Sunday, January 30, 2011

".. I think Mubarak has a week at most left in office.."

This is an odd group if you ask me. I guess panic brings people together in such ways.
"...“I think Mubarak has a week at most left in office,” Andrew Albertson, formerly with the Project on Middle East Democracy and the working group, told POLITICO Saturday. “He’s ultimately done. Either he flees fast, or there’s a transition to [newly appointed Vice President Omar] Suleiman, or the protests continue. Meanwhile, people are becoming incredibly angry with the U.S.," which is perceived, Albertson said, to be propping up Mubarak.  
“Given the situation we are now finding ourselves in, President Obama needs to say, 'Hosni Mubarak should go,'” Albertson continued. “That's what's needed to save the [U.S.] relationship with the Egyptian people.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, not a member of the working group, also argued Saturday that Obama would soon have to tell Mubarak to go, ideally after a transition plan has been worked out.
"At this point, facing by far the biggest foreign policy crisis of his presidency, Obama cannot afford to backtrack," Indyk, vice president for foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote on MSNBC.com Saturday. "He will soon have to decide whether to tell Mubarak that the United States no longer supports him and that it's time for him to go." 
Washington Egypt hands suggested there was tension inside the Obama administration -- which met for three hours Saturday on the Egypt crisis -- between those advocating the U.S. maintain a “cautious” policy of hedging its bets for now that Mubarak might stay on, and those who see that his departure is inevitable. They also said that some members of the administration were influenced by Israel’s concern at losing a reliable peace partner.
There’s "no fight,” one U.S. official involved in the discussions said Saturday. But "there’s a lot at stake.” ..."

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