Live: Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt’s growing revolution

[bks]

DrVolin wrote:

As long as regime forces stay intact, they can counterattack the disorganized and straggling protesters. How much room does the regime have?

If the military is in 'power', then it's up to the military to make sure that those forces don't stay intact with access to the ship of state. How realistic is this? What's the relationship between the Supreme Council and those regime forces?

From yesterday:

Is Egypt heading for a military state, as army transfers power?

Al-Alam TV, Iran

Guest, Male #1 (Dr. Imad Fawzi al-Sha'abi, Director of Cairo's Center for Strategic Studies)

Unfortunately, Egypt is heading toward instability. If the Egyptian president steps down or transfers his powers to Omar Suleiman, it means that the regime is no longer intact. The regime has constitutionally collapsed on the street. This means we are on the verge of entering a new era, that of a power struggle. A power struggle between the army and Omar Suleiman. However, if the president steps down and transfers power to the army's command council or the command council seizes power, it will mean we are facing a different type of political change in Egypt, a transitional change. In this transitional period, a new constitution will be drafted because the current constitution is invalid. Let's be realistic, both the constitution and the government have already collapsed. This government can't be maintained under these circumstances. The military will likely form a government that is based on the new revolutionary state of affairs witnessed in the country. Another possibility is for the army to form a military government, which is also the result of the new state of affairs imposed in the country. There's a third possibility, which is very frightening. The military could seize power and find it necessary to declare martial law. The army may activate the current emergency law in a bid to calm the street. Consequently, this may create a new environment but this is only hypothetical. The military could say: 'why can't we rule the country?' A power struggle within the army may ensue, just like the power struggle we have seen among the leaders of the revolution. The real revolutionaries are those who are standing on the frontline of the demonstrations, they are the masses of people who don't have a leadership. Again, a power struggle may ensue within the army's leadership. This is a very dangerous situation. The people may come out to counter the army and their proposition, the slogan 'the people and the army are one,' could change to 'the people and the army are at odds."

http://www.linktv.org/scripts/episode_t ... ic20110210

JackRiddler wrote:
Was there a better alternative for getting rid of Mubarak? Should Egypt have kept him, or Suleiman, who may have been even worse? I'd say no and no! Will things be better? Well, now there's a chance of it, as opposed to none. Should anyone deny the cry of a nation for their moment of freedom?

I'm not in any way diminishing the enormity of what just happened. But if this is really a moment of political freedom, then there will be a long period of it, won't there? If it's not a period of freedom, then power will be seized and re-concentrated, as in above. We'll soon see.

But to answer the question: yeah, ideally there was a better way (not that anyone could have got it to happen). Mubarak is driven from the country by the uprising while the military sits on the sidelines, ready to intervene only if the exiting government tries to attack the population. In this scenario, unrealistic as it is, the military acknowledges that it has no proper role in a state without a legitimate government to direct it. It recognizes, in other words, as it seemed to for parts of last week, that it must stay on the sidelines, because 1) it has no authority to act of its own volition, and 2) because there is no legitimate civilian commander-in-chief to direct it. The power struggle ensues, but without military interference unless an asymmetrical violent attack is launched by the government against the uprising..

[vanlose kid]

i want to make a distinction here for clarity's sake. there are, as of now, two aspects to this preliminary result of the uprising in Egypt and i want to address them separately.

1) earlier in the thread i asked folks to note the flash-organization and build up of an egalitarian society in Tahrir square as a counter-argument to the Leviathan thesis of government. as far as that is concerned: the people's demands, organization, patience, perseverance, nobility, etc., i find no fault, nor do i find an anomalous confirmation of the counter-thesis, as the counter-thesis, in my view, and history and anthropology support this, is the human norm. tyranny is the anomaly or aberration, if you will. – what the Egyptian people have achieved here is more than just noteworthy, it's very admirable.

2) i've been suspicious of the Egyptian military from the outset, and i still am. looking back at the stalemate of the past week or so – M naming a VP, handing over authority, Communique number two in response to M's second speech, etc., – i saw a play for stability on the part of the Egyptian regime and with the backing of the US. all along, stability ("orderly transition") was key to how the regime acted. this also explains the meandering response(s) from DC. the regime and its sponsors have all along played for stability or the "known knowns". if not M then Suleiman, and even though he'd have to stage some form of "orderly transition" with concessions and reforms of laws and so on, what he bought (what the "orderly transition" is meant to buy) was time. time to

(a) get to know and "shake hands" with whoever would be coming into power in Egypt or

(b) get whoever the US wanted in power in Egypt in place for the transition.

while that was going on, someone had to take the reins and that someone had to be a "known known". First it was Suleiman and the newly appointed cabinet (with the backing of the army). now it's the army straight up.

now there is a point to be made re the army and whether it isn't in fact siding completely with the people. but as a whole i think not. sure we've seen or heard of junior officers and some of even higher rank join in the protests and so on, but the brass? i don't think so. were they loyal to M? yes and no. they are however loyal to the existing structure of command and the power and influence the army has. by shunting M and Suleiman to the side they merely seek to protect that power and influence: their position. they've succeeded.

what's more so has the US. now the orderly transition is in the trusted hands of the brass, and they, in their turn, with whatever qualifications re pride and Egyptian military manliness taken into account, remain beholden to the US. they have the same world view: top down. Suleiman's argument that the Egyptian people "are not ready for democracy" is not a solitary view. it is even shared by the ruling classes in the US. – it's a class thing. end of.

so, applause, admiration, and all the best to the Egyptian people, for sure. with the above caveats.

