Egypt Update

The soprano isn’t even warming up in the wings. This will continue.

Mubarak has appointed Omar Suleiman as his Vice President, the first one he has had since coming to power. Generally people refer to him as Mubarak’s intelligence chief, but his brief seems to be broader than that, and National Security Advisor is probably a more accurate description for Americans, but in the sense of Kissinger, not Rice.

The new prime minister is Ahmad Shafiq, the former head of the Egyptian Air Force, adding a more military feel to the government.

The police have withdrawn from the streets. They weren’t able to deal with the protests, but it is also appears to be a psyops move, making people afraid for their safety, as there is no police presence anywhere in the major cities. There are reports that, in case the normal criminal element was laying low, plain clothes Interior Ministry officers have been out and about looting. There has also been a rash of jails that someone forgot to lock.

Egypt has a draft, and the military is tied closely to the population. There have to be serious doubts in the minds of the military leaders as to what would happen if they were ordered to fire on the protesters. Draftees are not an ideal force to use against the population. The Soviets and Chinese organize their military by regions, and don’t allow draftees to serve in their own region, or to interact a great deal with the civilian population where they do serve. I doubt that the Egyptians have a similar policy, so the lower ranks of the military units being deployed probably have friends and relatives in the crowd, and want to be able to go home at the end of their service.

I heard some Republican Congresscritter on the news at my Mother’s saying that the US wouldn’t accept an Egyptian government controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Yeah, right, like we wouldn’t accept Hamas winning the elections in Palestine. News flash: Egypt isn’t ours, so we don’t get a say. At this point, talk like that from US officials will probably help the Muslim Brotherhood in the polls. They were very late endorsing the protests, and they might succumb to a Mubarak offer to join a “national unity government”. Such actions would seriously erode their popular support, which was never great. I don’t doubt that a significant number of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood are employees of the Egyptian Interior Department.