At five in the afternoon, Cairo time (47).. Arab National Security (2)

  January 25 and the Process of Dismantling Armies:

 

If you want to bring down a state without declaring war on it, do not begin by toppling its political system, nor by directly targeting its economy. Begin with something deeper:

 

Break its backbone… the army.

 

This rule was not merely written in theoretical texts; it was applied in practice in more than one Arab country before the waves of “change” reached Egypt. In fact, what happened after 2011 cannot be understood unless it is placed within its military context, not the political one alone.

 

Arab Armies: The Threat That Did Not Disappear

 

After the October War of 1973, it became firmly entrenched in Western—particularly American—consciousness that the real threat to Israel, and to the equation of hegemony in the Middle East, does not come from the Arab street or from slogans, but from regular armies if they possess:

 

an independent political decision,

 

sufficient armament,

 

and a clear combat doctrine.

 

Hence, it was no coincidence that Arab armies, since the end of the Cold War, became an undeclared target of all “reform” and “change” projects.

 

What was required was not their development, but their neutralization.

And if that proved impossible, their dismantling from within.

 

Iraq: The Complete Model of Dismantlement

 

Iraq was the first laboratory.

 

When U.S. forces entered Baghdad in 2003, the most dangerous decision was not the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, but the dissolution of the Iraqi army. A decision that appeared administrative on the surface, yet in reality was a strategic earthquake.

 

With the stroke of a pen:

 

an entire army was abolished,

 

hundreds of thousands of officers and soldiers were dismissed,

 

the doors of sectarianism and militias were flung open,

 

and the state turned into an arena of open conflict.

 

This was not a miscalculation, as later claimed, but the literal implementation of the idea of dismantlement:

no state without an army,

no army without doctrine,

and no doctrine amid chaos.

 

Libya and Syria: Endless Attrition

 

In Libya, the scene was repeated in a different form.

 

The army was not formally dissolved, but it was effectively destroyed through external military intervention, which opened the door to militias, armed chaos, then withdrew, leaving the state without a center of gravity.

 

As for Syria, it became the longest-running model:

 

a war of attrition,

 

gradual dismantling,

 

continuous exhaustion,

 

and the summoning of every form of conflict: sectarian, regional, and international.

 

The objective was not merely to topple the regime, but to smash the Syrian army as a unifying institution and turn it into a party to a prolonged internal conflict.

 

Why the Army First?

 

Because the army is:

 

the final guarantor of state unity,

 

the natural brake on chaos,

 

and the only institution capable of preventing total collapse.

 

Therefore, any genuine dismantling project does not begin with politics, but with attempts to:

 

distort the army’s image,

 

break trust between it and society,

 

push it into internal confrontation,

 

or mire it in wars of attrition.

 

When that fails, other tools are employed:

 

siege,

 

doubt and suspicion,

 

sanctions,

 

and continuous media pressure.

 

Egypt: The Hardest Obstacle

 

In this context, Egypt was a different case.

 

The Egyptian army was not sectarian,

nor a ruling militia,

nor an institution isolated from society.

 

It was—and remains—the army of a state.

 

Thus, targeting it was not direct at first. Instead, efforts focused on:

 

politically isolating it,

 

distorting its role,

 

pushing it into confrontation with the street,

 

or dragging it into internal division.

 

What was not precisely calculated, however, was that the Egyptian army possesses:

 

the memory of a state,

 

a historical experience,

 

and a high sensitivity to dismantlement scenarios.

 

This would later become clear when the confrontation reached its peak.

 

What Failed? And What Was Postponed?

 

By the end of 2011, the plan had succeeded in some countries and faltered in others.

 

It succeeded where:

 

the army collapsed,

 

or was dismantled,

 

or was exhausted to the point of incapacity.

 

It faltered where:

 

the army remained cohesive,

 

refused to be drawn into civil war,

 

and preserved its role as a guarantor of the state, not a substitute for it.

 

From here, the tools moved into a new phase.

 

Weapons were no longer the primary means,

but democracy—as a tool of dismantlement.

 

(3) When Democracy Becomes a Weapon:

 

When the option of force faltered and the cost of dismantling armies through hard power became apparent, Western decision-making centers moved to a more cunning and less noisy phase: using democracy itself as a dismantling tool.