(yes, i am an optimist.)

*

[compared2what?]

I'll grant that it was beautiful theater. That last defiant speech, simultaneously focusing popular anger even more specifically on the person of Mubarak and reinforcing the expectation that his very departure equals victory; the dramatic, hurried, and apparently improvised message relayed by his vice-president and long-time head of military intel that power had passed to his long-time head of the military. One has trouble imagining a more orderly non-transition. Even the Western media have been suitably touched by the explosions of joy that symbolize the power of the people and signal a return to business as usual.

Not if the people choose not to return to business as usual, they don't.

That's a very real "if." Obviously. And it's not exactly like that or any other choice that's within the power of people to make is suddenly going to lead to everything coming up sunshine and lollipops overnight. Or even over the long haul. Equally obviously. People in general are just too highly prone to committing every kind of venal, short-sighted and selfish act of vicious brutality imaginable without (at best) even noticing that's what they've done for there to be any realistic hope that a considerable number of such acts won't be committed sooner or later whenever and wherever there are people doing (or not doing) anything. However, they're also capable of every kind of great achievement imaginable, both collectively and individually.

And that's pretty much the paradoxical nature of human existence for you. As a result of which, all is never going to be either won or lost by anybody. So until (I guess, maybe) time ticks to a finish, I'd say that it's a safe bet that -- newsflash! -- life will continue to be rife with serious hardships, numerous difficulties and even regular wholesale massive tragedies for the majority of living beings on the planet. Probably the vast majority, barring a truly unprecedented development.

But none of that means that progress in the direction of better things never occurs. Or that there's no point in celebrating it when it does. Or that celebrating it necessarily entails deluding oneself and others into thinking that evil has been vanquished and utopia on earth achieved.

In fact, when it comes to that last one, given that most rational and non-feral children have realized on their own that that kind of happy ending is nothing but a pure fantasy (though not one that's totally without its uses, imo) before they've make the non-definitive transition into adolescence, I personally am strongly inclined to just take it for granted that such delusions are fully pre-not-entailed, by definition. Absent some reason to think otherwise.

But not to the extent that they forget to congratulate themselves, in appropriately hushed tones, for the role they played in protecting the masses by keeping the world's attention on the thugs. Yes, the People have today won a famous victory. An 82 year old man retired from public life in February instead of September, and his cabinet can now get down to the business of running a country made safe again for big money, secure in the knowledge that the main dissidents have given away their positions by prematurely opening fire on the regime's light cavalry screen. Many an aging dictator, or more likely their ministers, are updating their Continuity of Government powerpoint presentations tonight.

I fully agree with you that the media is still ludicrously self-regarding, vain and foolish. As to the rest, since the value, import and consequences of events still in progress cannot be reliably determined and/or foretold by anyone, I can't really agree or disagree with it on substance. Although fwiw, I do concede that since you've arranged them into a narrative that's a pleasure to read, there's not really a man, woman or child alive anywhere who could have done more. So there's that.

Cheers.

[23]

Suleiman's argument that the Egyptian people "are not ready for democracy" is not a solitary view. it is even shared by the ruling classes in the US. – it's a class thing.

True that, with one additional caveat:

it's an authoritarian thing as well.

It is in the nature of authoritarians to perceive the people that they rule or lead as incapable of self-management. That perception supports their need to rule with an iron fist.

Authoritarian parents exemplify that trait quite well. Suppressing any opportunity for their children to learn how to fend for themselves, because they need to see them as incompetent to justify their authoritarian intervention.

The perception that someone is not ready to participate in a democratic system... says more about the person who's embracing that perception than it does about the people he is talking about.

[vanlose kid]

The vast and complex military machine will decide its nation’s future
No leader will be able to take control without the army’s backing

By Professor Robert D Springborg
Saturday, 12 February 2011

The half-million man Egyptian military is the largest in Africa and 11th largest in the world.

Since it started in the late 1970s, US military aid to Egypt has totalled a staggering $40bn (£24.9bn). It is now charged, since the collapse yesterday of the 30-year-old Mubarak regime, with running the country.

Some 40 per cent of troops are conscripts, suggesting that, despite its size, and its influence over Egyptian society, it is yet to make the transition to being a professional military force. Personnel structures remain rigid, there is no recruitment channel from the ranks of non-commissioned to commissioned officers and a single re-enlistment choice for conscripts is for 20 years further service.

