EXCERPT:
It will be a long, winding, treacherous and perhaps bloody road before the popular Egyptian revolution even dreams of approaching the post-Suharto Indonesian model (the largest, most plural democracy in a Muslim-majority country) or the current Turkish model (also sanctioned at the ballot box).
As predicted (Rage, rage against the counter-revolution - Asia Times Online, February 1) the counter-revolution is on, and brought by the usual suspects; the Egyptian army; Mubarakism's comprador elites; and the triad of Washington, Tel Aviv and European capitals.
After more than two weeks of protests on the streets of Egypt against President Hosni Mubarak, this is what the White House's "orderly transition" is all about - with Washington still playing all sides even as the Egyptian street smashed the mirror and defied for good the "stability"/terror imposed on it by the dark side.
The counter-revolution goes way beyond comments by Frank Wisner, a United States Central Intelligence Agency/Wall Street asset who is US President Barack Obama's secret agent to Cairo
and a personal friend of the Egyptian president, on the desirability of Mubarak stay and supervise the transition.
It comes across almost casually as Robert Springborg, professor of national security affairs at the US Naval Postgraduate School, tells Reuters, "The military will engineer a succession. The West - the US and the EU [European Union] - are working to that end. We are working closely with the military ... to ensure a continuation of a dominant role of the military in the society, the polity and the economy." Translation; erase the people to ensure "stability".
The tent city in Tahrir Square in the capital, Cairo, is very much aware that decades of Egypt as a US client-state plus endless International Monetary Fund/World Bank manipulations created the perfect economic storm that was a key cause of the revolution. That's also a key cause for the street to want - according to one of its top slogans - the whole regime brought down. Connecting the dots, the street also knows that a truly representative, sovereign Egyptian government cripples the entire US-controlled Middle East power arrangement.
Historically, what Washington always really feared is Arab nationalism, not crackpot self-made jihadis. Arab nationalism is intrinsically, viscerally, opposed to the 1979 Camp David peace accords, which have neutralized Egypt and left Israel with a free iron hand to proceed with its slow strangulation of Palestine; for As'ad Abu Khalil of the Angry Arab website, every Middle East expert who worked on the accords "helped construct a monstrous dictatorship in Egypt".
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