Today, many Egyptians are taking to the squares to reiterate their rejection of the military rule and demand the surrender of power to elected civilians. The expected response – of which Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi offered a sample two days ago – will be that the army is not about to relinquish what it perceives as being its nonnegotiable rights. The army's position is summoning the foundations of legitimacy on which it bases its insistence on remaining in power and its condition to see the staging of a popular referendum before returning to its barracks. The Egyptian army has surrounded itself with an aura of sanctity and veneration – like many other Arab military institutions, most of which do not deserve this sanctification and veneration. It has been presenting itself for decades as being the source of legitimacy for the authority in Egypt, because of the role it played in the establishment of the republic, the protection of the republic and the toppling of the monarchy and the corruption it featured. In this context, Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat exerted massive efforts to justify the legitimacy of the military's rule. As for Hosni Mubarak, he found no story other than that of the “air strike” during the October war to extend the legitimacy of the army's authority, as well as his own. During the last ten months of his quasi total control over Egypt (thanks to the constitutional principles document drawn up for the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to fit its needs), Tantawi neglected to carry out any effort to renew military legitimacy. He even went as far as saying that the revolution drew its legitimacy from the protection provided to it by the army, at a time when reality is the complete opposite. Indeed, now that Mubarak has stepped down, the army needs a new source of legitimacy for its role at the level of public life. Tantawi and his companions assumed that the Muslim Brotherhood could constitute a new partner, but the latter was smart enough to refuse to play in the army's court and surrender to its projects at the cheapest price, thus deciding to maintain some sort of “critical dialogue” with it. Following the tensions and the doubts generated by the massacre of the Copts in Maspero, Al-Silmi's document came to reveal what the army had tried to conceal, i.e. the blunt wish to impose tutelage over all the elected and judicial institutions and to remain distant from any kind of necessary questionings in a country seeking democracy. The tone used by Tantawi when addressing the Egyptians – and which was far from reality – reminded many of the tone featured in Mubarak's speeches during his last days, in terms of the arrogance shown toward the Egyptian people and the belittlement of their ability to recognize their short and long term interests. In order to understand the backdrop of the behavior of the Egyptian military men who have been in power since Abdul Nasser, we probably should go way back in the history of the modern Egyptian army, particularly to when it was founded by Mehmed Ali Pasha. Indeed, Al-Basha's main plan was to use this army as a tool to subject the Egyptian people to the wishes of the elite (which was non-Egyptian at the time), not through direct oppression, but through the subjugation of the Egyptian farmers via strict restraints imposed by officers who are engaged in a complex network of interests and loyalties and constitute a form of closed society. At this level, Khaled Fahmy's book “All the Pasha's men” – in which he explained the social structure of the Egyptian army during the days of Mehmed Ali – is probably a key tool to break the legendary aura with which the armed forces surrounded themselves, while using their abstinence to succumb to the restraints imposed on the other Egyptian institutions to eternalize their branched out control. What the senior officers of the Egyptian army cannot or do not want to understand is that the legitimacy of their authority has expired and that the contradiction expressed by the revolutionaries on Tahrir Square today is the one that exists between a civil authority chosen by the people and a military authority trying to mould the people based on its mood.