However, the internal structures belie the fact that the military is central to the narrative and historical reality of the emergence of contemporary Egypt, a message that is driven home not least by an impressive array of military museums, through curricula for the teaching of Egyptian history, and in the media, which lionises the past and present roles of the military.

No opposition political party dares be openly critical of the military, because not only does such criticism cross an informal "red line" drawn rigidly by the government, but also because such criticism would not strike a chord with most Egyptians.

The encroachment of the military into civilian domains, such as sports, is scarcely noticed and apparently not resented, as the much cheered victory in the 2010 Egyptian Cup of the Border Guards' football team attests.

Tangible economic and political interests underpin the military's popularity. It commands a sprawling economic empire that produces a vast array of military and civilian goods and services, none of which appears in the national budget. Close observers liken Field Marshal, Minister of Defence and now head of the Higher Military Council that took control of Egypt yesterday, Mohamed Tantawi, to the CEO of the largest corporate conglomerate in Egypt.

In the mid 1980s the World Bank urged that military companies be sold to civilian interests as part of the broader privatisation programme, advice that was rejected out of hand. Since then the military economy has continued to expand. Paradoxically, it has itself benefited from the privatisation programme, with formerly state owned civilian enterprises being handed over to military control.

That control is embedded in the constitution, which empowers the president, whoever that may eventually be, to determine the composition of the officer corps and to select the cabinet, hence to choose the Minister of Defence and Minister of Military Production, the latter presiding over the military economy.

Field Marshal Tantawi has long held both portfolios, suggesting the degree to which the military and its economic empire are intertwined and control over them centralised. The only civilian employees in the Ministry of Defence are said – and not jokingly – to be those who serve tea and coffee.

In more regular times, under the Egyptian constitution, neither the legislature nor civil society can exert any meaningful control over the military.

Civil society has been largely passive in the face of the military's autonomy. It has no access to relevant information about the armed forces, as attested to by Egypt's rank at the very bottom of Global Integrity's ranking of citizen's access under law and in practice to governmental information, its scores being zero on both dimensions. The asymmetry of information between the military and civil society has steadily tilted more in the former's favour over the past three decades. The media reported more information on defence and military matters in the 1980s [when Mubarak came to power, vk] than subsequently. A European defence attaché's lament that he learned more from the internet about the Egyptian military than he did during his three years in office in Egypt, reflects the information blackout that has been successfully imposed.

The political opposition, even if it wants to, cannot rapidly gain popular traction with a campaign to subject the military to civilian control, reduce it in size and restrict its role in the economy, a change that, even now, would be remarkable.

At present, despite its undoubted achievements in mobilising millions of Egyptians in protest against the established and military-backed political order, the opposition is not substantially more popular than the armed forces.

As manoeuvring around the establishment of the new political order intensifies, most if not all viable contenders, including the Muslim Brotherhood and other elements of the opposition, to say nothing of the new Vice President, the Minister of Defence and the rest of the high command, recognise that the military will probably be the single most important factor in determining its outcome.

Some members of the opposition may seek to strike a deal with the military to retain some power.

The writer is Professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, California

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 12491.html

*

[vanlose kid]

Warriors or peacemongers?

By JOHN REINIERS
More Than Words, Published: February 12, 2011, Updated: 06:09 pm

In one respect, our fascination with the corrupt Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is misplaced. He is just another one from a long line of military strongmen, having been preceded by Anwar Sadat and the infamous Col. Gamal Nasser.

What is more fascinating is that the military vowed not to fire on protesters and recognized "the legitimacy of the people's demands." And this was after Mubarak announced his appointment of Omar Suleiman, his long time confidante and intelligence chief, as Vice President. A military spokesman went on to say, "The military has not and will not use force against the public," that "The freedom of peaceful expression is guaranteed for everyone." What is even more surprising is that this pledge was made by the military on state TV, after Mubarak had shut down cell phone towers and the internet earlier.

The key to the military position, which now has abandoned Mubarak, is that its ranks include many young conscripts, who see themselves as citizen-soldiers who are highly respected by the people. It seems clear that the military will manage a transition and preserve some form of ad hoc government until elections take place. And given that this is a middle eastern country, it is also significant that Egypt is a secular country, not unlike Israel, Turkey and Pakistan. Of more importance in all these countries — their militaries are committed secularists. This may account for why the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood are keeping their powder dry and praising, "the glorious position of the great Egyptian army that has stood at its peoples side." They will lay in the weeds until an election as did Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Not to be forgotten are the close ties between the Egyptian and U.S. militaries which started in 1979 with the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. This not only includes weapons sales, but more importantly training, joint exercises and education in the United States under the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program where foreign officers are exposed to the values of a democratic society, rule of law, human rights,American culture, (as embarrassing as it might be at times) and the notion of civilian rule over the military. Set up in 1961, and interestingly in the budget of the State Department, it includes over 2,000 courses at 250 military schools and installations, such as the Army War College or the National Defense University, (NDU) a graduate-level premier center for professional military education. In 1998 Congress appropriated $50 million for 100 allied countries for the IMET program, having trained over 500,000 students in the past 40 years. Little-known but important information.

