an Egyptian Army source says…

“A senior Egyptian general recently told CNN that the military council is eager to relinquish power to civilian authorities.

“The army can’t wait to return to its barracks and do what it does best — protect the nation’s borders,” he said last month. He did not want to be named due to the sensitive nature of the topic.”

Let’s hope.

However, I think my friends are somewhat divided between those who fear the Army more and those who fear extremist religious forces more. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Egyptian Christians tend even more heavily toward the latter view.)

For my own part, I’m guardedly optimistic about not fearing either. There are still plenty of things that could go wrong, but you have to remember that there are a lot of very smart people in this country, and they’ve been waiting for a long time to put Egypt on a healthy path. Egypt generates scores of brilliant doctors, engineers, scientists, artists, writers, etc., and they’re all extremely serious about politics right now. I don’t foresee all of that mental energy just running down the drain into nothing. True, it could happen. But things feel reasonably promising to me at the moment.

Where I probably differ from the average Egyptian most is that I thought the behavior of the Army during the Revolution was not as neutral as many wanted to say. They did let the thugs into Tahrir on February 2, after all, and I find that hard to forget.

That said, the individual soldiers who are still on the streets (I saw about 15 of them today alone) do have a reassuring, trustworthy presence. They’re not at all scary when you run across them under normal circumstances, and neither are their tanks, which are still parked all over the place.