The Mubarak-Obama Plan Blossoms

From Al Jazeera:

7:50pm Reports of gunshots fired by army into the air near the cordon they set up inside the barricades, near Egyptian museum.

Protesters clashed with army as they try to confine space available to protesters with barbed wire.

The plan to strangle the people's revolt is now well underway. The "concessions" are the lipstick on a pig. And it is already starting to be smudged off.

This bit gives you an idea of just how far you can trust the Obama selected successor to Mubarak:

9:50pm According to Reuters leaked diplomatic cables suggest Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian vice president, has long sought to demonize the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in his contacts with skeptical US officials.

The reality is that the situation in Egypt is ugly. But the ugliness is morphing. A few days ago it was savage fighting:



Now it has become a slow grinding process of "negotiations" and "gestures" while exhaustion destroys the people's movement. I can see the "professional" hand of the Obama's administration behind the scene guiding the thugs of Mubarak's regime telling them to tone down the killings and instead smother the revolt with words and gestures, string things out, people will need to get back to the daily struggle for existence, and the few hours of the impossible dream will be forgotten and the regime of repression will again smother any democratic impulse.

I also see that the middle class youth will turn bitter and apathetic and emigrate of simply give up on life. Instead, the fanatics of the Muslim Brotherhood are slowly "taking charge" and the battle lines will move from a dream of universal democracy to a fight between repression and an Islamic revolution. This is the fight that the Obama administration wants. This is the ground on which it can win by justifying brutal dictatorship as necessary for "stability and security". But I believe they are only buying a few years of "stability and security". The Mubarak-Obama strategy will win for 5 or 10 years, but the repression will be broken. But the next time it won't be dewy-eyed idealist young people, it will be bitter revolutionaries who know that simple banners in the street won't win. They will come back with guns and plots and they will crush the remnants of Mubarak dictatorship with an Islamic dictatorship. This is the true legacy of Obama in Egypt.