Egypt is one of many countries that sends its officers to the U.S. Many of these officers bring over their families, so they too get exposure to democratic values which they carry back home. Perhaps this is one of the reasons the Egyptian military — as does its counterpart in Turkey and Pakistan — sees itself as the "Guardian of the people. In fact during the protests in Cairo, the whole world saw the army fraternizing with the protesters.

So is the IMET program showing positive returns? We could ask the same question about the enormous number of foreign graduate students who study here and return to their native countries.

Here is something to consider: Iran's Green movement was brutally repressed in 2009- 2010. Threats by the Basij security thugs were reinforced by warnings from the Revolutionary Guard (created as the "the people's army") that any protests would not be tolerated. The difference is that Iran is not secular. The Guard views itself as guardian of an extremist theocratic revolution, not guardian of the people, as we see in other secular Islamist countries.

Turkey is an interesting example. Mustfa Ataturk transformed Turkey from an authoritarian Ottoman Sultanate to a secular republic in 1923, and he constitutionally appointed the military as guardian of the fledgling country. After two military coups it managed to maintain control, but it did such a good job of creating an independent republic, that 200 active duty and retired officers are currently on trial for plotting to overthrow an Islamic-rooted secular government in a coup d'etat!

There is another piece to the Middle Eastern puzzle. Social networking. The median age in Egypt is 24 years. In Iran 26.4 years. The average age of an Iranian scientist is under 26! These young people are very savvy internet users. So in Iran, while the internet enabled the protesters, as in Egypt, to communicate through social networks like Twitter and Facebook, the savage crackdown by the government discouraged the freedom movement. Unlike Egypt, they had no allies in the military.

Which brings us to this new era of social networking. Governments no longer have a monopoly on information. (And the military doesn't exist in a vacuum. The young conscripts in the ranks are no different than the Arab street.) The internet is a window to the free world. Information technology has been and will continue to be a game changer in the Middle East. Egyptian, Tunisian and Iranian protests have been fueled and organized by social networks. So even if the Egyptian demonstrators compromise at some point during this transitional phase of governance, the tools to communicate and organize will still be there if the military backslides. Dictators can no longer stifle opposition by just shutting down newspapers, TV and radio stations.

Hogo Chavez tried this, and it failed. So in April 2010, he announced he would start twittering to reach the young people. His Director of Communications announced, "Commandante Chavez is going to open his Twitter account soon to wage the battle online."

As the old saying goes, "If you can't beat them — join them." Or better yet, to paraphrase another old adage, "You can't put technology back in the bottle."

John Reiniers, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill.

http://www2.hernandotoday.com/content/2 ... cemongers/

*

[vanlose kid]

re Communique number 2:

Egypt paper: Military disapproved of Mubarak's speech

Did internal regime disagreements precede Hosni Mubarak's resignation Friday?

Egypt's semi-official Al-Ahram reported Friday that Egyptian military leaders did not approve of the hardline speeches made by Mubarak and Vice President Omar Suleiman Thursday night, the New York Times's The Lede blog reports:

Ahram Online, the English-language arm of the state newspaper Al Ahram, reported on Friday that a former senior Egyptian intelligence official told the newspaper that "both of last night's addresses by Mubarak and Suleiman were in defiance of the armed forces."

As we wait got the military authorities to issue a new statement, here is the Egyptian newspaper's fascinating report in full:

Maj. Gen. Safwat El-Zayat, a former senior official of Egypt's General Intelligence and member of the Egyptian Council of Foreign Affairs, asserted, in an interview with Ahram Online, that the address delivered by President Mubarak last night was formulated against the wishes of the armed forces, and away from their oversight. He claimed that Vice Preisdent Omar Suleiman's address, which came on the heels of Mubarak's address, was equally in defiance of the armed forces and away from its oversight.

Attributing this information to his own sources within the Egyptian military, Maj. Gen. El-Zayat said there was now a deep cleavage between the armed forces, represented in its Supreme Council, and the Presidential authority, represented in both President Mubarak and his Vice President, Omar Suleiman.

According to El-Zayat, communiqué #2 issued this morning by the Supreme Armed Forces Council was not, as many people in Egypt and elsewhere understood it, an affirmation of the addresses of Mubarak and Suleiman, but rather an attempt to avoid an open conflict, while at the same time underlining that the army will act as guarantor for the transition to full democracy. He adivced that people should listen carefully to the anticipated communique #3.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/lauraroze ... ml?showall

*

[compared2what?]

You'd have to find transfers of property to their anonymous foundations, and then tie them to the foundations, which is next to impossible.

I can assure you with total confidence that happily, you are mistaken. That's not only exceedingly possible, it's actually not even very work-intensive, oftener than not. Neither is finding transfers of property to their churches or religious organizations, come to that. Property transfer records are a beautiful thing.

They'll leave enough assets in the open to be seized to satisfy the media and might even throw a couple of hidden ones at a corruptible, hungry young prosecutor. Just for later considerations.

