Today, I put up five posts — totalling more than 2,500 words, with four videos, two photos and 52 links — about the crisis in Egypt. I actually forced myself to watch both MSNBC and Al-Jazeera in order to bring you guys complete coverage:
Frankly, I’m all Egypted-out. If President Obama’s foreign-policy genius doesn’t end this mess pretty soon, I’m going start shaking the tip-jar so I can fly off to Hollywood to join Charlie Sheen in rehab. (Or maybe some hookers and cocaine, if Charlie’s in the mood for a relapse by the time I get there.) And speaking of Charlie Sheen, 22-year-old porn star Kacey Jordan describes sex with the CBS star:
“It was OK. . . . It didn’t last very long .. . . It was a three-minute ordeal.”
Some of you ladies may not be impressed, but wait — there’s more!
“After sex we just sat in bed and he held on to me. . . . He promised me he’d get me a Bentley.”
Admit it, ladies: Any sex with that ends with “I’ll buy you a Bentley” is good sex. But there are limits, even for the biggest star on TV, and folks are worried that Charlie’s going to spend all his money that way:
Charlie Sheen’s family is growing increasingly concerned about his well being, and is quietly discussing going to court to gain conservatorship over him, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned.
A source tells us: “Charlie looks awful… he is very, very depressed and feels like the world is going against him. Charlie’s parents are discussing getting a conservatorship of their son. Martin and Janet know that it’s highly unlikely their petition would be granted, but they are trying to do whatever possible to save Charlie’s life.”
UPDATE 6:55 p.m. ET: OK, Obama just gave his speech, saying he had spoken to Hosni Mubarak and that the transition “must begin now.” Obama also spoke of U.S. support for Egypt in “the aftermath of these protests,” indicating that he thinks the protests are now in the past tense.
The president looked somewhat angry. MSNBC analysts seemed confused as to Obama’s meaning. But Chris Matthews is one of those analysts, and he’s always confused about everything.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s announcement Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in September was less than the Obama administration had hoped for . . .
[Officials] said that the administration’s “prevailing view” since last weekend has been that an agreement by Mubarak not to run again was insufficient.
So Obama is unhappy, but he didn’t say explicitly that Mubarak must leave now. Like I said, though, Obama had an angry look on his face.
UPDATE 7:15 p.m. ET: Video via PBS:
“What is clear, what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now. Furthermore, the process must include a broad spectrum of Egyptian voices and opposition parties. It should lead to elections that are free and fair. And it should result in a government that’s not only grounded in democratic principles, but is also responsive to the aspirations of the Egyptian people.”
It is obvious to everyone that our government has no control over events in Egypt; that the sort of explosion now taking place has long been predicted, yet was not foreseen; and that Obama has been sitting back, awaiting developments, before deciding what way to jump. Now that it is clear that Mubarak’s regime cannot survive, he pretends to get out front of the Egyptian popular movement and to tell it, and Mubarak, what to do. That’s the way it looks, anyway.
The money line that’s being picked up by news outlets and touted on Twitter is, “an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.” But what does “now” mean? Didn’t Mubarak already begin the transition process today by agreeing not to run again in the fall? Didn’t he do precisely what Obama asked him to do, in fact? To listen to this, you’d think the White House was somehow displeased by his recalcitrance even though he’s following the advice they’ve given him.
Strangely enough, after Mubarak’s speech, now I’m trending toward optimism for the first time since this mess began:
Yes, the protesters in Cairo and other major cities were dissatisfied with the speech, shouting “Leave! Leave!” and “Not Enough!” but Mubarak wasn’t speaking to them. Rather, he was speaking to the 70 million or so Egyptians who haven’t participated in the protests. And he was appealing to them in explicitly patriotic terms.
“The Hosni Mubarak who speaks to you today is proud of his achievements over the years in serving Egypt and its people,” he said during his speech, “This is my country. This is where I lived, I fought and defended its land, sovereignty and interests, and I will die on its soil.” . . .
UPDATE 4:15 p.m. ET: Just watched Mubarak’s speech, which included expressions of his patriotism and determination to ensure a peaceful transition. The question is whether the protesters will accept this. Associated Press:
President Hosni Mubarak announced Tuesday that he will step down in September when a new Egyptian president is elected. . . .
The throngs who have been protesting day after day say they will accept nothing short of Mubarak’s immediate departure. . . .
