Mohammed Ayoob fears the intentions of Egypt's military and other regional military regimes:
The military-dominated Egyptian power structure is replicated in many other countries in the region, with Syria and Algeria being the prime examples. One should not forget that the Syrian rulers killed 20,000 of their own citizens in Hama in 1982 to avert a challenge to the Assad regime. The Algerian military by aborting the 1992 elections let loose a reign of terror in that country from which it has not recovered until this day.
The Jordanian army ethnically cleansed Palestinian camps in 1970 to prevent the fall of the Hashemite monarchy. Arab armies are very efficient at ruthlessly suppressing the democratic aspirations of their peoples. So much of their energy is devoted to the task of regime preservation that it detracts gravely from their capacity as war-fighting machines as was clearly demonstrated by the defeats inflicted by Israel on the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies in the 1967 war and on the Egyptian and Syrian armies in the 1973 war.