elected president and held office for one year but in that time he tried to make everything Muslim Brotherhood controlled. Egyptian culture over 5,000 years is a mix of religions and civilisations in which the Islamic religion is one ingredient of the Egyptian character," he said. "The Muslim Brotherhood are like a Nazi group that demand that everything changes and people everything to their way."
However, Mr Kholy said that the roadmap offered by the interim government for a return to democracy remained in place and that while the Muslim Brotherhood could be banned, its political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, could contest the polls.
Not only are those two actions not contradictory, the former is necessary for the latter.
UPDATE: Thanks to Mad Minerva for the mention. You want foreign policy "realism?" This is it.
