Why Society Doesn’t Change: The System Justification Bias

"Society's tendency is to maintain what has been. Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history: we have infinitely more instances of forbearance to exploitation, and submission to authority, than we have examples of revolt." (Zinn, 1968)

Have you ever wondered why society hardly ever changes? I think most of us have.

One answer is that humans have a mental bias towards maintaining the status quo. People think like this all the time. They tend to go with what they know rather than a new, unknown option.

People feel safer with the established order in the face of potential change. That's partly why people buy the same things they bought before, return to the same restaurants and keep espousing the same opinions.

This has been called the 'system justification bias' and it has some paradoxical effects (research is described in Jost et al., 2004):

• Poor people don't strongly support the sorts of political policies that would make them better off. Surveys find that low-income groups are hardly more likely than high-income groups to want tax changes that mean they will get more money. Generally people's politics doesn't line up with their position in society.
• Oddly, the more disadvantaged people are, the more they are likely to support a system that is doing them no favours. This is because of cognitive dissonance. In one US example of this low-income Latinos are more likely to trust government officials than high-income Latinos.
• Most disturbing of all: the more unequal the society, the more people try to rationalise the system. For example in countries in which men hold more sexist values, women are more likely to support the system.

People seem to rationalise the inequality in society, e.g. poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough and rich people are rich because they deserve it.

Via: "Psy Blog"

New Egyptian Military Arrest Powers Replaces Emergency Law

The decree will remain in effect at least until a new constitution is drafted, according to the justice ministry [EPA]


Last Modified: 13 Jun 2012 23:57
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Egypt's justice ministry has issued a decree allowing military police and intelligence officers to arrest civilians suspected of crimes, restoring some of the powers of the decades-old emergency law which expired just two weeks ago.

The controversial order was drafted earlier this month, but was not announced until Wednesday.

The decree applies to a range of offences, including those deemed "harmful to the government," destruction of property, "obstructing traffic," and "resisting orders".

Several of those provisions would allow the military to detain peaceful protesters. Rallies in Tahrir Square routinely disrupt traffic, for example.

It will remain in effect at least until a new constitution is drafted, according to the ministry.

Members of parliament voted on Tuesday to appoint a constitutional assembly, but the process of drafting the document could take months.

Adel al-Mursi, the head of Egypt's military justice, was quoted by AFP news agency as saying that "the decision fills a legal vacuum", while Sayyed Hashim, a former military prosecutor, called it a temporary measure.

"The police force has not yet recovered completely, and security is not back," Hashim was quoted by Associated Press news agency as saying in a television interview.

Parliament Bypassed


Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh, reporting from Cairo, said Egyptian activists see the current order as "much worse than the [previous] emergency law", in that it is seen as expanding the military's power.

"And it comes at a time when the ruling military council is expected to be handing over authority to a civilian authority in less than two weeks' time," she said, adding that the order bypassed the newly elected parliament.

"The initial reactions from the MPs has been very angry, specifically from the powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

Some of its members are saying that this is tantamount to a military coup."


The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), which has the largest number of seats in parliament, issued a statement on the controversial decree, suggesting that parliament will try to bring the issue under its supervision.

The brief statement quoted the party's deputy president, Essam El Erian, as saying parliament will be looking into the justice ministry's right to issue the decision and whether parliament can refuse it or not.

Parliament will seek to have oversight over the implementation of the decision "so that this mandate doesn't exceed its legal and constitutional limits," El Erian said in the statement.

"The Egyptian Revolution happened to get rid of injustice, corruption, autocracy and repression of freedoms - and the Egyptian people won't accept the return of any of that."

'Military Coup'


Mohamed Beltagy, another FJP member of parliament, called the decree a "military coup" in an interview with Al Jazeera, and said the measure was not discussed in parliament.

Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood's presidential candidate, said on Al Jazeera that the decision raises fears about the military's role.

Human rights organisations were also quick to criticise the decision, which they said confirmed that Egypt was a "military state".

