Egypt: Sightings of the Egyptian Deep State

12 January 2012
opinion

With months of violence and political turbulence in Egypt, it is the hybrid military-civilian deep state and its manipulations that could be the greatest cause for worry.

The turbulence that has hit Egypt since mid-November seems, at first glance, mostly a testament to the poor performance of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in handling the transition away from the rule of Husni Mubarak. Having assumed power on February 10, the SCAF moved quickly to attain the stamp of popular legitimacy through a March 19 referendum on constitutional amendments. Since then, however, the conclave of generals has stumbled over the flawed logic of its own plan for the transition, as well as ad hoc decision making and a high-handed, dismissive attitude toward the new politics of the country. The SCAF's plan, in brief, was to engineer a restoration of civilian rule that shielded the army's political and economic prerogatives from civilian oversight, and perhaps bolstered those roles, yielding a system not unlike the "deep state" that prevailed for decades in Turkey. Such was the system in Egypt, in fact, under Mubarak.

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