Mubarak: He won't go gently...

ANALYSIS: A Sky news commentator today (February 10) suggested that President Barack Obama should listen to Sky rather than his notoriously incompetent CIA, to work out what is going on in Egypt. Obama, having been wrongly informed today (yet again) by CIA director Leon Panetta that Mubarak would step down, could also listen to us - because we've been telling our clients, he won't go.
Hosni Mubarak won't walk. It's not in his nature. He is gripped by the delusions of all old men who have been dictators for decades. He has been good for the country. The people love him. His foreign friends will stick with him. So he won't walk.
Mind you, he could well be pushed, but the dynamics of the power struggles within the military are as complicated as the quantum reactions at the core of an atom, and we are not predicting which general might make the leap.
Mubarak may deserve some grudging credit for trying to make the inevitable transition to a new Pharaonic order as non-violent as possible, but shunting chunks of power onto his deputy Omar Sulieman is not the most credible way to go. The old man of the ancient regime hands over to another old mandarin of the same order? We don't think so.
In Tahrir Square the young revolutionaries scornfully accuse Mubarak and Sulieman of treating them like children: "You've had your fun kids; now go home." Mubarak may have decided he's going nowhere, but so have they, and if nothing else is certain at this moment, one thing certainly is.
These "children" are going to be around a for a lot longer than Old Man Mubarak.