Egypt Poised to Settle for a Mirage of Reform

Once in a blue moon, an oppressed people take their lives in their own hands, rise up and declare that enough is enough. There is nothing more stirring than the yearning to be free of the yoke of a corrupt regime, the insistence for a government by, for and of the people. The Egyptian people, leading themselves, have burst the bonds tyrants have imposed on them for decades. It has been unforgettably moving.

Therefore, the almost certain future of this liberating moment is all the more crushing.

Hosni Mubarak, however monstrous, is not the core of the problem; the military/economic regime is. And the most powerful interests within Egypt, in the region and in the United States government are doing everything they can to preserve that regime.

One million four hundred thousand men in this nation of 80 million serve in the army and perhaps 400,000 in the "security forces" -- the "intelligence" services that use the most brutal means to preserve the regime, by ferreting out and destroying any collective mode of opposition, any criticism of the tyranny. The Americans underwrite this enormous apparatus with $1.5 billion every year. The direct ripple effect of this enormous establishment must include at least 15 per cent of the populace, not to mention the small elite they have spawned who are enormously wealthy and powerful economically. Often the military and "civilian" elites are the very same people.

This is called the Hosni Mubarak regime. To be sure, he is a shrewd and ruthless figure to whom everyone else in the regime is beholden. As is the case with all dictators, he seems to have assumed that he would live forever, or be replaced, as was the Sun King, by his son. But the people around him are not merely his servants, though they owe him their places. This is not a narrow dictatorship but a powerful regime.

And yet the people call for Mubarak's head as their goal, and seem prepared to accept a regime, or at least the Americans and Europeans believe this to be the case, headed by Omar Suleiman, long time head of the "intelligence" service, the great enforcer of the current regime. And they cheer the army, the only real institution in this military dictatorship, because it is not Mubarak.

Army as friend of serious change?

But surely it is obvious that the thugs who attempted to break up the demonstrations are the security establishment itself. That tactic did not break the will to resist in the square, but it served to reinforce the popular, and false, belief that that army was the defender of the people. To repeat, the army is the core of the regime they hate.

But so effective has been this regime that there are no other civil institutions that can replace it. An opposition leader, even if a Nobel laureate, who has spent 30 years abroad does not a political movement make. There are embryonic opposition parties, but they are weakly rooted, through no fault of their own, but because they have been torn apart by the security apparatus. It would be a very tall order indeed to build effective political parties, draft a democratic constitution and hold elections this year, or next year or the next. The democratic impulse needs a home, and homes take support and time to be built.

To be sure, there are millions of highly intelligent people out in the square. Many of them are young, well educated and permanently unemployed -- just the sort of population that bred the Bolshevik party before the revolution against a rather similar military dictatorship in Russia in 1917. But there is no such party. Even the vaunted Muslim Brotherhood, founded in opposition to the British in 1928, is old and tired. For decades, Mubarak has said it is us or them, a proposition the Americans, Iran-struck -- have bought. (He has also said it is me or chaos -- and he sends his thugs into the streets to create chaos in the place of the non-violent mass movement underway!) But the Brotherhood does not speak for the vast majority of the huge educated mass of people out there in the square.

I hasten to add that the huge majority of the impoverished Egyptian population, the rural and urban poor, are non-players in the game, something no commentators seem to even mention. That is a tragedy of an even bigger dimension.

'Cosmetic changes' or revolution?

In my opinion, the fix is in. Mubarak will be moved aside, or if necessary, he will be removed. But the rest of the current leadership will remain in place. They will try to co-opt elements among those in the square and their supporters to join them in writing a "reformed" constitution and sponsor elections, a process they will control and subvert.

In fact, I believe that the people in the square will not accept the mere shunting aside of Mubarak into a ceremonial role while he moves to his country house. Then, when the Suleiman regime removes him, sooner rather than later, the people in the square will declare victory and go home. After all, they have little food and water, business has ground to a halt and the banks are closed. They cannot stay out forever, and when the revised regime gives them Mubarak as an apparent concession after further struggle, they will declare victory and go home to their normal lives.

Many on the square understand all this. To take just one prescient example, Hassan Nafaa, a political science professor at Cairo University said today, "they are trying to kill what has happened and to contain and abort the revolution. They want to continue to manage the country like they did while making some concessions. These are cosmetic changes that don't change the regime. We do not want this."

That is precisely right. There are inextricable limits to this leaderless and uninstitutionalized democratic uprising. Unlike Professor Naafa, many or them don't fully understand the construction of the regime they are opposing, and even if they do, they lack political means to get from this form of opposition to a root and branch reconstruction of their society.

I hope that this pessimistic assessment by a 67-year-old political historian is dead wrong and that democracy will grow and flourish in this harsh desert of tyranny. Revolutions are strange creatures that take turns no one predicts, turns that can throw off the realistic calculus of power politics. My heart says power to the people!