From: Sultan Bin Sulayem < To: Jefftey Epstein <[email protected]> Subject: Fareed Zakaria on Egypt's lost opportunity Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 01:38:23 +0000 Dear Jeffrey If you haven't read it I tend to agree with fareed analysis Sultan In Thursday's Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria looks at why Morsi fell to history and his own mistakes. Please visit the following link, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-morsis-lost-opportunity- in-egypt/2013/07/03/c1d8066c-e420-11e2-aef3-339619eab080 story html or scroll down to read the article in its entirety. Egypt's lost opportunity By Fareed Zakaria Over the past three decades, when American officials would (gently) press Egypt's Hosni Mubarak to stop jailing his opponents and initiate more democratic reforms, he would invariably snap back: "Do you want the Muslim Brotherhood in power?" Wednesday's events suggest that Egyptians continue to face this choice, between military dictatorship and an illiberal democracy. To succeed, the new leadership in Egypt has to find a way to reject both. That's a task for Egyptians, not for the United States. Much of the Western media has tended to describe the divide in Egypt as between secularists and Islamists, portraying ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi as having pursued a radical Islamic agenda in his year in office. There is certainly a strand of truth to this narrative, though the story is more about grabbing power than enacting sharia. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have been deceptive, avaricious and venal. The party promised that it would neither run for the presidency nor seek a parliamentary majority. It reneged on both pledges. It rushed through a constitution that was deficient in many key guarantees of individual rights. It has allowed discrimination and even violence against the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt. It has tried to shut down its opposition, banning members of Mubarak's old party from all political offices in