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wcg for the link: The BBC reports here that Egypt's embattled President, Hosni Mubarak, has finally done what he has been saying all through his nation's recent tumult that he absolutely, positively would not do: resign immediately rather than waiting out the final months of his current term. He has apparently handed over the reins of power he has held for three decades to his country's military, who presumably will install some sort of acting President until the elections scheduled for September.
History (including our own in the USA) has shown us that tyrants almost never give up their power willingly. This is as great a shocker for me as Mikhail Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union was in the 1980s, something I had never thought I'd live to see happen. As late as last night Cairo time, Mubarak (whose surname, ironically enough, means "blessed" in Arabic) was on state-run TV insisting he would not give in to the key demand of millions protesting in the streets outside the studio and all over Egypt for over three weeks now.
Why did the man who has led the Mideast's most powerful nation (by all accounts, with an iron fist) since Anwar Sadat was assassinated cave at last? Only he and perhaps a tiny handful of others besides God know, but one of several things has obviously happened: a) he was forced to step down by the army or some other interested party; b) he was offered something he wanted badly in exchange for leaving; or c) he was told bluntly that if he didn't quit and quit now, Egypt would burn and thousands, if not millions, of his people would be killed or injured as protests escalated into violent revolution...all because of his own mule-headed stubbornness.
We may never know, or not for years at any rate. Personally, I choose to give Mr. Mubarak the benefit of the doubt (though his actions over the last 30 years tend to indicate he doesn't deserve it) and finally did what any truly great leader always and inevitably does: put the best interests of his nation and its people ahead of his own desire to hang onto power.
But even with Mubarak gone, only the head of the snake has been removed; the government he built is reportedly rife with corruption at all levels. If the people and/or the army can get rid of all or at least most of Mubarak's remaining apparatchiks and get a new constitution enacted that gives the Egyptian people back the freedoms they lost under the old régime, then we truly will, as our own President remarked this week, be seeing history in the making. If you believe, for the sake of the innocents who will suffer if the transition is not kept peaceable, pray that this daunting task is accomplished, and with dispatch.
wcg for the link: The BBC reports here that Egypt's embattled President, Hosni Mubarak, has finally done what he has been saying all through his nation's recent tumult that he absolutely, positively would not do: resign immediately rather than waiting out the final months of his current term. He has apparently handed over the reins of power he has held for three decades to his country's military, who presumably will install some sort of acting President until the elections scheduled for September.History (including our own in the USA) has shown us that tyrants almost never give up their power willingly. This is as great a shocker for me as Mikhail Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union was in the 1980s, something I had never thought I'd live to see happen. As late as last night Cairo time, Mubarak (whose surname, ironically enough, means "blessed" in Arabic) was on state-run TV insisting he would not give in to the key demand of millions protesting in the streets outside the studio and all over Egypt for over three weeks now.
Why did the man who has led the Mideast's most powerful nation (by all accounts, with an iron fist) since Anwar Sadat was assassinated cave at last? Only he and perhaps a tiny handful of others besides God know, but one of several things has obviously happened: a) he was forced to step down by the army or some other interested party; b) he was offered something he wanted badly in exchange for leaving; or c) he was told bluntly that if he didn't quit and quit now, Egypt would burn and thousands, if not millions, of his people would be killed or injured as protests escalated into violent revolution...all because of his own mule-headed stubbornness.
We may never know, or not for years at any rate. Personally, I choose to give Mr. Mubarak the benefit of the doubt (though his actions over the last 30 years tend to indicate he doesn't deserve it) and finally did what any truly great leader always and inevitably does: put the best interests of his nation and its people ahead of his own desire to hang onto power.
But even with Mubarak gone, only the head of the snake has been removed; the government he built is reportedly rife with corruption at all levels. If the people and/or the army can get rid of all or at least most of Mubarak's remaining apparatchiks and get a new constitution enacted that gives the Egyptian people back the freedoms they lost under the old régime, then we truly will, as our own President remarked this week, be seeing history in the making. If you believe, for the sake of the innocents who will suffer if the transition is not kept peaceable, pray that this daunting task is accomplished, and with dispatch.
