Friday saw the culmination of 18 days of protests in Egypt. One day after President Hosni Mubarak’s defiant/insane speech, he was gone – pushed out by the military. There has been some partisan snark comparing the Obama administration’s handling of Egypt (and Tunisia) to the Bush administration’s democracy effort. This is a bit of political point-scoring, to be sure, but there is also some truth to it. The events and the eventual outcome in Egypt reveal the true extent of the United States’ power and influence in the Middle East. It is, in fact, limited.

Though not everything is . . .
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