Tunesia, Egyt and now Yemen: a domino effect in the Middle East?

Iraq has paid a pretty awful price for these freedoms and it would have probably happened without foreign intervention.

High-level contacts between the U.S. and Egyptian governments continued Wednesday, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talking to newly appointed Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman, Crowley said. And Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke by phone with Egypt's defense minister on Wednesday, their third conversation in recent days.

Those contacts followed separate meetings on Monday between former U.S. ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner, who traveled to Cairo to deliver a message on behalf of Obama, with Mubarak and Suleiman, according to Crowley.

A senior State Department official said on condition of not being identified that Mubarak has "a narrow amount of time" to make changes or take steps, with more demonstrations planned for Friday. However, the official said "there is a sentiment in the (Egyptian) government they can outlive the protesters."

"This is a false assumption," the official said. "They are not going away."

However, an Egyptian government official said on condition of not being identified that his government has a "serious problem" with how the Obama administration has been "spinning" the events to give the impression that Mubarak's statement Tuesday night resulted from pressure from Obama.

"This is Mubarak's decision," the Egyptian official said. "Clearly, yes, he has been listening to the messages coming from the administration ... but at the end of the day, this is a decision he had come to on his own in the interests of Egypt, first and foremost, and as he said, as a result of listening very carefully to the demands of the Egyptian people."

The Egyptian official said his government has rejected calls by Obama and other world leaders to begin the transition now.

"This is an Egyptian process," the official said. "What President Mubarak said is that his primary responsibility is to ensure security and order so as to ensure a peaceful transfer of power so that the Egyptian people may decide their next leader in the upcoming presidential elections."

More evidence-free assertions. What source have you read, which shows that the Iraq war or the situation there was what spurred this event?

I think, instead, it's simply convenient for you to try and justify previous foolishness on your party's part by latching on to events.

Unless you can provide some evidence of causation, I don't know why you think anyone here finds your statements compelling.

Cycloptichorn

[Before calling me or anyone here a 'fingers in ears' group, provide one bit of evidence. Show that you know the difference between correlation and causation in things like this.

I think that former Bush supporters have been secretly hoping for years for some sort of event to take place that they could then turn to their advantage, claiming that it was the result of something he did. In an attempt to quiet the cognitive dissonance that results from realizing that they spent years defending a truly foolish man who made mistake after mistake.

Enough sidebar for me, don't want to derail the thread any further.

Cycloptichorn

Translation, I certainly don't want to deal with anyone asking me for proof of my many unsoilicited expressions of opinion presented as though they were facts.

Calls for weekend protests in Syria
Social media used in bid to mobilise Syrians for rallies demanding freedom, human rights and the end to emergency law.

Calls for protests in Syria are spreading on social media websites, following popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

Organisers say protests will be staged in front of the parliament in the capital, Damascus, on Friday and Saturday, and at Syrian embassies across the world.

Several pages have been set up on Facebook, with the most popular one, named "The Syrian Revolution", "liked" by about 12,000 people by Thursday.

However, many of those writing comments on Facebook appeared to be Syrians living abroad calling on their "brothers" at home to protest.

Sources in Syria told Al Jazeera they doubted that the calls for protests would really result in much action on the ground.

"I think the day of anger will turn out to be no more than a day of mild frustration," one journalist told Al Jazeera.

"There's no appetite for regime change in Syria as there has been in Egypt for a while. The president isn't hated as much as [Hosni] Mubarak, or seen as out of touch. Also, the local context is very different ... and the poverty rate is significantly lower in Egypt."

One Facebook page said demonstrations would start on Friday outside the Syrian embassises in Canada, US, UK, Sweden and Denmark.

"For all the fine Syrians who live outside the Syria ... you can help your brothers in Syria by demonstrating in front of Syrian embassy where you live, the same day and same time," the site administrator wrote.

'We want freedom'

Sami Abdullah, a civil society activist from the initiative "Angry Day Syria", using Facebook and the microblogging site Twitter to gather support, said he expected "a lot" of people to turn up for rallies in the cities of Damascus, Homs, Aleppo and Qamishli.

"Maybe half of those on the Facebook sites are in Syria," he told Al Jazeera from a neighbouring country. "No one can talk to the Syrian media for security reasons.

"Many civil society groups in Syria have called for protests ... We want freedom, human rights and the end to emergency law."
Activists say Syria needs
a 'day of anger'

There were also reports that a pro-government demonstration would be held to coincide with other rallies.

Facebook is officially blocked in Syria since November 2007. However, many young Syrians bypass the hurdle by using proxy servers and in August last year, there were about 30,000 Facebook users registered in the country.

Security forces prevented on Saturday young people from gathering outside the Egyptian embassy in Damascus in support of the mass protests in Cairo calling for Mubarak's resignation.

As in Egypt, government critics in Syria complain of corruption and limitations to political freedom and human rights.

"Syria's authorities detained political and human rights activists, restricted freedom of expression, repressed its Kurdish minority, and held people incommunicado for lengthy periods, often torturing them, during 2010", the US-based Human Rights Watch said in a report issued last week.

The official unemployment rate is around 10 per cent, but some analysts say as many as every fourth Syrian is actually without a job.

However, Syria has undergone significant changes since Bashar al-Assad became president after his father Hafez's death in 2000, including slowly opening up the economy.

"Despite all troubles here, I don't think and don't hope that Syria will be the next [country to see an uprising] for too many reasons. My country is still not ready for such an experiment and the president here is not really hated," one young Syrian told Al Jazeera.

'Stability first'

In an interview earlier this week, al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal that the ongoing protests in the region were ushering in a "new era" in the Middle East, and that Arab rulers would need to do more to accommodate their people's rising political and economic aspirations.

He said he would push through political reforms this year aimed at initiating municipal elections, granting more power to nongovernmental organisations and establishing a new media law.

However, he said stability and economy were higher on his agenda than political reforms.

"Reform in politics is important but it is not as important and urgent as the people waking every day and they want to eat, to have good health, to send their children to good schools. That is what they want," al-Assad said.

"I want to feel safe in my own country. That is my goal."

He also told the Wall Street Journal that a domino effect with unrest spreading from Egypt and Tunisia to Syria was unlikely because his country is different.

"We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of that Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people's beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance."

But, in a possible reaction to the the recent events in Tunisia, where the president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was driven from power by unrest triggered partly by soaring prices, the Syrian government announced late last month that it had increased the heating oil allowance for public workers by 72 per cent to the equivalent of $33 a month.

Calls for protests in a numer of Middle East countries are circulating on Twitter, including Yemen, February 3, Algeria, February 12, Bahrain, February 14 and Libya, February 30.