On CNN and Fox today the Secretary of State took the U.S. position on the situation in Egypt a tonal step further, calling for an "orderly transition", suggesting that the administration is beginning to view embattled President Hosni Mubarak's days as numbered. She was careful in both appearances not to take sides explicitly, saying the U.S. stands with all Egyptians.

U.S. statements are unlikely to have much affect on the immediate situation. "There's not a lot of opportunity for the United States to influence events,” says Jon Alternman, director of Middle East programs at CSIS, and a former State and NSC official. “The protesters don't care about the U.S., and at a time of maximum peril for the government, [the Egyptian leadership is] not looking for outside advice or arm-chair quarterbacking.”

But it is becoming increasingly hard to see how Mubarak can survive the end of the year: elections are slated for next September and at this point he probably can't win or steal the vote. The U.S. will have a better chance of influencing a slow handover of power over the next six to nine months than trying to drive fast changing events on the ground. Clinton's statements suggest that's the developing American strategy.

It's too early to say whether the uprisings in Egypt, Yemen and other places will be remembered as brief rebellions or an historic turning point for the Arab world. Which is why Obama administration is struggling to find the right words for a which pits our natural sympathy for democratic reform against the fairly reliable partnerships Washington now enjoys with Cairo and Sana'a.

Still, for all the unpredictable consequences, it seems unlikely that a change of regime in either country would be a true Iran-1979 style fiasco for the U.S. (Certainly no one here would mind terribly if, say, Mohamed ElBaredei were to take over Egypt, although that seems quite unlikely at the moment.)

It could be a different story, however, if this anti-authoritarian people power should spread to Saudi Arabia. Unlike Egypt, the Saudi kingdom is a breeding ground for the brand of Wahhabi fundamentalism that fuels (philosophically and financially) al Qaeda. Remember that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. And the Saudi royals, for all the unproductive things they do, are essential strategic partners for the U.S. on a wide range of issues. There's terrorism, for instance: It was the Saudi intelligence service that tipped us off to the cargo bombs headed to Chicago from Yemen last October. And then of course there's the country's vast oil reserves, vital enough to the American economy that they're a prime reason we fought the 1991 Gulf War. It's little surprise, then, that oil prices are already surging; you can expect them to hit record levels should the house of Saudi begin to crumble.

The good news is that a friend who works in Riyadh reports no sign of unrest there, and notes that--unlike Hosni Mubarak in Egypt--Saudi King Abdullah has deftly presented himself as a liberal reformer at home. And yet there are reports today that dozens of protesters have been arrested in Jeddah--after a demonstration reportedly organized via text message--to express outrage about flooding in Jeddah for which poor infrastructure has been blamed. That's still a far cry from what we're seeing in the streets of Egypt. But any significant protests in Saudi Arabia are rare, making this one very much worth our close attention.

P.S. Al Jazeera is now reporting street protests in Jordan. Which is a whole other can of worms, perhaps one for another post.

The New York Times has one telling nugget from today's street protests in Egypt:

In a stunning turn of events, one pitched battle in that city ended with protesters and police shaking hands and sharing water bottles on the same street corner where minutes before they were exchanging hails of stones and tear-gas canisters were arcing through the sky. Thousands stood on the six-lane coastal road then sank to their knees and prayed.

This is different from the Green Movement in Iran. There, the religious police--the basij--were happy to split the skulls of those they considered heretics. They were on a mission from God. In Egypt, the police are on a mission from Mubarak. They may well have more sympathy for their fellow citizens than they do for a tyrannical leader who seems a figment of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's imagination. In any case, I'm not sure that the Obama Administration's continuing support for the Egyptian regime is exactly the best signal right now; at the very least, a statement of protest over the house arrest of Mohammed el Baradei would seem to be in order.

There is often a naïve reaction in America to political uprisings abroad. The United States is a free place and has a long, albeit imperfect, history of granting asylum to political dissidents. This leads some observers, like George W. Bush's former speechwriter Michael Gerson, to assume that freedom-seeking political dissidents abroad are looking to Washington as they face down tanks and truncheons in their streets. These dewy-eyed observers further assume that with sufficient encouragement from Washington, those dissidents are capable of creating peaceful democracies in their countries, if only their tyrannical dictators can be removed.

If there was a time when an American president's pronouncements could control the complex political upwellings of distant countries, that day has long since passed. More important, even if the brave demonstrators in Tunisia or Egypt or elsewhere do succeed in permanently overthrowing their dictators, their prospects for lasting freedom have nothing to do with rhetorical support from Washington, but depend rather on whether those countries have the broader political and economic infrastructure necessary to sustain democracy. If our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything it is that the removal of tyranny alone is insufficient to create stable democracy.

Sure there are things Washington can do to prepare for whatever happens in Egypt and across the Arab world, and to discourage violence, and the Obama administration should do them. But when it comes to long-term political change in the region, the real question rising from the so-called Arab street is not what America can do to magically ensure it comes out well for us. It's is the Arab world ready for democracy?

