Sundry alarmists have been busy painting the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, as if Mubarak kept a lid on it rather than used it for his own purposes. The ease with which Suleiman called its leaders into a televised tea suggests how far the banned Brotherhood leadership was already "transformed" (in the Italian sense) into a wing of the National Democratic Party, with its own business and property interests and representation, as "independents" in parliament. In return, Mubarak intermittently pursued their socially conservative moral agenda against homosexuals, Christians and witches. Not only does the Brotherhood lack a single leader, but it is rife with inter-generational tensions; it is not evenly present in the major cities, where ironically, many young people are nostalgic for the good old louche times they see in Farouk-era films.

In the last decade a major rift was developing between the crony-globalisers and messianic privatisers around Gamal Mubarak, and businessmen with a more modest focus, including an army with its own ramified commercial interests. Into this burst angry jobless graduates, in a society where wasta or "clout" rules. Even tourists are not immune to the corruption: I've been asked for a bribe by Cairo airport customs officers. It is to all of this that the Tahrir Square crowds said "Enough", and for which 300 people gave their lives. Since Western intelligence agencies failed to detect this, tantalised as they are by terrorism, one might ask what on earth they are paid for.

In 1953, Kermit Roosevelt organised the "democratic" monarchical coup against Mossadeq in Iran. It took about three months with the CIA's then primitive technologies. Let's see what can be done, openly, by the West to assist the heterogeneous elements of the Egyptian Facebook Revolution to become functioning mass political parties, a genuine democracy.