In my experience and observation, media-consciousness is such a complete and unalloyed non-factor when it comes to those very important decisions that every criminal megalomaniac has to make when it's time to start obscuring the ownership of (and/or the flow of funds swirling around) his or her ill-gotten and potentially seizable assets, I'd seriously be very hard-put to think of a single consideration of any kind at all that was more wholly unrelated to the general spirit of the enterprise.

Seriously. Apart from the utterly daft premise that judicious villains regularly set a few dirty assets aside for some fictive and unforecastable rainy day several decades in the future that may never come at all on which the purely notional corruptible, hungry young prosecutor on whose completely imaginary character flaws a key part of their estate-planning inexplicably has always depended finally darkens their doors, I can honestly say that I know of no less likely prospect.

Assets that disappear offshore after reportedly having last been seen leaving a party on the waterfront in the company of a rumored throng of underage limited liability and holding companies are next to impossible to find, even for people who have subpoena power. And I have very little doubt that most of Mubarak's billions are well beyond anybody's reach.

However, the question that I saw was about some property he might own in the Hollywood area. So that's pretty much strictly by the way.

[WakeUpAndLive]

1) earlier in the thread i asked folks to note the flash-organization and build up of an egalitarian society in Tahrir square as a counter-argument to the Leviathan thesis of government. as far as that is concerned: the people's demands, organization, patience, perseverance, nobility, etc., i find no fault, nor do i find an anomalous confirmation of the counter-thesis, as the counter-thesis, in my view, and history and anthropology support this, is the human norm. tyranny is the anomaly or aberration, if you will. – what the Egyptian people have achieved here is more than just noteworthy, it's very admirable.

2) i've been suspicious of the Egyptian military from the outset, and i still am. looking back at the stalemate of the past week or so – M naming a VP, handing over authority, Communique number two in response to M's second speech, etc., – i saw a play for stability on the part of the Egyptian regime and with the backing of the US. all along, stability ("orderly transition") was key to how the regime acted. this also explains the meandering response(s) from DC. the regime and its sponsors have all along played for stability or the "known knowns". if not M then Suleiman, and even though he'd have to stage some form of "orderly transition" with concessions and reforms of laws and so on, what he bought (what the "orderly transition" is meant to buy) was time. time to

(a) get to know and "shake hands" with whoever would be coming into power in Egypt or

(b) get whoever the US wanted in power in Egypt in place for the transition.
*

I've been watching this and looking for a way to describe it perfectly, the people are legit, but there is something deeper. Thank you for analyzing it well.

Egypt, your fight is not over, just know we stand behind you!

[AlicetheKurious]

A lot of the same analysts who have been getting it wrong all along, are still getting it wrong. There's a fine line between healthy wariness and the kind of cynicism that makes a person blind to anything outside a narrow range of only the most pessimistic possibilities, and they seem to be stuck behind it.

Maybe, and I'm speculating here, it's related to a certain one-dimensional, somewhat materialistic and even deterministic view of what human beings are, ultimately. Maybe it's just fear of disappointment. I don't know, I'll have to think about that. But it's a view that leaves no room for the very palpable and universal conviction among Egyptians today that what has happened since January 25 is not only a political but above all a spiritual revolution, one in which God as the refuge of the oppressed was constantly invoked (regardless of the invoker's religiosity or lack thereof), as were His attributes, such as Truth, Love, Justice, Mercy and Humility and Sacrifice among other things, which the revolutionaries embodied, and in which all their actions were rooted.

Tahrir Square was a place where the hungry were fed, where the sick and wounded were tended, where men rushed selflessly to man the barricades and faced, unarmed, live bullets and sticks and molotov cocktails in order to defend the thousands and sometimes millions of unarmed demonstrators inside the square. It was a place where the truth was spoken and written and drawn and sung openly and without fear, and where everybody who had something to give, gave it freely, including everything from the "people's barber" who gave away haircuts, to the young people who organized cleaning crews and the thousands who donated blankets, tents, food and water, who set up electrical "charging stations" for mobile phones and laptops, who provided material and help in making signs, and who worked tirelessly to keep people's spirits up with everything from songs to poetry to jokes. It was a place where each individual, rich or poor, man or woman, young or old, Christian or Muslim, was responsible for all and in solidarity with all. Unselfishness became viral, spreading nation-wide and manifesting itself in countless spontaneous acts of generosity; love was the dominant emotion. There was no identifiable leadership, and collective actions and decisions were coordinated through inspiration and example, never coercion.

Lies can only gain traction when the truth is suppressed. The power of Liberation Square is that it provided a space where the truth was on display for all to see, and before its awesome power, all the lies disintegrated and blew away in the wind.

To not take this into account necessarily leads to a deeply flawed analysis, one, ironically, rooted in precisely the same limited, materialistic, Hobbesian cynicism about human "nature" that the Mubarak regime embodied and propagated and upon which its own power was based. When that cynicism was exposed as a lie, there was a nation-wide spiritual awakening and the regime collapsed. It's that simple, really. Those who insist on trying to understand the Egyptian revolution while clinging to the same assumptions that the old regime embodied, will always be taken by surprise; sadly for them, they will be deprived of the chance to participate in the joy and appreciate the profound significance of this victory, not only for Egyptians but for all people, everywhere.

