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Wall Street Journal: Egypt's New Top General Has U.S. Ties

Tuesday, August 14, 2012 10:53

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Egypt’s new top military officer is a known commodity in Washington who has long-standing ties to the U.S., Obama administration officials said Monday, playing down the impact of the previous day’s power shake-up in Egypt.

U.S. military contacts with Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who was appointed defense minister on Sunday, date back more than 30 years to a U.S. infantry basic training course he took at Fort Benning in Georgia in 1981, officials said. He has more recently met with senior U.S. officials including President Barack Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser. U.S. officials expressed confidence that Gen. Sissi will maintain close ties with the U.S., which provides Egypt with $1.3 billion a year in military aid, and uphold Egypt’s peace deal with Israel.

Analysts in Egypt, meanwhile, expressed skepticism that President Mohammed Morsi’s surprise power shuffle would meaningfully dilute the power of Egypt’s military, which has dominated the country’s politics for generations.

Gen. Sissi was appointed after President Morsi dismissed powerful Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and canceled a constitutional declaration that had buttressed the military’s expansive political power in the wake of last year’s ouster of then-President Hosni Mubarak. Mr. Morsi’s moves appeared at first as a counter-coup, but the generals’ apparent capitulation may also turn out to be more of a tactical retreat than a lasting defeat, say people close to the military.

Mr. Morsi faces huge challenges if he hopes to truly unravel the military from the Egyptian state, a process that analysts and observers say could take generations. The military enjoys profound public loyalty, an expansive commercial empire and the support of a judicial system that has repeatedly ruled in its favor.

“Will the military leave completely…? I don’t think so,” said Mona Makram Obeid, a member of the civilian advisory council that has consulted with the military since late 2011. “They have the economic power, they have the military power and they have, no matter what, the love and respect of the great majority of the people.”

Egyptians are now waiting to gauge whether Egypt’s judiciary, which is known for its public hostility to Islamists, will mount a challenge to the president’s newly expanded authority.

By annulling the military’s constitutional declaration and declaring expanded powers for himself, Mr. Morsi acted in direct defiance of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court. The court approved the declaration last month on the grounds that the country’s “revolutionary” political circumstances empowered the military to make unilateral changes to the constitution.

But with few rules guiding Egypt’s nascent political system, any looming fight between the judiciary and presidency is impossible to handicap.

President Morsi, right, swore in his new defense minister, Lt. Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, left.

Mr. Morsi’s decision deviated from legal norms, said Tareq al Bishri, a judge with Islamist sympathies. Zakariya Abdel Aziz, a judicial reformer, countered that the late June constitutional change was illegitimate and that Mr. Morsi can now, as Egypt’s executive, overturn the change made by the military when it held executive functions.

It remained unclear what, if any, negotiations or wrangling had preceded Mr. Morsi’s move. Muslim Brotherhood officials confined their statements to praise for Mr. Morsi’s “revolutionary” decision. Egypt’s senior generals offered no public comments and made no obvious countermoves, which several observers took as a tacit concession.

While the Obama administration wasn’t caught off-guard by the choice of Mr. Sissi, it was taken aback by the timing, officials said. U.S. officials had expected Mr. Morsi to shake up the military’s ranks, but they believe he opted to use a security crisis last week in the Sinai—in which militants killed 16 Egyptian soldiers at a border post with Israel—as political cover to recast the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the body Field Marshal Tantawi once led.

U.S. officials said that as a former head of Egyptian military intelligence, Gen. Sissi has close ties to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, dined with Gen. Sissi during a visit to Cairo in October, a sign to the visiting Americans that Gen. Tantawi wanted to put Gen. Sissi forward as a future leader. Gen. Sissi has also had extensive contact with the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson.

“This is someone who we’ve worked with for a long time, who has shown himself to be eager to work with the United States, who sees the value of peace with [Egypt's] neighbors,” a senior Obama administration official said of Gen. Sissi. “What I think this is, frankly, is Morsi looking for a generational change in military leadership.”

Mr. Sissi’s appointment may also represent an ideal compromise between the secular-minded military old guard and Mr. Morsi’s Brotherhood. People with knowledge of the Egyptian military said Gen. Sissi has a broad reputation within military circles as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, a rare trait in a military culture inured against Islamism.

“Sissi is known inside the military for being a Muslim Brother in the closet,” said Zeinab Abul Magd, a professor at the American University in Cairo and an expert on Egypt’s military.

In a statement to the state-run media, the Egyptian military denied that any of its officers have partisan affiliations. U.S. officials said such “rumors” are frequently made about Mr. Morsi’s appointments.

Gen. Sissi’s appointment reflects the staying power of Mr. Mubarak’s old military order, said analysts and people close to the military.

Ms. Obeid said the military’s apparent concession on Monday marked little more than the inevitable end of what she called Egypt’s “two-headed presidency”—the untenable power-sharing that often placed Mr. Morsi and Field Marshal Tantawi at odds.

The field marshal led the generals’ disastrous foray into domestic politics after they assumed power from Mr. Mubarak in February 2011, threatening the armed forces’ once-unshakeable public prestige.

By withdrawing from domestic political life and sacrificing a few top officials, a layer of more junior officers may have been seizing an opportunity to preserve the privileges and esteem they enjoyed before Egypt’s revolution last year, said Ms. Obeid and other political analysts.

“This seems to be a move to preserve the military’s long-standing privileges as opposed to a move to back the military’s purely national defense mission,” said Hisham Sallam, an analyst and editor at the Middle East political blog Jadalliya.

2012-08-14 10:44:19

Source: http://lizzie-phelan.blogspot.com/2012/08/wall-street-journal-egypts-new-top.html

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