Egyptian Revolution Tweets. Day 15, No To The Entire Regime, Part 4

Wrongly choosing Egypt's generals over the democrats
Monday, February 7, 2011; 8:09 PM

THE OBAMA administration's latest flip on Egypt - it now publicly backs "the transition process announced by the Egyptian government" - is driven by fear of the dangers that could come with a victory by the pro-democracy movement headquartered in Cairo's Tahrir Square. "There are forces at work in any society . . . that will try to derail or overtake the process to pursue their own specific agenda," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Saturday. Most likely she was referring to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist movement that many in Washington worry could hijack an uprising currently led by secular liberals.

Egypt's Islamic threat cannot be discounted. But the administration has focused on the wrong problem - and, as a result, has taken the wrong side. The biggest threat to the stated U.S. objective of a "real democracy" in Egypt is not an extreme opposition but the very regime the administration is backing - which is attempting to limit change and perpetuate its hold on power beyond President Hosni Mubarak's announced retirement in September.

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The meetings Mr. Suleiman has conducted so far have excluded many of the most important opposition leaders. Instead the general has talked mostly with marginal, officially approved parties and the Muslim Brotherhood. The regime's strategy for decades has been to portray these as the only alternatives, while crushing centrist, secular movements like the organizers of the Tahrir Square protests. Mr. Suleiman said in an interview with ABC television Sunday that Mohammed ElBaradei, the former U.N. official accepted as a representative by many of the protesters, "is not one of the opposition."

The regime also is attempting to strictly limit the reforms it will undertake before September's scheduled election. Mr. Suleiman told ABC that "we can do what President Mubarak said, and we cannot do more." Mr. Mubarak spoke last week of amending two articles of the constitution covering presidential term limits and how candidates can qualify. But far greater reforms are needed, including an independent election-monitoring system, the opening up of state-controlled media, the removal of restrictions on creating political parties and the lifting of an emergency law that prevents public gatherings. A government statement Sunday said the emergency law would be changed when "conditions allow." That has been the regime's position for the past 29 years.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020705407.html?tid=nn_twitter