Daniel Davies, in his usual inimicable style, gets to the real reason the Egyptian army is playing nice with the protestors:
Numbers make a difference. An invading army can take over a city quite quickly; partly because an invading foreign army can usually be reasonably sure that all the guns are pointing in the same direction, partly because an invading army has physical momentum and has worked out ahead of time where it is marching to, but mainly because the population of an invaded city are usually not on the streets in anything like the numbers seen in Egyptian cities. Even a tank[1] is surprisingly little protection once it has stopped moving[2] and is surrounded by a mob. I saw pictures on the news yesterday of a tank crew sitting around at the edge of a square in Cairo – I have never in my life seen the crew of a tank looking so small and vulnerable. People are still talking about the army as if it was in control of the situation and for the moment at least, it just isn’t.
He also has the solution: Mubarak should’ve gotten the arseholes on side:
Basically, what you need is a large population who are a few rungs up from the bottom of society, who aren’t interested in freedom and who hate young people. In other words, arseholes. Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity, have the one useful characteristic that is the only useful characteristic in the context of an Egyptian-style popular uprising – there are fucking millions of them.
In the midst of an excellent analysis of why the protestors would be insane to accept Mubarak’s proposal to stay in power but not stand re-election again, Jonathan Wright provides evidence that Mubarak may have belately started to implement Davies’ suggestions:
A very disturbing trend which has surfaced in the last 24 hours is the appearance of pro-Mubarak supporters in close proximity to where the protest movement has gathered. Television stations reported on Tuesday evening that some of those pro-Mubarak supporters attacked protesters on the margins of the 100,000-strong march in Alexandria. I heard a noisy group of them in Kasr al-Aini Street just south of Tahrir Square in the early hours of Wednesday morning but I was reluctant to investigate because of rumours about their aggressive behaviour. Some of these pro-Mubarak gangs could be armed and dangerous. Some members of the protest movement would inevitably respond in kind, leading to gang warfare and even something akin to civil war. This is a very dangerous trend, carrying the potential for large-scale bloodshed. The trend suggests some regime elements are willing to fight for their privileges and will not easily accept defeat.
We’d like to think that authoritarian regimes like Mubarak’s only depend on the support of a small elite and brutal repression, but this is wrong. Plenty of people are willing to trade freedom for material gains (and you can’t always blame them either). In any revolution therfeore there’s always a sizeable portion of the middle classes, plus some priviledged parts of the working classes who stand to lose more from freedom than they will gain. Success or failure in any revolution is based in large part on keeping those elements at home cowering in front of the televisions screens, rather than on the streets.