Old fault lines that have existed for over a century between people who are more secular (read: urban elites, Coptic Christians and everyone who benefits directly from the state, like police, army, and bureaucrats) and religious reactionaries (largely poorer people, with heavier concentrations in the south and Alexandria) have opened up with the fall of Mubarak. Mubarak fell because the secularists thought they could have all the benefits of a Mubarak presidency without Mubarak, and hoped to create a Western-style experiment in democracy in their misplaced euphoria following the Tunisian revolution.

Instead, they got a president who makes Obama look effective in terms of being able to manage the nation, while at the same time they got a guy who was aspiring to turn Egypt into a Sunni version of the Iranian state (or perhaps a semi-literate version of Taliban Afghanistan). The "moral" legislation was passed but nothing was done to help the economy, and he was positioning himself to be a less effective version of Mubarak.

At that point, the secularists realized that they didn't want the results of their experiment anymore. It was a, "Holy shit, there really are a lot of religious reactionaries here!" realization moment.

So now the secularists are paying lip service to a return to democracy while doing whatever they can to restore order (read: terrorize the reactionaries to keep them quiet). Because I'm a pessimist about the ability of any Middle Eastern state (aside from Iran, ironically enough) to implement a democracy that is anything other than a sham, and because I don't like religious reactionaries, I think we should complain a lot about how awful it is that the army is doing what it's doing without actually doing anything to hurt them, which is frankly exactly what Obama is doing right now. So, yes, I'm happy about Obama's position on Egypt, though I'm afraid he'll fuck things up and try to insist on a "speedy return to democracy" and then do something really stupid like cut military aid. Send them the bullets they need to mow down the Islamists, make sure they at least schedule some elections and just forget about it.

As with Syria, this could lead to years of violence and death. As with Syria, as long as no side wins we probably don't care very much. I expect Lebanon and Iraq will be in full-blown civil war by the end of the year.

Hopefully, after about ten years and a few dozen million dead the Muslim world will realize what Europeans realized about 3 centuries ago: don't fucking mix religion and politics.