Egypt's political chasm continues to widen following the military's ouster of former President Mohammed Morsi, who, despite his many flaws and blunders, was the only democratically elected president in the country's history.
On one side is a curious amalgam: secularists (some democrats, some not), liberals, Coptic Christians and remnants of Hosni Mubarak's regime, particularly from the police, the military and the judiciary.
On the other stands Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, now being joined at the barricades by other Islamists, including hard-line Salafists from the Al-Nour party, who had stood with Egypt's military leader, General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, when he announced Morsi's removal on July 3.
More ominously, Egypt's political and cultural schism has segued into a bloodletting that shows no signs of ending. Scores of protesters have been killed -- most shot by the security services -- the wounds to the head and chest suggesting that the police had more than crowd control in mind. Many more people have been injured.
Morsi remains in detention, although the European Union's foreign policy czar, Catherine Ashton, was allowed to see him on Tuesday; though she, a seasoned diplomat, declined to divulge what he had told her, supposedly because she might get it wrong. (Given this odd explanation, one wonders whether the generals defined the ground rules for her visit.) Initially, the justification for holding Morsi was that it was for his own safety (though even his family was unable to see him); now he's been charged with conspiring with the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas.
Morsi's detention, along with the arrest of other senior Brotherhood leaders and the shutting down of the movement's media, indicates that the military leadership's real motive is to paralyze the party, perhaps even to put it out of business.
Enraged Brotherhood supporters have swarmed the streets, their sit-ins and marches galvanized by the fervor of Ramadan.
Brotherhood moderates -- the movement is not a monolith -- are rethinking their faith in electoral politics. The radicals, for their part, are proclaiming that it was folly to believe in the first place that the army or the United States would ever let an Islamist government, even an elected one, rule. Egypt's prospects for peace, let alone democracy, will remain poor if the latter assessment prevails. On the other side, the Brotherhood's staunchest enemies depict it as a shari'a-driven group with dictatorial inclinations that has no place in politics.
So deep is the mutual suspicion, so numerous the stereotypes and conspiracy theories, that even the minimal trust required to find a compromise is lacking.
The military has sought to camouflage its coup by creating a civilian leadership. The interim president is a Mubarak-era judge, Adly Mansour, who was appointed president of the Constitutional Court by Morsi. The Vice President is Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Commission, a Nobel Prize winner and a man with great cachet in Europe and America. ElBaradei embodies Egyptian liberals' dicey bet that the army actually favors a true democracy (which requires that the military be under civilian control) and will head to the barracks once it's established. Given the role that the army has played in Egypt's politics over the past sixty years they are likely to be disappointed.
The new government cannot act on any issue of any significance without the military brass' blessing. The anti-Morsi crowds who wave General El-Sisi's pictures, hail him as a hero and chant his name know this -- so do most other Egyptians, regardless of their politics. On this a divided country can agree.
By contrast, the Obama administration has engaged in wondrous verbal contortions to eschew uttering the four-letter word that truth demands: coup.
The situation is in the eye of the beholder; the military is not running the country, civilians are; we don't want to parse words; Egypt is undergoing a difficult transition and all sides should avoid violence. Such are the obfuscations and bromides offered up by the White House.
