The Other McCain

Christiane Amanpour interviews Hosni Mubarak:

He said he’s fed up with being president and would like to leave office now, but cannot, he says, for fear that the country would sink into chaos. . . .
When I asked him what he thought seeing the people shouting insults about him and wanting him gone, he said, “I don’t care what people say about me. Right now I care about my country, I care about Egypt.” . . .
When I asked him how he responded to the United States’ veiled calls for him to step aside sooner rather than later, he said he told President Obama, “You don’t understand the Egyptian culture and what would happen if I step down now.”

Here’s a video news report featuring an interview with Ibrahim Kamel, a member of the ruling National Democratic Party:

UPDATE: The Egyptian NDP is crucial to answering the big question about the violence that began Wednesday: “Who let the thugs out?”

Foreign journalists were beaten with sticks and fists by pro-government mobs on Thursday, and dozens were detained by security forces. The U.S. condemned what it called the “systematic targeting” of the reporters, photographers and film crews who have brought searing images of Egyptian protests to the world.
Foreign photographers reported attacks by supporters of President Hosni Mubarak near Tahrir Square, the scene of vicious battles between Mubarak supporters and protesters demanding he step down after nearly 30 years in power

Who ordered Wednesday’s brutal raid — featuring pro-Mubarak goons riding horses and camels — on Tahrir Square? Who was responsible for the crackdown on the press that resulted in an ABC News producer being threatened with beheading? Permit me suggest that this might be a big clue:

(Via National Journal.) Could it be that the thugs (many of whom carried NDP identification) were doing the bidding of the president’s son, Gamal Mubarak? And could it be that Gamal’s otherwise unexplained ouster from the NDP is related to Wednesday’s hooliganism?

UPDATE II: The latest Associated Press video report:

Also from the Associated Press:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has issued a sharp criticism of attacks on journalists, peaceful demonstrators, human rights activists and diplomats in Egypt.
Clinton said the attacks violated international norms on freedom of the press.
Without directly blaming President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, she said, “It is especially in times of crisis that governments must demonstrate their adherence to these universal values.”

UPDATE III: Wow, this is some amazing news:

Preliminary figures released Thursday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that Egypt’s decision to block Internet services for five days cost the country an estimated $90 million. The OECD said the blocked telecommunications and Internet services accounted for about 3 percent to 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, which accounted for about $18 million a day.

The Internet amounts to as much as 4% of the economy in Egypt?

Considering that the Internet provides about 100% of my own personal economy (hint, hint), I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised.

UPDATE IV: Egyptian blogger “Sandmonkey” — who was beaten and detained in Cairo — Tweets about his experience:

Suggestion for Pajamas Media CEO Roger Simon: Bring “Sandmonkey” to Washington next week for CPAC, so I can buy him a beer.

UPDATE V: Time magazine reports:

On Thursday night, an ambulance driver told TIME that he witnessed a tank open fire on anti-government demonstrators near the Egyptian Museum, where pro-Mubarak forces had launched attacks the previous day. “The army has started to cooperate with the pro-Mubarak people. I saw this with my own eyes,” he told TIME. “I saw a tank open fire from the bridge onto the demonstrators below the bridge so that they would be scared and run.”

When I first saw that Tweeted — “Tanks open fire on protesters” — my immediate reaction was two words: Ruh-roh.

But the report seems to indicate that, if the ambulance driver’s account is correct, these were basically just warning shots. I reckon warning shots with a .50-caliber machine gun are pretty serious business, though.

It’s now a little past 7 p.m. ET Thursday, three hours until dawn of Friday in Cairo. We’ll see how the situation develops. Meanwhile, more scary news:

Get Ready for the Muslim Brotherhood

That’s the headline on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s column in (of all places) the New York Times.

UPDATE V: Headline on story by Graeme Wood of the Atlantic:

Why I Was Dragged Through
the Street by an Egyptian Mob

And no, the answer is not, “They thought I was Sully.”

One of my Twitter friends is closely following events in Egypt:

You may have already seen some of this footage showing Wednesday’s charge (by what one of our blog commenters called “irregular cavalry”) on the anti-government protesters in Cairo. But it is, as Alyssa says, “astonishing.”

The Christian Science Monitor has an account of the violence in Cairo. Meanwhile, the site of Egyptian blogger “Sandmonkey” is currently offline, but someone has reposted Sandmonkey’s ominous final post from before his arrest yesterday:

The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay “because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people”. This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can’t. I am heading to Tahrir right now with supplies for the hundreds injured, knowing that today the attacks will intensify, because they can’t allow us to stay there come Friday, which is supposed to be the game changer. We are bringing everybody out, and we will refuse to be anything else than peaceful. If you are in Egypt, I am calling on all of you to head down to Tahrir today and Friday. It is imperative to show them that the battle for the soul of Egypt isn’t over and done with. I am calling you to bring your friends, to bring medical supplies, to go and see what Mubarak’s gurantees look like in real life. Egypt needs you. Be Heroes.

Via Memeorandum.

So says a leading Egyptian businessman:

Shafik Gabr was one of President Obama’s greatest fans eighteen months ago. Today, as Mr. Obama presses for the immediate resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, not so much. “The United States is siding with chaos if they force Mubarak out now,” says Gabr.
Gabr is the Chairman of the Artoc Group for Investment and Development, one of Egypt’s leading businesses. . . .
He is, needless to say, sickened by recent developments. He is also alarmed at the response by the Obama administration. “If the transfer of power happens today, the mobs will rule,” he warns. “It will be similar to the circumstances that brought Hamas to power in Gaza.”

