That’s what dictators mean when they say they want to leave with “dignity”.
I don’t understand how this will shore up his regime, all it will do is radicalise the protestors and strengthen their resolve. He’s just handed the demonstrators a huge moral victory and moral leverage against their opponents.
Well, when it was ordered, it was probably believed that the counter demonstrators could or would be portrayed as a legitimate response by the silent majority against the student/recently graduated agitators. That it was handled so badly that the government’s hand could be clearly seen behind the violence was just clumsiness. How is Egyptian media reporting the counter-demonstrations? Out here in the rest of the world, we can get Al Jazeera and the BBC, but if the internal news media is government controlled, the facts may be less clear on the ground.
I agree, but if that was the intention, arming them for rioting was a very bad idea. If I was in his shoes, I’d have organized the counter-demonstrators as an expressly peaceful show of support by the ‘silent majority who appreciate the stability, peace and order Mubarek has brought for 30 years’.
The time for violent crack-down is when the army is under your control.
Mubarak needs Kevin Phillips!
But they just unbanned Al Jazeera and brought back the Internet, which spells to me grade A stupidity, because not only will the reports of the pro government brutality spread, but it will also discredit them further. So the opposition, with now nothing to lose, will just hold out until he falls, and he will fall.
The US State Department just put out a call for calm and non-violence by both sides. I guess false equivalency isn’t just for US domestic situations, anymore.
Hosni Mubarak has made the top slot in Time magazine’s Top 10 Autocrats in Trouble.
I don’t know; some of what they’re doing might be very popular around the world. For instance:
(I kid because I read that he’s OK).
They made some strange choices, though. Like Ahmedinijadwhositz…he’s not an autocrat. Khameini is the one in charge. I don’t think you can actually call a minion an autocrat.
I agree on one level, but I don’t know. From listening to BBC, I think the whole idea that the Army is on the side of the People (in a non abstract fashion) may be very premature.
Someone was saying the Army deliberately stepped out of the way of the thugs.
Maybe the BBC commentator was wrong, but I am thinking we may have misread this.
But Ah’m-a-Mad-Genie is so much more annoying than Khameini.
Yeah mate, that looks more like a list of a few guys in trouble plus a bunch American Establishment don’t like much.
Way I read it, the army is standing aside - for now. Doesn’t mean, of necessity, that the army will side with the popular uprising. However, it appears that they will not actively move to crush it, either, at least at this time.
In short, the army appears to be playing its own game. I think that Mubarek cannot hope to meet a popular uprising with violence, with any success, unless the army is truly under his willing control.
To my mind, at least, the army may be simply biding its time - when the rioting gets out of hand (as seems likely), it can then move in, take over, turf out Mubarek and his cronies, impose order, and appear the saviour of the nation in so doing.
If that’s the game-plan, Mubarek’s plan of using his recruits to crush the mob violently is just making the army’s task that much easier. Enough thugs beating up peaceful protesters, women and children, and the nation will be begging for the army to intervene.
I think anything that goes on in those puppet parliaments is just kabuki theatre, a play following a script to a pre-ordained outcome. Abdullah gets to pose as a moderniser but in reality rising Islamic sentiment in the country gets assuaged by the “representative” parliament. And look! You’re not living in a dictaorship after all. Try starting a political party that is pro-Palestinian and see how long it takes before your balls get connected to the Jordanian national grid.
It’s just a show they can show on the TV news every night to pretend that their political system is something like the ones in the west.
I am baffled by the actions of the regime. They had plenty of advance warning during the Tunisian protests that there could be trouble in Egypt but they seemed completely unprepared when protests erupted. If they had organized a massive and peaceful counter-demonstration early, that could have taken the wind out of the protests and also made a positive impression internationally. While Mubarak appears to be very unpopular, I am sure that after 30 years in power there are some people who genuinely support him and many more who could have been bribed or bullied into demonstrating on his behalf. Today’s pro-Mubarak protests however look like a blunder: too little, too late and too violent. You had massive and peaceful anti-Mubarak protests one day and the next day you had a bunch of pro-Mubarak thugs riding horses and camels into a crowd in front of international news cameras.
As mentioned earlier Mubarak looks remarkably young for an 82-year old but I am wondering whether he has just lost it. And unfortunately today’s events will increase the chances of a very messy transition. I hope the Obama administration is using all its leverage to avoid this. At this point I think the best hope is to persuade the Egyptian military that getting rid of Mubarak as quickly as possible is the best path to a stable Egypt.
You think the National Assembly is a “puppet parliament”?
It’s voted into office by the populace and it can and has on multiple occasions.
Please list me some dictators who’ve been overruled by their own parliaments.
What are you talking about and where are you getting your information.
Jordan has over thirty political parties, most of which are very “pro-Palestinian”.
In fact, IIRC, the largest is the Islamic Action Front which is very “pro-Palestinian” and its leaders have not been locked in prison and had their genitals electrocuted.
CNN: Ongoing strife in Cairo between pro- and anti-Mubarak demonstrators, Molotov cocktails thrown, gunshots, three dead, 600 injured. Footage from earlier of pro-Mubaraks riding through the crowd swinging their whips; one was pulled off his horse and beaten up.
If Mubarak could muster his own counterdemonstrators, you have to wonder why he didn’t do it sooner. They’re kind of late to the party. And, one presumes, are in many cases driven by personal fear of what a new government might do to them.
I am getting the impression that the army is sort of like the US: it wants stability and to choose the winning side. They may have negotiated the Mubarak stepping down in September deal and thought that was the least unstable way forward, they may have thought that it would take enough steam out of the protest movement that few would stand up to a bit of “counterdemonstrator” violence and that so long as it wasn’t them or the police doing it they could get away with it. If so it seems they thunk wrong.
The impression I get is that whoever rules they rule with the army’s assent, but that the army’s power rests on its having the respect, even if it be the grudging respect, of the people.
Anyone who is more informed than I is free to either disabuse me of or confirm my impression.
Maybe Obama should tell Mubarak he can leave office peacefully now, or he can live out the rest of his life in a pain amplifier. (We do have pain amplifiers, don’t we? We’re a superpower and shit, we gotta have pain amplifiers. And agony booths. And agonizers.)