There are a lot of the theories about why Arab countries have lagged other parts of the world in economic and political development. Some blame the legacy of colonialism, others the so-called “resource curse”, others blame Islam itself. In an interesting new book called The Long Divergence, Timur Kuran of Duke argues that Islam's economic restrictions, rather than its cultural conservatism or isolationism, stunted development in countries where it was the dominant religion. Marriage and inheritance laws, he argues, blocked the pooling of capital that made possible the Renaissance, exploration and the industrial revolution in Europe, developments that ultimately helped pave the way for stable democracy throughout the West.

Much has changed since the end of colonialism in the Arab world. In some countries, the resource curse has been lifted: Bahrain, for example, has increased experimentation with democracy as its oil wealth declined. Whatever you think of Al Jazeera, it represents a breaking of government control over the exchange of information, at least in countries other than Qatar, where it is based. And some have argued that civil society has made steady progress in some countries, including Egypt and Tunisia. But it is not easy to be optimistic. Said Freedom House in December 2001, “The gap in freedom has only widened over the last twenty years. While every other region of the world has registered significant gains for democracy and freedom, the countries of the Islamic world have experienced a significant increase in repression.”

Kuran concludes his book on a pessimistic note. “If the region's autocratic regimes were magically to fall, the development of strong private sectors and civil societies could take decades,” he writes. “With few exceptions, their civil societies are too poorly organized, and too beaten down, to provide the political checks and balances essential to sustained democratic rule.” Kuran probably didn't expect his conclusions to be tested so soon and we can all hope that he's wrong. But from Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America and Southeast Asia, recent history makes it clear that democracy's future in the Arab world depends on Arabs, not Americans.

In mid-2008 I profiled Mark Salter, the former McCain aide whom Halperin identifies as the author of O. Salter's authorship would certainly be consistent with O's thinly-veiled and rather mocking portrait of Arianna Huffington and her Huffington Post, as evidenced by my favorite passage from the piece:

This vision of the future came to Salter on a Saturday night in late May 2006, as he sat down at his home computer to check the latest news about McCain. A search led Salter to a fresh blog item on the liberal Huffington Post. Titled "Why I Spoke Up," it was written by a young woman named Jean Rohe. A day earlier, Rohe had spoken just before McCain at the commencement ceremony of Manhattan's New School. Rohe unexpectedly castigated McCain, roundly condemning his support for the Iraq war. Now she was amplifying the incident across the Internet via The Huffington Post.

Salter is neither a humorless man nor an intolerant one. McKinnon recalls a campaign swing through Kentucky, during which a jug of moonshine appeared on the Straight Talk Express after the candidate had called it a night. "Salter gets it and takes like five huge gulps of the thing," he recalls. "We call Mark the next morning, and he says he's paralyzed from the waist down and blind." He also counts among his close friends several members of the D.C. media establishment--a rare quality in a senior Republican operative. Reporters return the compliment. "I never once found him to lie to me or deceive me," says one person who has covered McCain extensively for a major news outlet. "And I don't give that compliment too lightly. I think he works pretty hard at that reputation."

But reading Rohe's words, and especially what he calls the "toxic" anti-McCain vitriol of the blog's often-anonymous commenters, Salter felt his blood boil. He hammered out a ferocious response:

Once upon time, even among the young, the words courage and hero were used more sparingly, more precisely. It took no courage to do what you did, Ms. Rohe. It was an act of vanity and nothing more. ... [McCain] has, over and over again, risked personal ambitions for what he believes, rightly or wrongly, are in the best interests of the country. What, pray tell, have you risked? The only person you have succeeded in making look like an idiot is yourself. ... Should you grow up and ever get down to the hard business of making a living and finding a purpose for your lives beyond self-indulgence some of you might then know a happiness far more sublime than the fleeting pleasure of living in an echo chamber. And if you are that fortunate, you might look back on the day of your graduation and your discourtesy to a good and honest man with a little shame and the certain knowledge that it is very unlikely any of you will ever posses one small fraction of the character of John McCain.

Salter posted this screed under Rohe's item at 10:28 p.m. By the next day, The Huffington Post was featuring it under the giddy headline TOP MCCAIN AIDE INSULTS ENTIRE COLLEGE GRADUATING CLASS. Today, Salter admits he may have gotten carried away, perhaps with the aid of a couple of glasses of wine with dinner.

Heh.

--The Senate strikes a deal on rules reform. As we previewed earlier this week, the push to overhaul the filibuster system, led by Democrats Harkin, Merkley and Udall, petered out. In the end, reformers were left with a pact that ends secret holds, trims the number of presidential appointees that require confirmation votes and bars the practice of stalling by amendment-soliloquy, along with other dilatory tactics. Party leaders also reached a handshake agreement not to change the rules via the "constitutional option," as Ezra Klein explains.

--Most of us are suffering from State of the Union fatigue by now, but if you've ever aspired to be a speechwriter or wondered about the craft, you should read former WH scribe James Fallows' annotated version of Obama's address.

--A Tea Party freshman chides Michele Bachmann for Tuesday night's freelancing.

--The GOP is in the process of sorting out their differences on defense spending as well.

--Meanwhile, the Senate Tea Party caucus inks just its fourth member.

--Two days after President Obama calls for bipartisan immigration reform, GOP Senators Paul and Vitter unveil a resolution to end birthright citizenship.

--And Super Bowl wagers go highbrow.