The 59th anniversary of the July 1952 Revolution falls this Saturday. In the early days of that revolution, its leaders, the Free Officers who later ran the country through the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), were on the best of terms with the US. To them, the US -- fresh out of World War II -- was a force for freedom and democracy around the world, and Washington, eager to supplant Britain and France on the international scene, was cordial to Gamal Abdel-Nasser and other RCC members. As the memoirs of various Free Officers show, Abdel-Nasser met with the US ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, before the revolution, and US support for Egypt was later so solid that Washington did not think twice about opposing the Tripartite Aggression of 1956, practically forcing Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from their attack on Egypt. However, the honeymoon was short-lived: Egypt quarrelled with the World Bank over the financing of the Aswan High Dam, and the rest is history. In 1967, Washington was a major backer of Israel's war effort. The dramatic change in Egyptian-US relations over that period was due to the fact that the Americans began treating the Free Officers as if they were members of a junta running a banana republic. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen W Dulles were convinced that the Free Officers were no different from the Latin American dictators who were on the CIA payroll. This was a mistake. The 1952 revolutionaries may have come from the army, but they had a patriotic agenda, and their aim was to stamp out corruption, end repression and fight imperialism. Today, something similar is happening. The January 2011 revolutionaries are casting the army in the role of a military junta. The fact that the army has protected the revolution and said more than once that it cannot wait to go back to barracks seems to have escaped their notice. The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) may have erred unintentionally on occasion. But its errors are being blown out of all proportion by those who wish to harm the revolution. Remnants of the old regime and extremist religious currents are trying to convince the January revolutionaries that the army is against them. It would be very unfortunate if the revolutionaries believed them. Not everyone in military fatigues is a dictator in the making. France's de Gaulle, America's Eisenhower, Vietnam's Giap, Sudan's Siwar Al-Dahab and Egypt's Mohamed Naguib, along with Anwar El-Sadat, were all staunch believers in democracy and freedom. We have to give those currently running the country the chance to get things right. This does not mean that we should invariably succumb to authority, military or otherwise. What it does mean is that we should not focus on the negative aspects of their rule alone. Meanwhile, the SCAF, now acting as the guardian of the revolution, also needs to live up to the nation's expectations. We cannot afford to see the army estranged from the people, as this would only benefit the enemies of the nation at home and abroad. Egypt has the largest military in the Arab region, and any weakening in it could only benefit Egypt's regional rivals -- Israel, Turkey and Iran -- whatever their declared intentions might be. We must all pull together and not slide down that particular slippery slope.
