January 30, 2011
Things Fall Apart...
The situation in Cairo is very worrisome.
While some seem very happy that there is a populist revolt going on, I do not share their optimism.
Mubarak is indeed brutal and oppresses people. Like the Shah of Iran, many of the people he is oppressing desperately need to be oppressed for the good of humanity. Like the Shah, if Mubarak falls, he is likely to be replaced by a pretty radical anti-US anti-Israel group of Islamists, in this case tied to the Muslim brotherhood.
There is a lot of criticizing of the president on his handling of this situation, but we don't know what intel he is privy to, what conversations he's had or what is being done behind the scenes. What we CAN be sure of is that the US doesn't have much sway over the situation right now and any pressure we are perceived as applying will likely make the situation worse. I don't envy the President tonight. He may indeed be out of his depth, he may indeed have a blinkered worldview, but he is now faced with a situation that has the potential to become very bad indeed, and there is very little he can do.
This has the potential to be a very big international crisis, if Mubarak falls the odds are things in the middle east will go very far south with alarming rapidity.
Egypt controls the Suez canal (not, as some have suggested, the Panama Canal) and having a Sunni version of the Iranian mullocracy control that waterway has very real implications for world trade.
Having Egypt, which shares a boarder with Israel go all Jihadi is a very bad thing.
The news services are following this pretty well but there were a couple of opinion pieces I thought merited linkage.
The mustache of justice has thoughts here.
Cdr. Salamander has a long post here.
Rep. Thaddeus McCotter has a piece in Human events (via Cubachi, who has additional video)
Stratfor has extensive analysis here.
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While some seem very happy that there is a populist revolt going on, I do not share their optimism.
Mubarak is indeed brutal and oppresses people. Like the Shah of Iran, many of the people he is oppressing desperately need to be oppressed for the good of humanity. Like the Shah, if Mubarak falls, he is likely to be replaced by a pretty radical anti-US anti-Israel group of Islamists, in this case tied to the Muslim brotherhood.
There is a lot of criticizing of the president on his handling of this situation, but we don't know what intel he is privy to, what conversations he's had or what is being done behind the scenes. What we CAN be sure of is that the US doesn't have much sway over the situation right now and any pressure we are perceived as applying will likely make the situation worse. I don't envy the President tonight. He may indeed be out of his depth, he may indeed have a blinkered worldview, but he is now faced with a situation that has the potential to become very bad indeed, and there is very little he can do.
This has the potential to be a very big international crisis, if Mubarak falls the odds are things in the middle east will go very far south with alarming rapidity.
Egypt controls the Suez canal (not, as some have suggested, the Panama Canal) and having a Sunni version of the Iranian mullocracy control that waterway has very real implications for world trade.
Having Egypt, which shares a boarder with Israel go all Jihadi is a very bad thing.
The news services are following this pretty well but there were a couple of opinion pieces I thought merited linkage.
The mustache of justice has thoughts here.
Cdr. Salamander has a long post here.
Rep. Thaddeus McCotter has a piece in Human events (via Cubachi, who has additional video)
Stratfor has extensive analysis here.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
03:50 AM
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Eh, control of the Suez Canal would have been a bigger loss a few years ago, before the pirates in the Gulf of Aden made the Canal route a somewhat dangerous passage. What percentage of Canal traffic is already taking the long route around the Cape?
Posted by: Mitch H. at Mon Jan 31 15:10:23 2011 (jwKxK)
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