Gamal Eid, a prominent human rights lawyer, said the decree made Egypt look like "a banana republic".

"Several of the crimes included in the decree are actually rights, such as the right to freedom of expression against ruling powers or established laws, demonstrations and strikes," according to a statement issued by 15 Egyptian rights groups.

The military has played an extensive and controversial role in the justice system over the last 18 months. More than 12,000 civilians have been hauled before military tribunals since the revolution; rights groups say the military courts do not provide basic standards of due process.

The 31-year-old state of emergency, imposed in 1981 after Anwar Sadat was assassinated, was finally allowed to expire at the end of May. It granted wide-ranging powers to former president Hosni Mubarak's security forces, including the right to detain suspects without trial.

Court Rulings


Amr Hamzawy, a liberal member of parliament from Cairo, said in a statement on his Facebook page that the ruling simply "reproduced" the emergency law.

"[It] reproduces the emergency law using new tools and threatens the state of law, for it gives military intelligence and military police powers of judicial execution in crimes committed by civilians," he wrote.

The decree comes just days before the country's presidential runoff, which pits Morsi against Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister in Mubarak's government.

It also comes a day before two crucial court rulings. The supreme constitutional court will decide on Thursday whether to expel Shafiq from the race because of the so-called "political isolation" law, which bars ex-regime officials from running for public office.

The court will also rule on whether parliament is unconstitutional; a lower court found that some provisions of the electoral law  - allowing political parties to compete with independent candidates for some seats - might have violated the constitution.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Push To Grant Immunity To Military Generals

One Day After A High Level US State Department Meeting, The Brotherhood Wants To Protect Egypt's US-Supported Military Criminals From Prosecution 

By John Glaser, 
January 12, 2012 
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood  say they plan to pass legislation granting immunity to the ruling military generals for crimes they have committed since taking power in February.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won large majorities in a set of Egypt’s post-Mubarak democratic elections, but the prospects for civilian rule to take over are not so certain. Allegedly, they are trying to ease the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) out of power in exchange for immunity.

The influence of SCAF had helped oust former dictator Hosni Mubarak from power during last year’s revolution, but they have since renewed the state repression and violence against peaceful protesters so prevalent under Mubarak. The youth and Egypt’s leading secularists have been calling for SCAF to be prosecuted and punished for their crimes.

But now that may not happen. And it’s possible the shrewd politics from the Muslim Brotherhood is not the only reason. The Brotherhood has been on the side of the military junta more and more since the U.S. started talks with them in recent months. One day before this announcement to grant immunity, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns met with the head of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, Mohammed Morsi.

It quite possible that the U.S. fears that legal action against the SCAF will put them in jeopardy as well. Amnesty International recently found that the U.S. has repeatedly shipped weapons – including ammunition and riot gear – to SCAF despite the violent crackdown on protesters. U.S. support for SCAF has remained assertive even as it rolled back progress toward democracy in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter also recently met with SCAF leader Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. ”Full civilian control is a little excessive, I think,” Carter was quoted as saying after the meeting. ”I don’t think the SCAF is going to turn over full responsibility to the civilian government. There are going to be some privileges of the military that would probably be protected,” Carter added.

The attempt to unseat contested Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh also facedsimilar questions of immunity. But U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay denounced it as illegal: “International law and the UN policy are clear on the matter: amnesties are not permissible if they prevent the prosecution of individuals who may be criminally responsible for international crimes including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and gross violations of human rights.”

Egypt's SCAF Leading Counter-Revolution

Al-Masry Al-Youm Staff 
Thu, 05/01/2012 - 22:45 
Courtesy Of "Al-Masry Al-Youm"

A group of political activists, writers, journalists and artists have launched an initiative under the name, “the National Initiative for Saving the Egyptian Revolution.”

The initiative includes, according to the draft statement signed by more than 100 public figures, laying a strategy for revolutionary powers to achieve 3 major goals, the first of which is protecting the revolution from its enemies inside and outside the country.

