• Listen to this segment

• Listen to the entire program

The Obama Administration is reportedly in discussions with embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to prepare for his immediate resignation. Such a move would be followed by a transitional government headed by Mubarak’s new Vice Presidential appointee Omar Suleiman and supported by the Egyptian Army. A Pentagon spokesman has said that despite the uprising in Egypt the U.S. has no plans to stop weapons and other economic aid to the Mubarak regime. Colonel Dave Lapham went as far as to say that the military has “acted professionally and with restraint.” For more than 3 decades the U.S. has given Egypt tens of billions of dollars of weapons and ’til today, continues to support Mubarak’s authoritarian rule to the tune of $1.3 billion a year. Many of the weapons being used against the pro-democracy protesters in Egypt today are “Made in the U.S.A.” This is not at all unusual for the U.S.’s historic role in the Middle East. For decades, regardless of who is in the White House, American presidents and Congress members have propped up dictatorial regimes in Arab countries against the specter of fundamentalist Islamic takeovers and/or threats to the security of Israel. Countries like Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, and others have had decades-long undemocratic rulers benefit from American support. But even fundamentalist countries like Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states have enjoyed American beneficence in exchange for the stability preferred by capitalist enterprises. The current wave of largely secular, educated, young, Arab families, and students rising up against US-backed dictators has put President Obama in a tough spot, having to choose between stated American ideals, and the military and financial interests of the American state.

GUEST: Ahmad Shokr, Egyptian journalist and editor of the newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youmi, Joshua Stacher, Mideast specialist at Kent State University in the department of political science. He has spent over a decade in Cairo and is working on a book comparing Egypt and Syria.