Super: Crowding out Egypt's secular democrats

When Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi dismissed the country's top generals over the weekend, some warned of an Islamic takeover of the Arab world's most populous country. Morsi, elected from the Muslim Brotherhood, certainly bears watching. But appearances can be deceiving in Egypt.

Far from being the firebrands some assume, the Brotherhood's leaders are machine politicians, much more Tammany Hall than al-Qaida. Egypt's generals, on the other hand, have been so obsessed with holding political power to preserve their vast business empire that they allowed extremists unconnected with the Brotherhood to become entrenched in the Sinai Peninsula.

This weekend's forced retirements of several top generals notwithstanding, the military's relationship with the Brotherhood is deeply symbiotic -- if hardly friendly. Keeping the specter of Islamist rule in view has helped the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces dissuade the United States from insisting they return to their barracks. The threat of the military reclaiming full power, in turn, allowed the Brotherhood to win grudging support from secular Egyptians, the overwhelming majority of the electorate.

The military advanced this tacit alliance by setting election rules favoring the Brotherhood in last winter's parliamentary elections, disqualifying for president all but one secular candidate not affiliated with the old regime, and harassing and imprisoning the Brotherhood's secular competitors. The Brotherhood, in turn, was late in joining the revolution and abstained from most subsequent protests against military repression.

The power struggle in Egypt is not fundamentally about Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu's aggressive settlement-building policy has made it impossible for any viable politicians in Egypt to embrace Israel openly. But neither does the Brotherhood, nor any other civilian group, have an interest in inflaming tensions with Israel. Egypt's economy is in tatters after decades of corrupt military rule, and no group can retain broad support without showing tangible progress.

Morsi's inability to persuade any recognized figure with economic or foreign policy expertise to serve as prime minister shows the widespread belief that his administration will be short-lived. This is welcome: Egypt deserves a leader who reflects the hopes and aspirations of the full breadth of its society.

The question is what comes next. International observers have been paying considerable attention, justifiably, to the drafting of a new constitution, a process in which the military and the Brotherhood have marginalized other voices representing the vast majority of Egyptians. Neglected, but just as important, is the need for new election laws to prevent future regimes from excluding their opponents from the ballot, as the military did this spring, and to end abuses of the voting lists. Many parents of protesters killed in Tahrir Square, for example, were appalled to learn that the military regime had posthumously registered their children to vote.

Egypt's real future lies in its secular democrats, which by some estimates make up at least two-thirds of the population. Some formed independent trade unions, reminiscent of Poland's Solidarity. Others rallied middle-class youth support for those unions. Some even organized soccer clubs to demonstrate for democracy before the leading organizers were slaughtered last year. Many learned nonviolent advocacy in the United States -- in the tradition of Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King -- and are strongly pro-Western.

They've paid a heavy price for their principles. The military imprisoned and tortured them in large numbers, before, during and since the revolution. While turning a blind eye to the Persian Gulf states' lavish funding of Islamists, the military regime slandered secular democrats as foreign stooges and convened show trials for those who received U.S. training.

Sadly, the Obama administration has been too preoccupied with the intricacies of the military-Brotherhood shadow theater to defend the secular democrats strongly. It should suspend military aid to Egypt until the generals and the Brotherhood release all civilians tried for peaceful organizing, allow representative elements of Egyptian society to participate in writing the constitution and election laws, and allow free and fair elections for parliament and a full-term president.

David Super, a professor of law at Georgetown University, is active with the nonprofit organization Voices for a Democratic Egypt.