The dramatic events of the revolutionary developments in Egypt present a situation that quite literally changes by the hour. One of the few things that almost all observers agree on is that the military is a key player in the drama and could well be in a position to determine the eventual outcome of events.
Armies and their generals have long played a decisive role in civil conflicts. General Monk brought an end to the English civil war and handed the country over to Charles II. In the current jasmine revolution in Tunisia it was the decision of the army to side with the protesters that toppled the rule of Ben Ali and put the nation into its present state of flux. So far the military in Egypt appears to be divided in its sentiments and sitting more or less on the fence. It seems as though some background information on its history and organization might be useful.
Egyptian Armed Forces
The Armed Forces of Egypt are the largest on the African continent and one of the largest in the world (ranked 10th), consisting of the Egyptian Army, Egyptian Navy, Egyptian Air Force and Egyptian Air Defense Command.
In addition, Egypt maintains large paramilitary forces. They numbered about 397,000 in 2007.[2] The Central Security Forces, and the Border Guard Forces are under Ministry of the Interior control. The National Guard, about 60,000, comes under the control of the Ministry of Defence.
In 1952 a group of Egyptian army officers under the leadership of Gamal Nassar overthrew the British puppet monarchy of King Farouk. Nassar proceeded to nationalize the Suez canal. The British, French and Israeli governments attempted to stage a coup to regain control of it. President Eisenhower refused to support their initiative and it collapsed. The Suez crisis can be viewed as the last gasp of the British Empire. From that point forward the US established a policy of exerting the greatest possible influence and control in the region.
In 1979 Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty which was brokered by Jimmy Carter. This treaty effectively ended the state of active hostility that had existed between the neighboring nations for many years. During that series of wars Egypt had become a highly militarized nation.
Why Egypt's Military Cares About Home Appliances
The reasons for this arrangement go back to the '60s and '70s, when the Egyptian military was very large as a result of the wars with Israel. After the peace treaty with Israel was signed, the need for such a large fighting force disappeared. But leaders worried about all those young men released from military service suddenly flooding the job market.
So the military transformed itself from a fighting force to hiring force. And some of the businesses it got into were pretty far away from its traditional mission
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..car assembly, we're talking of clothing, we're talking of construction of roads, highways, bridges. We're talking of pots and pans, we're talking of kitchen appliances. You know, if you buy an appliance there's a good chance that it's manufactured by the military. If you ... don't have natural gas piped into your house and you have to have a gas bottle, the gas bottle will have been manufactured by the military. Some of the foodstuffs that you will be eating will have been grown and/or processed by the military.
Egypt has a military that functions in a very different capacity from that in the US and European nations where there is a tradition of civilian control of the military and it is expected to perform a restricted role in society. The government has been controlled by senior military officers for the past 60 years. Military officers have become personally wealthy from their participation in a wide variety of economic enterprises. The people in control of the military have benefited from the exiting political and economic order. The approach of buying them off has been successful in preventing their posing a threat to political control. It is doubtful that people in such a situation would be favorably inclined toward changes that are likely to thoroughly disrupt the established order.
Mubarak's phantom presidency
The Armed Forces of the Arab Republic of Egypt are quite unrelated to the Markazi or police and see themselves as a distinct kind of state altogether. One could say that Egypt is still a "military dictatorship" (if one must use that term) since this is still the same regime that the Free Officers’ Revolution installed in the 1950s. But the military has been marginalised since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel and the United States. Since 1977, the military has not been allowed to fight anyone. Instead, the generals have been given huge aid payoffs by the US. They have been granted concessions to run shopping malls in Egypt, develop gated cities in the desert and beach resorts on the coasts. And they are encouraged to sit around in cheap social clubs.
These buy-offs have shaped them into an incredibly organised interest group of nationalist businessmen. They are attracted to foreign investment, but their loyalties are economically and symbolically embedded in national territory. As we can see when examining any other case in the region (Pakistan, Iraq, the Gulf), US military-aid money does not buy loyalty to America; it just buys resentment. In recent years, the Egyptian military has felt collectively a growing sense of national duty, and has developed a sense of embittered shame for what it considers its "neutered masculinity": its sense that it was not standing up for the nation's people.
The nationalistic Armed Forces want to restore their honour and they are disgusted by police corruption and baltagiya brutality. And it seems that the military, now as "national capitalists", have seen themselves as the blood rivals of the neoliberal "crony capitalists" associated with Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal who have privatised anything they can get their hands on and sold the country’s assets off to China, the US, and Persian Gulf capital.
Thus we can see why in the first stage of this revolution, on Friday January 28, we saw a very quick "coup" of the military against the police and Central Security, and disappearance of Gamal Mubarak (the son) and of the detested Interior Minister, Habib el-Adly. However, the military is also split by some internal contradictions. Within the Armed Forces there are two elite sub-branches, the Presidential Guard and the Air Force. These remained closer to Mubarak while the broader military turned against him.
This explains why you can had the contradictory display of the General Chief of the Armed Forces, Muhammad Tantawi, wading in among the protesters to show support on January 30, while at the same time, the chief of the Air Force was named Mubarak's new Prime Minister and sent planes to strafe the same protesters. This also explains why the Presidential Guard protected the Radio/Television Building and fought against protesters on January 28 rather than siding with them.
Whether or not this interesting analysis from Aljazeera is correct in every detail, it does seem to be useful in painting a picture of the complex currents that are influencing the situation. It would appear that many of the influential military figures have figured out that time is not going to stand still. Some form of change is at hand in Egypt and in the broader region. They are likely scrambling around trying to figure the best way to protect their own interest.