Diplomatic and moral support; police supporting services and equipment; realtime sigint and comint. Nonlethal mob-handling gear (disorienting gases, sleep gases -- hell, itching powder). Names and addresses and IP's -- intelligence around the clock. Orbiting flying intel centers (RIVET JOINT etc.), providing realtime intercepts. Background info on who's screwing Mubarak and why. We could have made it infinitely harder for the MB to turn out a flashmob without Mubarak's people knowing where, when, and how many -- and who, if there were a phat MB agitprop puke in charge.
We have tossed "our friends" under the bus before. Remember the Shah or Batista or a host of other tyrants and dictators we have had to deal with.
Batista got screwed by the International Left (formerly known as COMINTERN) working through the New York Times and other KGB exarchates manipulating American opinion. That one wasn't on us -- and we did put together the Bay of Pigs to do something about it. Too bad Jack Kennedy's guevos dropped off.
As for the Shah ..... yeah, you got me there, dragging that selfrighteous little pr*** Jimmy Carter's kill through the living room. Okay, I'll give you that one. But that's the only one I think we could really be guilty of having sold out. Maybe Somoza, but he screwed the pound-pooch when his goons executed that U.S. newsie on-camera. You don't do that to U.S. citizens, I don't care who you are. Even if it's a little liberal puke who insisted on sticking his nose into a hornet's nest.
That was Jimmuh again, by the way.
And the Vietnamese are on Ted Kennedy's conscience as he burns brightly in hell. Congress did that, not President Ford.
As a former diplomat, I know how well moral support works. The reality is that Mubarak had come to the end of the line. He had to go. He was hated and dispised by the people. The one government institution that is still relatively respected is the military. They are fairly free of corruption and they are politically conservative. They will be the obstacle to a MB takeover. That is our current strategy, i.e., support the military and let them help orchestrate the transition.
It would have been a major mistake to support a violent suppression of the opposition. We would just be postponing the inevitable and pave the way for the MB. A peaceful, orderly transition is in our best interests.
We must have relations with all kinds of unsavory characters in this world to protect our strategic national interests. Many of them are dictators and tyrants who usually have oppressed the opposition so there is no clean, peaceful transition to another government when the leave the scene. We must plow the fields with the oxen God gave us.
We are seeing a seminal moment in the Middle East. It remains to be seen what the outcome of the Arab Awakening will be once the dust settles. It may turn out that they are just changing one dictator for another. Whatever happens, we will have just a marginal impact on the result.
Our involvement in Libya came from pressure by the Europeans who have a vested interest in keeping the oil from Libya coming and to stop the mass influx of refugees into Europe. Unfortunately, the Europeans are incapable militarily of doing very much without us. They couldn't deal alone with Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo and now they need our assistance to get rid of Ghadaffi. Obama's indecisiveness has dragged the conflict out, which has given the Europeans the results they didn't want, i.e., an interruption of oil from Libya and tens of thousands of refugees, many of them transiting Italy on their way to France.
I was in Tehran when the Shah left and Khomeini took power. Our involvement (read Carter and Vance) helped Khomeini hijack the Iranian Revolution and we are living with the results to this very day. Iran is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism, the home and purveyor of radical Islamic fundamentalism, and a future possessor of nuclear weapons.