Obama to Egyptian Army: Remove Mubarak now, start transition

Debka File ^ | 2 February, 2011

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Wednesday, Feb. 2, President Barack Obama delivered an ultimatum to Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman and the army and security chiefs: Mubarak must be removed in the coming hours or else US aid to Egypt will be cut off, debkafile's Washington sources exclusively report. Pressure on the Egyptian armed forces to oust the president forthwith was further applied by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who called Vice President Omar Suleiman, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates who called Egyptian defense minister Mohamed Tantawi, and US armed forces chief Adm. Mike Mullen in a telephone call to the Egyptian chief of staff Gen. Sami Enan.,

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and UK Prime Minister David Cameron were recruited earlier to lean hard on Egyptian army chiefs to bring Mubarak's presidency to an end in the coming hours.

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More conformation on FR from the NYSlimes:

White House, Egypt Discusses Plan for Mubarak’s Exit

As I suspected, this report was accurate.

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Latest from Front Page Magazine on FR

“Not September. Now means now,” said Gibbs. “The conversation the president had with President Mubarak was direct…[and]…the message that the president delivered to President Mubarak was that the time for change had come.”

Also on Wednesday, Obama asked American military commanders, as well as the leaders of France, England and Germany, “to lean hard on Egyptian army chiefs to bring Mubarak’s presidency to an end in the coming hours.” Again, the misreading of the Egyptian political scene’s inner workings is astonishing, considering the important place this state occupies in the Arab world and as America’s and Israel’s most important Arab ally. Obama’s advisors seemed to have discounted the fact that Mubarak is a general himself with a distinguished war record. And although Mubarak has donned civilian clothes, he is still regarded, and regards himself, as a member of the officer corps. Besides, his fellow officers probably also feared that the Egyptian leader’s rapid removal would only lead to chaos, as Mubarak himself had already stated. (The benefit this scenario would have given to the Islamist Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was another factor the administration seemed to ignore.)