The battle of the palace convinced liberals that Morsi had to go. They began to look toward the military commander Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to intervene on their behalf. Out of nowhere, a small group of activists offered to organize a nationwide campaign aimed at pushing Morsi out of office, a campaign called Tamarrod (Rebellion). Kirkpatrick recounts the evidence showing that Sisi and his allies, including regional powers like Saudi Arabia, gave Tamarrod crucial support while feigning neutrality.

Many of the activists insisted they didn’t want a coup, but army intervention could mean nothing else. After huge marches on June 30, the military ousted Morsi. The president’s supporters retired to two encampments. Clashes periodically erupted nearby and hundreds of people died, some Islamists killed by the government and some bystanders killed by the Islamists. Television stations called for a crackdown on the Islamist “cockroaches,” and many activists joined in. “I had fallen in love with the young liberals of Egypt. It broke my heart to see them like this,” Kirkpatrick says.

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On Aug. 14, the army finally moved on the encampments. Kirkpatrick and el-Sheikh were among the small number of journalists who witnessed the ensuing massacre. They spent hours sheltering from heavy, relentless gunfire, counting the bodies that went by. All told there were probably over 1,000 deaths. But by then, the country was ready to move on. The morning after, Kirkpatrick returned to the site to find a group of happy youths dancing to a pop song praising Sisi and the army.

Egypt wanted stability and Sisi provided it, or at least its vestige. There was no more tolerance for protests. The new regime was even more harsh than Mubarak’s. New demonstrations were crushed and the organizers jailed. Kirkpatrick lingers on the bitter aftermath, as former comrades exchanged recriminations whenever Facebook reminded them of the anniversaries of important marches. “We were so blinded by hatred. … We were non-Jews in Nazi Germany,” one concluded. “We failed the test.” The regime had already come for the Islamists and there was no one left for them.

“Into the Hands of the Soldiers” is a journalist’s eye view, not a comprehensive history. Kirkpatrick ignores or skips quickly through key grievances of the anti-Morsi movement, both the contrived (the Islamists blackmailed the army into rigging elections for them) and the genuine (Islamists were complicit in killings near the protest camps and in post-coup violence against Christians). Nor does he really treat the army’s partisans as having legitimate fears of their own.

Kirkpatrick suggests that if the activists had lived with Morsi’s illiberal but weak rule until he could be voted out, democracy might have had a chance. Their mistake, he says, was “they trusted Sisi.” They chose the greater of two evils. But he doesn’t fully explore the risks of sticking with Morsi. Nor does he analyze how a revolution works, how power can be seized and lost so easily. The closest he comes is a remark that political power is like “fairy-tale magic” that only works if you believe in it. That observation is actually well-rooted in political theory: Revolutions happen when enough people stop blindly accepting that it’s futile to resist the current regime.