Does Hope Spring From the Barrel of a Tank?:  the Problem with Relying on Military Officers to Foster Change

Thoughtful detail from Londonistani on the roots of the Egyptian protests.  Americans have to ask how much and for how long they are willing to fund those officers.

• Mubarak...was the fourth leader of the Egypt's Free Officers' regime which came to power in a military coup against a constitutional monarchy in 1952. Egypt has a long history of being at the forefront of Middle East affairs and its people have a strong sense of pride. Political squabbling, corrupt politicians and disastrous war against the newly formed state of Israel motivated the middle class military professionals to remove their king, and British influence along with him. The coup's leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, made Egypt the focal point of Arab hopes and earned their eternal admiration. In reality, he achieved little. His successor, Anwar el-Sadat switched the regime from the pro-Soviet to the pro-Western camp during the cold war. Sadat realised post-independence Egypt's central problem; it's economic muscle didn't match its ambition....
• Egypt's military leaders['s]...phobia of political competition acquired by their experience of the constitutional monarchy they replaced prodded them to the conclusion that Egyptians were not ready for democracy....
• [T]he problem with a rule-by-military-clique approach to government is that it does little for long-term development. Sadat's solution to this problem was to leverage Egypt's strategic value to the United States as a source of income. ("Mubarak and Me," January 31, 2011, Londonstani, Abu Muqawama)

Liberation 1944, 2011

• The Egyptian tanks, the delirious protesters sitting atop them, the flags, the 40,000 protesters weeping and crying and cheering in Freedom Square and praying around them, the Muslim Brotherhood official sitting amid the tank passengers. Should this be compared to the liberation of Bucharest? Climbing on to an American-made battle tank myself, I could only remember those wonderful films of the liberation of Paris. A few hundred metres away, Hosni Mubarak's black-uniformed security police were still firing at demonstrators near the interior ministry. It was a wild, historical victory celebration, Mubarak's own tanks freeing his capital from his own dictatorship.
• In the pantomime world of Mubarak himself – and of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Washington – the man who still claims to be president of Egypt swore in the most preposterous choice of vice-president in an attempt to soften the fury of the protesters – Omar Suleiman, Egypt's chief negotiator with Israel and his senior intelligence officer, a 75-year-old with years of visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and four heart attacks to his credit. How this elderly apparatchik might be expected to deal with the anger and joy of liberation of 80 million Egyptians is beyond imagination. When I told the demonstrators on the tank around me the news of Suleiman's appointment, they burst into laughter. (Robert Fisk, "Egypt: Death throes of a dictatorship," Sunday, 30 January 2011, The Independent)