Mubarak to step down
That’s the report, anyway. He’s about to give a speech some time today to announce his resignation, and according to the Fox article I just linked, the Egyptian Higher Council of the Armed Forces will take over.
Other sources, including the NY Times, report it more likely that his VP, Suleiman, will be the temporary successor until elections can occur in September of 2011.
The army has long been the most powerful group in Egypt. All the country’s leaders since independence and the 1952 removal of King Farouk have come from its ranks. Whoever does take power temporarily and officially, the military will have a huge say.
What of the Egyptian constitution? It dictates that Mubarak’s successor would ordinarily be the speaker of the house, not Suleiman the VP, and that elections must occur within 60 days.
If one is concerned about following the constitution, there is no foundation for a military takeover, which would occur “outside the constitutional framework:”
So they will have to define the format under which they are taking power.”
The source [for this story] did not know how long the military would reign nor what mechanism or timetable would be put in place to end the military’s administration of power, but said that “when (the transfer of power from Mubarak) does happen, they will presumably indicate the direction of the country.”
The source drew parallels with the Army coup of 1952, and the removal of King Faroukh, noting that it took six months before the monarchy was dissolved and the modern republic formed.
The source said this marks “a moment of grave magnitude for the national security of Egypt.”
Indeed.
It reminds me of the period when a lobster sheds its hard outer shell, and it takes some weeks for it to grow another. Till then, the highly vulnerable lobster must slink off and hide in order to protect itself. Egypt has no such luxury, and the predators it must fend off originate mostly from within. Will the end result be more liberty, or less?
[ADDENDUM: I will be busy and away from the computer until some time this evening. Till then, use this thread to talk about developments, which I assume will be coming fast and furious.]
The American people (and Israeli people, of course) are going to be greatly indebted to the Egyptian military if it can somehow chart a course that keeps Egypt from going lunatic Islamist.
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
We can expect the left to object to the military’s steps to protect the country against Islamists during and immediately after the election.
Can you crank up an election in two months?
Not to worry anyone, the Director of National Intelligence assures us the Moslem Brotherhood is really the Boy Scouts.
“The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’…is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam,” Clapper said. “They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera…..In other countries, there are also chapters or franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.”
Now I feel so much better.
Can you crank up an election in two months?
of course… if the votes don’t actually matter, then its not really an issue, is it?
Government outside well-established democracies is to large part behind the scene activity, especially in times of political turmoil. Does it makes much difference, if the most influential figure in establishment formally abdicate? I do not think so. What is more important, what steps military council will make to diffuse the situation. Will they clear the streets by violence or just by force, avoiding mass causalities?
They have a constitution.
They are ignoring said constitution. Actually they have ignored it for the last 30 years.
The army is now taking over. The same army we pay to not attack Israel.
They will have elections.
To establish a democracy.
I am with Bob. I feel so much better now.
We all want to see democracy succeed in Egypt, but there is good reason to believe that the current political crisis in that country is geared toward breaking Egypt’s close ties with the United Sates, not toward installing democracy there. From my vantage point, I see this crisis as an updated version of the Kremlin’s highly secret Cold War effort to turn the Islamic world into an enemy of the United States. In my other life as a top figure in the KGB intelligence community, I was involved in that effort, as I have described elsewhere (“Russian Footprints,” National Review Online, August 24, 2006[1]). Ion Mihai Pacepa / http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/usegypt_relations_under_attack_1.html
It is noteworthy that the current Middle East rebellion is taking place only in Islamic countries that are pro-American and that the people demanding democracy there are burning the flag of the country symbolizing democracy for most of the world — the United States.
these “mass uprisings” were so secretly planned that the entire U.S. intelligence community was taken completely by surprise
We do, however, still have the weapons cases captured from Hezb’allah by the Israelis, which are clearly marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.” That was another goof, and such markings are no longer visible in Hezb’allah’s arsenal. Nevertheless, it is impossible for Moscow to conceal the fact that Hezb’allah is carrying out its war against U.S. allies in the Middle East with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles, and Kornet antitank rockets.
not impossible..
the people here have been well trained NOT to include actual history related to the soviet union, or its later conception.
no movies as to the horrors. no documentaries. no spy movies with realistic info (now that jame bond no longer uses real things like smersh, etc)
a complete no go no write, no perform, no talk zone
we have a blackout on one country, and even self censor any related history, and we dont notice we do it.
