The Officer's Club

by Patrick Appel

Ellis Goldberg, who Marc Lynch calls "a real Egypt expert," has a post on the protests:

Where things go next is hard to tell. Unlike Tunis, the army is probably quite willing to use force to back up the police. The army does benefit from the current institutional arrangement. Nothing says this to me quite as much as the immense growth over the last 30 years of the Officer’s Club in Zamalek, a very affluent section of Cairo, which now has a luxury hotel, an outdoor restaurant, and (at least as nearly as one can judge from peeking through gaps in the very high and solid wall) an extremely relaxing oasis of a club in this island in the middle of the Nile.