The statement labeled members of Egypt’s military council and members of the defunct National Democratic Party (NDP) “the heads of the anti-revolution.” That also includes all personnel working the National Security Agency, formerly called the State Security Investigations Service.

Some judges, businessmen, foreign companies, and media personalities working in Egypt are also enemies of the revolution, the statement added.

The second goal of the initiative is to deepen the sense of revolutionary spirit in Egypt by increasing political awareness by promoting escalating conflict with counter-revolutionary powers.

The third target of the initiative is to “put the revolution into effect” by tasking an elected authority to purge the country of remnants from the ousted regime.

End Of The Pro-Democracy Pretense

BY GLENN GREENWALD 
MONDAY, JAN 2, 2012 7:34 AM EASTERN STANDARD TIME 
Courtesy Of "Salon Magazine"

Media coverage of the Arab Spring somehow depicted the U.S. as sympathetic to and supportive of the democratic protesters notwithstanding the nation’s decades-long financial and military support for most of the targeted despots. That’s because a central staple of American domestic propaganda about its foreign policy is that the nation is “pro-democracy” — that’s the banner under which Americans wars are typically prettified — even though “democracy” in this regard really means “a government which serves American interests regardless of how their power is acquired,” while “despot” means “a government which defies American orders even if they’re democratically elected.”

It’s always preferable when pretenses of this sort are dropped — the ugly truth is better than pretty lies — and the events in the Arab world have forced the explicit relinquishment of this pro-democracy conceit. That’s because one of the prime aims of America’s support for Arab dictators has been to ensure that the actual views and beliefs of those nations’ populations remain suppressed, because those views are often so antithetical to the perceived national interests of the U.S. government. The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world, in large part because democracy will enable the populations’ beliefs — driven by high levels of anti-American sentiment and opposition to Israeli actions – to be empowered rather than ignored.

So acute is this contradiction — between professed support for Arab democracy and the fear of what it will produce — that America’s Foreign Policy Community is now dropping the pro-freedom charade and talking openly (albeit euphemistically) about the need to oppose Arab democracy. Here is Jon Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a very typical member of the National Security priesthood, writing on Friday inThe New York Times about Egyptian elections (via As’ad AbuKhali):

Many in Israel and America, and even some in Egypt, fear that the elections will produce an Islamist-led government that will tear up the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, turn hostile to the United States, openly support Hamas and transform Egypt into a theocracy that oppresses women, Christians and secular Muslims. They see little prospect for more liberal voices to prevail, and view military dictatorship as a preferable outcome.

American interests, however, call for a different outcome, one that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians. We do not want any one side to vanquish or silence the other. And with lopsided early election results, it is especially important that the outcome not drive away Egypt’s educated liberal elite, whose economic connections and know-how will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs.

Our instinct is to search for the clarity we saw in last winter’s televised celebrations. However, what Egyptians, and Americans, need is something murkier — not a victory, but an accommodation.

I love this passage both for its candor and for what it lamely attempts to obfuscate. Why should “American interests” determine the type of government Egypt has? That it should is simply embedded as an implicit, unstated assumption in Alterman’s advocacy. That’s because the right of the U.S. to dictate how other nations are governed is one of the central, unchallenged precepts of the American Foreign Policy Community’s dogma and it thus needs no defense or even explicit acknowledgment. It simply is. It’s an inherent imperial right.

But Alterman here is expressly admitting the reality that most media accounts ignore: that the U.S. does not, in fact, want democracy in Egypt. It fears it. That’s because public opinion polls show overwhelming opposition among the Egyptian populace to the policies which the U.S. (for better or worse) wants to foist on that country: animus toward Iran, preservation of the peace agreement with Israel, ongoing indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, and subservience to U.S. goals. Indeed, according to the 2011 Pew finding, “nearly eight-in-ten Egyptians have an unfavorable opinion of the U.S.” That tracks opinion in the Arab world generally, where the two nations perceived as the biggest threat are — by far — the U.S. and Israel (not Iran), and the three most admired foreign leaders are Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, followed by Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinijad.

