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After almost a week of demonstrations and riots, nothing is certain in Egypt. Nothing, except, perhaps one thing: President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year regime is fatally wounded.
True, the demonstrations were not as large as the ones we saw in Tunisia. Also true, much of the violence, especially the sacking and looting of shopping malls, was the work of organized gangs rather than politically disaffected youths.
And yet, the Mubarak era is all but over.
The real question now is how the 82-year-old president slips into history. Three scenarios are possible.
In the first, the top brass who provide the backbone of the regime call on Mubarak, himself a retired air-force general, and “advise” him to pack his suitcases.
Mubarak would announce that he would no longer be a candidate in the next presidential election, due in June.
The hope is that the country would immediately switch from a revolutionary mood to an electoral one. The risk in this option is that the impending departure of the “The Iron Fist” would further inflame revolutionary passions. Opportunists would also jump on the revolutionary bandwagon to burnish their résumés and claim part of the credit for Mubarak’s downfall.
In the next scenario, the generals would ask Mubarak to step down immediately. They would then appoint an interim president while they prepare for new presidential elections in June.
The man likely to play that role could be Amr Mussa, the current secretary-general of the Arab League and a former foreign minister of Egypt. Mussa is the last surviving member of the small clique of military and civilian agitators who staged a coup that ended Egypt’s monarchy in 1952.
This option would give the ruling elite the advantage of surprise.
A dramatic change at the top could calm down some passions in the country, while denying the most ardent opponents of the regime enough time to find a leader and coalesce behind him.
One of the big problems in Egypt today is precisely the absence of an instantly recognizable leader of the opposition to the regime. The risk in that option is that once things have calmed down, the ruling elite reverts to despotic instincts that form part of its political DNA.
IN the third scenario, the generals decide to stay on the sidelines and let things play out according to their dynamics. There is little doubt that, regardless of its poor performance in several wars against Israel, the army is still popular in Egypt.
The younger generals might not wish to squander that popularity by killing people in the streets in order to keep an octogenarian dictator in power.
Unlike the older generation of officers who had been trained in the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe, younger Egyptian officers are mostly US-educated.
At the same time, since Egypt signed an association accord with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, younger Egyptian officers have learned from their fellow officers in NATO nations a new understanding of the relationship between the military and politics.
Earlier this month, we saw how the Tunisian generals, again influenced by that country’s association with NATO, refused to kill demonstrators in the streets to keep President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a former general, in power.
In 1979, Iran had a similar experience. Then, too, Iranian generals, again influenced by their association with NATO, as well as a bilateral military accord with the United States, announced their neutrality as a revolutionary movement fought to overthrow the Shah.
However, the risk to this option is that what happened to Iran, rather than what is happening in Tunisia, may strike Egypt.
Mubarak’s precipitous departure, plus the army’s neutrality, could create a vacuum that only the most organized opposition groups could fill. And right now, the most organized opposition group is the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical outfit with a terrorist record and a plan to create an Islamic republic based on sharia.
Like the Shah in the 1970s, both Presidents Anwar Sadat and Mubarak focused on crushing the secularist, often leftist opposition. In the process, they encouraged Islamist groups by giving them access to the government-controlled mass media, and by injecting a heavy dose of religion in academic curricula at all levels.
The seizure of power by Islamists could trigger a civil war. Parts of the army and police are sure to rebel against any government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. A good slice of the urban middle class would also be unwilling to risk the fate of their counterparts in Iran. At the same time, Egyptian Christians, the Copts, who account for almost 15 million people, would not be happy to live under the sharia that regards them as second-class citizens.
ONE of Mubarak’s biggest mistakes was his refusal to appoint a vice president as required by the Egyptian Constitution. Every time we asked him about this, he promised “an announcement in the near future.”
Now history itself is showing him the door.
Yesterday, Mubarak named his intelligence chief, Gen. Omar Suleiman, as vice president. He also named aviation chief Ahmed Shafiq as prime minister.
The opposition has already dismissed the moves as too little, too late.
In addition, Suleiman is probably the most unpopular man in Egypt, even ahead of Mubarak himself. As the intelligence mastermind, he is accused of having orchestrated for years the regime’s oppressive measures.
By practically handing over the government to the military, Mubarak is, in fact, asking the generals to take the decisions that he himself cannot take. By doing so, he may have transformed himself into an embarrassing irrelevance.