We could have defeated the Brotherhood on our own.

“This is what the Muslim Brotherhood boils down to,” Fahmy told me. “They don’t have a project—it’s empty, flaky, vacuous.” The Brotherhood could have been defeated with time, Fahmy felt; calling in the military was a premature, and ultimately more reckless, choice. “I still believe that the Army takeover was the wrong thing to do,” he said. “We didn’t need the Army to do this for us. We could have defeated the Brotherhood on our own.” Joshua Hersh´s text in the The New Yorker in full can be read here. This is AUC history professor Khaled Fahmy´s view and i share it , in the sense that Egypt would have been much better off had not SCAF decided to oust President Morsi. In my view the MB and the Presidency was so weakend on 30 June , that it would have payed the political prize for it at the ballot box had only the then opposition and the Army held their guns.. We are now crawling nearer and nearer the political system we had on the eve of Jan25. The security state seems to be back. No real politics. The state of the media in terms of restrictions and (un)freedom and in terms of following in the footsteps of the state (read Army)reminds of the mood in America just after 9/11.. The killings can never be justified , forgiven or forgotten. Just as Mubarak lost his legitimacy on 28 of February 2011, Morsi on 22 November 2012 , so did Sisi and company on August 14 , in my view even before that. The fact is that during the 62 days since Morsi´s ousting, there has been more killed than during the 18 days of al Tahrir in January-February 2011. The current regime are doing the same mistake as the two previous ones. Aiming for "Winner takes all" strategy. Excluding at least 1/3 of the population. Instead of a constitution of "Consensus" that the then opposition had on top of their agenda , while still belonging to the opposition". Now when they have the chance , they opt for the same strategy as they accused Morsi for , the winner takes all scenario... It will come back to haunt them , and not only for the constitution. For more on how Khaled Fahmy views 3 July: How do you describe what happened on 3 July? KF: I can’t give a clear answer, but what I can say is that we had an overpowering move by the people. It sent a clear message to the regime that "your legitimacy has fallen." This is a very hard message because those who were in power were elected; their legitimacy was built upon the ballot box. What the message implied is that the legitimacy of a regime couldn’t be merely reduced to a set of formal electoral procedures. The legitimacy of this regime fell because it violated the constitution and the state institutions, eventually building resistance against them. The huge political vacuum, as the regime lost the support of the institutions of the state, signaled the army to take action to save the entity of the state. The hard question now is on the legitimacy of the army’s intervention. If we took 'legitimacy' in its literal and lawful terms, this would be considered a coup d’état. However, if we questioned this procedural understanding of legitimacy, taking into account the profound message the people sent, then a new legitimacy has been constituted. We can say that the army had to move and bow to the popular will. The legitimacy of this intervention derived from the will of the people. This raises another question: Will this army bow to the demands of the people or will it take advantage of the current political vacuum to impose its own agenda? I’m aware that the army did not only move to defend the national security and freedoms but also to defend its own interests and aims. The challenge we face now is how to insist on our demand to have the right to control and observe all of the state institutions, including the military and the presidency, but this is still unmarked territory. Joshua Hersh´s text in the The New Yorker in full can be read here.