"It's a gloomy picture. The regime is losing its credibility."

Link

In the LATimes, here

" .... The men have given no indication that they will step down. Mubarak's term runs until 2011 and the king's reign lasts for as long as he sees fit. But Mubarak and Abdullah are frail.

In Egypt, there is incessant chatter that the president's younger son, Gamal, will follow his father, and in Saudi Arabia, several leadership scenarios are unfolding within the ruling House of Saud.

A senior State Department official said the U.S. believes that its relationship with the two countries is "deep enough and broad enough to withstand the strains of any kind of transition."

But the official, who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter, added that the eventual absence of Mubarak, who has been in power since 1981, and Abdullah, who took the throne in 2005 but has run Saudi Arabia since 1996, when the since-deceased King Fahd suffered a stroke, raises concerns about the future of a jittery Middle East.

The imprints the aging leaders have left are indelible. Mubarak has kept peace with Israel -- at a stiff cost to his domestic credibility -- while pushing for a Palestinian state. Abdullah has transformed his kingdom's oil wealth into diplomatic power as Riyadh, the Saudi capital, has become influential from Beirut to Kabul, Afghanistan.

The pair have brushed aside historical animosities between their nations to cooperate in confronting what they regard as major threats to the Sunni Muslim Arab world: the prospect of a nuclear-armed Shiite Iran and the violence sparked by Islamic militancy extending from North Africa to Indonesia....

It is likely that Iran, Syria and their Islamist allies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip will move quickly to provoke whoever follows the two leaders. At the same time, domestic reformers and opposition groups, especially the radical Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are expected to push for broader political freedoms....

"With the kingdom facing the prospect of enthroning a new king every two or three years (or even at closer intervals), the U.S. president faces the prospect of having to work with several Saudi monarchs during one term alone," noted a policy paper written by Simon Henderson, an expert on Saudi Arabia and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy....

Hamzawy of the Carnegie Endowment said that if the Egyptian regime can't agree on a post-Mubarak candidate, and economic and social anxieties spread, the country could enter a "chaotic succession . . . that the Muslim Brotherhood could exploit by using the street to demonstrate their influence."

.......The oppressed of Egypt and the young of Saudi Arabia are angry and restless. They listened to Obama's June speech in Cairo, and many were disappointed by the lack of criticism of their nations' regimes, which often ignore American principles of democracy. ......"You live in an oil bonanza. The country is flush with money, but you have unemployment and 30% of the people living in poverty. Only 22% of families own their own homes.

"It's a gloomy picture. The regime is losing its credibility."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 10:50 AM