Hope you find some. I would love to know why.
Great. Now where will they put all the Egyptian pottery?
The whole cabinet?
Where is Murbrak?
More Gao'uld treachery!
Ping me when the China Cabinet resigns!
I wonder if he planned this?
The $19.95 window fan died, so they up and quit.
fyi
So you're saying that they WALKED like Egyptians?
The Egyptian Cabinet have been replaced with the Stonecutter's Secret Society!
Tut, tut.
Leni
Which World Leader want to step into control of a chunk of Israel? The last volunteer seems to be getting a call to discuss it with God kinda personal like.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has flown to Germany for surgery for a slipped disk. He has transferred power to Prime Minister Atef Obeid during his absence. The surgery will take place on Monday. There are two important points here. First, Mubarak has not transferred power when he left the country in the past -- and surgery for a slipped disk would not cause him to change his behavior. Second, Egypt's better hospitals can certainly handle a slipped disk, or a foreign specialist could be flown in if needed. We do not believe this surgery is about a slipped disk, and we do not believe that the transfer of power to Obeid is a casual move. As we noted last week, it is time to start thinking about post-Mubarak Egypt.
For the moment, however, the focus of public attention in the Middle East is beheadings. With today's videotape of a kidnapped Korean contractor begging for his life, we are in yet another cycle that has, in the past, ended in beheadings. Since this is now an international process, involving Saudi Arabia and Iraq (assuming we exclude Daniel Pearl's execution in Pakistan from this list), we are clearly dealing with a strategy, not an incident.
The question is what the strategy is intended to achieve. Al Qaeda has three audiences: the Islamic world, non-Islamic U.S. allies and the United States. In the United States, as al Qaeda surely knows, the impact of the beheadings will not help accelerate antiwar sentiment. It will reinforce the feeling that al Qaeda must be resisted at all costs, and will tend to work against those who had come to see the United States as the prime mover in the atrocity business.
It is also not working particularly well among U.S. allies. The Spanish reaction to the Madrid bombings is, looking backward, more a fluke than a trend. After some uneasiness in the coalition ranks -- and the defection of some Latin American countries -- the alliance in Iraq steadied and held. Strategic acts equal to or greater than Madrid might have a different effect, but beheadings are not going to break the alliance. And again, we suspect al Qaeda and its allies know this.
That leaves the third audience, the Islamic world. Al Qaeda has learned that intermittent operations tend to undermine its credibility in the Islamic world. During a period of relative quiescence, doubts grow about its continued viability. This hurt al Qaeda badly between the end of the Afghan campaign and the beginning of the Iraq campaign, and was particularly troublesome during January and February 2004. The intermittent actions al Qaeda prefers simply do not maintain the psychological cadence it is looking for.
Al Qaeda lacks large numbers of highly skilled, language-capable operatives able to carry out operations in the United States and Europe. These have to be husbanded carefully. On the other hand, al Qaeda does have a large number of minimally trained operatives in Islamic countries. They cannot go after hardened targets, but they can be very effective against soft targets -- and they are expendable. The question has been how to use these operatives effectively. Suicide bombings and random incidents have ceased to be riveting events. A beheading catches the attention like few other things can.
Beheadings are a demonstration of will and ongoing capability. They are played and replayed in both the regional and global media. Even if it doesn't scare anyone away, a beheading still serves to drive al Qaeda and its goals into the global and regional mind. It is difficult to take beheadings in stride and ignore them. This is not al Qaeda's core strategy -- that continues to be strategic attacks. However, it is a powerful tool for shaping public awareness. Even if it drives non-Muslims -- and many Muslims as well -- away form al Qaeda, it rivets the target audience and gives al Qaeda a single message that it can deliver: They are still very much there.
With reason. Hope the military doesn't take over, but if Mubarak and his cabinet is leaving the stage as rumored, what's left? I imagine Israel is following events very closely.