Mubarak, the military, and the future.

Only fools would predict the unpredictable, and thus with the course of the Egyptian revolution. Imagine yourself as a pundit in Paris at the start of the French Revolution, the mother of them all. In August of 1789, you would have celebrated the “General Declaration of Human Rights,” an ur-document of democracy, as the dawn of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” Yet, four years later, the Terreur erupted, claiming anywhere between 16,000 and 40,000 lives. In 1804, one-man despotism was back. Except its name was not “Louis,” but “Napoleon.”

In the Russian Revolution of 1917, a halfway nice man by the name of Alexander Kerensky pushed out the Tsar, only to be replaced by Lenin and Stalin. And then, some soothsaying from Berlin in 1918: Who would have thought that the first German republic would be done in by communists and Nazis? Shift forward to Cairo in 1952. A genuine people’s revolt drives King Farouk into exile. Yet democracy takes a fall, too—toppled by Egypt’s officers’ caste. Egypt has been a military dictatorship in civilian garb ever since.

Let’s move to Tehran in 1979. The Shah flees for his life, semi-liberal Mehdi Bazargan officiates for a few month, and then, the iron fist of Khomeinism closes around the country. It is still there 32 years later, prevailing in a long civil war and shrugging off the democratic revolt of 2009.



Radicalization, then, is revolution’s fate. The one big exception being Eastern Europe’s “Velvet Revolution.” Yet the template doesn’t quite fit Egypt today: The regimes in Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin lived on borrowed power, courtesy of the Soviet army. Once the loans were called in by Mikhail Gorbachev, these satrapies simply evaporated. Hence, there was no violence, and yesterday’s freedom fighters didn’t turn their guns on the next day’s “counter-revolutionaries.” The East Europeans were lucky, as the Egyptians may not be, even as President Obama threatens President Mubarak with the cut-off of $ 1.5 billion in U.S. alimony. The revolution is velvety no more. Some hundred dead have been reported. There is looting and shooting. So Mubarak, the tottering tyrant, is allowed to pose as the guardian of law and order. “Egypt challenges anarchy,” trumpets a government gazette.



Mubarak’s next line of defense, however, is less successful. Appointing Omar Suleiman as vice president, in an attempt to appease the masses, means that Mubarak’s offspring, Gamal, not exactly a beloved figure, can scratch the dream of a “dynastic dictatorship” in the way of Syria’s Assad père and fils. Yet, as revolutionary history shows, appeasement like Mubarak’s late offer of political concessions only emboldens the opposition. What’s more, Barack Obama’s pressure for reforms and free elections isn’t helping the Egyptian president. Mubarak must surely ponder what happened to the Shah of Iran once he was dropped by Jimmy Carter back in 1978, when the White House dispatched the same “mend your ways” message to Tehran. That was the beginning of the end of the Pahlavi dynasty.

