Middle East

Calling for Restraint, Pentagon Faces Test of Influence With Ally

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WASHINGTON — The officer corps of Egypt’s powerful military has been educated at defense colleges in the United States for 30 years. The Egyptian armed forces have about 1,000 American M1A1 Abrams tanks, which the United States allows to be built on Egyptian soil. Egypt permits the American military to stage major operations from its bases, and has always guaranteed the Americans passage through the Suez Canal.

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The relationship between the Egyptian and American militaries is, in fact, so close that it was no surprise on Friday to find two dozen senior Egyptian military officials at the Pentagon, halfway through an annual week of meetings, lunches and dinners with their American counterparts.

By the afternoon, the Egyptians had cut short the talks to return to Cairo, but not before a top Defense Department official, Alexander Vershbow, had urged them to exercise “restraint,” the Pentagon said.

It remained unclear on Saturday, as the Egyptian Army was deployed on the streets of Cairo for the first time in decades, to what degree the military would remain loyal to the embattled president, Hosni Mubarak.

The crisis has left the Obama administration to try to navigate a peaceful outcome and remain close to an important ally, and the military relationship could be crucial in that effort.

One fear was the possibility that, despite the Egyptian Army’s seemingly passive stance on Saturday, the soldiers would begin firing on the protesters — an action that would probably be seen as leading to an end to the army’s legitimacy.

“If they shoot on the crowd, they could win tomorrow, and then there will be a revolt that will sweep them away,” said Bruce O. Riedel, an expert on the Middle East and Asia at the Brookings Institution, who predicted that in any event Mr. Mubarak would step down.

A possible successor — and a sign of how closely the military is intertwined with the ruling party — is Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief and a former general, who was sworn in as the new vice president. Mr. Suleiman is considered Mr. Mubarak’s closest confidant and a hard-liner, although Obama administration officials say they consider him someone they can work with. In meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, they say, he has shown substance and an ability to deliver on promises.

Mr. Riedel, who was an Egypt analyst at the C.I.A. when President Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and has since tracked the rise of Islamic extremism in that country, said that the Egyptian military would be a critical player in any deal to remove Mr. Mubarak from power.

Unlike the feared Egyptian police forces, which had mostly withdrawn from central Cairo on Saturday, the army is considered professional and a stable force in the country’s politics. Egyptian men all serve in the army, which for the most part enjoys popular support.

Mr. Obama met Saturday afternoon with his national security team at the White House about the uprising, but the officials would not say what, if any, decisions had been reached or whether the administration was trying to negotiate a safe exit for Mr. Mubarak.

One former United States official who is close to the Obama administration, Martin S. Indyk, said that it was time for Mr. Mubarak to go, and that the Egyptian military could serve as a crucial transition power.

“What we have to focus on now is getting the military into a position where they can hold the ring for a moderate and legitimate political leadership to emerge,” said Mr. Indyk, a Middle East peace negotiator in the Clinton administration.

Mr. Suleiman could announce that he would take control as president and hold elections within six months, Mr. Indyk said.

At the Pentagon on Saturday morning, American military officials said that the Egyptian Army was acting professionally and that they had no indications that it was swinging over en masse to the side of the uprising. At the same time, the officials noted, the army had not cracked down on the protests.

“They certainly haven’t inflicted any harm on protesters,” said Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “They’re focused mainly on protecting the institutions of government, as they should be.”

United States military officials said there was no formal line of communication between the Joint Chiefs and the Egyptian military, although they held out that possibility if the crisis deepened. Admiral Mullen had been scheduled to meet on Monday with Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, who is Egypt’s defense chief and chief of staff of the Egyptian Army. But General Enan was the leader of the delegation of senior Egyptian officials that left abruptly for Cairo on Friday night.

For the Pentagon, the question is how much a military that the United States in large part pays for will be receptive to American influence. Since the 1978 Camp David accords, the United States has given Egypt $35 billion in military aid, making it the largest recipient of conventional American military and economic aid after Israel.

“Is it a force that will listen to us if there is a military takeover and we want them to move to a democratically elected government as soon as possible?” said Anthony H. Cordesman, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They will listen. But this is a very proud group of people. The fact that they will listen doesn’t mean we can in any way leverage them.”

American military officials said on Friday that they had had no formal discussions with their Egyptian counterparts at the Pentagon about how to handle the uprising. “In other words,” said Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “we didn’t say anything to them about how they should handle it, and they didn’t tell us about how they were going to handle it.”

But, General Cartwright said, “hallway” discussions did take place, and American military officials said contingency plans had been made should the American Embassy have to be evacuated.

Mark Landler contributed reporting.

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