How The Military Won The Egyptian Election

Clarification appended: June 30, 2012

The junta was magnanimous and did not begrudge its old enemies their joy. One day after the Muslim Brotherhood set off fireworks over Tahrir Square to celebrate its historic presidential victory, Major General Mohamed Said el-Assar, one of the 19 members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has officially ruled Egypt for 16 months (apart from tacitly commanding the nation since 1952), sounded proud, not defeated. “Now we have a new elected President, so that is a great accomplishment for SCAF,” the general enthused in an exclusive interview with TIME, even though the Islamists’ candidate, Mohamed Morsy, had beaten Ahmed Shafik, a retired air-force commander and former member of SCAF, by 2% of the vote. “So we would like to hand over power and for everything to be O.K.” Still, he made sure the military got credit: “We have done the best we can for our country. We saved the revolution.”

But which revolution is that? Most of the world is familiar with Egypt’s people-powered uprising, partially fostered by Twitter and Facebook but mostly driven by the frenetic protests of a secular-led youth movement that took to the streets to topple the 30-year-long dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. Then there was the dramatic political surge of the formerly banned Muslim Brotherhood, which used its immense person-to-person social network to dominate the messy democratic space opened by Mubarak’s fall. It won the bulk of seats in parliament and seemed to augur apocalypse for Egypt’s relatively secular constitution. The generals, however, appear to have trumped both developments with an effort that began so modestly that it seems more palace coup than upheaval: the imperial guard decided Mubarak the emperor had to go in order to preserve its own prerogatives, including control of up to a third of Egypt’s economy.

After Morsy’s victory was certified, the generals exuded graciousness. But it took a while. The Supreme Presidential Election Commission waited a week from the end of the vote to declare a winner, and the delay gave rise to conspiracy theories. But the official developments contained ominous signs that the junta was entrenching itself in power in the most populous country to be swept up in the Arab Spring. First, just before the Morsy-Shafik runoff, a constitutional court dissolved the legislature because it deemed the parliamentary election law unconstitutional. Then, just as the polls closed, SCAF decreed a constriction of the powers of the presidency. Morsy will have no real control over the budget and no decisive role in foreign policy, defense or national-security matters. He won’t even have the symbolic status of commander in chief of the armed forces. By fiat, the junta has kept all those functions for itself. The military claims it is all part of ensuring Egypt’s future. As General Mohamed Elkeshky, Cairo’s military attach in Washington, told TIME, “We want to leave Egypt in safe hands.” Asked if he feared that the Islamists might compromise Egypt’s national security, el-Assar simply said, “We have taken all measures in order to protect the country from these early stages of democracy in order not to face a crisis or problems like war or anything at this point.”

Though sheared of much of its old power, the presidency is still a huge opportunity for the Brotherhood, a perch from which to push political and social change. However, a Morsy presidency may also be of some advantage to the military. Joshua Stacher, a political scientist and Egypt expert at Kent State University in Ohio, says allowing Morsy to win makes him and the Brotherhood “the primary focus of blame whenever Egypt’s continuing structural problems–like the economy, tourism–are not fixed. [SCAF] can shift all the blame to the elected government while still having massive unaccountable and unelected input.”

El-Assar insists that the country continues to move toward democracy and that “executive authority will be in the hands of the presidency.” He does concede that “remaining in our hands is partial legislative authority until the constitution is drafted and a new parliament elected. That may take several months.” If there is a hint of nervousness in those words, that is because SCAF, long accustomed to directing Egypt from behind the scenes, has achieved its current ascendancy through a relatively open series of political improvisations–taking advantage of the secular movement and the Brotherhood’s falling out with each other because of deep mutual suspicion. SCAF is improvising still and anxious for its luck to last.

Who’s in Charge Here?

With rare access to Egyptian military personnel and Americans who have worked closely with them, Time has assembled a portrait of the shadowy and sometimes diffident junta that rules the country. For starters, the generals who make up SCAF hate being called a junta. The word is too negative. They consider themselves the saviors and guardians of Egypt–and indeed, most Egyptians idolized the military until SCAF became the designated ruler of the country in the post-Mubarak transition to democracy. The nearly 1 million-man Egyptian army–made up of conscripts and thus composed of everyone’s sons and brothers, fathers and uncles–had always been vaunted for self-sacrifice and heroism. The military is the most representative institution in Egypt: almost every family has had a relative in uniform. Amid the Arab Spring last year, the demonstrators trusted the soldiers even as they despised the thugs and cops sent out by the Ministry of the Interior. With that adulation came not a little hubris among members of the upper ranks, who are not from the conscript levels and have been trained in military academies in Egypt and overseas. Says Robert Springborg, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who has taught dozens of Egyptian officers: “They think they have the right to rule. There’s an incredible arrogance in their mind that they are better than anyone else.”

