Egypt And The Fall Of The Arab Spring

Benny Morris writes about the victory of the Islamists in Turkey:

The Turkish Islamists, who took control of the country after democratic elections in 2002, are well on their way to completing a revolution which will radically affect the Middle Eastern balance of power and perhaps, more generally, the international arena (West versus Islamic East), practically without protest or opposition. This weekend, they ticked another important "V" in their gradual desecularization of the country with the mass resignation of the country's top military brass and their immediate replacement by Islamist-friendly generals.

Morris leaves one of his key points for the very end of his article: Turkey's process of "gradual desecularization" may be serving as a model for another Middle East country:

The Turks may soon find an emulator in Egypt, where Islamists seem set to take over the state by democratic means. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties are favored to win the forthcoming general elections and may be expected to follow the selfsame Turkish "softly, softly" paradigm, in which a state is gradually subordinated to Islam and removed from the West's orbit by a slow, incremental process, stretching over years or even decades, which the West barely notices and finds itself unable to counter.

I wrote about how the Islamists are taking over the Tahrir square protests (In Egypt, Last Friday Was Not Your Father's Tahrir Square Protest), and now it is being reported that the challenge to the secular protesters is not all that understated.

According to The Wall Street Journal, even the Egyptian man on the street has turned against the secular protesters:

Mobs of ordinary Egyptians joined with soldiers to drive pro-democracy protesters from their encampment in Tahrir Square here Monday, showing how far the uprising's early heroes have fallen in the eyes of the public.

Six months after young, liberal activists helped lead the popular movement that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, the hard core of these protesters was forcibly dispersed by the troops. Some Egyptians lined the street to applaud the army. Others ganged up on the activists as they retreated from the square that has come to symbolize the Arab Spring.

The Fall of the Arab Spring has arrived.

And if anything, Morris may have underestimated how quickly Egypt will follow in Turkey's footsteps.

Technorati Tag: Egypt and Turkey and Arab Spring.