Another grave error these 'analysts' make is to assume that those who organized and carried out this revolution against impossible odds are naive and easily fooled, despite the huge amount of evidence to the contrary, for those who have eyes to see. They ignore the power and resources of the multi-pronged forces, domestic and international, that were mobilized to prevent and/or defeat this revolution at all cost. This view assumes that the brilliant strategies and coordination that repeatedly foiled the combined efforts of not only the Mubarak regime but its international backers, were a fluke, but that now the revolutionaries will be no match for those who are undoubtedly even now plotting to undermine and reverse it.

All I can say to them is, keep watching.

[Byrne]

From http://prosperoinc.blogspot.com/ (Ian Bell of the Glasgow Herald)

Saturday, 12 February 2011
Egypt: That Parade, This Rain

Quote: “The generals say they will guarantee reform.”
You’ll forgive me if I just dropped my laudanum and my service revolver. The TV news is rolling. Eager telly producers the world around are laying anthemic pop tracks over shots of happy Egyptians while relaying the usual Obama-feed.
Democracy, it turns out, is a good thing. The president just said so. Obama is talking about history as though speaking of a personal friend. He’s also talking about what must be.
Take it from a man who just ordered a military coup, eh?

Speaking live from my front room, though, I wonder, being difficult, about the connection between supreme military councils and the people’s will. Since I’m not Egyptian, I don’t necessarily love the army that kept Hosni Mubarak in power for 30 years. Since, unlike the President of These United States, I’ve actually read some history, I don’t believe revolutions work that way. But I quibble.
What makes me curious is all the cheering coverage. Is there a script? In living reality, Obama’s White House will be terrified, right now, by what the cast changes in Egypt might portend. To paraphrase: “Democracy? Oh, crap.”
Our counterpoint will be informed by an equal and opposite assumption. For al-Jazeera’s Gulf audience (and owners) the idea that representative legitimacy might catch on across the region will also elicit a startling thought. Something like, “Democ­racy? Oh, crap”.
Egypt’s ancient generals have their work cut out. The trick – and the Pentagon will be gaming this one – will be to let the youngsters argue and vote without allow­ing a single important difference to occur in Egypt’s politics or policies.
Secondly, and vastly more important to America’s own numerous generals, is the issue of what old Dr Henry “Death” Kissinger used to call linkage. If this democ­racy idea – which is a good thing – gets out, “Oh, crap” will barely cover it for America and her friends.
Whom might those be? Three, as a rule: Egypt, Saudi, and the little Jewish one the others pretend to hate. If Mubarak has been sold for scrap, the implications of his fall matter only, in American eyes, to the extent that they affect Israel and Saudi Arabia. But if the democracy idea gets around, who knows what might happen?
Israel and the House of Saud confronted with democracies everywhere they turn? Would that be another good thing?
Mubarak’s kiss-off – was he arguing over the pension plan? – caught me and numerous others in mid-ponder yesterday. The following is therefore the rewrite, rough in places, from this week’s turtle-and-hare race. It should appear, more or less, in The Herald this morning.
Clumsy or not, the piece means to address the idea that all of the west’s rheto­ric about democracy is coming home for a long roost. The hypocrisy is easy to identify. Watching the Cairo demonstrators was sad, though, only because you could glimpse the out­lines – medals, braid, guns and all – of the betrayal to come. But what happens if, when, those afflicted people decide that democracy isn’t all it was cracked up to be?
Lying through our teeth, we sold them liberation. When they catch on, those betrayed people, they might choose to rattle our cages, too. Anyhow...