But even more significant is Egyptian public opinion specifically on the issue of greatest concern for American (and Israeli) foreign policy officials: a nuclear Iran. A 2010 Brookings/University of Maryland/Zogby poll found vast, overwhelming Egyptian supportfor the view that Iran has the right to have a nuclear weapon, and for the view that a nuclear Iran would be a net positive for the region. That, too, tracks general public opinion in the Arab world, which supports Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons. In light of these facts, does anyone believe that the U.S. government and its pool of experts that exist to justify what it does — the Foreign Policy Community — have even a slight interest in actual democracy in Egypt specifically or the Arab world generally?

Of course not. As Noam Chomsky put it recently: “The U.S. and its Western allies are sure to do whatever they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world” because “if public opinion were to influence policy, the U.S. not only would not control the region, but would be expelled from it.” That’s why Alterman is urging what he delicately calls “a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians” – meaning: ensuring the ability of the Egyptian military to prevent the country’s democratically elected leaders (“Egypt’s new politicians”) from implementing the will of the citizenry. The fear of (and desire to stop) Arab democracy has been openly expressed for some time by many American neocons and even Benjamin Netanyahu; that it is now spilling over into America’s mainstream Foreign Policy experts is telling indeed.

In calling for a force to constrain democratic rule, Alterman doesn’t mean here the kind of Constitutional protections that exist in the U.S. to safeguard (in theory) minorities from the tyranny of majority rule, at least not primarily. Those are legitimate issues balancing democracy and minority rights — for the Egyptians to resolve. What Alterman advocates is a bulwark against the ability of the Egyptian people to free themselves of military rule, choose their own government, and decide their own fate. He wants democracy to exist in Egypt to extend only to the point where Egyptians “choose” to do what the U.S. wants them to do and to end at the point where they want to do something different (in that regard, his vision for “freedom” in Egypt is not unlike what many “freedoms” have come to mean in the U.S.: you can exercise them provided they do not contradictthe interests of the U.S. Government). Thus, Alterman announces, in Egypt we must avoid the “clarity” of democracy in favor of something “murkier.”

Even if you’re indifferent to the moral questions involved in actively trying to impede democracy in Egypt — suppose you’re a hard-core adherent of Henry Kissinger and realpolitik and want to the U.S. to act only to advance its interests without regard to moral and ethical questions – the foolishness of this approach is manifest. It’s what the U.S. has been doing, so disastrously, in that part of the world for decades: feigning support for democracy while working against it.

The Obama administration paid pretty lip service to the Egyptian revolution but then worked to install Mubarak’s chief torturer Omar Suleiman in power, who, for obvious reasons, is viewed with great disfavor among Egyptians. That propaganda ruse fooled one of its chief targets (the American electorate) but failed miserably among Egyptians, who knew exactly what the U.S. was up to. As a result, Egyptians now view the U.S. even more unfavorably than they did during the Bush years,while “more Egyptians — 64 percent — said they had low or no confidence in President Obama in 2011 than they did last year, up five percentage points.”

Nothing will ensure ongoing anti-American sentiment in Egypt (and the Muslim world generally) than following the approach prescribed by Alterman of working actively to impede democracy. Egyptians yearn for democracy and will scorn those who impede it. That they continue so bravely to protest in the streets even with Mubarak gone is dispositive proof of that fact, but for those who want empirical data: in the 2011 Pew poll, 71% of Egyptians say “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government,” while only 17″% say that “in some circumstances, a nondemocratic government can be preferable.” In other words, the vast majority of Egyptians do not want Alterman’s “murkier” framework where military rule “balances” democracy; they want democracy. In this extremely informative analysis of the current situation in Egypt, Issandr El Amrani notes: “The military’s claim to be guardian of the revolution has been weakening since soon after Mubarak was toppled.” While the U.S. Government can trick Americans into believing that the U.S. is on the side of Freedom and Democracy even as it works against it, it cannot fool the citizens in those nations it seeks to suppress.

