The situation has changed and impressions about the Military Council among Egyptian are no longer what they had been when it left its barracks and took to the streets on January 28. And regardless of the details, which Egyptians, as well as those who follow Egyptian affairs from abroad, know quite well, the irrefutable truth is that the phase which is supposed to be transitional – from the fall of Hosni Mubarak's regime, through what is happening on the Egyptian scene now, and up to power being handed over to an elected civilian President – has not been managed in the way Egyptians had hoped for from the military, whether those of them who rejected the latter's rule from the start or even those who fear for their army, and believe it to be exposed to conspiracies from domestic and foreign parties that seek to harm it and the Egyptian people. Far from the “theorizing” of political analysts about the difference between managing war maneuvers and battles one the one hand, and engaging in politics on the other, to justify the fact that the Military Council has committed the same mistakes, considering that it had entered politics without having any experience qualifying it to engage in it, the Council's real problem, ever since it took over the reins of power after Mubarak stepped down, is that it turned its mission of managing the affairs of state into one of managing the Egyptians themselves, without realizing the size of the ambitions produced by the Revolution within them or the size of the discrepancy between their different political views, social classes and economic conditions. The Council sought to avoid engaging in clashes with any party, and thus entered into battles with all parties. And because it is an army, not a political party, movement, group or faction, the way it dealt with every clash was violent, even when the matter did not call for violence and could have been resolved with a little bit of wisdom and some politics. For the sake of managing the affairs of the state during the transitional period, it met the demands of the Revolution and took Mubarak, his two sons and some of the leaders of his regime to court, thus gaining the approval of the revolutionaries. Yet the latter saw that others from Mubarak's entourage had been left held to no account or unpunished, and that in fact some of the “remnants” of the NDP had retained positions within the state, allowing those “remnants” to obstruct or combat the goals of the Revolution. Even the trials moved forward with tiresome and suspicious slowness, and thus the Military Council gained from taking the step of prosecuting Mubarak and his men only discontent, which of course increased when the belief became well entrenched that the toppled President was not spending a period of treatment at a Sharm El-Sheikh hospital, then at the International Medical Center, but rather the rest of his life. Politically, the Council set down a roadmap for the transfer of power, after deliberations, discussions and meetings with “traditional” political forces, excluding the revolutionary forces which had incited the street in the first place, and which continued to hold the ability to do so, thus widening the gulf between the two of them. And because there are contradictions between political forces, whether in terms of their ideas or of their goals, they of course disagreed over the roadmap. This baffled the Council and it sought to satisfy one party, angering another, and moving forward with a referendum in which it gained the support of Egyptians for its plan. In order to earn the approval of those who had been angered, it resorted to delaying the parliamentary elections, so as to give them a chance to get prepared, not realizing that their anger had gone beyond any measure or decision it could take. And when it realized that their chances of winning in the elections were limited, it tried to lighten their burden through a supra-constitutional document that included not allowing one party (the Islamists) to singlehandedly determine the future of the country. But it could not stand in the face of their objections, and so offered them one concession after another until the document was voided of its goals, after having gained the anger of the Islamists, to be added to the resentment of secular forces! And between the Council dealing with the remnants of the past and the roads to the future, its performance on the ground at every challenge was a source of wonder. Amid the boisterous discussion of Council members about foreign conspiracies, hidden goals, the minority of infiltrators and the counterrevolution, it always seemed easy to drag it into the quagmire of violence, as if it sought to be stung every time and not to learn from the mistakes committed by the police. The Council thus remained in a position of one that reacts to events, putting forward justifications and postponing admitting to reasons. And between the incidents at the Balloon Theater, the Israeli Embassy and the Giza Security Directorate, and then Maspero, Mohamed Mahmoud Street and the Cabinet of Ministers street, the story remained the same: “forces that seek to foment chaos and hidden hands endangering national security”; the armed forces have “maintained self-control”; and “the office of the prosecutor is investigating and the facts will be revealed”. And so far, neither the Egyptians nor anyone else have found out which forces the Military Council is referring to – forces that incited incidents from the Balloon Theater to the Cabinet of Ministers. When people were reading the Council's statement and its denial that soldiers had climbed to the roofs of government buildings and thrown rocks at protesters, those who had written the statement were not aware that the whole world was seeing the images. When the Council spoke of attacks by the baltagiya (hired thugs) against soldiers, social media websites were rife with scenes of violence perpetrated by the army against protesters. And when the military looked for supporters from among the political players, it found them all standing on the far side, abstaining, evading or criticizing. And while the Council spoke of elections, democracy and the future civilian regime, people wondered: what about the rule of the military?
