Rage Against the Regime

[somone]

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/30/rage-against-the-regime.html

Rage Against the Regime
by Babak Dehghanpisheh, Christopher Dickey, Mike Giglio

...For America, the immediate concern is that through the terms of five U.S. presidents, Mubarak’s Egypt has been Washington’s most powerful and most indispensable ally in the Middle East. It has been at peace with Israel since 1978 and, partly as a reward, has received more than $600 billion in U.S. aid over the past three decades. Mubarak has positioned his government as a vital counterbalance to Iran and helped to isolate Hamas. His enormous Army, with a troop strength of 468,500 soldiers, trains closely with the Americans. Historically, the country has been the keystone in the enormous and troubled arch of Arab and Muslim countries stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean—and if it shakes loose, everything else could crumble. The United States, Europe, and its neighbors have viewed Egypt as too big to fail. But its 82-year-old president has been in power longer than two thirds of his population has been alive, and an odor of decadent tyranny hangs over the country. Obama said he has consistently pressured Mubarak to pursue reform, which he called “critical to the long-term well-being of Egypt.” But if that was America’s policy, it was news to most Egyptians.

Obama’s rhetoric didn’t seem to impress the crowds as they tried to wash tear gas off their faces. They saw no need for American support. Their model was the popular uprising that brought down Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Jan. 14, an event so unprecedented that it inspired street demonstrations from Algeria to Yemen...

But crowds in the streets aren’t the only challenge to Mubarak’s dictatorship now. For the first time he’s facing a new threat as well: crowdsourcing, a kind of collective leadership, elusive and resilient, the likes of which Egypt has never experienced. Its manifestoes—even the chants shouted in the faces of the cops—have been polished by dozens of anonymous editors on a Google document. “We are Egypt’s youth on the Internet,” they proclaimed on the eve of last Friday’s protests. Mubarak cannot keep Egypt unplugged forever, and they know it...

Near Tahrir Square, 35-year-old Safar Attiya, a mother of four, is asking questions that have gone unspoken for three decades. “What did the president ever do for us?” she demands. “Nothing! Nothing! He didn’t do anything for us. We can’t even find work.” Between her part-time job cleaning houses and her husband’s job as a day laborer, they earn about $60 a month. “We see videos of rich people’s mansions and villas on TV,” says Attiya. “And we are beaten out of the street.” The protests will continue, predicts Ahmad Mahmoud, a 30-year-old lawyer with a small black mustache and slight build. A tear-gas canister lands nearby and he steps back. “Egypt is bigger than Tunisia, and Mubarak is smaller than Egypt. I think he will go to Saudi Arabia like Ben Ali.”...