WP: Egypt- Opposition Campaign Embodying Bush Vision Now Lies in Pieces

[Rose Siding]

.....What followed was the emergence of the Arab world's most ambitious democracy movement, coalescing in opposition to the taciturn Mubarak, now 78, a former air force commander who has ruled Egypt longer than any leader since Mohammed Ali, the 19th-century founder of the modern state. With its protests, banners and slogans, the largely secular, technically savvy movement represented what the Bush administration asserted was its vision of an effervescent Middle East, set to be transformed by U.S. strategy in Iraq and the world after the Sept. 11 attacks. Ironically, at almost every turn it was deep-seated opposition to American policies that rallied the protesters.

Today, that movement is in shambles. Its most committed supporters admit to a lack of vision, an inability to capture the imagination of the Egyptian people. Its leadership is riven by disputes over everything from the veil to charges of corruption. The government has crushed its momentum with impunity, deploying the ubiquitous security forces to arrest scores of activists, intimidate others and signal to the rest that it will no longer tolerate unsanctioned protest. Across the divide, the government's supporters and foes are unanimous in their belief that U.S. pressure for change, occasionally effective in the past, has now decisively subsided.

"The sense of powerlessness is complete," said Mohammed el-Sayed Said, a secular activist and writer who is trying to win permission to publish a new newspaper, the Alternative. "We're back to the status quo we wanted to liberate the country from."

The arc of Egypt's democracy movement is a story of the unraveling of American policy and the contradictions that always shaped it......

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/17/AR2007031701482_pf.html


Bush, to a reporter during an 04 press briefing-

"Hold on a second please. I don't want to lecture you hear, but you were given one question and President Mubarak's going to wonder, "Is the press corps totally out of control here in America?" So I'm going to have to cut you off at this point."

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0404/12/se.02.html