The ferocity of the attacks by security forces on Islamist protesters in Cairo, Egypt this week appears to have been a deliberate calculation of the military-appointed government to provoke violence from the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, a number of Arab and Western historians of Middle East politics said. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/world/middleeast/attacks-on-protesters-in-cairo-were-calculated-to-provoke-some-say.html?hp&_r=0
The hatreds unleashed on all sides presaged a possible future of low-level insurgency by embittered, alienated Islamists. Some drew parallels to Algeria, where the military also intervened to subvert Islamist ascendance in democratic electoral politics more than two decades ago, leading to a horrific period of mayhem and repression.
“Given the propaganda of the state-supported media in Cairo, tarring the Muslim Brotherhood with the terrorist brush, making them enemies, not just a nuisance, is setting them up for being completely crushed and eliminated,” said Hugh Roberts, director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Tufts University. “To use an Algerian term, eradication.”
Egypt’s military commanders had concluded beforehand that they would gain nothing from negotiations with the Brotherhood, and would rather deal with it as an insurgent group that presented a security threat, not as a popular political movement.

“Clearly today Egypt is not on a trajectory to democracy, pluralism, tolerance. It is polarized, divided and bloody,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “We’re back to the security state,” she said.