Between the Egyptian Army and the Revolution: What is the Deal?

News from the Egyptian Street and Media Translated Without Comment from Arabic into English As a Public Service
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No body knows for sure, except that the revolutionaries are impatient.  They want a date certain for the transfer of power from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to a civilian government.  They want an immediate lifting of the state of emergency law which has been in effect for nearly the entire reign of "El-Askar" (the army) from the early 1950s till now.  Under these laws, detainees can be held without charges or trial for an indefinite period of time.  They want to abolish trials before military tribunals.  They want jobs with salaries commensurate with the inflationary pressures.  The want... They want... They...!!

Revolutions are never tidy affairs.  They are, as in all countries in the region affected by the Arab Spring, cascading events, popular explosions, sudden upheavals where there is hardly any planning or any recognizable leadership.  Euphoria is the result especially, as in the case of both Tunisia and Egypt, the dictator either flees (the case of Tunisia's Ben Aly) or is prevented from leaving the country and is put on trial (the case of Mubarak of Egypt).  In Egypt, the guns of that one-million man cohesive army remained silent, and the generals were invited to rule in an interim capacity (ruling by the Supreme Military Council under Field Marshal Tantawi, and governing by a technocratic government led by Prime Minister Dr. Essam Sharaf) until after elections, both parliamentary and presidential.

Although the honeymoon between the protesting public and the military seems to have lost a part of its steam, but the bond between these two poles of power seems to survive in the following manifestations:

• The fear of a pro-Mubarak conspiracy to sour that relationship persists;
• The responsiveness to the public demand for a definite time-table for parliamentary elections (with 38 parties in the competition), now set for November, to be followed by presidential elections on the basis of a new constitution to be drafted thereafter;
• The declaration by Field Marshal Tantawi that the military would not offer a candidate to be Egypt's next president.  This declaration had a calming effect with regard to the new Egypt becoming, once more, a secular democratic polity;
• The trumpeting of the completion by the Egyptian army corps of engineers of a speedway stretching for 309 kilometers (192 miles) from Giza, at the foot of the pyramids to Assyout, the de facto capital of southern Egypt, nearly halfway from Cairo to Aswan;
• The pomp and circumstance attending Armed Forces Day, October 6, in which the public came out in strength to celebrate;
• The avoidance of showering praise in the Egyptian media on the generals for fear of a slide-back to the military dictatorship which collapsed on February 11, 2011 after 60 years of oppressive rule;
• The call by leading opinion-makers in the Egyptian media for the armed forces to show more muscle in dealing with the chaotic conditions resulting from the continuity of demonstrations in Tahrir and elsewhere in Egypt;
• The rejection by the public of foreign criticism of the slowness of the pace of Egypt's transition from military to civilian rule as interference in Egyptian internal affairs;
• The repeated assurance by Tantawi and other leaders on the Egyptian Supreme Military Council that once the acts of instability cease, and the re-organized police forces are back to the business of maintaining law and order, emergency laws will be lifted.

These are indications that both the military and the Tahrir throngs are adjusting to a basic revolutionary reality: filling the vacuum left by the defunct regime takes time.  And solutions for the economic downturn cannot be fashioned by decrees alone. 

But the anxiety about the speed of the return of the military to their barracks is catalyzed in an old Arab proverb reflecting the fear of the return to military rule.  The proverb says:

Those who have once been bitten by a snake suffer a jolt upon seeing a twisting rope being dragged.

This proverb explains why a frenzy of speculation gripped the entire Egyptian political spectrum because Field Marshal Tantawi was seen recently for the first time out of uniform walking the streets.  His mere appearance in a civilian suit and tie evoked the grim speculation of yet another military officer grooming himself for the post of president.  Tantawi was quick to respond to the rumors by saying humorously, "Would it have been better if I wore a torn up civilian suit?"