Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen - Hazem Kandil

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corps. The components of this internally differentiated regime oscillated between cooperation and competition over the six decades that followed the coup. This is because their interests, while sometimes overlapping, remained essentially separate. The political leadership needed military and/or security support to preserve its power should the masses refuse to obey, but played them off against each other to increase its autonomy and avoid falling hostage to any of them. The security establishment understood that its influence was contingent on the persistence of autocracy, that transition to democracy would spell its downfall from power. As for those who remained in the military, the adverse effects of politicization on the combat readiness and public image of the corps was unsettling. Their preference was to return to the barracks after implementing the needed reforms, and reintervene only if necessary. Driven by varying interests, the three institutions were inevitably drawn into a fervent competition over regime domination, a competition that unfolded within a turbulent domestic and geopolitical environment. The goal was surely not for one institution to eliminate the rest, but rather for one partner in the ruling bloc to subordinate the other two. For years, the shifting alliances among the components of this triangular ruling complex, as well as between them and the intervening forces within and outside the country, continually altered the balance of power between them. Yet the overall trajectory was one where the political and security components of the regime gradually coalesced to sideline their third partner. The military-dominated order of the 1950s began to founder by the 1970s. The day Hosni Mubarak took office, Egypt had already metamorphosed from a military to a police state. And the day he was deposed was brought forth by a military that saw in the popular uprising an opportunity for retribution.

      The work at hand is a revisionist history of the subtle configurations of Egypt’s July 1952 regime from start to finish based on primary sources (memoirs, interviews, declassified documents, news clips) and a rereading of a massive amount of secondary literature. The realist historian E. H. Carr said: “The real job of the historian is never simply to ask questions and look up the answers in the book, but to find answers which aren’t in the book; and that requires understanding and imagination quite as much as access to facts.”2 In line with his valuable advice, this book essentially reconstructs the critical junctures of the six-decade power struggle that consumed Egypt—a reconstruction centered on institutions as the primary players in a social drama governed by the logic of power. As problematic as this reconstruction might appear to some, it is a necessary first step on the road to clear understanding of the Egyptian question. The political scientist and veteran Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali began his memoirs by explaining:

      Whoever intends to write about the past must be aware that … important events rarely unfold in a coherent narrative and sequence; they are scattered through time … but once the different aspects of a single subject are collected, they appear much more connected than they did in reality. The thoughts and actions that [seem to have] occurred in a random and segregated manner appear in the form of a lucid and flowing sequence. That is why reality as it occurred is truly difficult to grasp … Historians … ultimately pass judgments on the [sequence of] events in its full constructed form.3

      After a brief overview of the military grievances underlying the 1952 coup, the first five chapters of the book examine in great detail the climactic episodes that locked Egypt on its destined pathway: the March 1954 crisis; the June 1967 defeat; the May 1971 “corrective revolution”; the October 1973 war; and the January 2011 revolt. Each chapter outlines the balance of forces, the issues at stake, the constituting events, and the outcome that set the stage for the next encounter. The concluding chapter presents the January 25 Revolt as one of several episodes of struggle, an episode that simply reshuffled the players and reconstituted the field of forces to pave the way for yet another round.

      To my knowledge, no other work has yet integrated the whole string of episodes that occurred in the period between 1952 and 2012 in a single analytical narrative, whose unfolding is examined systematically through a distinct theoretical model. In fact, the 2011 revolt has taken many by surprise because of the misguided belief that the Egyptian regime has maintained its military character throughout. In other words, observers unanimously treated army support as a constant, not a variable. Even the earthquake that shook Egypt to the core left this unshakable consensus intact, with writers insisting that the high command had no qualms with the existing order and only reluctantly deserted Mubarak and his cronies because they became liabilities. This is clearly because very few took the military seriously as an institution with distinctive interests, depicting it instead as a supplement to the regime, and conflating the officer corps with any political actor with a military background (whether he be president, intelligence chief, or prime minister).

      The key to explaining the initial triumph of the 2011 uprising is therefore to understand that the ruling bloc has not been as well integrated as many assumed. The day the people resolved to overthrow their rulers, the military was no longer invested in the regime; it has become the least privileged member of the ruling coalition that emerged out of the 1952 coup. After a series of wars, conspiracies, coup plots, and socioeconomic transformations, the balance within Egypt’s tripartite alliance tilted heavily toward the security apparatus, with the political leadership living contentedly in its shadow, and the military subordinated, if not totally marginalized. The economic niche that the military controlled began to diminish with the aggressive privatization policy of the capitalists who colonized the ruling party; its social privileges were dwarfed by those of the security and political elite; the quality of its manpower deteriorated significantly as a result of the social and educational collapse of the Mubarak years; its exclusive reliance on the United States might have made it impressive on paper, but in reality has crippled its capacity to project regional power. Unfortunately for the political rulers, the effort to isolate the army ultimately backfired because passing the responsibility of domestic repression from the military to the police weakened its coercive power, and the substitution of officers with crony capitalists in leading government posts imposed unbearable austerity measures on the population. The conjunction of these two processes provoked the uprising that was welcomed, rather than repressed, by the armed forces. Once the people took to the streets, it was only natural for officers to rally to their side. The revolt was not a bullet they had to dodge, but rather a golden opportunity to finally outflank their unruly partners and get back on top.

      * What about economic and ideological power? I believe in general that there are three “sources” of social power: coercive, economic, and ideological. Yet in terms of “institutions of rule,” the modern world knows only three: political, military, and security. Economic and ideological powers are loosely organized in networks and agencies of varying sizes and functions and are mostly located in civil society; their influence over the state must pass through one of the three ruling institutions. This is why economics and ideology are accounted for in this book through their relationship with the three partners in the ruling coalition.

       Prelude: Countdown to the July 1952 Coup

      The outcome of revolution rarely corresponds with the intentions of those who carry it out, and both the 1952 coup and the 2011 uprising in Egypt are ample proof. Still, exploring the background and intentions of those who attempted to overthrow their rulers helps unlock the logic of the regimes they unintentionally produced. So what exactly inspired the July 23, 1952 coup, which was carried out by a secret cabal of junior officers, calling themselves the Free Officers Movement, and set the stage for Egypt’s new regime?

      Egypt had been occupied by the British since 1882, under the pretext of protecting the Egyptian sovereign from his own army. In other words, when their predecessors in the military intervened in politics to demand greater rights for officers and citizens, they brought nothing but disaster. For decades, Egypt lay at the mercy of a stifling colonial mandate that not only exploited its resources, and dismissed monarchs and cabinets that defied its will, but also kept the army understaffed, unequipped, and trained for little more than parade ground marches—even when Egyptians won nominal independence and a constitution in 1923, it was through a massive revolt that civilians (spearheaded by the liberal al-Wafd Party) ignited four years earlier, without any military participation. Worse, three decades after this glorious upheaval, the British still had the upper hand. The young and promising King Farouk, who ascended

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