How Cairo, U.S. Were Blindsided by Revolution

By CHARLES LEVINSON, MARGARET COKER And JAY SOLOMON
WSJ

Two months before Egypt exploded in popular rage, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egypt's foreign minister, in her seventh-floor offices in Washington.

U.S. officials were miffed that Cairo was ignoring their pleas to make coming legislative elections more credible by allowing international ballot monitors.

But after the meeting, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Aboul Gheit mentioned that disagreement when they spoke publicly. Mrs. Clinton praised the longstanding partnership between the U.S. and Egypt as the "cornerstone of stability and security in the Middle East and beyond."

Months later, that cornerstone is crumbling. A week-long wave of demonstrations has pushed President Hosni Mubarak to promise he'll leave—and the repercussions of the tumult in the Arab world's most populous land have only begun to reverberate around the strategic and volatile Middle East.

(Original here.)