Egyptians have two bad options to choose from right now. Will anyone offer a third?
Of all the troubling images from Cairo, none could be worse than the pictures of the many civilian casualties. But nearly as disturbing was footage from last week showing an Egyptian police vehicle toppling off the 6th of October Bridge, which spans the Nile in central Cairo.
News accounts differed over whether the vehicle was pushed over by protesters or in a panic the driver burst through the bridge railing and plunged into the river. Either way, the bridge was badly damaged, the car was lost, the fate of its passengers unknown.
That picture is a miniature of a country that is already facing enormous environmental and population challenges, already desperately in need of development and repair.
Who will pay to heal the human and material wounds Egypt is now inflicting on itself? Even billions of dollars from Gulf nations can't indefinitely prop up a country of 85 million people, where roughly half the women can't read. What Egyptians are doing to their nation is sheer madness.
Egyptians are being given a choice between a military that seems to want to take Egypt back to 1952, when the army first seized power — and kept those Muslim Brothers in their place — and the Muslim Brothers, who want to go back to 622, to the birth of Islam and to a narrow, anti-pluralistic, anti-women, Shariah-dominated society. As if that is the answer to Egypt's ills.
"Egypt's striking lesson today is that its two most powerful, organized and trusted groups — the Muslim Brotherhood and the armed forces — both proved to be incompetent in the business of governance," the political scientist Rami Khouri wrote in The Beirut Daily Star last week. "The lack of other organized and credible indigenous groups of citizens that can engage in the political process and shape new constitutional systems is largely a consequence of how military officers, members of tribes, and religious zealots have dominated Arab public life for decades."
How true. The Eastern Europeans had had experience with parliamentary democracy in the interwar period. So when communism was lifted in 1989, with the help of the European Union, they made relatively easy transitions to democratic capitalism. The East Asians had decades of dictators, but, unlike those in the Arab world, most of them were modernizers. The East Asians also had Japan as a model — a country that said: "We're behind, what's wrong with us? We need to learn from those who are doing better."
The Arab world did not have the roots of democracy that could quickly blossom or modernizing autocrats, who built broad, educated middle classes that could gradually take control. So when the lid came off with the Arab awakening, there was no broad-based progressive movement to effectively compete with the same old, same old: the military and Muslim Brotherhood.
I understand why so many Egyptians turned against the Brotherhood. It was stealing their revolution for its own stale agenda. But the best way to justify ousting the Brotherhood was for the military to put in place a government that really would get Egypt started on the long march to modernization, entrepreneurship, literacy for women and consensual and inclusive politics — inclusive even of Islamists.
So, once again, Egyptians are being polarized between the same two bad options. The hour is late. Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has got to produce a third way — an authentically modernizing, inclusive government. That is what the 2011 revolution was about. If he diverts Egypt from that goal, Egypt is headed for a steep plunge, just like that police vehicle tumbling into the Nile.
Thomas Friedman writes for The New York Times.