Reply #4: NYT: President Obama came out on the side of the Arab street, issuing a call for the Egyptian

[pampango]

military to quickly hand over power to a civilian, democratically elected government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/world/middleeast/us-urges-egypt-to-let-civilians-govern-quickly.html

In so doing, the president opened up a litany of risks, exposing a fault line between the United States and the Egyptian military which, perhaps more than any other entity in the region, has for 30 years served as the bulwark protecting a critical American concern in the Middle East: the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

In explicitly warning the military to swiftly begin a “full transfer of power” to a civilian government in a “just and inclusive manner,” the White House served notice that the army in Egypt would continue to receive the Obama administration’s support only if it, in turn, supported a real democratic transition.

The statement, issued at 3:03 a.m. in Washington, was timed to greet the news of the military’s selection of a new prime minister in Egypt and to get in front of protests in Cairo that drew hundreds of thousands, the largest turnout of a tumultuous week. It signaled, foreign policy experts said, the beginning of a shift in how the United States deals with a fast-changing Arab region and tries to preserve the Egypt-Israel peace accord.

“What we’re now doing is saying to the military that if you think you’re going to maintain military power, we’re not going to support that,” said Martin S. Indyk, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and the former United States ambassador to Israel. “We want you to play the role of midwife to democracy, not the role of military junta.”