For the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to call for, time after time, international intervention to defend their legitimate rule is only a reminder of the failure of their own underpinnings to fulfill their desire to change the status quo. This perception is further reinforced by the fact that the Brotherhood's appeal for intervention has taken place in parallel with the emergence of a broad consensus among Islamist forces, bringing together, in addition to the Brotherhood, the Salafis, al-Wasat Party, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, and Mohamed Salim Al-Awa; for one thing, this gathering is one of the upshots of the last coup, since the Islamists had hitherto been fragmented and divided. Yet the weakness of the Brotherhood's underpinnings here remains less dramatic (and scandalous) than the endorsement given by the modernists, the opponents of the Islamists, for the army, giving Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi a mandate. If it took in 1964 something like intervention by the Soviet Union to push Egyptian communists to disband their party and merge into the Arab Socialist Union, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, then pledging allegiance to the army by the leftists and liberals equally did not require any extraordinary international effort this time. Just like Iraqi and Syrian communists joined Saddam Hussein's and Hafez al-Assad's fronts, liberals infused with a flavor of social democracy before them, such as Iraqis Kamel al-Jaderji and Mohammad Hadid, had worked with the governments of the military coup leaders Bakr Sidqi (1936) and Abdul Karim Kassem (1958). Similarly, in modern Syrian history, a symbol like Akram Hurani was a stark example of the permanent confusion between parliamentary work and military coups. This confusion was not interrupted since Hosni al-Zaim's coup in 1949 until the ascent of the Baath to power in 1963. Recently, several modernist Syrian intellectuals expressed positions in support of the military rulers and Assad against the popular uprising. This, in turn, expresses the same kind of sentiment as above, and in some cases, the same confusion as Hurani's. While it is possible to note a thousand criticisms of the U.S. war in Iraq in 2003, what must not be ignored is the failure of the Iraqis, between 1968 and 2003, to topple Saddam Hussein. Furthermore, when Iraqis ran the affairs of Iraq the result was – and continues to be – disastrous. The same applies, albeit on a smaller scale, to the Libyans, whose revolution could only be concluded through foreign intervention. Their administration of their affairs continues to rely on tribes, regional allegiances, and rival militias. In regard to the Syrians, who began the process of toppling Assad by themselves in 2011, it is clear that, without foreign intervention, they will be unable to complete this process. As for the Egyptians and Tunisians who managed to finish the job on their own, they are today stumbling in a profound fashion, and facing many problems in managing their affairs after having toppled their leaders. Most likely, all these events, despite the differences between them, reveal an inherent weakness that cannot produce solid local underpinnings that are adequate by themselves. In general, this is something much more important and dangerous than polity itself. Indeed, the armed forces, the foreign powers, and religious illusions about salvation, remain until further notice the only active forces in our reality, which still struggles to be that, a reality. This kind of dependence is where our past-loving Islamists and modernism-loving liberals and leftists intersect.