Alterman claims that he wants to impede Egyptian democracy in the name of “what Egyptians, and Americans, need” — right: because Jon Alterman and his fellow denizens in America’s National Security priesthood want only what’s best for The Egyptian People, and that means preventing them from living autonomously. But one need not even bother with that pretense to see the huge deficiency in this approach. Having the U.S. impede democracy in Egypt no more fulfills what “Americans need” than it does what “Egyptians need.” It’s a self-perpetuating, self-inflicted dilemma: the more the U.S. impedes democracy in other nations, the more it is disliked in those nations, which in turn means it needs even more to impede democracy in those nations, etc. ad infinitum. This is exactly the behavior (along with blind support for the actions of the Israeli government) that has led to such vast anti-American sentiment (which in turn is what fuels Terrorism and support for it).

It’s just extraordinary how our nation’s Foreign Policy Experts never learn the lesson. Either that, or they view anti-American sentiment in that part of the world as an agenda-enabling positive. It’s hard to know which is worse.

* * * * *

Speaking of propaganda and the meaning of “democracy”: The Washington Post today has the latest installment of increasingly pure fear-mongering media accounts about Iran (this from the NYT last week — “Clock Ticking for West to Act on Iranian Nuclear Program” — was a remarkable escalation). Today’s Post article mindlessly echoes neocon fantasies about a growing Persian menace in Latin America, frighteningly close to America’s borders!  Without an ounce of skepticism or balance, it quotes a GOP Congresswoman complaining that Iran has found “willing partners in the region’s anti-American despots,” and then ominously warns:

Former U.S. intelligence officials say the presence of Quds Force officers and other military personnel in diplomatic missions enhances Iran’s ability to carry out covert activities, sometimes in conjunction with members of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group that operates extensive networks in Latin America and maintains ties with drug cartels. U.S. officials say the Quds Force was behind the alleged plot to hire Mexican drug gangs to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in Washington.

“For Iran to be so active in Venezuela and for the Quds Force to be there can only suggest Iran is serious about asymmetrical force projection into our neck of the woods. If Israel bombs Iran, we may well see retaliatory strikes aimed at U.S. interests coming from these Quds Force guys in South America,” said Art Keller, a former case officer with the CIA’s counterproliferation division.

Leaving aside the fact that this Quds-Force/Mexican-drug-cartel/Saudi-Ambassador assassination plot was so facially absurd as to be laughable, and further leaving aside that these neocon fantasies of Hezbollah running wild in Latin America have been clearly debunked, and further leaving aside that the Post article does little more than identify commercial transactions between Iran and these nations, consider who are the region’s “anti-American despots” whom Iran is threateningly befriending.

The Post explains that Iran has now “opened six new missions there — in Colombia, Nicaragua, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia — and has expanded embassies in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela”; Iran’s President, the article informs us, is now embarking on a trip to Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Nicaragua. Other than Cuba, all of those nations are governed by democratically elected leaders. But many of them periodically defy American dictates and act against American interests; they are thus magically transformed into “despots.” By contrast, try to find any high-level American official using such a term to describe, say, America’s close friends ruling Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. That is what is meant by “democracy” and “freedom” and “despots” when used in establishment American foreign policy discussions.

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Has Egypt's Revolution Been Aborted?

As Egypt's Army Continues To Clash With Protesters, We Debate The Status Of The Promised Transition To Civilian Rule.

Inside Story 
Last Modified: 19 Dec 2011 09:33 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"


Egypt's military police have clashed with demonstrators in Cairo in a third day of violence.

It began on Friday when one of several hundred peaceful protesters, staging a sit-in outside the cabinet building, was reportedly detained and beaten by troops.

Since then the violence has left 10 people dead and 432 others injured. It has also emerged that precious national archives were burnt when the Institute of Egypt was set alight.

The violence has overshadowed the first parliamentary elections since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in February.

We look at what all of this means for Egypt's increasingly troubled transition in the wake of the revolution that brought the end of Mubarak's rule almost a year ago.