UPDATE 4:25 p.m. ET: The live translation of Mubarak’s speech on Fox News was somewhat shaky, but he said he would work with the Egyptian parliament to change the constitution to limit presidential terms. He also vowed that he would stay in Egypt. In response to his speech, protesters in Cairo shouted, “Leave! Leave!”
UPDATE 4:40 p.m. ET: I watched the speech on Fox and then switched to MSNBC to watch their reaction and analysis. Then I clicked onto Al-Jazeera’s English-language live feed online. Honestly, the Al-Jazeera coverage was a lot more informative than either U.S. network, and much less irritating than MSNBC.
Al-Jazeera had a live interview with one of the protesters in Cairo, who made an important point: Mubarak’s vow to stay on through September was unpopular with the protesters, but will likely be received more favorably by the 70 million or so Egyptians who are not participating in the protests.
In other words, Mubarak may have cleverly undermined popular support for the unrest. We shall have to wait and see what happens next.
UPDATE 6:30 p.m. ET: Associated Press video about the Mubarak speech:
The intellectual community of Egypt calls on Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, and Sami Enan, Chief of the Egyptian armed forces, to act as leaders of the opposition. We do not want El-Baradei. He spent too much time abroad, and knows nothing of the daily reality of the Egyptian people. He does not represent us,” declares on Facebook a professor of economics lecturer at the University Amércaine Cairo (AUC).
That’s Dondero’s translation of the French story. While this declaration seems tentative, Dondero notes that the report includes a link to the Muslim Brotherhood, which evidently has vetoed El-Baradei. Dondero also links similar reports from both Reuters and the Kuwaiti Gulf News service.
Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke [Monday] about the situation in Egypt, where an enormous wave of demonstrations has the government in turmoil. The demonstrators are calling for President Hosni Mubarak to step down.
Mullen said he spoke with his Egyptian counterpart, Army Lt. Gen. Sami Enan, by phone and received an update on the situation.
“He assures me that they’re very focused on this, and they will continue to be a stabilizing influence within their country,” Mullen said. “So again, [it’s a] very tough situation. There’s great uncertainty right now, and we certainly are looking for a future which stabilizes, we hope, as fast as possible.”
Kamel El-Helbawy, a prominent overseas cleric from Egypt’s main opposition movement, told Reuters that Enan, who has good ties with Washington, was a liberal who could be seen as suitable by an opposition coalition taking shape on the streets of Egypt.
“He can be the future man of Egypt,” Helbawy said in a telephone interview.
“I think he will be acceptable … because he has enjoyed some good reputation. He is not involved in corruption. . . .”
This seems encouraging: A military leader respected by the Pentagon and not opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Nevertheless, it’s best to remain cautious both as to (a) whether Gen. Enan will in fact emerge as the post-Mubarak leader, and (b) whether in such a scenario, Gen. Enan would be able to restrain the Islamic radicals whose support he would need.
President Obama has told the embattled president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, that he should not run for another term in elections in the fall, effectively withdrawing American support for its closest Arab ally, according to American diplomats in Cairo and Washington.
Al Arabiya television, citing unnamed sources, reported that Mr. Mubarak would announce in a nationwide address Tuesday evening that he would not run for another term.
We’re reporting this stuff very close to real-time, folks.
President Hosni Mubarak will address the nation as hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to call for an end of his rule and international pressure mounts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. U.S. President Barack Obama has conveyed a message to Mr. Mubarak asking him to decline to run in the next election
There are no specific details of the content of Mr. Mubarak’s address, which comes as hundreds of thousands of Egyptians filed into Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Tuesday, forming the largest crowd yet in eight days of demonstrations. Al Arabiya TV, without citing its sources, reported the president will say he will step down at the next election but stay in office until then.
Here’s the way I view this situation: Suppose that about half of the protesters find this to be an acceptable compromise, and the “world community” also supports it. So the massive crowds dwindle, as the more moderate and peaceable protesters go back home. This would leave a bunch of angry radical dead-enders trying to foment unrest when, clearly, the revolutionary moment has passed. At that point, the army and the police could play a bit of hardball, state-run media would portray the radical types as troublemakers, and the radicals would be isolated without widespread support.
That’s one way it could play out, but obviously the situation is volatile and dynamic. We continue to await Mubarak’s promised TV speech. It’s now pushing on 11 p.m. Cairo time, so he’d better hurry up.
So says Donald Douglas at American Power, whose initial optimism about democraticization in Egypt has been tempered by evidence that the anti-Mubarak protesters are influenced byIslamic radicalism, and that a post-Mubarak Egypt is therefore likely to be anti-Israel and anti-American.
