Egypt: Even Obama Knows The Military Are Toast

It's possible that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the military junta that has ruled Egypt since Hosni Mubarak was overthrown last February, will regain the initiative but it will be very difficult. After months of whittling away at the momentum and morale of the revolutionary movement with arrests, torture and the suppression of protests and strikes - including committing a massacre against minority Copts protesting against sectarian terror that left 24 dead, by last week it seemed that SCAF had the upper hand.

But SCAF demonstrated once again that great historical lesson, that arrogant rulers who are contemptuous and out of touch with those over whom they rule will inevitably push too far. In this case it was their announced intention to implement constitutional amendments that would have elevated the military above the state, shielding it from oversight of its budget and granting it a veto over any civilian policies that affected it. It's worth noting that the military is not just confined to the military but owns and controls about one-third of the Egyptian economy. Their violent attack on the tiny, remaining encampment in Tahrir Square last Saturday was the final straw.

The re-emergence of the revolution's momentum has been so swift and so overwhelming that it has caught everyone by surprise. The military's response - to send in the hard cops, the Central Security Force - to suppress the swelling protests with a carte blanche on the use of violence backfired even further. It is a useful reminder that a revolution needs an enemy to battle and while the nibbles of repressive attrition can sap the will, a frontal assault, on the other hand, can provide a stable target on which people can focus their anger. As I write there may well be one million people in Tahrir Square demanding the overthrow of the military council that was loved and supported as an ally of the revolution only a few months ago.

What is even more surprising in this new phase is the apparent fracturing of the base of the Muslim Brotherhood. Around for a century, the MB have long been the largest and best organized oppositional force in Egypt. Millions follow the MB, which has hundreds of thousands of disciplined members. But the brutality of the Mubarak dictatorship made the MB appear more radical than they actually were and now that space has opened up for the possibility of real and profound change, the MB are demonstrating that they weren't so very radical after all. On the one hand, it doesn't do to be dismissive of the MB as a bunch of counter-revolutionaries, not only because tens of thousands of their members have played important and leading roles in the present revolution even against the wishes of their leaders. But also because it misses the point that the MB's quietism and desire to keep its head down and focus on the elections is, in part, a function of the experience of holding together an oppositional organization under a dictatorship where leaders and cadre suffered imprisonment and torture. The conservatism that was necessary in normal times now appears as pure opportunism when the political arena has been so radically transformed.

The irony of this new phase of the revolution is that it may well not only destroy the SCAF as the ruling force in the country - and profoundly weaken the command structure as middle level officers appear to be going over to the revolution in growing numbers. It may also shatter the long standing centre of opposition to the military.

The American government clearly sees this process unfolding and is panicking a bit at the direction the revolution could take its largest Arab ally - recipient of $1.3 billion in military aid every year (like the tear gas and rubber bullets being used on protestors). Remember back in January when vice president Joe Biden said in an interview that Mubarak was "our" friend and wasn't a dictator? Remember how Hilary Clinton preached a process of slow reform involving Mubarak? How Obama said nothing? They've learned to that they need to get ahead of the curve in order to control the revolutionary process - as they did in Libya where the "revolutionary government" is a pliant client regime for the west. And they clearly now understand that once things degenerate to a certain point, repression only makes things worse, something that the SCAF seems to have missed. But, given their preference for dictatorships over democracies the White House must think that things are pretty bad to come out publicly in support of the demands of the revolution.

Egypt Military and Protesters Dig In for Tahrir Square Standoff - NYTimes.com:

Egypt's Revolution Continues To Burn

Lots of people hoped that everything would return to normal after the dictator Mubarak abdicated. They hoped that once the face at the top was changed people would be happy. None wanted this more than the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), led by Mubarak's childhood friend Field Marshall Mohammed Hussein Tantawi. At first they seemed to get their way. Tahrir Square, the beating heart of the revolution, was emptied and the revolutionaries went home. The military, while it used the language of the revolution and talked about its martyrs, tried activists in front of military tribunals, which handed out swift and harsh judgments. Strikes and protests were banned. Meanwhile, the cops who killed around 900 protestors during the revolution weren't prosecuted. Former regime figures weren't prosecuted for their crimes and theft. Others - "little Mubaraks" - were left in charge of public businesses, universities, hospitals, the government controlled unions.

