The forces unleashed in Egypt can't be turned back

The upheaval spreading across the Arab world is at heart a movement for self-determination. The west resists it at its peril

A GREAT COMMENT
Seumas Milne
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 February 2011

"The fate of the Egyptian uprising is in the balance. There is a revolutionary situation in Egypt, but there has not yet been a revolution. In the wake of Hosni Mubarak's pledge not to stand again for the presidency next September, gangs of government loyalists were today let loose on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria.

First, the army spokesman called for the protesters to stand down now "your message has arrived". Truckloads of thugs, armed with iron bars and machetes, many clearly members of the security forces, were then dispatched to Cairo's Tahrir Square to assault and terrorise the mass of peaceful demonstrators and drive them from the city centre – with reports of killings and hundreds injured.

It's the latest and potentially deadliest of the regime's counterattacks against the tide of popular pressure for change. First there was the withdrawal of police from the streets, orchestrated looting and armed provocations apparently staged to scare people into submission with the threat of chaos and social breakdown.

Now Mubarak and his cronies have switched to direct confrontation and the risk of a full-scale bloodbath – after more than 300 people have already been killed – presumably as a prelude to demands that the army take control to keep the "two sides" apart.........

The army high command were in the US capital for consultations when the protests began last week. And Omar Suleiman – the intelligence boss now appointed vice-president to oversee political reform – is famously close to the US and Israel; oversaw the CIA's rendition and torture programme in Egypt; and publicly champions the crushing of its largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, by force......

But more profoundly, the upheaval now spreading across the Arab world is at heart a movement for self-determination: a demand by the peoples of the region to run their own affairs, free of the dead hand of largely foreign-backed tyrannies. It's not a coincidence, or the product of some defect in Arab culture, that the Middle East has the largest collection of autocratic states in the world........

The contagion is already spreading across the region: to Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and elsewhere, as regimes scramble to offer cosmetic reforms to head off more radical change. Tunisia has demonstrated that people in the Arab world are more than capable of freeing themselves from dictatorship. They have seen and felt their power. If Mubarak is indeed forced out, it will only be the beginning for Egypt, but it will also reshape the Middle East – and the wider global balance of power – for decades to come.

After today's events, it's clear that the Egyptian regime will try to bludgeon or divert the popular movement for change into a phoney transition. If that is seen to happen with US or Israeli connivance, the radicalisation western leaders fear will only be greater. Whatever now happens, the forces that have been unleashed, in Egypt and beyond, cannot be turned back."