Equally significant are the current efforts made by the ANSWER to organize Cairo-style anti-Mubarak demonstrations in the U.S.
why would this be so?
As I no longer live in the bear’s lair, I do not have hard proof to document that the Kremlin has a hand in the current events in Egypt. I do know, however, that few things were more important for the leaders of the KGB community when I was one of them than kicking the United States out of the Middle East and helping Moscow to take control of the Arab oil reserves. The Kremlin wanted so desperately to achieve these goals that it even created an anti-American Palestinian leader out of whole cloth.
The KGB community went to great lengths to transform an Egyptian-born Marxist, Mohammed Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, nom de guerre Abu Ammar, into a Palestinian-born Yasser Arafat. It took us years to credibly falsify his birth certificate and other IDs, to build him a new past, and to train him at the KGB Balashikha special-operations training school east of Moscow [6]. It took us more years and the help of former Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, another Soviet puppet [7], to catapult the newly-created Arafat into his position as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (also created and financed by the KGB). It is no wonder that in 1970, when Nasser died, the whole leadership of the Soviet bloc attended his funeral. During those early years, Egypt was literally being run by Soviet advisers — the KGB and the Red Army alone had some 18,000 advisers assigned there.
read the rest at the link
there are a few of these guys who were involved in planning who defected… we pay them no heed…
why?
beacuse our self created musings to fill in the blanks makes us beleive that they have no effect, dont exist, the game stopped, nothing to fear, and on it goes.
but to actually contemplate the actual reality? too much dissonance… not because its not real or such, but because we are so used to ignoring reality we can no longer tolerate it.
on July 2007, they predicted a new Cold War against the West. “War has started,” the Kremlin announced on August 8, 2008, minutes after Russian tanks crossed into the pro-Western Georgia
anyone interested in his article in national review can go here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/218533/russian-footprints/ion-mihai-pacepa
teaser:
By the end of the 1960s, the KGB was deeply involved in mass terrorism against Jews, carried out by various Palestinian client organizations.
Here are some terrorist actions for which the KGB took credit while I was still in Romania:
November 1969, armed attack on the El Al office in Athens, leaving 1 dead and 14 wounded;
May 30, 1972, Ben Gurion Airport attack, leaving 22 dead and 76 wounded;
December 1974, Tel Aviv movie theater bomb, leaving 2 dead and 66 wounded;
March 1975, attack on a Tel Aviv hotel, leaving 25 dead and 6 wounded;
May 1975, Jerusalem bomb, leaving 1 dead and 3 wounded;
July 4, 1975, bomb in Zion Square, Jerusalem, leaving 15 dead and 62 wounded;
April 1978, Brussels airport attack, leaving 12 wounded;
May 1978, attack on an El Al plane in Paris, leaving 12 wounded.
we forget that the industrialists of the US like ford were also antisemetic, and were also in support of all this. after all where did the CFR and all that come from?
we also forget that after wwii was over, the US did NOT destroy the death camps used by hitler.
no…
we signed them over to our friend Stalin who continued to put Jews and others into them for decades later.
even here in the US all the left stuff against white guys knows taht by doing so, you also attack the subset inside that set, but avoid the negative attention. by doing this they made the situation ambiguous. you cant say that they are going after the same old same old, despite they are going after the old same old same old AND their guardians
In 1971, the KGB launched operation Tayfun (Russian for “typhoon”), aimed at destabilizing Western Europe.
The Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction (RAF), and other KGB-sponsored Marxist organizations unleashed a wave of anti-American terrorism that shook Western Europe.
we forget the terrorist organization Rote Zora, which was the terrorist roots of modern feminism! yes, they started as terrorists, which is why they have this warm spot for it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_Zora
note that they make the SAME lie that Obamas mentor bomber also claims
Richard Welsh, the CIA station chief in Athens, was shot to death in Greece on December 23, 1975
General Alexander Haig, commander of NATO in Brussels was injured in a bomb attack that damaged his armored Mercedes beyond repair in June 1979.
