There is an excellent article posted to Foreign Policy on Monday by Robert Springborg entitled "Egypt's Cobra and Mongoose," in which the author muses on the historic, present and future power-struggles between the Egyptian military (the cobra) and the Muslim Brotherhood (the mongoose). Springborg, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, is a recognized expert on the Egyptian military whose commentary on the dynamics of the Egyptian revolution has been excellent. His opinions merit consideration by anyone seeking more than a superficial and knee-jerk understanding of the issues in play as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) vie for power in Egyptian politics and society.
The central question of Springborg's essay is whether the pattern of relations between the military and the Brotherhood in post-Independence Egypt—the pattern of initial "cohabitation" followed by repression of the Brotherhood, manifest under Farouk, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak—can offer hints to the outcome of the current uneasy power-arrangement between the SCAF and MB.
The history of relations between modern Egyptian rulers and the Muslim Brotherhood has played out again and again in the same manner of the epic clash between the mongoose and cobra, with the former always winning. Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi and his fellow generals on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) are of course well aware of this history. Their behavior suggests that they too want to benefit from the Brotherhood's political support during a transitional period. But almost as farce, history seems destined to repeat itself. The rivalry inherent in the relationship renders political cohabitation difficult to the point of being impossible, so the military mongoose can be expected to strike at the Brotherhood cobra yet again. But this time the outcome may be quite different.
Springborg proposes that the balance has shifted toward the Brotherhood for a number of reasons. First, the SCAF has been particularly inept in their attempts to protect both their independence from oversight as well as their economic fiefdom and, in so doing, have exposed themselves to popular resentment. Second, while the SCAF still retains "hard" political and economic power, the Brotherhood's dominance of the institutions of "soft" power will become increasingly significant during the drafting of the new Constitution. Third, the SCAF's bungling of the standoff with the U.S. over NGOs has stoked sentiments that are, in the long run, favorable to the Brotherhood.
Springborg concludes:
The present cohabitation of the military and the Brotherhood, based as it is on the transient supremacy of the former, is therefore inherently unstable. A preemptive strike by the generals, or even by a colonel, as was done in the past, would be unlikely to succeed this time around. And failing such a strike, time is on the side of the Brothers. This time, they will be the victorious mongoose and the military the defeated cobra. Egypt is thus at a historic turning point as profound as when the republican era replaced the colonial one. Will they try to directly control the cobra they have defeated, or will they seek instead to subject that military to institutional control within an at least quasi-democratic polity? In other words, will they opt for an Iranian style system of control of the armed forces, thereby converting them into a base for their own power, or will they chose instead to depoliticize the military, thus making democracy possible? Here, finally, neither history, nor the mongoose metaphor, offers us lessons.
I encourage you to read the article in full...