But in a revolution the people rarely are happy to settle with cosmetic change. In the wake of Mubarak's fall, strike waves rolled across the country. After all, it had been a mass strike by millions that had forced the military's hand in turfing Mubarak. Now those workers had tasted their power, there was no putting it back in the bottle - even the military trials of strike leaders failed to quash the movement. This was combined with an mushrooming of independent unions, controlled by rank-and-file election and committed to bettering the conditions of the workers, rather than simply serving as a conduit to transmit the priorities and propaganda of the dictatorship. Many of those unions have now come together to form a union central representing everyone from tax collectors to hospital workers and bus drivers.

Sooner or later the movement was going to come up against the attempts by the military government to put a lid on any change. That time appears to be now. It seems clear that a new phase with a new decisive battle is taking shape in Egypt. Millions marched last Friday, demanding that the cops who killed protestors be put on trial - along with former regime figures. The demands include purging public life of officials from the former regime, whose loyalty is to the defeated dictatorship and whose interest is in rolling back the revolution. And from political demands, the revolution has now taken on social demands - demanding minimum and maximum wages to bring aid to the poor and close the massive gap between the richest and poorest. They want state industries that were sold at fire sale prices to Mubarak's cronies to be brought back under state control.

The immediate response of the government and the military leadership has been twofold. On the one hand, it was announced just prior to today's mass protests - including at Tahrir, which has been again been occupied by a permanent sit-in, like the early days of the revolution - that the deputy Prime Minster had resigned. He was a hated figure from the former regime and his departure is a clear victory. There were also several verdicts released which found former regime figures guilty. According to Al Jazeera:

Earlier on Tuesday, an Egyptian court sentenced Ahmed Nazif, Egypt's former prime minister, to a one-year suspended jail term.
Two other ministers from Hosni Mubarak's, the former president, cabinet were also sentenced to prison for fraud, judicial sources said.
Habib al-Adli, the former interior minister and one of the most reviled members of Mubarak's administration because of the brutality of his police force, was sentenced to five years and former finance minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali received ten years.
Al-Adli and Boutros-Ghali, who is being tried in absentia, have both been sentenced in other cases. This was the first time Nazif has received a court conviction.
The three were fined $15.6m and are to return the same amount to the state. Boutros-Ghali and Adli were fined another approximately $16.9m, sources told the AFP news agency.

But the military council, through its spokesman Mohsen El-Fangari also came on TV to deliver threats to the protestors in Tahrir, Suez and elsewhere. They were warned not to disrupt "public order." There is also a widespread belief that the military and the police have deliberately allowed criminal gangs to run rampant in Cairo as a way to make people long for the security of the dictatorship. In addition, there are shadowy forces - identically dressed men who show up at Tahrir with truckloads of rocks, attacks on Christian churches designed to foment inter-religious conflict - that are undoubtedly connected to the regime. The response, however, to El-Fangari was clear enough - tens of thousands of protestors took off their shoes and waved them in the air - a profound insult and demonstration of defiance in Arab culture that was a popular display whenever Mubarak spoke, prior to his resignation. And protestors intended, for the first time, to march past the Prime Minister's palace, something that never happened during Mubarak's final days.

As resentment and longing for change continues to burn throughout the Arab world, Egypt remains the key to everything. It is the most populous nation and a lynchpin, along with Israel, in America's Middle East policy. If the revolution can push forward in Egypt, deposing the corrupt and compliant military leadership - who own up to a third of the economy - they can help to bring about an historic transformation, the kind that happen once in a century.

Millions back on Egypt’s streets|16Jul11|Socialist Worker