Egypt Has Selected an Interim Leader

He is Mohamed ElBaradei. All of the major parties in Egypt have agreed to let his lead a unity government.

So who opposes him? Well there are two parties. One is the intransigent Mubarak. The other is the brain dead, heel dragging, support the dictator until the people hate you American government. In other words, Obama.

So, yet again, Obama has allowed a historic opportunity to slip through his fingers. Tragic. I remember reading stories of Obama studying his Lincoln biographies because he felt he was called to be a great leader of America, a leader at a turning point leader like Lincoln. Well, Obama is no Lincoln. Lincoln had a plan. And Lincoln was willing to act swiftly and decisively including firing a highly popular general -- McClellan -- who failed to win the war. Obama dithers. Obama hides in the back room talking to his "advisors" while history bypasses him.

Here is a NY Times article that points out that the Egyptian have decided their future. It now looks like it will be bloodshed in the street, enough blood flowing until significant army units defect and the tide turns. It will be bloody but it didn't have to be. Obama will have blood on his hands.

Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition banded together Sunday around a prominent government critic to negotiate for forces seeking the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, as the army struggled to hold a capital seized by fears of chaos and buoyed by euphoria that three decades of Mr. Mubarak’s rule may be coming to an end.

The announcement that the critic, Mohamed ElBaradei, would represent a loosely unified opposition reconfigured the struggle between Mr. Mubarak’s government and a six-day-old uprising bent on driving him and his party from power.

Though lacking deep support on his own, Dr. ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and diplomat, could serve as a consensus figure for a movement that has struggled to articulate a program for a potential transition. It suggested, too, that the opposition was aware of the uprising’s image abroad, putting forth a candidate who might be more acceptable to the West than beloved in Egypt.

In scenes as tumultuous as any since the uprising began, Dr. ElBaradei defied a government curfew and joined thousands of protesters in Liberation Square, a downtown landmark that has become the epicenter of the uprising and a platform, writ small, for the frustrations, ambitions and resurgent pride of a generation claiming the country’s mantle.

...

Dr. ElBaradei also criticized the Obama administration, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered the message via Sunday news programs in Washington that Mr. Mubarak should create an “orderly transition” to a more politically open Egypt, while she refrained from calling on him to resign. That approach, Dr. ElBaradei said, was “a failed policy” eroding American credibility.

“It’s better for President Obama not to appear that he is the last one to say to President Mubarak, it’s time for you to go,” Dr. ElBaradei said.

...

In a collapse of authority, the police withdrew from major cities on Saturday, giving free rein to gangs that stole and burned cars, looted shops and ransacked a fashionable mall, where dismembered mannequins for conservative Islamic dress were strewn over broken glass and puddles of water. Thousands of inmates poured out of four prisons, including the country’s most notorious, Abu Zaabal and Wadi Natroun. Checkpoints run by the military and neighborhood groups, sometimes spaced just a block apart, proliferated across Cairo and other cities.

Many have darkly suggested that the government was behind the collapse of authority as a way to justify a crackdown or discredit protesters’ calls for change.

“Egypt challenges anarchy,” a government-owned newspaper declared Sunday.

“A Conspiracy by Security to Support the Scenario of Chaos,” replied an independent newspaper in a headline that shared space at a downtown kiosk.

I am thoroughly disenchanted with Obama. He is a sold-out politician, a lackey for the big corporate interests. He has no vision. He is not a leader. He dithers. He has not courage. He is smart but only in a kind of rousing speech giver way. Beyond giving good speeches, he hasn't snow any real brilliance. He is an empty suit.

• Obama has continued the Bush policy of torture.


• Obama continues to do warrantless wiretaps of all Americans.


• Obama chose to widen the unwinnable war in Afghanistan by doing a "Bush" surge that has failed.


• Obama "gave" Americans a health care bill but it is a windfall for insurance companies and will do nothing to reduce the 20% extra cost that Americans pay because the US system is deeply burdened by insurance companies that spend all their energies trying to refuse coverage to those with a policy.


• He kept in place the same financial "team" that caused the Great Recession by their unwillingness to regulate. His team has had no problem throwing trillions of dollars at Wall Street banks but has given almost nothing to help either Main Street or the honest homeowners who are being foreclosed either by trickery from their banks or because they had a personal tragedy that has temporarily cut their income so they can't afford their mortgage.


• He lied to the American people with his political slogan "change you can believe in". He is no change. He is another centrist politician but one who dressed himself up as a left-of-centre people's candidate when in fact he was a corporate sell-out.

This policy disaster in Egypt is the last straw. I give up on Obama. He is useless.