Is the army losing credibility as Egyptians await the promised switch from military to civilian rule? Are Egyptians becoming more intolerant of a violent transitional period with no security and a deteriorating economy? And who is to blame?

Inside Story discusses with guests: Ahmed el Nashar, an Egyptian political activist; Abdallah Schleifer, a senior fellow and professor emeritus at the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism at the American University in Cairo; and Gamal Abdel Gawad, a political analyst and senior research fellow at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

"There's a polarisation going on and it's true a lot of people have come to the conclusion that the revolution did not happen or was aborted or it has not been fulfilled and are pressing on. But on the other hand, what has to be considered is with each swelling of a clash, a significant portion of the population gets turned off." Abdallah Schleifer, professor emeritus at the American University in Cairo
 

"This is not the first time, every time the military council said 'we meant well, forgive us, this is the last time'. But now, it seems that this is their
style of handling things."

- Emad el-Din Hussein, Editor Al-Shorouknewspaper

Egypt's Untenable Status Quo Meets An Unwritten Future

A protester takes cover from rubber bullets fired during clashes with riot police on a side street near Tahrir Square in Cairo November 22, 2011 (Photo: Goran Tomasevic / Reuters)

Posted by Tony Karon 
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 5:00 am 
Courtesy Of "The New York Times"

With reporting by Abigail Hauslohner / Cairo

"Say it, don't be afraid: the military council has to leave," chanted some of the tens of thousands of protesters who thronged Cairo's Tahrir Square Tuesday night. Their slogan was a combative response to the  junta's plan, announced hours earlier in an unprecedented television address by Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, for a transfer of power to an elected civilian government next summer. 

But with at least 31 dead and 600 wounded in ongoing clashes in and around the square over the past four days, Tantawi's offer to expedite a handover to civilian executive authority that his Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) had originally planned to delay until 2013, was too little, too late—at least for the many thousands that have taken to the streets again, having risked life and limb to oust Mubarak, only to see authoritarian power revert to the military core of his regime.

If it was designed to calm the situation, Tantawi's speech had the opposite effect: 

Following his broadcast, battles raging in Tahrir's side streets grew even more ferocious, spilling into surrounding neighborhoods late Tuesday night. And they carried on into a fifth day Wednesday, with street battles occuring around the heavily fortified Interior Ministry.

But the crisis in the post-Mubarak transition that has revealed itself in recent days could force all of the key players to change their political scripts.

For protester Ekrami Abdel Azim, the matter is simple: The generals cannot be allowed to

 remain in power. "The military is always killing people and claiming that it's the invisible fingers who are doing this," he said. Earlier this month, he watched a fellow demonstrator shot alongside him as the military swept in to crush a protest in Damietta against poisonous pollutants issuing from the Agrium fertilizer plant. For others braving the Square on Tuesday, the turning point came when the military massacred 27 people, mostly Christian protesters, outside the state TV building on October 9, or when soldiers had forcefully cleared Tahrir during protests in July. "The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is deceptive," Azim warns. "The clues that they want to stay in power is there in all these injuries, in the supra-constitutional principles, and in the delay of the presidential election until 2013."

Tantawi had, of course, pledged on Tuesday to bring that election date forward and insisted that "We don't want to stay in power, we never wanted to." He also maintained that the military had never shot any Egyptians. But the crowd was no longer buying it. A banner in the square mimicked the text that Egyptians see on the screens of their mobile phones when their prepaid air time expires: “I'm sorry Field Marshall, your credit has ended."

Tantawi, the 76-year-old who served as President Hosni Mubarak's defense minister, has ruled Egypt as the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces since the generals eased the strongman into retirement last February. Yet Tuesday marked the first time he'd addressed the citizenry, and he did so in circumstances that might have been familiar to his old boss—he was the target of the fury of tens of thousands of Egyptians on the street to demand an immediate transfer of power.

