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A Quick Mubarak Exit Is Too Risky

(Wall Street Journal) Edward N. Luttwak - The Obama administration, like much of the world, is not reacting to the situation in Egypt - a mostly rural country populated mainly by poor peasants. It is reacting to the media spectacle in the center of Cairo, in which huge but largely middle-class crowds have gathered to demand President Hosni Mubarak's removal. The few journalists who speak colloquial Egyptian Arabic report that among the poor majority of the population many still support Mubarak. Elite opinion in the West is almost unanimous that Mubarak must go now. Fears of an Islamist takeover are overblown, they argue. It is not often recalled that Hamas is simply the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which won power by election - and now refuses to hold more elections. As for Israel, it is likely to lose an ally in Egypt but unlikely to face a military threat any time soon: The U.S.-equipped Egyptian armed forces could not fight a war without U.S. supplies - and it would take at least $20 billion and 10 years to re-equip them with non-U.S. weapons. The writer is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
2011-02-04 08:52:52
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