Mubarak's bloody hands

Hosni Mubarak may have appointed a new government, but it is clear that he has no intention of stepping down after 30 years in power. In a televised address that came too late and said too little, the Egyptian president made the usual vague promises to introduce reform, while at the same time sending the army out on to the streets and imposing a Draconian curfew. Neither has done anything to calm the growing violence: thousands of people have been injured, and nobody knows how many killed by the security forces. The people demonstrating on the streets of the Arab world's most populous nation know that it makes little difference who occupies government positions while Mubarak remains in power. Their demand is simple: Mubarak must go.

The president faces the dilemma of all dictators cornered by popular uprisings: increase the repression or step down. For the moment, Mubarak has opted for the former. Clearly, he is looking over his shoulder at what happened in Tunisia, where President Ben Ali first sacked his government but was himself forced to flee once he lost control of the military. For the moment, Mubarak, a former military man, can be assumed to have the support of the armed forces. The man he has named as his vice president, Omar Suleiman, is the former head of the secret police, and the new prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, was the air force chief.

The key to Mubarak's survival is the military. The collapse of his regime would send out shock waves throughout the region: inspiring fear in many governments; hope in many opposition movements; and effectively deal a death blow to the already moribund talks between Israel and the Palestinians, while putting the West on red alert.

Whatever decision the well-equipped, well-trained, and largely respected armed forces come to will be all the more important given that the popular uprising has no visible leadership. Among the candidates is Mohamed ElBaradei, who has been out of the country for several years, while the most organized of the opposition groups is the Muslim Brotherhood. The prospect of an Islamist force taking over in Egypt will remind the West of how the Iranian revolution of 1979 was hijacked by fundamentalists. For the moment, the armed forces are literally holding fire, but it has said that if the current chaos persists, then it will not hesitate to intervene to restore order.

The crisis currently unfolding in Egypt will be of particular concern to the United States, which has long been a backer of the Mubarak regime, and is the biggest supplier of weapons and equipment to its military. In 2009, shortly after taking office, US President Barack Obama chose Cairo as the location from where to make his famous speech reaching out to the Arab world. He now faces a difficult situation: the United States has long seen Mubarak as a vital ally in the region, pumping billions of dollars into the country; at the same time, Washington is constantly telling the world of the importance of democracy.

It now appears that it must make a decision on which of those two positions is the most important. If Washington supports a brutal crackdown on protesters demanding democracy, its already tarnished reputation in the region will be further damaged. And if the dictator falls, and forces unfriendly to Washington take over, the world's most conflictive region, and the source of much of the United States' oil, could get a lot more complicated.