L’etat, c’est moi. Such was the gist of Hosni Mubarak’s speech to his country on Thursday night. Egypt’s own Sun King was less defiant than supremely complacent. I am the state: if I fall, it falls. Therefore, I cannot fall and will not fall. I will depart when I choose, with my dignity (and wealth) intact.
It didn’t turn out that way. Three decades of one-man rule may have left the world wondering about the chaos that might descend after Mubarak’s passing. He de­signed that fear, if you like, by allowing no alternatives to his authority. He said it was him or anarchy. Yesterday, finally, the Egyptian military, no doubt nudged by their friends in the Pentagon, chose to differ.
A victory, then, for American policy? More like an act of desperation. The re­moval of a dictatorship by a military coup is no ringing endorsement of democracy. On Thursday, a cheerful Barack Obama seemed convinced that the crisis was reach­ing a decent, manageable end. A swift, “orderly transition” to democracy was at hand. Then Mubarak cocked a snook. The White House paused, shocked and confused.
In his televised speech Mubarak went out of his way to tell the US – “I have never succumbed to any international pressure” – where it could stick its advice. No doubt this was the last straw for Obama and Egypt’s generals. But the assumption of control by a supreme military council is hardly ideal for Obama, despite the jubilation of the Cairo protesters. The outcome may be welcome, but it reeks of bad old days and bad old ways. It says little for the reach and grasp of the last superpower.
But that’s becoming common. Israel also cocks its snook, when the mood takes it, at its “closest ally”. Pakistan, “bulwark against terror”, is a long way short of reliable. Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, secure in Kabul thanks only to US firepower, frequently tells his patron what he will and will not tolerate. Then there’s Saudi Ara­bia’s King Abdullah, oil-hungry America’s most-favoured friend of all.
At the end of January, according to the Times, that autocrat reprimanded the President of the United States, instructing Obama to avoid humiliating his good friend Hosni. If America persisted, the king himself would put up the $1.5 billion in aid given annually by the US in exchange for influence. Thanks to American motorists, Abdullah can afford small change. Thanks to Mubarak, we now know that $1.5 billion doesn’t buy much.
The US may have won the contest, but only just, and only by the least attrac­tive means. Mubarak came very close to proving that a determined dictator can defy an American president. There has been nothing neat, tidy, or – let’s be brutal – in­spiring about the means used to force his “resignation”.
Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated that American power is a fragile con­cept. The capacity to blow up things and people – for a price that a hugely indebted US can ill afford – is no guarantee that strategic aims will be achieved. The ability to invade a country is one thing; the ability to hold it another. The idea that America can tame and shape an entire region, the Middle East above all, is an illusion, especially when, as now, an American president is baffled by contradictory demands.
Egypt is the obvious case at hand, but scarcely alone. Ever since the people of Tunisia decided that enough was enough, the US has been confronting a paradox. Democracy is the vaunted ideal: so much (supposedly) goes without saying. But what if the popular will produces unsought (for America) outcomes?
A simple example, currently agitating minds in Tel Aviv: what are the chances of a newly-democratic Egypt deciding that Israel has been indulged for too long, that the price of peace has been the betrayal of the Palestinian people? The chances, at a rough guess, are excellent.
You could say the same about Jordan, another of those friendly family busi­nesses. The common people there have a long, shared history with the Israelis, and few happy memories. Democracy would give Jordanians the chance to emulate the people of Gaza, and vote for their equivalent of Hamas. If that happened the US and Israel would not be able to pretend that a coup – the fiction inflicted on Hamas and Gaza – had been mounted.
Finally, there is America’s biggest nightmare, and the real reason why Abdul­lah stood ready to write a cheque for his chum in Cairo. If the Middle East’s democ­racy movement can be pictured as a spreading wave, what is there now to prevent that wave from crashing over the big beach called Saudi, and over a royal house that needs no lessons in corruption and oppression from Mubarak?
Few would mourn, but the US – and Europe – would panic. Oil dependence constitutes two vast, interlocking problems. One is obvious: production has probably peaked. At best, the stuff is becoming much harder to find. Secondly, those who still have oil to sell are generally not the people with whom you would choose to do busi­ness, in an ideal world.
They range from vexatious (for America) left-wing states such as Venezuela, to “mafia regimes” (say US diplomats) such as Russia, or to those sweethearts in Saudi. The US has courted, coddled and indulged the last of these for over half a century. A blind eye has been turned to every excess. Talk of spreading “our values” is suspended on the instant one of those repressive, filthy-rich princelings hoves into view.
No one in American government, of either party, has ever talked of an “or­derly transition” to democracy where Saudi Arabia is concerned. They wouldn’t dare. It is a cardinal rule of the last superpower’s foreign policy that the House of Saud must never, ever be offended. Even the fact that most of the 9/11 bombers sprang from Saudi Arabia, and from its malevolent fundamentalist Wahabi sect, is rarely dis­cussed in front of American voters. Who really funds al Qaeda and the Taliban? Don’t ask.
You can see Obama’s problem, then. If the US president endorses democracy and the demonstrators in Tahrir Square, why not do the same for Saudi Arabia and its people? If a 30-year secret police state in one country can no longer be defended, what justifies support for venal, oil-fuelled medievalism on the other side of the Red Sea?
A simple answer: because devout folk in Saudi might take it into their heads to install a government of Islamists. What was deemed unsayable after 9/11 is fast be­coming the only thing worth saying: free peoples are not likely to accept the embrace of the foreigners, the US and Britain above all, who courted and supported the auto­crats for all those years, who allowed Israel to do as it pleased with the Palestinians, and who, for an encore, took to killing Muslims in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
If the point was to defeat fundamentalism, America and friends have picked some strategies. Reports from Cairo certainly suggest that the demonstrators, secular or not, conservative or liberal, are no lovers of the US or Britain. What did we expect, exactly?
And when might we realise that the phrase “the last superpower” has a hith­erto unsuspected meaning? In the last of something, as often as not, lies its end.

[wolf ticket]

The US may have won the contest, but only just, and only by the least attrac­tive means. Mubarak came very close to proving that a determined dictator can defy an American president. There has been nothing neat, tidy, or – let’s be brutal – in­spiring about the means used to force his “resignation”.

huh? Nothing inspiring?

