Hosni Mubarak has just finished announcing to a furious Egyptian nation that he will make some progressive reforms, but 'maintain stability' at all costs. In other words, no real change, he is staying, and his family have probably fled the country. He doesn't get it at all.
The longer he clings on, courtesy of tanks and guns supplied by America, enforcing the American economic regime which is causing the revolution in t he first place, the more the people will blame America. Naturally enough. And the greater will be the danger of America's worst fear, a fundamentalist regime running Egypt. Which would be a classic American bungle.
However, this will not come from the Muslim brotherhood, and in fact it seems that the era of massed Islamic militancy may be coming to an end. This seems natural enough somehow. As well as the almost biblical crumbling of an entire chain of rancid dictatorships across the world, not excluding America's jewel in the crown, Saudi Arabia, we may well be witnessing an early form of social change which doesn't need leaders in its early, revolutionary phase, just a means to keep in constant contact with enough people who feel the same way. It doesn't need gods or visionaries, just communication.
What kind of change then happens depends largely on how much opposition it encounters, and from what direction and in what form. The history of revolutions shows that the quickest way to turn them into dictatorships is to interfere with them.
