good article by a young Egyptian

Here’s a solid piece in al-Masry al-Yaum by AUC alumnus Amr Abdulrahman, now a Ph.D. candidate at Essex in the U.K.

The title is “Why fear the military?”, which has a double meaning.

In one sense, he thinks it’s wrong to fear the military at all, an attitude far more common within Egypt itself than among pro-revolution observers in the West. Mr. Abdulrahman makes the case that the army realizes it’s time to democratize for the best interests of Egypt.

But in a second sense, he does think there are other things to fear about the military. He says the army is too suspicious of organized labor, Islamism, and the radical Left, and unless these forces are brought into camp there will be no democracy and too many angry and desperate excluded factions. Furthermore, the army is too financially entwined with many crony-capitalist projects of the old regime.

In order to deal with these problems, says Mr. Abdulrahman, the protestors will need to come up with a more diverse palette of strategies than continued reoccupations of Tahrir.

The analysis seems quite persuasive. However, I’m still worried about two things never mentioned in this article:

1. The continued and unexplained detention of many protestors arrested during the revolution.

2. The continuation in office of the “new” late January Cabinet. I’m not saying they’re all bad guys, I’m just saying that if you were in office with this government during the ugliness of early February, your hands are ipso facto dirty even if you didn’t do anything bad yourself. In my opinion the whole crew should have been canned the instant Mubarak’s helicopter took off, if only for the sake of appearance. Surely they could have come up with one honest career bureaucrat in each Ministry to lead it during a transitional period?