WE AREN'T GOVERNED BY THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION:

The removal from power of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's duly elected president will never change one irrefutable truth: If you applaud or support military coups in democracies--even young, wrongheaded democracies--you aid in the making of a very messy world.

 

Only a year after Morsi was elected to replace the disgraced Hosni Mubarak as Egypt's leader, it was plain even to some senior officials in the governing Islamic Brotherhood that mistakes had serious been made and that Egypt's laudable democratic experiment needed more institutional substance and several new priorities. It needed maturity by way of experience. And what post-revolutionary government would not?

Surely the best way to reach institutional strength and sophisticated political and economic policies is not by way of a violent coup, one that wipes the slate of all that has been achieved in the post-Mubarak period. Nor is it by toppling an elected leader and replacing his government with one chosen by the army.

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