|
February 1, 2011
It increasingly looks as if the Mubarak regime in Egypt is finished. The military's decision not to fire on the protesters, because their demands for political freedom were legitimate (eg., "freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody") may well be the tipping point.
Steve Bell
Mubarak will try and hang on by avoiding political reform and trying to ensure a return to stability but the regime's legitimacy is gone. So its goodbye Mubarak as the revolt intensifies and Egypt's economy grinds to a halt.
Presumably, regime change in Egypt will send shockwaves across Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Libya and Syria as the Arab people resist domination through the extensive and systemic use of torture by the police and security services. Stephen Walt observes that:
Egypt is not a major oil producer like Saudi Arabia, so a shift in regime in Cairo will not imperil our vital interest in ensuring that Middle East oil continues to flow to world markets. By itself, in fact, Egypt isn't a critical strategic partner. .... the real reason the United States has backed Mubarak over the years is to preserve the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and to a lesser extent, because Mubarak shared U.S. concerns about Hamas and Iran. In other words, our support for Mubarak was directly linked to the "special relationship" with Israel, and the supposedly "strategic interest" involved was largely derivative of the U.S. commitment to support Israel at all costs.
A more democratic Egypt would be more critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and its refusal to accept a viable two-state solution. It will also be less willing to collude with U.S.-backed policies such as the counter-productive and cruel siege of Gaza.
The U.S., finds itself in the unenviable position of being a status quo power in a region where so many detest the status quo, wish to fight it, and may - or perhaps inevitably will - one day bring it crashing down.it is still not sending a clear signal to the Egyptian people that the US support their democratic aspirations and that the US will no longer offer unqualified support to a post-colonial regime that systematically represses those aspirations.
|
Stable change in Egypt today can mean only a compromise with the Mubarak forces by way of slightly enlarging the ruling circle--eg, Omar Suleiman.WikiLeaks show that the new vice president-- Omar Suleiman-- was involved heavily in the US rendition of prisoners. That involved torture.
I wouldn't think that the protesters would want him as their new leader. That is a cosmetic change in which something changes so that everything stays the same.