Egypt's Vice President General Omar Suleiman talked of a "coup" that might happen if the protests go on. That is somewhat difficult to understand.
Since the protests started the military has already conducted what looks like a coup. The core of the military authoritarian regime asserted itself by sidelining Mubarak and throwing out all its civilian attachments. Mubarak's son and the civilian neoliberal oligarchs were kicked out of the government.
Mubarak, himself a "former" general, was shifted to the side and General Suleiman put up as vice-president. After Suleiman finished his oath to office, he saluted Mubarak, offically still his supreme commander, even though both were in civilian cloth. Another General was put up as Prime Minister. While many positions in the government changed, the Defense Minister, another General, was kept in place. The sham civilian parliament was not allowed to convene.
When the military came into the street, it was greeted friendly by the demonstrators. But when the Interior Ministers thugs are one side of the coin the military is just the other. As Kent State Professor Joshua Stacher wrote in Foreign Affairs two days ago:
With the protesters caught between regime-engineered violence and regime-manufactured safety, the cabinet generals remained firmly in control of the situation.
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This latest adaptation of autocracy in the Arab world is more honest than its previous incarnations. Before the uprising in Egypt began, the military ruled from behind the curtain while elites, represented by public relations firms and buoyed by snappy slogans, initiated neoliberal economic policies throughout Egypt. In this latest rendering, with Suleiman at the helm, the state's objective of restoring a structure of rule by military managers is not even concealed. This sort of "orderly transition" in post-Mubarak Egypt is more likely to usher in a return to the repressive status quo than an era of widening popular participation.
With escalating protests, now accompanied by labor strikes, the last sentence's estimate may change.
The Egyptian military apparatus owns a lot of land, production assets and other economic valuables It has immense business interests:
Paul Sullivan, a National Defense University professor who has spent years in Egypt, says it is huge, probably accounting for 10% to 15% of Egypt's $210 billion economy.
The generals are unlikely to give those assets up. A real democratic transition, which would allow a new civilian government to control or take over the military businesses, is not in the Generals interests. They'd likely rather shoot some civilians over that.
Therein of course might lay the danger of the "coup" Suleiman warned of. There may be some Majors and Colonels who would not want to be part of a violent military crackdown on their brothers and sisters. But the regime still has an alternative to a military crackdown that migh incite a coup. It can reignite terror in the streets with the secret civil part of its rule, the Interior Ministry. After a few weeks of random mass night killings be snipers and "thugs" and the propagandizing the resulting fear, the soldier part of the regime could again be seen as savior, or simply as the less threatening alternative.
Suleiman alluded to that strategy:
He warned of chaos if the situation continued, speaking of "the dark bats of the night emerging to terrorise the people."