News Desk: Mubarak and the Generals : The New Yorker

29.1.11

News Desk: Mubarak and the Generals : The New Yorker: "The future of the Mubarak family’s grip on Egypt now appears to be a matter for the Egyptian Army to decide. The riots on Friday started out in a way that suggested the regime’s riot police might hold control. An apparent dividend of the long U.S.-Egyptian alliance has been the transfer to Egyptian police of equipment and riot-control tactics of a type more humane than is sometimes employed by police states. There has apparently been some live firing on protesters by Egyptian forces, but in Cairo, where the international media is clustered, the police initially emphasized nonlethal tactics like water cannons and tear gas instead of live rounds fired at unarmed civilians. (Any authoritarian leader who gives even cursory study to the failures of his brethren around the world would know that when security forces shoot middle-class protesters dead in the capital city, the shock and outrage that follows can lead quickly to the dictator’s overthrow, as happened last week in Tunisia.) By nightfall on Friday, however, the regime judged this defense to be inadequate and ordered the Army into the streets."