Death by 1,000 cuts

Come back Mohammed Morsi, all is forgiven!  Well, almost all.  At least he was an elected figure who could have been removed at the next general election.  Now the army are back in control and conducting the same sham elections as they had been doing under Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak - Mubarak only fell because the military establishment didn't like his succession planning and withdrew its support.  So the man that is now president is former general Abdel Fateh al-Sisi, a person with similar opinions on democracy as Belarus' dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko - Jeffersonian or Madisonian al-Sisi is not.
The latest crackdown has placed all civilian infrastructure (a posh word according to David Blunkett, even though technocracy is the opposite of posh), that is parks, university campuses, roads and bridges under army jurisdiction.  The presidential decree lists all these as "equivalent to military facilities" and anyone accused of committing a crime in these areas will disappear into the military tribunal system.  It is a further triumph of the military as democracy in Egypt dies by a 1,000 cuts.
It is not unlike the Emperor Diocletian 'rationalising' the administration of the Roman Empire, dispensing with the last vestiges of civilian rule left over from the Republic (or in Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope, imperial lackeys and thereby the cinematic audience being informed that Emperor Palpatine had dissolved the Galactic Senate).  Not that Diocletian was unpopular for doing so - he gets a bad rep largely through his ferocious persecution of Christians.  Al-Sisi has also been known in the last few years to whip up popular resentment against the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt.  Al-Sisi's popularity in the middle-classes isn't dented though -as The Guardian put it "many Egyptians welcome Sisi’s response to Friday’s attacks [in the Sinai peninsular], with his strongman rule seen as the only bulwark against the chaos wrought elsewhere in the Middle East by extremists such as Isis."  After the chaos since the Arab Spring, Egyptians want peace and view the unravelling of Syria with ever greater horror.  On Sunday, 17 editors from both state and private newspapers issued a joint statement backing the government's fight against terrorism and reiterating “our rejection of attempts to doubt state institutions or insult the army or police or judiciary in a way that would reflect negatively on these institutions’ performance”.  It's a party line but one that the middle-classes can swallow.
Diocletian did the same in his day, giving over twenty years of internal peace and prosperity after a sequence of ten emperors in 17 years and the temporary breakaway of huge sections of the empire in east (Palmyra) and west (the Gallic Empire).  He governed with a co-Augustus and two vice emperors known as Caesars (the Tetrarchy).  However, in 305 Diocletian stepped down, promoting his junior colleague in his place and twisting the arm of his co-Augustus to do the same.  This experiment in a 'constitutional military' settlement ended in civil war and Constantine I ('the Great') unifying the whole edifice under his sole command.  Yet as the factions marched against each other, squandering lives and resources, they promised to keep themselves in check if Diocletian would come out of retirement to return as dominus (lord).  Diocletian's response was "If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed." With every Egyptian president that there has been either dying in office (Nasser, Sadat) or overthrown (Mubarak, Morsi), it is inconceivable that al-Sisi will ever come close to paraphrasing that ancient statement which emphatically rejected power.