White House, Egypt Discusses Plan for Mubarak’s Exit
As I suspected, this report was accurate.
“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.)