 

The goal was no longer to overthrow the state with tanks, but to reshape its consciousness and dismantle its institutions from within, in the name of reform, human rights, and freedoms.

 

Here, democracy was not discussed as a universal human value, but as a mechanism of political pressure, used selectively and managed according to interests rather than principles.

 

From “Spreading Values” to Engineering Societies

 

At the beginning of the third millennium, the language of Western discourse toward the Middle East changed. The overtly military vocabulary of the “war on terror” receded, replaced by softer headings:

 

support for civil society,

 

youth empowerment,

 

media freedom,

 

women’s rights,

 

building democratic capacities.

 

These terms were not inherently wrong, but they were not presented in a vacuum, nor applied by uniform standards everywhere.

 

They were used where they served the objective,

and frozen where they complicated calculations.

 

Western discourse did not mention other rights that the Middle East—especially Arab countries—was far more in need of:

 

the right to education,

 

the right to good healthcare,

 

the right to decent housing,

 

the right to build agricultural and industrial infrastructure that paves the way for a better future.

 

Instead, they proposed:

 

the right to protest,

 

the right to declare homosexuality,

 

the right to sexual freedom,

 

the right to abortion.

 

Civil Society… The Alternative State

 

In this context, the role of civil society organizations was inflated—not as partners in development, but as a parallel alternative to the state.

 

Funding poured in,

programs proliferated,

and some of these organizations became:

 

unelected political platforms,

 

tools of pressure on governments,

 

direct channels of communication with the outside world.

 

Over time, these entities no longer operated within the state,

but above it,

and sometimes against it.

 

More dangerously, they were not subject to popular accountability or parliamentary oversight, yet they possessed a moral discourse that granted them complete symbolic immunity.

 

Training in “Smart Protest”

 

In parallel, heavy investment was made in training generations of youth in:

 

mobilization techniques,

 

managing demonstrations,

 

breaking the prestige of the state,

 

exploiting social media.

 

The goal was not normal political participation, but managing anger and directing it.

 

The slogan was not “toppling the regime” outright, but:

 

exhausting the state,

 

paralyzing its institutions,

 

creating a permanent state of pressure and chaos,

 

and pushing it toward self-collapse.

 

What later became known as “nonviolent revolutions” was neither entirely innocent nor as spontaneous as portrayed.

 

Media… A Weapon No Less Dangerous

 

At this stage, the media played a pivotal role.

 

It was no longer merely a conveyor of events, but:

 

a maker of narratives,

 

a shaper of consciousness,

 

and a determiner of who is a “revolutionary” and who is an “enemy of the revolution,” a remnant.

 

Some events were magnified,

others ignored,

and priorities reordered to serve a particular political trajectory. Well-known media platforms were used in this process, whose roles were later exposed, such as Al Jazeera and Alhurra, along with a number of social media pages and some media figures inside Egypt and the Arab world.

 

All of this was done under one slogan:

freedom of expression.

 

But freedom without responsibility quickly turns into discursive chaos—

a discursive chaos that was set as a prerequisite for political chaos.

 

Egypt: The Greatest Contradiction

 

In Egypt, these tools collided with a more complex reality.

 

Yes, there was legitimate anger.

Yes, there were real imbalances.

But the Egyptian state was not a blank page.

 

It possessed:

 

deeply rooted institutions,

 

a society highly sensitive to chaos,

 

and a historical experience that taught it the price of collapse.

 

Thus, the attempt to turn civil society into a full alternative state did not succeed, nor did efforts to reduce democracy to the street alone.

 

Even so, these tools played their role in preparing the climate and creating the moment of explosion—one that could have been exploited in favor of a project of total dismantlement.

 

After Preparation: Searching for the Political Tool

 

By the end of this phase, the scene was set:

 

an exhausted state,

 

an angry street,

 

institutions under pressure,

 

and an unregulated media landscape.

 

One element was missing:

the organized force capable of leaping over the moment.

 

Here, the old-new question returned:

 

Who has organization?

Who has the network?

Who has the ability to maneuver?

 

The answer led to one option.

 

The Islamists—specifically, the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

This is what we will discuss in detail in Part Three.

 

To be continued.