who are helping mubarak and suleiman and those dinosaurs and young men, telling people we are not listening to you. take the side of the future in the arab world and help people understand their peaceful desires will be listened to. we don t want violence to enter into this. peace is the solution. congressman, we ve watched the emergence of a number of leaders here, most notably and most recently, a gentleman by the name of wael ghonim, a 30-year-old google executive in prison for 12 days, believed to have been in prison for the formation of a wildly popular facebook page that was seem to have seeded this revolution. do you believe that the american leadership understands the values that are being articulated by people like wael, by mona and others who are advocating a new middle eastern type among the young of highly educated, highly interconnected and peaceful and no longer
and there has to be no vagueness about that in the minds of the people in the street. fawaz, if that were to happen, would this be different? yes. yes, it would be different. and i mean i think the united states must think in terms of the long term. this is the beginning. it s the beginning of something very big, not just in egypt, throughout the arab world. you have a new era. this is the beginning of the crisis in egypt and other arab countries. what s striking about the speeches today is how disconnected mubarak and suleiman are. they re dinosaurs. they re out of it. this is the reality. they don t understand what s happening in the country. look at what suleiman said. we would have expected suleiman to appreciate the complexity and the danger of the situation. he blamed the unrest on subversive forces. he said satellite stations are responsible for the unrest, you and i and all of us are inciting the egyptian people.
mubarak has emphasized his commitment to the presidency and his country, that effective power, supervisory power in that speech, was transferred to the vice president in that country. aaron, i want to bring you into the conversation, whether mubarak stas or goes, gives power to suleiman, that crowd is not happy. is it possible to anticipate the next 24 hours? yeah. i think you re going to see rising tensions and the possibility of escalation into violence. i mean we can t forget one basic reality. egypt has been and is now and likely to remain a peer to yan state. the military exercises dominance not just in national security policies but in politics. they own businesses, industries, they don t pay taxes. they have a privilege and a set of perks which they are going to be very reluctant to surrender. the core question, even if mubarak had announced that he was stepping down and stepping out, the basic challenge would
and we have heard all these stereotypes for years now, arabs only understand violence, arabs only understand the strong leader who can suppress them. here is a generation trying to get rid of that and fighting for freedom and dignity in a peaceful way and if the army crushes that, if mubarak and suleiman crushes that, the message to the fellow arabs is that peace does not work. we must take the side of these young people and understand it is those young people who will ensure stability, not these old men who continuously in a paranoid way blame satellite channels or outside forces. these are egyptians calling for change in egypt and we must remember that, you know, i like to hear this from these congressmen but i want them to understand there are lobbyists working overtime right now as they say these sweet words, to keep mubarak exactly where he is. we must understand who we are fighting here in this country. get the lobbyists and understand on the hill they are the ones
you r reporting is where now? well, this has been a mixed message coming out all day. we were speaking with sources very close to the president. they thought as of several hours ago, that he was going to announce a resignation, that he would step down. he instead announced that he is transferring authority to his vice president. now, what exactly that means, is unclear and i think that s why you re seeing the crowds so furious right now. people have been the people have been i want a clear statement, they wanted him to say, i understand what has happened in this country and i am now leaving for the sake of the country. he didn t exactly do that. he said, vice president suleiman will oversee the transition, but he still called himself president mubarak. you can see from as ron is reporting right now, the crowds are not accepting it. they are already continuing with their chant go go, mubarak go.