"... While Clinton distanced herself from remarks made Saturday by her hand-picked U.S. Egypt envoy Frank Wisner that Mubarak needed to stay on to oversee Egyptian constitutional reforms, she also seemed to move closer to embracing Wisner’s private opinion that Mubarak should stay on in the transition at least for some time...
Similarly, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs at the press conference Monday referred "to what's happening in Egypt as 'a process' -- dropping the need for 'transition now' that was said from the same podium last Friday," journalist Mina Al-Oraibi noted.
The decidedly more go-slow messaging and embrace of a Suleiman-led transition contrasted with Clinton’s remarks to news shows last Sunday that the United States wanted to ensure that Egypt did not end up with just another military regime with someone else at the helm.
Some U.S. Egypt analysts raised alarms Monday at the shift in U.S. emphasis to one that seems to favor more continuity with the Egyptian military-backed old order.
“This sort of ‘orderly transition’ in post-Mubarak Egypt is more likely to usher in a return to the repressive status quo than an era of widening popular participation,” academic Joshua Stracher wrote at Foreign Affairs Monday. "It plays right into the hands of the regime," agreed the Council on Foreign Relations's Steve Cook. "The longer this goes, the better it is for Mubarak, Suleiman, and the rest of the military-dominated leadership."
“I fear the administration is heading toward acceptance of the perpetuation of the Egyptian dictatorship in all but name,” the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan told POLITICO Monday..."
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