“Was this perhaps even a coup of some sort?” someone asked on the Al Jazeera English broadcast this morning. Well, technically, if you want to dwell on it, the assumption of power by the
Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces
—yes, that is generally what people call a coup.
Given the other choices: the dictator continuing to refuse to acknowledge the crowd, or the dictator handing control of the dictatorship to his chief of torture and secret police, the army is the happy outcome for today. “The news reader is smiling,” Al Jazeera recounted, describing the state-television feed.
For today. Hosni Mubarak, in his intransigence, had insisted that he would not surrender power until September, when the elections were duly scheduled. Constitutional proceduralism was the last refuge of one-man government. But now he’s gone, and the procedures have gone with him. Parliament has reportedly been ”
.” So does the election have to wait till September, still? Does it come sooner? Or later?
