Sunday to Monday

At Foreign Policy.com, Marc Lynch's Middle East blog, concerning the peaceful end to the Mubarak dictatorship:

The Obama administration also deserves a great deal of credit, which it probably won't receive. It understood immediately and intuitively that it should not attempt to lead a protest movement which had mobilized itself without American guidance, and consistently deferred to the Egyptian people. Despite the avalanche of criticism from protestors and pundits, in fact Obama and his key aides -- including Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power and many others -- backed the Egyptian protest movement far more quickly than anyone should have expected. Their steadily mounting pressure on the Mubarak regime took time to succeed, causing enormous heartburn along the way, but now can claim vindication. By working carefully and closely with the Egyptian military, it helped restrain the worst violence and prevent Tiananmen on the Tahrir -- which, it is easy to forget today, could very easily have happened. No bombs, no shock and awe, no soaring declarations of American exceptionalism, and no taking credit for a tidal wave which was entirely of the making of the Egyptian people -- just the steadily mounting public and private pressure on the top of the regime which was necessary for the protestors to succeed.

The Obama administration also understood from the start, and has consistently said, that removing Mubarak would not be enough. It has rejected "faux democracy," and pushed hard for fundamental systemic reforms...By the way, for those keeping score in the "peacefully removing Arab dictators" game, it's now Obama 2, Bush 0. The administration has been subjected to an enormous amount of criticism over the last two weeks for its handling of Egypt, including by people inspired by or who worked on the previous administration's Freedom Agenda. It was also attacked sharply from the left, by activists and academics who assumed that the administration was supporting Mubarak and didn't want democratic change. In the end, Obama's strategy worked. Perhaps this should earn it some praise, and even some benefit of the doubt going forward. And now, a day to celebrate before rolling up the sleeves for the hard work to come."


From Think Progress, the first fruits of their investigation: "ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign."

Just some of the details revealed so far are interesting beyond even this infamy: a plan to plant a false story with a progressive organization, then reveal the story is false to discredit that organization. Sounds just like what happened to Dan Rather. The plan was for the lobbying firm of Hunton and Williams to hire a set of security companies to do the deeds for a cool two million:"HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis)."

Tipped by one of the comments at Think Progress, I looked up the meaning of "Themis." It refers to a Greek Titan, and means "divine law."