really at the end of the day, substantively, what do we expect to happen once we get beyond this election and how does this country pull itself forward and move forward? i think a fork in the road. it either goes back into the vicious circle i described of poverty, instability. let s be honest about it. the neighboring countries playing a role and seeing as a state in which they will have influence. or you can see a world in which lowell the locally a distribution of power and 40,000 valleys and villages and you see there the different communities learning to live together and actually make some of the economic and social gains that will make the country worth living. i ve been to the country many times. what you have is an extraordinary potential. remember in the 70s, people talked about kabul the paris of the east. in the 19th century, it was the silk road, the crossroads of asia.
only god knows. we don t even know. we don t know what the americans are truly telling the egyptians. i guess we have to wait for bob woodward to tell us. he s in the situation room. so much of the egyptian military has been trained here so the influence may be from bob gates to suleiman saying this is enough. look, egypt is not iran. you can t turn off the lights. the iranians had the revolution against the regime in 2009 and the regime put out the lights. expelled all outsiders. lived off oil income. had its own money, could snub the world. couldn t care less what barack obama thought. egypt is in a very different place and in a very different economic situation. it s at the crossroads of asia, africa, europe. it s very vulnerable to american approval and to american opinion. now, i ll tell you one thing, hosni mubarak would have really gone out after these people had he not known that he is under american gaze so maybe people