The revolution in Egypt is moving ahead at the speed of the internet rather than the speed of the telephone or the newspaper.
Apparently people are already cursing the army.
The police in most countries are not very popular. They are seen as a repressive arm of the state. The “Dixon of Dock Green” (a ludicrously pro-police TV show from the 1960s) image of British police is unusual.
In revolutions the police are usually the states first line of defence. They are the ones to try and get the people off the streets. But if they fail, they usually disappear. They are either withdrawn to barracks by their superiors or they go to ground.
In Russia for example in 1917 the hated “pharaohs” (as the police were known) simply disappeared and never reappeared. The police just went to pieces.
It is however the former that seems to have happened in Egypt.
Mubarak seems to have gone for the second line of defence, the army, almost immediately.
As the army goes into the streets they are normally greeted by the people as saviour and people give them tea and flowers. When the British army went into Northern Ireland in 1969 it was cups of hot tea from Catholics house wives which greeted them. In Portugal in 1974 people put carnations in rifle barrels.
There are so many more other examples of this, too many to start listing.
Why is this?
Unlike the police, who are generally known to be the servants of the state, the army is usually seen as the servants of the people, of the nation. They are not usually used for internal repression.
A second reason they are welcomed is that revolutions, when they start, are broad movements for the improvement of “the nation.” It usually takes time for the different sections of society start to struggle for power and for it becomes clear that there is no homogenous “nation” all that we all have the same interests is a myth.
It is only once the army goes onto the streets and starts to maintain “law and order” (or rather the status quo), that the scales fall from people’s eyes.
This often happens quickly, as unlike the police, the army are not used to dealing with confrontation with people at close quarters. Furthermore they they are not trained in crowd control, they are trained to kill, something they end up doing.
The soldiers greeted with flowers and tea end up hated. Usually the state tries to crack down and withdraw them before this happens. If they still remain on the streets they then just have to use so much force to smash the movement that they end all resistance.
Using the army to repress the movement and not succeeding is the most dangerous thing that can happen for any regime. In 1979 the Shah of Iran tried to shoot the movement off the streets, and failed. The result was that the the army and state became so hated that there was nothing the regime could do to save itself. When the insurrection came in February the state was utterly destroyed. The police, the army and bureaucracy simply ceased to exist. They had to be completely rebuilt from scratch. The struggle over how this should happen became the struggle which defined the revolution. It was, as we should note, a struggle won by those around Ayatollah Khomeini and their conception of an “Islamic state”.
That people are turning on the army so soon in Egypt shows the speed with which the revolutionary movement is developing. The decisive moment could be approaching quickly.