The derision with which the SCAF chief's words were greeted on the Square was reminiscent of the desperate final days of Mubarak, when the strongman and other officials made repeated TV appearances making new offers, as if bargaining with the crowds. But despite the breadth of the protest —rich young women sporting expensive sunglasses wandered through the throng along with poor men in tattered gallabiyas, veiled women, children, and Islamist activists— it may be early yet to predict a precipitous collapse of the junta. Much depends on whether those in Tahrir Square, and on the streets of Alexandria and other cities, are able to win support for a new revolutionary confrontation from the vast majority of Egyptians who remain passive observers sidelines.

There's a bitterness and frustration, almost an air of desperation in the air now: The demonstrators don't trust the generals, and they vow not to be duped again into accepting anything less than SCAF stepping down and returning to barracks, making way for a civilian "government of national salvation." The violence unleashed by the security forces over the weekend has hardened their resolve to hold the Square until they have won Tantawi's resignation.

Autocratic power and its trappings, however, have been the exclusive preserve of Egypt's military for the past six decades: Mubarak, and Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdel Nasser before him, were all military men, who owed their presidencies to their status in the armed forces. The latest round of clashes were triggered, in fact, when SCAF last Thursday announced "supra-constitutional principles" to which those elected to write a new constitution would have to adhere, and which not only kept the military exempt from civilian oversight and command, but also reserved for its leaders a role of "guardianship" over the democratic political process.

Ceding power to civilians would certainly be a counter-intuitive step for a military that has been the source of political power in Egypt since the coup of 1952, and the performance of the SCAF since assuming power —maintaining draconian emergency laws, detaining thousands of democratic activists and subjecting many to arbitrary military justice, and setting the rules and timetable for a political transition by diktat—has hardly generated optimism over its intent.

Tantawi's speech may have been an opening bid, a way to speed up the presidential election, but Egypt in military hands for most of the next year. He did concede that if it was the will of the people, established through a referendum, that the military step down immediately, it would do so. But, of course, no such referendum is scheduled, and the generals may be counting on the consent of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose priority is going ahead with the parliamentary elections scheduled to begin next week, and in which its Freedom and Justice Party is expected to garner the largest share of the vote. Clearly, it's not going to be enough to bring the latest crisis to a close.

As analyst Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution told the New York Times, "The gap between the military and the protesters is so large now as to be almost impossible to close... The maximum of what the military can offer doesn't meet the minimum of what the protesters are demanding." That, notes Cairo-based blogger Issandr al-Amrani leaves just two scenariosfor ending the standoff: "Massive force by the police and army, which seems unlikely for now, or a much grander gesture than what Tantawi is offering tonight, one with a convincing vision for Egypt's future."

While the military appears to be scrambling for new measures of appeasement—it reportedly tried to get liberal favorite Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei to accept the role of interim Prime Minister on Tuesday, but the Nobel laureate former IAEA chief was reportedly reluctant to take the job without first establishing its independence from military diktat, and some form of popular mandate—the opposition doesn't necessarily have a unified position of its own. The lack of cohesion was evident  Tuesday on the Square: 

Rich kids tweeted sarcastically about the Islamists operating alongside them at the protesters' field hospitals; some Christians still insist that the Muslim Brotherhood is in cahoots with the military, even though many of them were active in Tuesday's demonstration, despite the reluctance of their leadership to endorse a new wave of protest lest they jeopardize next week's election.

Still, there was teamwork. Corridors opened up in the sea of bodies to allow ambulances through; human chains formed to protect field hospitals and the faithful bowed in prayer. Strangers sprayed one another's scarves with an alkaline solution to mitigate the suffocating sting of the tear gas. So enormous were the piles of donated medical supplies that they gave the impression that volunteer medics were expecting the standoff to last for weeks.

It may well do, with many in the Square expecting a more torrid test than they faced in ousting Mubarak in February. The crisis provoked by the authorities' handling of last weekend's protests has forced all of the key stakeholders out of their political comfort zones: The military, the Muslim Brotherhood and its various factions, and other opposition groups in the protest action may be forced, in the coming days, to recalibrate their tactics. 

After all, Friday is coming, and with it comes prospect of yet another fateful day of prayer in Tahrir Square.