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

I understand what you are saying and somewhat surprisingly the protest appears to be gearing up again after seeming to wind down the last couple of days. However, if in the end, Mubarak and the government just hold on making these kind of meaningless concessions and ride this out; without the military backing them, what can the protesters do? Do you think the businesses joining will have more of an impact for pressure for Mubarak to step down from the military?

Also, no matter what happens I just don't see how things can back to business as usual now that the spot light is on them to change. The protesters are not going to forget and go back to normal life. Or is everybody more or less saying that when the spotlight gets off, these talks of reform will just drift away if Mubarak does not step down now while the iron is hot so to speak?

As for as Suleiman, after reading part of that (will read the later) I can't believe that the US and Mubarak thought the protesters would think that he would be any better than Mubarak. Worse in fact.

mohamedahmos Mohamed Ahmos ✔
FREEDOM LOADING ███████████████████░ 99% [ Error : Please remove Mubarak and try again ! ] #Jan25 #Egypt #Mubarak #Tahrir
4 Feb

In Vietnam we fought a war to defend an allied country facing an organized insurgency and an armed attack by another (North Vietnam), and lost that war, mostly on domestic political grounds.

The winner, the Communist government of the now combined country, wasted a generation of its unfortunate people in socialist slavery, but is now making modest economic progress, though moving slowly with respect to human rights and freedom.

Almost 70 years ago the U.S. fought a war in the western and south Pacific region against Japan following their attack on our territory. The need for the South Pacific campaign was the result of Great Britain's unwise decision during WWI to use Japan to seize and control (and retain as it turned out) former German island colonies in the region (something to which the United States objected to at the time), as well as Japan's spectacularly successful aggression against China and the colonial posessions of France, Great Britain, Holland and the U.S. in the region.

Your memory is mostly wrong.

We didn't intervene to help or save Batista (though it would have been easy to do), but we didn't help or welcome Castro. It wasn't until months after his acession to power, when he declared himself a "Marxist" and his revolution to be modelled after Soviet Communism, that we found out where we stood.

Indeed until his declaration we were a model of nonintervention - one that might have even pleased the ever critical Msolga.

Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar (Spanish pronunciation: [fulˈxensjo βaˈtista i salˈdiβar]; January 16, 1901 – August 6, 1973) was a Cuban President, dictator, and military leader closely aligned with and supported by the United States. He served as the leader of Cuba from 1933–1944, and 1952–1959, before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

It is interesting to note that the repression both politically and economically of Cubans under their current regieme dwarfs that of Mubarak, who is relatively speaking a mere piker. I suspects she blames the suffering of the Cubans on the U.S. embargo, which simply means we don't lend them money and we don't trade with them (since they are broke had require loans for trade the issue is really moot.

I'm sure Olga wouldn't want us to give aid or loans to a government that controls all aspects of it's peoples lives and economic activity - they might even spend it on weapons.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, says the intelligence community never warned Congress or President Barack Obama that a potential revolution was brewing in Egypt — partly because it wasn't reading Facebook and Twitter.

The performance of the intelligence agencies has been debated since Thursday, when Stephanie O'Sullivan, the Obama administration's nominee for principal deputy director of national intelligence, told the committee that they warned the administration of instability in Egypt at the end of last year.

Several senators on the committee challenged O'Sullivan at the hearing, and in an interview today on MSNBC TV, Feinstein indicated that it wasn't true.

"There was a good deal of intelligence about Tunisia [but] virtually nothing about Egypt," Feinstein told NBC News' Andrea Mitchell. "So there was, to my knowledge, no real warning, either to the White House or, certainly, to the Senate Intelligence Committee or the Congress."

She added that even though the protests apparently were organized in public on Web sites and social media platforms, "I don't believe there was any intelligence on what was happening on Facebook or Twitter or the organizational effort to put these protests together."

But Feinstein hedged a bit when asked whether the episode was an intelligence "failure."

"I would call it a big intelligence wakeup," she said. "... Open-source material has to become much more significant in the analysis of intelligence." MSNBC World Blog