“Likely,” I say, and to say that is not to suggest the Egyptian unrest will certainly or immediately turn Cairo into Tehran-on-the-Nile. We must keep in mind that the enormous prestige of Egypt’s military remains a brake on any ambition of the radicals to turn these protests into a sequel of the Iranian revolution.
Nevertheless, the potential for such a development cannot be casually dismissed and, in this regard, Israel is still the canary in the Middle Eastern coal mine. Professor Douglas links to a Jerusalem Post editorial pointing out that Egypt’s military is armed with “the most advanced American-made technologies” and that, should a revolution bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power, “a sometimes reluctant ally . . . would be transformed into a bellicose foe.”
This should cause concern if you happen to notice the Egyptian military’s rather soft attitude toward the protesters:
As I write, it’s now nearly 8 p.m. in Cairo and, last time I looked at the TV, protesters were still in the streets there, in defiance of the official 3 p.m. curfew. (“The BBC’s Jim Muir says that hours after dusk and despite a theoretical [3 p.m.] curfew the square is still full of people.”)
“The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.”
– Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Of course, the situation may yet resolve itself in such a way as to assuage these concerns, but in the meantime we would be wise to avoid euphoria.
The Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government.
“An estimated one million people have gathered in Tahrir Square . . . fulfilling the hopes of opponents of Hosni Mubarak’s regime who wanted to make this the biggest protest since demonstrations began a week ago. Protesters believe this could be the last few hours of Mubarak’s rule, but it remains unclear whether they will march on the presidential palace as planned.”
Not sure how much effect today’s protest will have on the US. The US is demanding reforms from the regime – and quickly. Mubarak can’t deliver that, even if he wanted to, because opposition figures are refusing to talk to the regime until he is gone. So for that reason the US attitude is likely to harden against Mubarak over the coming days.
The Egyptian opposition’s demand for Mubarak’s immediate ouster as a pre-condition of any discussion with the government is a familiar tactic of radicalism.
More than a quarter-million people flooded into the heart of Cairo Tuesday, filling the city’s main square in by far the largest demonstration in a week of unceasing demands for President Hosni Mubarak to leave after nearly 30 years in power.
Protesters streamed into Tahrir, or Liberation, Square, among them people defying a government transportation shutdown to make their way from rural provinces in the Nile Delta. . . .
Organizers said the aim was to intensify marches to get the president out of power by Friday . . .
While demonstrators initially planned to march to the presidential palace – which was surrounded by some 60 tanks – they remained instead at Tahrir Square. Some began to drift away after the curfew began at 3 p.m. local time.
UPDATE II: Whether it’s a million protesters or merely “more than a quarter-million,” the weeklong protests are not helping the Egyptian economy:
Egypt’s economy approached paralysis on Monday as foreign commerce, tourism and banking all but halted . . . .
International companies closed plants and sent workers home or out of the country; food staples went undelivered to stores; and banks remained closed during a week when many Egyptians, who are routinely paid monthly, would receive their paychecks.
A major ratings agency cut the country’s bond rating, while shortages led to rising prices.
Days of mounting unrest in Egypt have turned into a delicate public relations challenge for the White House as a number of new players in the West Wing try to craft messages for President Obama that will resonate well overseas and at home.
The president’s advisers on Monday struggled to maintain a carefully calibrated position regarding the future of Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, in the face of intense pressure from protesters in Egypt and tough questions from the American press corps.
Wonderful: In a situation requiring statesmanship, instead the White House is focused on spin.
The next Egyptian government – or the one after – might well be composed of Islamists. In that case, the peace with Israel will be abrogated and the mob currently in the streets will roar its approval.
UPDATE IV: What is remarkable is how so many bien pensant liberals who relentlessly warn about the dangerous influences of “extremists” in American politics are, despite all evidence of hateful extremism in the Cairo mob, sanguine about the prospects of “democracy” in Egypt.
There seems to be an idea that, while the U.S. is unable to enforce its will via the continuation of the Mubarak regime, nevertheless we can enforce our will by “managing” the Egyptian revolution. Unfortunately, history illustrates the folly of such ambitions, as Drew M. warns at AOSHQ:
Remember, it isn’t always the ones who topple the government who wind up in control after the original government is gone. There’s usually a pretty nasty group waiting in the wings to knock off the happy talking reformers and re-institute tyranny, just with another name.
