Egypt (Or Its Generals) Looks To Ataturk's Turkey

In a set of moves which is in no way surprising, the supreme command of Egypt's armed forces is seeking a continued, large role in the upcoming government.  The reason for the sudden political aspirations of the generals is not hard to unpack.  They are more than a tad scared of the Muslim Brotherhood and other advocates of political Islam.

Both the Washington Post and New York Times have taken note of the development.  That implies the US government will soon do so as well.  One would hope that the Deep Thinkers of the current administration have already taken cogniscence of this development, but you can never be sure given the number of blunders which constitute the Obama and Company's excuse for a Mideast policy.

It is clear both from the US media accounts and those appearing in Egypt that the senior leadership of the Egyptian armed forces sees the military as the guarantor not only of territorial sovereignty but also the integrity of the government.  As the ultimate protector of state, nation, and government, the Turkish model is completely accurate.

Until the recent stare-down between the Islamist predicated AKP and the military, the people of Turkey not only allowed but expected the army to take over whenever the civilian government was unable or unwilling to put a stop to internal violence of whatsoever origin and goal.  Parsing the public remarks of Egyptian generals in recent days, it is evident that they see the army as the only neutral party able to impose and maintain peace between highly motivated contestants willing and able to resort to violence in pursuit of political goals.

The armed forces' moves in the direction of greater authority to be exercised over an indeterminate span of time has perturbed some of those who provided the muscle of the "Lotus Revolution."  Many of these individuals see the armed forces' counsel, the transitional government, as having stolen the fruits of the revolution, of having become a set of Mubarak clones.  This sense of betrayal has motivated the recent sit-in demonstrations in the same Cairo square as those which brought down Mubarak.

Months ago as Mubarak prepared to call it quits, the demonstrators chanted, "The Army and the people are one!"  Now to many, the memory of that chant rings hollow and empty.  Many in the younger demographic segment of the Egyptian population no longer see the armed forces as a protector or the powerful force multiplier which assured Mubarak had no choice but abdication.

The generals who run Egypt behind the screen of carefully chosen civilian political nonentities have made concessions to the outraged "kids" in the square.  Hundreds of senior police officials were forced to take early retirement.  Mubarak, his sons, and close associates have been arrested and face trial on a number of charges even though the armed forces high command had promised initially to spare the aging autocrat this fate.

The concessions have not been enough to satisfy the dissidents.  They could not be.  The very success of the protesters assures that.  In a completely understandable way, the heady aroma of having dumped the dictator has clouded a lot of folk's judgement.  The armed forces commanders have recognized something of which the dissidents are either totally unaware or, at best, have a dim awareness.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to any sort of secular Egypt.  The Brotherhood has employed very slick public relations moves to convince many in the West, in the US particularly, that the MB is not a collection of Muslim crazies with delusions of power.  The leadership, or at least the visible portion, has denied any ambition of taking power--immediately.  They have publicly distanced themselves from any imposition of Shariah upon the state--again immediately.  They have declined to run a candidate for president and will not enter a candidate in many of the upcoming parliamentary elections.  The message is: See, we are not hell-bent on taking over Egypt, of establishing a new Cairo caliphate.

Not unlike the senior echelons of the world's foremost seat of Islamic learning, al-Azhar university, located in Cairo, the commanders of the Egyptian military do not believe the Muslim Brotherhood's protestations of innocence.  Alone or in conjunction with other apostles of political Islam, including those willing to use violence, the Muslim Brotherhood will move as quickly as is politically expedient to establish a Shariah compliant state, a Cairo Caliphate.  This is what the generals hope to preclude.

Kemal Ataturk had the same fear in the wake of World War I and the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire.  He and his fellow officers knew the power of Islam, its raw emotional force acting on a people who had been oppressed and humiliated for years.  The inevitable internal violence which would accompany a religious conflict would destroy Turkey at worst or, at best, prevent its entering the modern world for generations.  The Turkey of Ataturk would be resolutely secular--and the army would guarantee that.

In the days following the Second World War, the Turks discovered that secular political ideologies could be as violent and disruptive of social and political life as any religious conflict.  Thus, the army was expected, empowered really, to step in and take over whenever political passions overflowed the dikes of civil discourse.  Much as the periodic military takeovers bothered the states and people of Western Europe, the Turks saw them not only as unexceptional but quite necessary.

(Her Geekness was a student at METU in the early Seventies when the Left and Right exchanged gunfire on campus.  She found no dissenting voices--save among the ideological combatants--when the army moved onto the streets and lowered the noise level to a saner level.)

The Egyptian generals are not any less perceptive than Ataturk and his supporters.  They know the Egyptians and the Muslim Brotherhood with the fine grained detail that no foreign observer can muster.  They also are aware that the armed forces of Egypt (like those of Turkey in an earlier period) have a level of universal approbation that no other institution possesses.  They fear the passions of a long oppressed people which can be tapped with ease in the full flush of democracy poorly understood as to practice.  They fear with good reason the potential power of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, a power which can unleash the passions with no good result for Egypt.

The move by the senior commanders to keep a firm hand on the levers of power is both prudential and justifiable.  It can be hoped that they use the firm hand with caution and restraint, a caution and restraint which was often lacking under Mubarak and Sadat.  If they fail to use their authority in a controlled and minimal way, their failure will bring more problems, problems which cannot be solved by tanks and troops.  For decades the Turks played the game well, so there is a paradigm for the Egyptian military to follow.

It is questionable whether or not the Obama administration recognizes the motives of the generals in Egypt.  It can be hoped that the Deep Thinkers will understand that stability in Egypt and the region requires not only an exercise in plausible democracy but also mechanisms to assure the passions will not swamp a civil society and a polity sailing in new and troubled waters.

Well, one can hope.  Can't one?