[Editor's note: The Hook is home for various analyses and updates on the situation in Egypt. Michael Fellman’s previous related Tyee piece is here.]

Beyond demonstrating what 30 years of absolute power can do to building a monument to a man’s ego, Hosni Mubarak's amazingly tone-deaf speech, offering no concessions, indicates that the senior generals surrounding him were unable to carry off a soft coup that would both preserve his dignity and let them continue to run the regime without him.

Here is the scenario that I imagine went on:

Earlier in the day the fix appeared to be in for Mubarak's resignation, but then he refused and the senior generals, a truly geriatric crew, lost their nerve and caved. My assumption is that he told them that they were just as implicated in the regime as he, and that when scores would be settled, they too would go down.

And this is my speculation about what is likely to happen now:

Tomorrow, the crowd on the street, once more insulted and threatened by this paternalist monster, will march on the presidential palace, the national television service, and perhaps move against other public buildings that I assume the generals occupied today in advance of their soft coup.

This leads to two possibilities: either the senior staff will give the orders to fire and a bloodbath will ensue, or else they will give those orders but will be disobeyed by the field level officers. In either event, the next step will come swiftly.

It is likely to be a colonels’ coup.

By now you can be sure the army is badly divided, with the junior officers and the majority of the men in far more sympathy with the people in the square—their families—than with the corrupt group of senior generals, who have also blocked their careers and scooped the lion's share of the pelf this kleptocratic regime has grabbed.

And, in either event, subsequent developments now will cut deeper than they would have if Mubarak had departed at this point. The colonels would come in as true reformers rather than old-regime preservationists, and the chances of real constitutional and political change would increase dramatically. The old regime would be placed on trial, and who knows, democracy might even emerge.

The best recent antecedent for this form of coup would be Portugal in the 1970s, although those junior officers were socialists. But closer to the Nile, the most compelling precedent is the 1952 coup organized by Lieutenant-Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser and his young officers' movement, great Egyptian nationalists if not democrats.

Of course, the preservation of public order is Mubarak's great claim to power, but I cannot imagine that the army would sacrifice their independent standing in the eyes of the people to do the bloodbath at his bidding in a last desperate attempt to preserve his very ancien regime. So the army -- by which I mean elements of it that put Egypt above Mubarak -- will have to act decisively and soon or else they will discredit themselves.

Or they will do the bloodbath to try to keep him in power -- putting Mubarakism above any other version of their nation, and then Egypt will collapse. Perhaps he has hypnotized them all.

Michael Fellman, a regular Tyee contributor, is professor emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University. His most recent book is In the Name of God and Freedom: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (Yale University Press).