"Still I look to find a Reason to Believe..."

When it comes to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, I got it wrong. Way wrong.

If you're going to be the sort of person who exposes their political philosophy to public scrutiny (and apparently I am), then you run the risk of being publically wrong. How you choose to deal with that should say a lot about who you are. Who I am...but you'll have to be the judge of that.

I choose to own my mistakes, not to hide from them.

This makes me a bit unusual among the political "commentators" cluttering up your bandwidth. There are three common ways of dealing with such errors:

1. You can ignore your errors, and simply move on hoping no one will notice. This is bad policy; in an age when every word you type is electronically preserved somewhere, it gets increasingly difficult to pretend you didn't say something. If you achieve any kind of notoriety, your words will eventually come back to haunt you.

2. You can flat out deny that you made an error. Again, the problem is this internet thingy that preserves your mistakes forever. Still, lying about ever having said something that later turns out to be pure horse shit does seem to work. The attitude among pundits seems to be that if people are listening to you they're inclined to believe you, and if they aren't listening to you then you have no reason to care what they think.

3. You can admit that you made a mistake, but claim it wasn't your fault. This requires someone to blame, but there's always someone you want to demonize that will serve for a scapegoat. If it comes to it, you can always claim that it's everyone else's fault for not being the people you hoped they were, and that in a perfect world you would have been right all along.

There's a fourth way to handle errors. Like I said, If you're going to be a pundit, even a self-styled one, then you run the risk of error. You're human; you will make mistakes. In my own case, I am not fit to judge what sort of "pundit" I am; only you can judge whether or not I'm worth listening to. And part of my value as such, as I perceive it, is to admit it when I'm wrong.

So now we come to it; we come to my own foolish error.

In an article I wrote about a month ago (Egypt, Israel, Gaza...peace? 11-21-12) on the occasion of an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, I wrote about hope for a lasting peace (that hope is still pending) and had praise for Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, for his role in the deal. I said:

"But now there's hope for peace. Maybe it's no more than a faint hope, maybe it won't last, maybe it's too fragile to survive in such a harsh environment. But as long as there is a hope for peace, there's a hope for peace. And it appears to be mostly Mohamed Morsi's doing."

The very next day, Morsi turned tyrant. He gave himself virtually unlimited powers to "protect" Egypt. He granted himself the power to enact legislation without any judicial oversight or review. Though today Morsi reversed much of this totalitarian power-centralization, it came only after massive protests in the streets and a warning from Egypt's military: "Dialog is the best and only way to reach consensus. The opposite of that will bring us to a dark tunnel that will result in catastrophe and that is something we will not allow."

Morsi now governs from behind barbed wire, surrounded by his "Revolutionary Guard." The Egyptian Army has assumed even more power for itself in response to Morsi's edicts, but Morsi still has the strong backing of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Any way you look at it, Morsi cannot be seen as the beacon of hope that I portrayed him as.

So where did I get it wrong? Well,  I erred on the side of hope. When Morsi brokered that peace deal, there was certainly cause for hope. The fact that it has held this long means that there is still hope, but I have to admit that there is less of it now. Both Israel and Hamas have been approaching peace as if neither of them really wants it.

More to the point, I had hope for Morsi. I pointed out that Egypt and its President had been wild cards in the Middle East, and no one really new what sort of a leader Morsi would turn out to be. With the peace deal, there seemed to be reason to hope that Morsi would turn out to be a source of reason and dialog in the region. Instead, the next day he showed himself to be neither.

Yes, I blew it and I can offer no excuse. In a world where people are far to quick to judge for the worse, I was too quick to judge for the better. I was wrong.

(I should say that I should have written this a couple of weeks ago, that it's late in coming. Which it is... Well, I never said that when I owned a mistake I did so promptly, now did I?)

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

Egypt: Mohamed Morsi cancels decree that gave him sweeping powers (The Guardian/The Observer, UK)

Egypt crisis: Opposition shuns Morsi move (BBC News)

Egypt's Morsi leans on uncomfortable alliance with military (Los Angeles Times)

Mohamed Morsi in Wikipedia