Makes sense to anyone who has been clinging to this planet for enough years. Not easy to wipe out politics driven by sectarian religion. Juan Cole writes:

The Egyptian military’s obvious determination to crush the Muslim Brotherhood involves serious human rights violations, apparent in the appalling scenes of the siege of members in a mosque on Saturday. A separate question, which any political pragmatist would ask, is, can it work?

If we look at long term attempts to limit political expressions of religion in modern history, it is a mixed bag. But mostly, no, it doesn’t work in the long run. …InformedComment

See Iraq. Syria. Afghanistan. See Iran. Check out Turkey. See the still “fragile” Algeria. (See George W. Bush’s awful miscalculations.)

Not to mention that the Egyptian government banned the Brotherhood in 1948, as a result of which it assassinated Prime Minister Mahmoud al-Nuqrashi; and in 1954-1970 because it tried to assassinate Col Gamal Abdel Nasser. Anwar El Sadat rehabilitated it because he wanted to offset the Nasserist Left, then Hosni Mubarak used it to deflect the Muslim extremists of al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya and the zegyptian Islamic Jihad. It always came back.

The only places where hard line repression of political Islam had medium-term success (Syria, Iraq, Algeria), very heavy losses of life were involved. And even that did not always work (Afghanistan)

So the Egyptian generals are likely trying something that can’t be done in the long term, and can only be accomplished in the short term by genocidal techniques. …InformedComment

In other words, they’re not going to succeed. We can’t seem to find a way to detach ourselves from the Egyptian military. We’re just making the same damn mistakes over and over again.

The violent crackdown has left Mr. Obama in a no-win position: risk a partnership that has been the bedrock of Middle East peace for 35 years, or stand by while longtime allies try to hold on to power by mowing down opponents. From one side, the Israelis, Saudis and other Arab allies have lobbied him to go easy on the generals in the interest of thwarting what they see as the larger and more insidious Islamist threat. From the other, an unusual mix of conservatives and liberals has urged him to stand more forcefully against the sort of autocracy that has been a staple of Egyptian life for decades.

For now the administration has decided to keep the close relationship with the Egyptian military fundamentally unchanged. But the death toll is climbing, the streets are descending into chaos, and the government and the Islamists are vowing to escalate. …NYT

EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to a systems glitch this original went up on TMV with the wrong byline. We regret the system error.

Cross-posted from Prairie Weather