Who's to cut off the head of the snake? Crisis in Egypt by Pepe Escobar

[Jefferson23]

February 3, 2011

It does sound like the pastiche of a short story by the late, great Egyptian winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz. United States President Barack Obama sends a "secret" emissary to tell President Hosni Mubarak to abstain from seeking a sixth term in the next elections - on the same day that almost 2 million people yell in the streets for him to just go. The president of Egypt then duly hits state television to announce to the Egyptian people what the US president told him to do.

Predictably, the street exploded in anger. Al-Jazeera (yes, the revolution will be televised ...) just ran a split screen, no
comments, with the sound of the street in Cairo and Alexandria for all the world to hear. "Leave." "Leave, have some dignity." "Get out." So now it's official; it's the dignity, pride and respect - values extremely prized in Arab culture - of Mubarak, against the dignity, pride and respect of 80 million Egyptians.

Call it the White House coup in favor of the Washington catchword of the moment - "orderly transition". As in Obama going on global TV live after Mubarak to spell out the message carried by his messenger, "What is clear, as I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, it is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now." ;

Well, as Mubarak himself preferred to spin it, it's "chaos" (protesters "manipulated by political forces") against "stability" (himself and his regime). Something got lost in translation. Who's going to explain to him the meaning of "now"?

The secret agent:
Obama's "messenger" in the latest Mubarak pantomime was Frank Wisner, a former diplomat and former AIG executive very close to the Mubarak system oligarchy, and whose brother Graham has represented their extensive business interests. Wisner has lately been a de facto lobbyist for the Mubarak regime among Middle East experts in Washington - unlike, for instance, the bipartisan Egypt Working Group led by former National Security Council member Elliott Abrams and Michele Dunne from the Carnegie Endowment. Without a mere hint of irony, the US State Department had announced that Wisner would press the Mubarak system to "embrace broad economic and political changes" - the same ones never embraced over the past three decades.

in full: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MB03Ak02.html

[Raster]

1. " The secret agent: Obama's "messenger" in the latest Mubarak pantomime was Frank Wisner, a former..

...diplomat and former AIG executive very close to the Mubarak system oligarchy, and whose brother Graham has represented their extensive business interests."