THE PAST AND FUTURE OF EGYPT

First, about the future. I cannot see how the current military rule in Egypt can hold. A ‘normal’ military coup has to be largely a “family affair” among the powerful elites, with the masses playing an oversized section of second fiddles. Not so in Egypt, where the masses have been too actively involved in the political process by now to agree to a situation that could easily have been achieved without their involvement at all. Moreover, I believe that should the army now try to convert its temporary position of power into another military dictatorship, it will find some extremely powerful and exceptionally well organized elements within the Egyptian society, which will start a civil war, with an eventual Islamic radicalization of Egypt becoming inevitable. Ironically, I think that it may well be that the best possible scenario for Egypt becomes a moderate Islamic rule, like that of the Moslem Brotherhood, which at least has a realistic potential of thwarting the ascent of Islamic extremism by offering a “kinder, gentler” version of a popularly acceptable form of government in Egypt for some time to come.
(In any case, even with the most palatable outcome, the current events in Egypt are very bad news for Israel, and a potentially insurmountable challenge for the U.S. policy in the Middle East.)
Now, regarding the recent past. The Mubarak regime of the past three decades has been described by many as a “totalitarian dictatorship.” In my view, this is sheer nonsense, demonstrating the lack of comprehension of the basic difference between an authoritarian rule and a totalitarian state. Mubarak was unquestionably an authoritarian dictator, who represented himself and his military base, but not the Egyptian nation and state as a whole. For more on this difference, I direct the reader to my entries on totalitarianism, several of which have been posted on this blog already, among the excerpts from my book Nunc Dimittis.