The chairman of SCAF is Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, 76, a Mubarak loyalist and the Defense Minister since 1991, who was described as the President’s “poodle” in one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. But he and the generals signaled to Mubarak and the protesters that they were intervening in the chaos by sending the army out of its barracks on Jan. 28, 2011. In the power vacuum after Mubarak’s resignation on Feb. 11, Tantawi led the council as it ruled by decree–a form of governance that continues and has allowed SCAF to shape Egypt’s political agenda to its design.

According to U.S. officials who have worked closely with SCAF, Tantawi is soft-spoken and spends more time listening than speaking. Still, when he chooses to address SCAF meetings in the Ministry of Defense, the room falls silent. It is out of deference for rank, as well as from some admiration. Tantawi was a battalion commander in the 1973 war against Israel, which the Egyptians consider a victory. His battalion was said to have faced off against one led by Ehud Barak, Israel’s current Defense Minister. (Unlike Mubarak’s virtual embrace of Israel, Tantawi has more distant relations with the Jewish state. However, Barak is one of reportedly only two Israeli officials to meet with the SCAF chairman since the fall of Mubarak.) The field marshal loves to play soccer on Fridays with his generals. “Of course, he always wins,” says a former U.S. military officer who worked in the region. “It’s not part of their culture to even imagine trying to beat him on the soccer field.”

But while SCAF rules Egypt, Tantawi doesn’t dictate what SCAF does–even as his visage has replaced Mubarak’s in protest posters and graffiti. According to people familiar with its proceedings, the council decides by majority vote on its decrees and, by all accounts, Tantawi respects the outcome, even when it goes against his wishes.

Some of the deference for Tantawi can be tongue in cheek. Graeme Bannerman, who worked on the Camp David accords at the U.S. State Department and then became the Egyptian generals’ consultant in Washington for nearly 20 years before retiring in 2005, says that in July 2008 he finally convinced visiting generals that Barack Obama would win the U.S. presidency–except for one, who insisted it would be John McCain. Bannerman asked why. “He deadpanned, ‘Because the field marshal said so.'”

If there is a take-charge person, it is Tantawi’s second in command, SCAF Chief of Staff Lieut. General Sami Hafez Anan, 64, who usually visits Washington on odd-numbered years (on even-numbered years, U.S. officials visit Cairo) to review budgets, joint exercises and other projects that form part of the U.S.’s $1.3 billion annual military assistance to Egypt. Anan was in Washington last year amid the uprising and had to cancel a lunch with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen to return home. By all accounts, he is the most politically adept of the SCAF generals and was even rumored to be weighing a bid for the presidency. David Dreier, a California Republican who chairs the House Rules Committee, speaks to a SCAF general at least once every three days. He has met Tantawi four times in the past year and says the field marshal is slowing down and getting on in years. Anan, says Dreier, has stepped up since the uprising: “Sami’s taken on more responsibilities than he had had.”

SCAF is trying to be more media savvy. In early June, a dozen Egyptian officers arrived in Washington for the military’s first-ever media-training session. The hope is that these officers will be able to speak for the generals, who almost never grant interviews. But they have had no real problem communicating with Washington.

The problem is their relationship with ordinary Egyptians. No longer camouflaged by the presidency–an office occupied by men with military credentials since 1952–SCAF is now an open and primary target for public criticism. Its record on human rights and the treatment of minorities, particularly Coptic Christians, has deteriorated dramatically. In October 2011, soldiers suppressed a Christian protest, resulting in the deaths of 24 people. Furthermore, more than 12,000 civilians have been sent to closed military trials since SCAF took over, a trend that has helped turn the youth protest movement against the junta it once welcomed.

The generals don’t like to be challenged, and when they are, particularly on the recent deterioration of human rights, their composure can frantically come undone. When former U.S. President Jimmy Carter met with Tantawi in January, he brought up the infamous incident captured on video of soldiers beating and stripping a female protester of her black abaya, exposing her blue bra, as they broke up protests. “[The generals] got very animated about it,” says a source with knowledge of the meeting. It was one of the only parts of the meeting that seemed to work them into a frenzy, all interrupting one another and denying the incident in different ways. They clearly hadn’t worked out a unified message.

Military Anxieties

The military is adamant that it did not go after power as Mubarak tottered, nor does it want to cling to it. “You have to understand, we did not seek to do this,” Elkeshky insists. “Everything was imposed on us since the revolution. We didn’t have any other choice.” While many are skeptical of this spin, others see in it a hint of what may truly motivate Egypt’s military: fear. Zvi Mazel was Israel’s ambassador to Cairo for five years, until 2001. He is not optimistic about the military’s future, sensing that the momentum of history is against it. “The army is now, I think, in dire straits,” says Mazel. “They published this constitutional declaration. They took some of the powers of the President. But I don’t see how they can be saved. The Muslim Brotherhood will get back the parliament, write a constitution, and once this is done they will put the generals on a retirement program.” He adds, “It will take some months, but there is no other possibility.” Still, he says, “this is not like Syria or Libya. The army will not send tanks and kill thousands of Egyptians.”

