Egypt’s crisis: The storm before the storm | The Economist
▻http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21583718-bloody-confrontation-streets-cairo-damaging-development-and-coul
Many Egyptians assume that much of this will be rendered moot by the backlash of Islamist violence they feel sure will come. Egyptian security forces are already fighting a nearly full-blown insurgency in the lawless north-east corner of Sinai and taking casualties almost every day. The Brotherhood’s allies include radical Islamist factions that mounted a spate of terrorist attacks two decades ago, culminating in the massacre of 58 tourists at Luxor in 1997. Some members of the Brotherhood itself may now be prepared to take up arms; the group’s leaders warn that they can no longer control rowdier elements.
All this leads some liberals and centrists to fear that an éradicateur faction along the lines of that which the Islamists fear is already installed will indeed come to power. That would amount to a full-scale counter-revolution, ending what is left of the optimism for a more open society generated by the Arab spring. Perhaps, as so often in the past, Egypt will find a way to muddle through. But the situation, which looked a great deal worse after the coup of 2013 than it did after the somewhat-similar-looking revolution in 2011, now looks even less hopeful. In 2012 one Egyptian commentator suggested that the country’s future was to be either Turkey or Pakistan. On August 14th an Egyptian who tweets under the name Salama Moussa suggested that his countrymen, “in the grip of madness”, saw a yet grimmer dichotomy: Tiananmen Square or Somalia.