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Whilst there is revolution in the Egyptian air.....US sticks to its old tired script

One has to wonder what universe the US occupies when its foreign policy is so often out of sync with the realities on the ground, regularly rooted in supporting despots and dictators and failing to recognise a changing world. Take the current events in Egypt and the US response - as veteran journalist Paul McGeough explains in a piece in The Sydney Morning Herald.

"Events in the Middle East are moving too fast for the Obama administration to think it can get away with Plan A and Plan B reaction strategies according to the regimes or leaders it wants to keep in and out of power.

Consider the response of the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to Hezbollah tightening its grip on power in Lebanon this week - Washington might have to pull its funding worth hundreds of millions for Lebanon, her office warned.

But as democracy demonstrators were confronted by thousands of baton-wielding policemen in the streets in Cairo, there was no mention of pulling the $US2 billion-plus cheque that Washington writes for the octogenarian President, Hosni Mubarak, each year.

Instead, a rhetorical nugget that Mubarak's mouthpieces would use in their defence - ''our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable'' and then some namby-pamby words about how Mubarak was ''looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people''.

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