The future of the Mubarak family’s grip on Egypt now appears to be a matter for the Egyptian Army to decide. The riots on Friday started out in a way that suggested the regime’s riot police might hold control. An apparent dividend of the long U.S.-Egyptian alliance has been the transfer to Egyptian police of equipment and riot-control tactics of a type more humane than is sometimes employed by police states. There has apparently been some live firing on protesters by Egyptian forces, but in Cairo, where the international media is clustered, the police initially emphasized nonlethal tactics like water cannons and tear gas instead of live rounds fired at unarmed civilians. (Any authoritarian leader who gives even cursory study to the failures of his brethren around the world would know that when security forces shoot middle-class protesters dead in the capital city, the shock and outrage that follows can lead quickly to the dictator’s overthrow, as happened last week in Tunisia.) By nightfall on Friday, however, the regime judged this defense to be inadequate and ordered the Army into the streets.
What will the Army do? The United States provides about $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt’s armed forces annually. Its military-to-military strategic partnership is more than two decades old. An Egyptian military delegation led by Lieutenant General Sami Anan, chief of the armed-forces staff, happened to be visiting the Pentagon this week for talks. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell described the visit as “an example of how engaged we are with the Egyptians, even as these developments have taken place on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere.”
It would be natural for a leader in Mubarak’s position to wonder whom he can trust in a moment like this—in the Army’s leadership, or at the Pentagon, for that matter. Mubarak has been under pressure from Washington and Europe over his repressive policies for a long time. If he survives the current unrest, his regime will still be weakened, and the president’s apparent hopes for an intra-family handoff of power to his son will fall into doubt. And that is the best case, from Mubarak’s perspective.
Some American intelligence types I’ve run into this week suggest that the Egyptian Army is more closely tied to and controlled by the presidential palace than the Tunisian Army was. (I wrote about Tunisia in this week’s New Yorker.) Even if that is so, there is no way to predict how the generals will react to the dilemmas and opportunities of a revolt of this character. A cynical way to explain their position would be to observe that the uprising has provided an unplanned opportunity to stage a coup d’état, if the generals wish to carry one out. They may not even carry out the coup out of cynical motives. They may conclude that patriotism and justice require them now to switch sides, to stand with the population, which they are, after all, sworn to defend.
There have been reports that protesters are relieved to see the Army in the streets; no doubt, as in many other like countries, the Army has more credibility than the corrupt and often torture-prone police. The sense among generals and line officers that they have popular standing may influence the choices they now make. They could deliver an ultimatum to Mubarak, but fashion it to allow Mubarak to remain in office in exchange for an announcement of reforms and free elections. That is unlikely to quiet the streets, but it might. Or the generals could decide, as in Tunisia, that only Mubarak’s departure from office will create the necessary space for a transition.
Or the generals could decide, as other Arab generals in their position have before, to level their guns in defense of the status quo. The People’s Liberation Army did that at Tiananmen Square, of course. I happened last month to read Orville Schell’s book “Mandate of Heaven,” from the early nineties, which begins with a tour-de-force reconstruction of the Tiananmen crisis and its awful, bloody end. It was bracing to be reminded in vivid, emotional detail of just how murderous the People’s Liberation Army was when ordered to clear the protest. The students and the urban workers who had persuaded themselves that they were near victory were also stunned by the Army’s indiscriminate, decisive violence. They seemed to expect until the last hours that the military would stand with them. We can hope, at least, for something better in Egypt during the days ahead. Its Army officers have lived in a much wider world than the P.L.A.’s commanders had known. Many of Egypt’s generals have probably learned by now to think for themselves. They may not be democrats, but they will not likely wish to act merely as bodyguards for a despot.
Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images
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