Will Egypt Save Itself From Total Collapse by Going to War With Israel?

The Egyptian military has given President Mohamed Morsi until today to resolve the country’s political crisis or else it will step in. “If the people’s demands are not met,” Gen. Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, announced on Monday, the army “will have to disclose its own future plan.”

Aside from promising that “no one party will be excluded or marginalized,” Sisi failed to elaborate on his roadmap to restore stability to Egypt. That’s perhaps because no one, not the government, not Morsi’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Freedom and Justice party, not the army, nor even the protesters themselves know what it is that the 3 million people who have taken to the streets of Egypt are demanding. The unhappy reality is that in all likelihood, the vast majority of the protesters do not want anything except to end the chaos in their country, which they apparently aim to do by gorging themselves on violence.

The White House has called for early elections and warned the military against a coup. The bigger problem is that the Egyptian army has no plan to stabilize the country. And even if the army takes over, what price is it willing to pay to keep the streets quiet? Shooting protesters? How many? Egyptians, contrary to received wisdom, do not love the army, or else hundreds of people wouldn’t have flashed laser lights at a military helicopter the other night in an effort to blind the pilot and crash it. The army can’t bring order because the energies unleashed with the fall of Mubarak two-plus years ago can’t be put back in the bottle.

The Egyptian army has only one card left to play. Western journalists and other true believers in the promise of the Arab Spring may be shocked by the suggestion that Egypt may be headed to war with Israel in the not-too-distant future. But as the country implodes, war has become the easy way out. It doesn’t matter that the Egyptian army doesn’t want another catastrophic contest with Israel—neither did Anwar Sadat 40 years ago when he saved Egypt by going to war with Israel, which in turn helped him acquire the superpower patronage of the United States.

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