More Pieces of the Egyptian Story

Here are some more useful pieces toward piecing together the Egyptian jigsaw:

• Mike Giglio and Christopher Dickey at The Daily Beast  on "The Quiet General: What Does Egypt's Ruler Want?" A look at General Sisi's background and career.

• Sahar Aziz at the Carnegie Endowment: "Sinai's Role in Morsi's Ouster." How the anarchic situation in Sinai pushed the Army to move.

• As many of you already know, General Sisi's 2006 "thesis" (more of a brief essay or short term paper really)  at the US Army War College in Carlisle on "Democracy in the Middle East" was released earlier this month under the Freedom of Information Act. A lot of pundits have read it as a "radical" or "Islamist" document, but I think this is over-analyzing a very short paper that expresses views not that uncommon in Egypt, where even the secularists don't usually call for excluding Islam from politics entirely. Read it yourself and decide how sinister it may be.