White House: Don't Blame Us For Pace Of Egypt Transition
ShareIs the White House stubborn or simply patient? They're watching the events in Egypt with a nervous eye, but as Laura Rozen reports today, officials are confident that their strategy is the correct one. Does the fact that the crowds in Cairo continue to grow and vocal protests about the leading transition role of Vice President Suleiman give them any pause? No -- the White House sees it as leverage to force Suleiman to concede more quickly to the demands of the protesters. "More important" Robert Gibbs said today than whether the U.S. is satisfied with the pace of change is whether the "people of Egypt are." And they aren't, he noted. Gibbs suggested that Vice President Biden conveyed that message in his phone call to Suleiman: the people are telling you that you're not doing enough and not moving quickly enough.
It's a back end way of backing away from Suleiman, who, in the words of former CIA director Michael Hayden, is "unfailingly loyal to his president for the past 20 years" and who has a reputation among Egyptians as the orchestrator of the security state. American elites who have dealt with Suleiman have had to overlook this, judging that it's in their interest to nurture contacts with a man who -- here's Hayden once again -- is also a professional, and he has shown remarkable pragmatism when dealing with Israel, the Palestinians and Hamas." Damned if you do and damned if you don't. No question -- during the first days of the crisis, the US leaned on Suleiman to start this process and invested a lot of capital in noting his role.
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