US REACTION:THE OBAMA administration appears to have been caught off guard by President Hosni Mubarak's failure to step down last night.
Though the White House carefully avoided predicting what the Egyptian dictator would say, Mr Obama’s intelligence chief, CIA director Leon Panetta, told the House permanent select committee on intelligence a few hours before the speech: “There is a strong likelihood that Mubarak may step down this evening, which would be significant in terms of . . . the hopefully orderly transition in Egypt.”
In a media conference call immediately after Mr Mubarak’s address, Richard Haass, the president of the council on foreign relations and a former high-ranking official, said the fact that he and other observers believed the news from Cairo would be different “underscores the tenuousness and incompleteness of our knowledge” of what is happening in Egypt.
Mr Haass said the Obama administration has become more disciplined and restrained in its reactions to the Egyptian uprising, and now prefers to give advice to the regime in private. “The bigger reality is still the limits of US influence, the limits to what we know and the limits to what we can do.”
Commenting on the speech of Omar Suleiman, which followed Mr Mubarak’s, in which the vice- president said demonstrators should go home and go back to work, Mr Haass predicted: “That sort of language won’t work.” Mr Mubarak’s statement that he never succumbs to international pressure was widely perceived as an allusion to the US.
Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the council on foreign relations, said Mr Mubarak’s speech was “clearly not enough . . . Hosni Mubarak remains defiant to the end. There is the possibility we will see this go on in a way that does not end peacefully”. A few hours before the speech, Mr Obama spoke hopefully of “witnessing history unfold” in Egypt. “The moment of transformation is taking place because the people of Egypt are calling for change. They have turned out in extraordinary numbers representing all ages and all walks of life,” he told students in Michigan.
Mr Obama promised that “America will continue to do everything that we can to support an orderly and genuine transition to democracy in Egypt.” Mr Panetta also warned: “There are a number of countries in the Arab world that reflect similar concerns. The triggers, the factors that kicked off what happened in Egypt, could very well happen in other areas.”