Monday, January 31, 2011
Saviors in Uniform? (Updated, 2/2)
“The Army and the People Are One!” Don’t count on it. |
“The army is all good men but the police, every policeman is bad,” explained Egyptian demonstrator Mustafa Abdel Wahab to Time magazine. Mr. Wahab is as tragically mistaken in the first assessment as he is correct in the second.
In Egypt — as is the case nearly everywhere else — the police and army are what Alexander Hamilton called “correspondent appendages of military establishments.” Not every individual soldier or policeman is exceptionally depraved, of course. But the institutional purpose of such establishments is to serve the depraved interests of those who control the State. This is why, as Hamilton pointed out, military bodies (which include police agencies) “have a tendency to destroy … civil and political rights.” Decades of “emergency” rule in Egypt have destroyed whatever trivial substantive differences may once have separated the police from the military.
In the late summer of 1994 I spent a couple of weeks in Cairo covering a United Nations conference on population control. That event attracted thousands of people — politicians, delegates, lobbyists, activists, and journalists — from around the world. In anticipation of media scrutiny the Mubarak regime made a considerable effort to prettify itself. The cosmetic changes included issuing brand new white uniforms to the heavily-armed police officers who were deployed in small groups everywhere in downtown Cairo.
I remained in Cairo for a few days after the conference ended. It was my expectation that the departure of the Important People would bring about a change in the security situation. In a sense, I was correct: The white uniforms were put away, and the heavily-armed police who prowled the streets reverted to their standard military attire. Like other visitors, I had assumed that the high-profile police presence was the exception, rather than the rule. We were wrong.
The ongoing upheaval in Egypt offers a potent illustration of the fact that government police agencies are instruments of plunder, rather than protection — and that protection of person and property is best handled privately.
When they weren’t beating people in the streets or hauling them off to be murdered, plainclothes thugs from Egypt’s Central Security Service (or Mukhabarat) brazenly looted private businesses or provided protection to those who did — deputized criminals referred to by one protester on the scene as “prisoners who have been released by that bastard Mubarak in return for their services to beat up civilians.” Egyptians not employed in the coercive sector responded by creating private anti-looting patrols.
Private defense: Egyptians link arms to protect property. |
Public loathing of the government’s police force is widespread in Egypt, which is a healthy development in any society. However, as Mr. Wahab’s comments illustrate, the growing disrepute of Egypt’s police organs organs has actually enhanced the stature of the military.
Writes Steve Coll of The New Yorker: “There have been reports that protesters are relieved to see the Army in the streets; no doubt, as in many other like countries, the Army has more credibility than the corrupt and often torture-prone police.”
Dictator-in-waiting: Suleiman, left, with Israel’s PM Netanyahu. |
Thumbs up for tyranny! |
The convulsion in Cairo brings to mind Brig. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap‘s essay “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” which was published in the Winter 1992—93 issue of the U.S. Army War College journal Parameters — a subject I have discussed before.
Dunlap used the literary device of a smuggled prison letter composed by “Prisoner 222305759,” condemned to death for “treason” by the American military junta of Gen. E.T. Brutus. Following a series of military disasters overseas and domestic crises at home, Brutus staged a coup in the name of protecting “public order” from the corruption of the political class.
In the decades leading up to the putsch, the “Prisoner” recalled, “The one institution of government in which people retained faith was the military.” Even as the public lamented the corruption and profligacy of Big Government, they had nothing but bottomless respect for the Regime’s chief instrument of death and property destruction. The military retained its prestige in spite of the fact that its structural defects — made painfully visible by a long, bloody, and futile war in the Gulf — left it “unfit to engage an authentic military opponent.”
While the military was no longer well-suited to fight and win wars, its subtle integration into every element of domestic life made it perfectly suited to carry out a coup:
“Eventually, people became acclimated to seeing uniformed military personnel patrolling their neighborhood. Now troops are an adjunct to almost all police forces in the country. In many of the areas where much of our burgeoning population of elderly Americans live — [military dictator] Brutus calls them ‘National Security Zones’ — the military is often the only law enforcement agency. Consequently, the military was ideally positioned in thousands of communities to support the coup.”
During Egypt’s long “state of emergency,” its army managed to lose two wars abroad, while fine-tuning its skills as an instrument of domestic suppression. Granted, it has announced that it will not fire on Egyptian citizens, which is always a welcome development. But why should the Egyptian Army fire on protesters, given that the citizen uprising is helping to entrench military rule, rather than end it?
With our own economy unraveling and our political class becoming shamelessly predatory and unbearably impudent, it’s not difficult to imagine a similar scenario playing out in America, with Tea Party Republicans — for whom the military (which in our system includes our own “torture-prone” police) is sacrosanct — eagerly welcoming a military coup as “liberation” from Big Government. Perhaps Field Marshal Stanley McChrystal — formerly military proconsul in Afghanistan, most recently seen flogging Soviet-style “national service” in the pages of Newsweek — could be tapped to play the role of America’s Omar Suleiman.
Among those chronicling the scene are Graeme Wood of The Atlantic, who was present in Tahrir Square during the last mass protest — the 2003 demonstrations against Washington’s assault on Iraq.
“During those protests, the police encircled the protesters and let them scream for a couple days, Wood recalls. “Late at night, I stood among the police, asking them about their hometowns in Upper Egypt. Then, around midnight, they were called to attention, told to harden their lines, and finally to march toward the remaining protesters, letting none escape. Truncheons came down, and within a few minutes they had rounded everyone up into paddy wagons, and the square resumed its light evening traffic.”
While blood is being shed in Tahrir Square, government-organized bands of criminals are looting everything in sight. The police are actively protecting the thugs and looters. Meanwhile, the “good men” in the Army do nothing to protect those who had trusted them.
Dum spiro, pugno!
Content retrieved from: http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2011/01/saviors-in-uniform.html.