“These revolutionaries in Egypt don’t remind me very much of Iran in 1979,” said Abbas Milani, who marched in Tehran a generation ago. (Now a scholar at Stanford University, he just published a biography of the shah.) “They seem more like the Green Revolution in Tehran in 2009: they are peaceful, they have no cohesive leadership, and they have no program besides getting the dictator out.”
Obama’s relatively quick decision to encourage Mubarak to leave power is in sharp contrast with Carter’s actions in 1979. “That’s the big difference,” said Gary Sick, who was Carter’s top NSC expert on Iran at the time of the revolution. “In the case of the shah, we spent a lot of time trying to help him save himself.”…
Now, Sick says, the important thing will be for the Obama administration to keep up the pressure on Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman and other military leaders to bring about real change, without allowing the revolution to spin out of control — no easy task.
“The longer this drags out, the more likely that radical groups will rise up and assert themselves,” he said.
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