The chaos is described by a BBC reporter in Alexandria:

It’s getting increasingly difficult to work as a foreign journalist here – there’s anger and tension from all sides, not just with the political crisis but also because of the worsening economic situation here. Twice in the last couple of days we have been attacked and driven off by angry locals while trying to film in the streets.
In many areas law and order has completely broken down. One of the country’s biggest shopping malls on the city’s outskirts has been completely ransacked by looters.

President Obama told the National Prayer Breakfast that he’s praying for an end to violence in Egypt. His tardy attempts to stage-manage the situation have already damaged both Egypt and his own influence:

Prior to delivering this clear criticism regarding the insufficiency of Mubarak’s announcement that he would retire only at election time, Obama’s administration had cautiously navigated the crisis in Egypt. But this caution was cast to the wind this week with Washington’s blatant revocation of its endorsement of Mubarak. . . .
“I think that the Obama administration is really struggling to keep up with the events themselves,” Isobel Coleman, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.
“Obama and U.S. foreign policy are between a rock and a hard place: On the one hand, to sort of pull out the rug from under Mubarak doesn’t say much for our long-term relations with this guy; on the other hand, we have already been caught on the wrong side of history. The equivocation out of Washington is interpreted very clearly on the streets of Cairo as siding with the government,” said Coleman.

Notice that the White House spent Monday and Tuesday trying to make Obama the protagonist of the Egyptian drama. After Obama’s speech Tuesday, violence erupted Wednesday in Cairo. Now the White House is trying to keep the president off the stage.

Yesterday, the prominent Egyptian blogger known as “Sandmonkey,” whom PJTV’s Roger Simon says is the son of a top Egyptian general, was reportedly beaten, arrested and released. His car was “destroyed” and his cellphone taken away from him.

Drew M. at AOSHQ has an Egyptian news roundup.

UPDATE: Almost forgot – Roger Simon’s telephone interview with Sandmonkey:

UPDATE II: It’s not just Obama’s foreign policy that is implicated in the Egyptian crisis, but also his economic policy, as Dan Collins explains:

The gathering consensus is that the latest events in Egypt, while inspired in large part by “simmering resentment” against Mubarak’s regime, were in fact ignited by food shortages. Egyptian currency is pegged to the dollar, so as the dollar inflates due to “quantitative easing,” the policy of meeting debt obligations by printing more money, food naturally becomes more expensive on the market. So, those who say that Obama has inspired the unfolding events in the Middle East are right in a sense, though it has had little or nothing to do with his grandiloquent speech to the Egyptians during his Apology Tour.
This morning, the Telegraph tells us that worldwide food prices have hit an all-time high. On the global market, this is in part as well a function of rising energy costs, as crude oil now averages over $100 per barrel. . . .

Read the rest. It is little realized what a disastrously destabilizing political force inflation can be.

Turn on the TV news, and that’s all you hear. Whereas Jehovah smote the ancient Egyptians with a series of plagues, now we’re cursed with a repetitive plague of Egyptians on TV news. Dan Collins reacts poetically:

In Aegyptus did Kubla Bam
A peaceful transition decree . . .

Read the rest, although I prefer Dan’s prose to his faux-Coleridge. Linked late Wednesday by Instapundit, who also links Robert Springborg:

The so-called “pro-government” forces are actually Mubarak’s cleverly orchestrated goon squads . . . The opposition, largely cognizant of the dirty game being played against it, nevertheless has had little choice but to call for protection against the regime’s thugs by the regime itself, i.e., the military. And so Mubarak begins to show us just how clever and experienced he truly is. The game is, thus, more or less over.

If this were a socialist regime cracking down on its opposition — e.g., Chavez in Venezuela — the Left would shrug and say something about breaking eggs to make an omelet. But what the Left accepts when done on behalf of the “proletariat,”  it finds intolerable when done without such a revolutionary pretext. Or, as Lenin put it: Who, whom?

However, whereas doctrinaire Marxism is disavowed by the 21st-century American Left — so vehemently, in many cases, that it is considered de facto proof of “extremism” for any conservative even to speak the word “Marxist” as an accusation — the Left has a more difficult time denying that their foreign policy instincts are fundamentally anti-American. That is to say, whenever any overseas problem arises, the leftist insists that under no circumstance should the United States pursue a given policy merely because it would advance U.S. interests.

Mubarak is a U.S. ally? Mubarak must go, says the Left!

To the Left, American interests are inherently illegitimate, which is why the Left sides with the anti-Mubarak protesters even when those protesters shout “jihad” in the streets of Cairo.

If Islamic jihad is bad for America, the leftist reckons, Islamic jihad can’t be all bad. So, mirroring their Cold War stance, the Left in the 21st century may be described as anti-anti-jihad. (And Pamela Geller is Joe McCarthy!)

The auguries are inauspicious, the omens are . . . well, pretty doggone ominous, and Egypt teeters on the brink:

As dawn broke Thursday, heavy gunfire reverberated in central Cairo as the two sides continued to face off at Tahrir Square — the confrontations portending what awaits when Egypt awakes.

It is likely there will be no good outcome in Egypt. Rather, we will get either bad or worse. What can we do, but laugh?

Code Pink Dupes Saved from
Cairo Chaos by Evil Oil Company

That there’s funny, I don’t care who you are!