This goes back to the Cold War. One reason the U.S. so often supported authoritarian anti-Communist “strong man” regimes in the Third World for more than four decades — from the end of WWII to the fall of the Soviet Union — was that such a policy had the virtue of simplicity.
We didn’t have to address the multitudinous grievances of a mob of foreigners. We didn’t have to try to understand their culture or decipher their language or try to make sense of a kaleidoscopic whirl of shifting factions. No, all we had to do was to keep sending guns and money to the anti-communist strong man and let him keep a lid on it, to prevent the outbreak of one of those “brushfire” guerrilla wars that the Soviets were always trying to foment.
That was the realpolitik calculus of our Cold War foreign policy: So long as the U.S.-allied strong man stayed in power, his country was not part of the Soviet-led anti-American communist coalition, and to hell with everything else.
Of course, that policy never had any shortage of critics who accused the U.S. of “imperialism” and a cynical disregard for “human rights,” but as we now look back at the Cold War — approaching the Reagan centennial — isn’t it time to admit that it worked? And if, as we are told, Islamic jihad is an existential menace comparable to Soviet communism, shouldn’t we consider the lessons of the Cold War as applicable to contemporary foreign policy?
You can answer such questions in the negative — many of my libertarian and paleoconservative friends do — but the problem remains of how to prevent a post-Mubarak Egypt (and other Islamic countries that may be swept up in a series of “democratic” revolutions) from becoming part of a radicalized international caliphate with outposts among Muslim immigrant communities here. This potential development is what the ravings of the Cairo street mobs portend, and we ignore these omens at our peril.
Nic Robertson of CNN was interviewing protesters in Alexandria when some of them started telling him the truth. Here’s a picture of the guy (in beard with blue cap) who really lays it out:
The Blaze caught this and, as they explain, the truth-telling starts at about the 1:30 mark, including a woman who says of Hosni Mubarak:
“All the people hate him. He’s supporting Israel! Israel is our enemy. We don’t like him … Israel and America supported him. We hate them all!”
Then, at 2:20, the guy shoves himself in front of the camera and says:
“It is revolution, yes, but who supports Hosni Mubarak? The United States of America, British government, German government, French government . . . The whole people in Egypt, we got to be free. . . . We got to go free Palestinians. We got to destroy Israel. The country that controls [unintelligible] is Israel.”
UPDATE: Bare Naked Islam says, “These are the same kind of people who assassinated Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel.”
Exactly, and the pervasive prevalance of this anti-Israel sentiment on the “Arab street” — their sense that Israel’s continued existence is an offense to every Muslim — is the fundamental root of Islamic terrorism.
This attitude has been relentlessly propagandized in the Arab-speaking world for decades, so that it is the dominant view among Muslims worldwide, from Jakarta to Dearborn. And as the guy in the video indicates, when he starts naming the governments that support Mubarak, this Jew-hatred suffuses Islamic rage against the West.
According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.
Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.
Read the whole thing, as Glick cogently describes the “anti-colonialist paradigm” that influences Western policy for the worse.
LeBron James argues with a ref during the Heat/Thunder game
“…Like I said, I have nothing bad to say about the players that I left and the team. I wish the organization the best. And I wish the fans, more than anything, the best because we had a lot of great years together.”
I want Jon to know that the president has no hard feelings. In fact, he just did an interview with the Tea Party Express saying how integral he has been to the success of the Obama administration.
Also, “Huntsman’s team . . . is heavy on McCain 2008 veterans.” Dave wanted reactions to this announcement, and so I e-mailed him mine:
I can’t get excited about Huntsman. Or I should say, I couldn’t get excited about Huntsman for less than $9,000 a month. For the right price, I could probably even get excited about Tim Pawlenty, but I doubt T-Paw’s in a position to spend that kind of cash, whereas Huntsman’s richer than God. He could afford to pay me $9,000 not to make fun of him. And if anyone has any contacts with Team Huntsman, please pass that info along to them. Otherwise, they can look forward to lots of vicious snark at Huntsman’s expense.
— RSM
“Monetizing the Blogsophere the Old-Fashioned Way”
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On the other hand, I understand that my blog readers aren’t billionaires, so if y’all want to hit the tip jar, it won’t take $9,000 a month for me to keep up a steady diet of Huntsman jokes until we laugh him completely out of the race. And if I ever stop snarking at his expense . . . well, you’ll understand, right?
Charlie Sheen’s family is growing increasingly concerned about his well being, and is quietly discussing going to court to gain conservatorship over him, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned.
