you know in yemen, saleh is asserting that the protests are an american/israeli plot. meanwhile the protesters are asserting that the crackdown by saleh is american-backed. whatever the fact, it's obvious that anti-americanism is something everyone agrees on. i think you'd have to blame the bush admin on that, in part (on the other hand decades of uncritical support for israel, combined with arab antisemitism, doesn't help. neither exploitation of oil, arming despots to the teeth etc.) on the other hand, the 'pragmatism' of the obama admin is extremely disconcerting; i think we don't know which side to be on; we just want to back and thus influence the winners. what we say about libya is exquisitely proportioned to who's winning, as it was in egypt.