The military’s almost homogeneous conservatism and reticence stem from two historic events. The first was the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 by Islamist officers. The killing shook the military to its secular core and provoked a backlash against Islamists in their ranks. Its legacy is the thinly disguised animosity that even religious officers feel toward the Muslim Brotherhood today. The conflict propagated one branch of modern terrorism: the fanaticism of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was implicated in the Sadat killing, and his ideological offspring among Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

The other defining piece of history was the rise and fall of the charismatic and popular General Abdel Halim Abu Ghazala, who was Mubarak’s Defense Minister from 1981 to ’89. Abu Ghazala was the chief architect of the military’s private-sector investments, helping create the consumer-industrial complex that makes the generals’ domain one of the most important economic sectors in Egypt, accounting for perhaps one-third of the country’s $220 billion GDP.

Under Abu Ghazala’s stewardship, the military produced its own food, water and textiles out of factories run by former officers (or, later, by their offspring). In fact, they made almost anything the army could conceivably require to function, ostensibly to take the burden off Egyptian taxpayers. (During civilian shortages of certain goods, the military would open its surpluses and production to the population at large, thereby adding to its luster.) Eventually, this would include property, such as resorts and residential complexes where military families could live apart from everyone else.

Mubarak would not tolerate a potential rival having control of such a power base. In 1989, Abu Ghazala–who harbored presidential ambitions–was removed from office for allegedly importing missiles illegally from the U.S. The generals, however, continued to control the sprawling economic empire he created.

The ranks of the military, already strictly policed after Sadat’s assassination, faced even more strict policing after Abu Ghazala’s fall. All public appearances, speeches, press interviews and trips abroad had to be approved by Mubarak. The President, says Springborg, “walled off personal contact between officers and the outside world.” Even U.S. officers “could not go on [Egyptian] bases without explicit permission.” The result was the hermetic mind-set that dominates SCAF to this day. It is a tradition of silence that, the generals’ apologists claim, contributes to a misunderstanding of their motives. Says Bannerman, the consultant: “They’re trying to do the right thing. They’re not plotting everything out.”

Strange Bedfellows

Tantawi and Anan both called the President-elect to congratulate him on his victory. For his part, Morsy met with SCAF at the presidential palace as his first official act. A materials scientist with a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, Morsy says he has renounced his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood to symbolize that he is the President of all Egyptians. But few of the Brotherhood’s critics are buying that line. Morsy grew up in the Brotherhood, remained active in it even during his California years and has never been known to stray from its message. His opponents called him an electoral accident: a candidate who found himself pushed into the race after the Brotherhood’s initial nominee was disqualified. In the days since his victory, the group’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) has continued to speak on Morsy’s behalf.

A diminished presidency still remains a very important wedge into the Egyptian power structure. It is not impossible for Morsy and the FJP to use it to pry open Egypt’s politics–slowly. History provides at least one example of how this may happen. In many ways, Morsy is in a position parallel to that of Turkey’s current Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose party won a popular mandate in 2003 even as Turkey’s generals–who had ruled the country along the ferociously secular philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk–held on to real power. But Erdogan managed to avoid becoming the civilian fall guy to the Turkish junta and outmaneuvered the military to become the paramount political figure in the country.

Even if Morsy does not have Erdogan’s nimbleness, others in the Brotherhood might, including the man who did not get to run for President: Khairat al-Shater, the deputy head of the FJP. The party is also helped by ideological differentiation: many of its leaders are pushing a moderate Islamism similar to Erdogan’s, one in sharp contrast to that of the more radical Salafists who also won a sizable chunk of the now dissolved Egyptian parliament.

One problem, however, is the size of Morsy’s mandate: just over half the votes in an election for which less than half the country showed up to cast ballots. That may account for some of the pragmatic and cautious words coming from both Morsy and the Brotherhood. And indeed, pliancy may be the best policy in dealing with the generals–for now. Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood are well aware of the limits on the presidency and the need for a protracted struggle for civilian rule. “President-elect Morsy is pushing back already,” wrote Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations. “While paying homage to the Egyptian armed forces, his camp has already declared that they do not recognize the dissolution of the parliament or the legality of the military’s decree.” But, he noted, while “the Brotherhood has the symbolic advantage, it does not have the means to impose its will on the officers.”

Changing that arrangement will require a broad consensus among opposition groups, which is why Morsy is reaching out, at least rhetorically, to rebuild the bridges with rival opposition groups that the Brotherhood had burned in recent months. The generals have already had plenty of help from opposition forces, who failed to forge a common outlook and strategy for a democratic transformation in Egypt and ended up perennially at odds with one another, allowing SCAF to take a dominant position. Morsy and his movement’s only hope of tipping the balance lies in establishing a government that represents a democratic consensus far broader than what the Brotherhood has attempted. To the extent that they can re-establish the main political dividing line in Egypt as being between military rule and civilian democracy rather than between Islamists and secular democrats, they have a fighting chance of making progress in rolling back the authoritarian post-Mubarak state.

The original version of this story said that the army refused to fire on demonstrators in January 2011. That fact has never been clearly established. Egypt’s top generals have denied receiving orders from then President Mubarak to shoot at the protesters.