Diadem wrote:The Reaper wrote:Some people are calling to gather everyone to take the palace tomorrow, and a few were already starting to walk that way.
Too late. Mubarak is clearly secure in his position again now. He would not have given such a speech otherwise. They should have stormed his palace much earlier if they had wanted to be succesful.
The protesters lost the momentum. Mubarak has had time to realign the people around him and make sure of their loyalty.
Security is always a matter of perspective - I'm leaning toward Reaper's take ("Man's trying his damnedest to get himself lynched") being more accurate here. It's a damn shame they didn't storm it earlier - march of millions was their best opportunity for that - but it's not too late.
The protesters have been slowly losing momentum until recently, but watching AJE this morning it seems like Mubarak's speech is helping them regain that easily. Yeah, he may have had the opportunity to better secure his immediate surroundings, but even the leadership of his own NDP is calling for him to step aside, and I have to admit I doubt his presidential guard is so big and/or so loyal that they'd dare to take on tens of thousands of angry Egyptians, much less the several hundred thousand to over a million of them that might turn out to show him the door.
The terrifyingly unpredictable variable here is the military. They may continue pretending to stay on the sidelines, letting this play out with their current minimal level of involvement. There's a good chance (though I wouldn't yet call it a probability) of their staging a coup, which could lead to anything from an open, stable democratic system to yet another unelected regime that lasts another few years (decades?). There also exists the (apparently/hopefully extremely remote) possibility that they'll end up making this several thousand times more bloody than it needs to be.