General Frederick J. Kroesen, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, barely survived a rocket attack in September 1981.
on and on.. if you expand beyond pacepa, you will then find all kinds of stuff.
like the communist jim jones who killed a US elected official. we forget that his cult was not christian, but communist…
we forgot it all
In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.
and how far did they get?
inside the UK (and the US too)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8150247/Muslim-pupils-learn-to-cut-off-hands-of-thieves.html
Up to 5,000 pupils attending weekend schools across Britain are being exposed to textbooks claiming that some Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and that some offences could be punished with stoning. One book for six year-olds warns that those who do not believe in Islam will be condemned to “hellfire” in death.
Another text for 15 year-olds teaches that thieves who break Sharia law should have their hands cut off for a first offence and their feet amputated for a subsequent crime. Teenagers are presented with diagrams showing where the cuts should be made.
and remember, under multiculturalism, you cant block their cultural practices!!!! they get a ticket to practice… (i guess the labour side feels bad about stopping sutti).
DEFIANT: DOES NOT STEP DOWN; TELLS WORLD TO BACK OFF
Guess not. Mubarak “ain’t goin’ nowhere!”
And, frankly, I think I can understand why. First, I don’t think he wouldn’t have made his statement to the Egyptian people if he did not have the backing of the military.
I also think Mubarak know a lot more than we do and is intimately familiar with the phrase “Beware of what you wish for!” That phrase has been beating a steady beat in my brain for awhile now and just grows louder every time I watch tape of the uprising and demonstrations.
I’ve commented about this numerous times before in political discussions of popular uprisings. History tells us this is VERY dangerous. When the Germans supported Hitler in his rise to power, they did so because they were unhappy with conditions and believed they were getting something better. Ditto in Cuba when people were delirously happy that there was a young man named Castro who was going to rid their island country of Batista. That turned out well, didn’t it? (sarcastic) In fact, it resulted in one of the longest controlling dictatorships in history. Do I need to remind all of Chavez in Venezuela? And last, but probably most significant, when the people of Iran rose up against the Shah thinking they would be in a much better position under the benificent leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, they sure aren’t feeling the love there.
What troubles me the most about this (aside from Obama’s completely screwing up this situation — he’s nothing if consistently inept with foreign policy – inept being a charitable description) is that this uprising began almost overnight. To me this indicates that someone/group fomented this and it is not a true grass roots effort. Just because Mubarak is a dictator, he’s held pretty firm control, and the people have not before rebelled against his alliance with the US — having ANY relationship with US, as in many other Arab countries. The one state that comes to mind as the American-haters in chief is Iran, and the group which would love to destroy us in one fell swoop is the Muslim Brotherhood — which just happens to be the most organized opposition group in Egypt. Isn’t that interesting? Despite the “wisdom” of our Director of National Intelligence (ironic title, isn’t it with the word “intelligence?”), James Clapper, who today declared that the Muslim Brotherhood is ““a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam, it just ain’t so. And if this Administration is relying on him for leadership in intelligence, Egypt is in really big trouble….and we and Israel are in for even more trouble — big, big, BIG trouble.
Ahhh… Had not yet fully read Artfldr’s comment above, but good to see that I’m not only one thinking along these lines.
Hope the Egyptian people are sharp enough to recoil from would-be leadership with a not-so-hidden agenda — say folks like the….Muslim Brotherhood.
If the situation becomes a get-rid-of-Mubarak-at-any-cost — which I fear it just might, and, imminently — the one group ready, willing, and able, if not eager, to step in, no doubt will be the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egyptians: Beware of what you wish for!!!!!!!
Former Air force pilot, one of the best in Egypt, surely is not a coward. He has nothing to lose, with his terminal cancer. So he will do everything to have upper hand and will not step down because of hysterics of his people, whom he despise, and rightly so.
Mubarak is 83 years old. IIRC, life tables would show that a man of 83 will not be living many more years. Mubarak made a mistake when he groomed his son to be successor. Neither the army nor the people wanted Pharoah to anoint his son as successor.
Even if Mubarak stays, there will be an issue of succession.
For commentary on the benign origins of the Muslim Brotherhood, Googlebanna nazi.
he cant step down if there is no place to go
since no one invited him, he don’t want to end up like Nicholas, on February, with what happened later