AlicetheKurious:

A lot of the same analysts who have been getting it wrong all along, are still getting it wrong. There's a fine line between healthy wariness and the kind of cynicism that makes a person blind to anything outside a narrow range of only the most pessimistic possibilities, and they seem to be stuck behind it.

And

Tahrir Square was a place where the hungry were fed, where the sick and wounded were tended, where men rushed selflessly to man the barricades and faced, unarmed, live bullets and sticks and molotov cocktails in order to defend the thousands and sometimes millions of unarmed demonstrators inside the square.

Thanks, Alice for your perspective. How so many at Rigint and elsewhere can deny the courage and true revolutionary spirit of the people of Eqypt is beyond me. Of course things could very well turn out badly, but give the heroes of Tahrir Square their due, for God's sake!

[brainpanhandler]

Maybe it's just fear of disappointment.

That's what it is for me Alice. I've refrained from offering any thoughts on the revolution because I just don't have enough information to offer much of an opinion. But even bearing distant witness to what a few million determined people can accomplish is not enough to dispel my fear that it's just too good to be true. I have to believe that the forces plotting against the Egyptian people right now are ruthless and cunning and patient and determined. The Egyptian people will need to be even more ruthless, cunning, patient and determined.

Those who insist on trying to understand the Egyptian revolution while clinging to the same assumptions that the old regime embodied, will always be taken by surprise; sadly for them, they will be deprived of the chance to participate in the joy and appreciate the profound significance of this victory, not only for Egyptians but for all people, everywhere.

While my brand of cynicism differs from the " limited, materialistic, Hobbesian cynicism about human "nature"" you mention and rather springs from a fear of being disappointed but also a fear that the forces arrayed against the Egyptian people are just too powerful and the stakes are just too high, nonetheless, I too cannot feel an unalloyed joy over events. But then again that's just my nature in general. I never appreciate the beauty of a sunset without also realizing night is falling and nothing lasts.

[JackRiddler]

How so many at Rigint and elsewhere can deny the courage and true revolutionary spirit of the people of Eqypt is beyond me. Of course things could very well turn out badly, but give the heroes of Tahrir Square their due, for God's sake!

Without a doubt. The commentaries searching for a "real plot" that determines the Egyptian events behind the visible scenes tend to ignore the entry into the history of a new agency, that of the people themselves. Any moves by the military command, whether containing clever hidden agendas or not, until now have been forced by the action of a united people, who were inspired by last month's revolution in a nearby nation, who discovered their own power and character in the act of physically coming together in the country's public spaces to fight for their lives. They cannot help but be transformed in the process. Many things can go wrong from here and they usually do, but there is no forgetting, or going back.

The gentle-seeming Google exec may want to go back to his life of "normalcy" with his family, working for the company in the Emirates, as I heard him say in a TV interview, but that's not what 99 percent of the people he helped to awaken to their own power can possibly do now (and it may not be what he thinks in two weeks either). If it's obvious to us, here, how much road still lies ahead, then it's even more obvious to the people who just cleared it! Egyptians never got to develop our kind of consumer complacency, where they could possibly be fooled into thinking the game is now won, justice restored, the movie over and they can go home and watch democracy unfold from on high.

It's wise, nay imperative, never simply to trust authoritarian command institutions like the Egyptian or any other military, or corporation, or international organization. It's always right to scrutinize motives and possible hidden agendas, and to understand how masses are fooled, manipulated and shaped by forces they don't understand, since they usually are, and since elite power has developed sophisticated sciences to do that. But to portray the popular uprising of the last two weeks as some kind of puppet show, the strings of which only a few special un-brainwashed observers among us can see, expresses the same mentality that robs We the People of our roles in the great French and Russian revolutions, or of our gains in the 20th century workers and womens and national and minority liberation struggles, and would represent all people's history as the product of long-armed but small cabals with thousand-year agendas.

.

[wallflower]

This discussion is of very high quality and "above my pay grade" as they say. I do appreciate the generosity of the contributors very much. I haven't seen the communique issued by "January 25" leadership posted yet and think it's a useful document to add here.

http://www.assawsana.com/portal/newsshow.aspx?id=44605

Juan Cole translates and adds commentary, I'll just copy his translation.

http://www.juancole.com/2011/02/scenarios-for-egypts-future-how-democratic-will-it-be.html

* Repeal of the state of emergency, which suspends constitutional protections for human rights, immediately.

* The immediate release of all political prisoners

* The setting aside of the present constitution and its amendments

* Dissolution of the federal parliament, as well as of provincial councils

* Creation of a transitional, collective governing council

* The formation of an interim government comprising independent nationalist trends, which would oversee free and fair elections

* The formation of a working group to draft a new and democratic constitution that resembles the older of the democratic constitutions, on which the Egyptian people would vote in a referendum

*Removal of any restriction on the free formation of political parties, on civil, democratic and peaceful bases.

* Freedom of the press

* Freedom to form unions and non-governmental organizations without government permission

* abolition of all military courts and abrogation of their rulings with regard to civilian accused