If it looks like a military coup and has the effect of a coup – then it probably is a military coup. President Obama’s inability to use the “c” word, in relation to Egypt, is not because he has difficulty grasping what has happened. It is because, as soon as the United States declares that the Egyptian government has been overthrown by a coup, it is legally bound to cut off aid to Egypt.
Lying behind the question of whether to call this a coup lies a deeper western confusion. Western governments like to deal in clear moral categories: freedom-fighters versus dictators, democrats versus autocrats, goodies versus baddies. It makes foreign policy easier to understand, and easier to explain to the folks back home.
In this simple moral universe, a military coup is obviously “bad” – and an elected president is obviously “good”. And yet, many in the US and Europe preferred the look of the anti-Mohamed Morsi demonstrators in Tahrir Square to the look of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the secular liberals in Egypt, prominent in Tahrir, who espouse western-sounding values like minority rights and freedom-of-speech. It is the Brotherhood that wants a constitution inspired by Sharia law. However, the awkward fact is that it is also the Brotherhood that won the presidential election and that is the largest party in the Egyptian parliament. Even more awkwardly, the second largest group in the parliament are not liberals but Salafists – who espouse an even more fundamentalist approach to Islam.