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" This weekend, while Cairo was burning and Hosni Mubarak struggled to maintain power, I was in a kind of virtual Vulcan mind meld with a network of regional experts for my day job at Wikistrat, a Tel Aviv-based online scenario-modeling firm, ginning up ideas of what might come next for Egypt: Does the big man step down? Or do the people win? Does it all happen very fast, or way too slow? They&amp;#039;re not easy questions to answer, and what happens in the next day or so will be crucial. But based on that weekend of analysis \u2014 and quite a bit of time spent in Egypt, including close interactions with the military there \u2014 a clearer picture is starting to emerge. 1. Speed kills. This flash-mob revolt has gotten inside the Egyptian regime&amp;#039;s decision loop, and \u2014 all &amp;quot;net delusions&amp;quot; aside \u2014 the classic loop notion from legendary Air Force Colonel John Boyd holds true in Cairo: observe, orient, decide, and act. Once you get inside your enemy&amp;#039;s loop cycle, he&amp;#039;s screwed, because you&amp;#039;re making three or four chess moves while he&amp;#039;s in slow motion. That&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s going on right now inside Egypt \u2014 and in the region in this age: sclerotic regimes fumbling for responses to fast-moving events. Score one for Zuckerberg! 2. The real revolution already happened. Call this the follow-on revolt. (To the uprising in Tunisia, of course.) Hell, call it a revolution. Because no matter what people like Fareed Zakaria tell you about this being a &amp;quot;revolt&amp;quot; and not yet a true revolution with huge social change, well, that&amp;#039;s just backwards. The revolution has been there all along, and it&amp;#039;s called Globalization Begets Rising Income. In a nutshell, Egyptians, like the Tunisians before them, feel progress passing by. Two decades ago, Egypt sucked not much worse than China, India, and Turkey \u2014 certainly less so than sub-Saharan Africa. Now they see all of these places surging, and Mubarak&amp;#039;s got bupkes. So get it straight: the socio-economic revolution is well underway, and it&amp;#039;s just now finding expression in the form of political revolt. 3. The Egyptian military is large and in charge. Not that it&amp;#039;s interested in ruling things directly, but still. For the time being, the military is voting with its street tactics, clearly doing as little as necessary to keep the protests from going overboard (like signaling to the opposition that looting should be curbed) but effectively hanging Mubarak out to dry. The military is quite popular in Egypt (as opposed to the hated Interior Ministry), and no real resolution can survive its veto. 4. The crackdown was all hype. We had some seriously big names predicting that no more dominoes would fall and insisting that Mubarak&amp;#039;s security apparatus was more than up to the task. But that conventional wisdom was crushed by the events of the past week, signaling that we&amp;#039;re still in the early phases of a revolutionary cycle in the region \u2014 one that suddenly makes Tehran&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;great victory&amp;quot; in Lebanon (Hezbollah picked the new prime minister) look small by comparison. 5. Mohamed ElBaradei has good timing. Enough for Lenin to admire. I mean, who even knew this guy was Egyptian until a few months ago? Then suddenly he&amp;#039;s everywhere \u2014 on shoulders, maybe even in office. Armed with a Nobel Peace Prize from his days as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, you can pretty much go ahead and slot him in for Person of the Year if he&amp;#039;s president come December. That&amp;#039;s how important Egypt is in the Arab/Muslim world. Right now, our man is under house arrest in Cairo, which is a frickin&amp;#039; brilliant gig, because it instantly credentializes his role in these events. 6. Obama does not. The legacy of diplomatic boners here is magnificent: Hillary Clinton describing the Mubaraks as &amp;quot;friends of my family&amp;quot; last year, then just days ago describing the regime as &amp;quot;stable&amp;quot; (a term she sidestepped on Meet the Press yesterday), while Joe Biden denies Mubarak is a dictator and questions the legitimacy of the protestors&amp;#039; demands. (Earth to Joe: That&amp;#039;s Beijing&amp;#039;s line). Obama, as always, hangs to the back, confusing laconic with leadership and fostering the majority opinion in the Middle East that &amp;quot;freedom-loving&amp;quot; America is once again leading from behind. Hate to say it, but with the White House missing in action on this, you&amp;#039;ve got to ask: Where&amp;#039;s Dubya when you need him? 7. The China Model is taking a hit. For years, the Mubaraks (Hosni and his son Gamal) had been pushing this image: deliver income growth, and the masses will tolerate autocratic rule ad infinitum. Yes, Beijing has pulled it off magnificently since Tiananmen Square, but lately we&amp;#039;ve been sold the image of its transferability around the world (call it &amp;quot;state capitalism&amp;quot;). Scratch that paranoia off your list and realize this crisis is made to order for a West feeling low over its political-economic model. That&amp;#039;s what makes Obama&amp;#039;s tepid, backbench leadership style so off-putting. Read your own Cairo speech, sir! 8. But the Iran Path can&amp;#039;t be ruled out just yet. The Supreme Leader is already taking credit, painting this revolution as an Islamic one when it&amp;#039;s not. But remember how things went down in 1979: We can&amp;#039;t assume there&amp;#039;s enough of a middle class in place to propel a democratic outcome, because we&amp;#039;re talking street amateurs (true democrats long beaten down by the regime) versus seasoned professionals \u2014 in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood (established 1929). All a brother needs is a seat at the table and the door is cracked open; to wit, the Brotherhood announced on Sunday that it&amp;#039;s given its mandate to ElBaradei to negotiate a &amp;quot;unity government.&amp;quot; Sit yourself down, Brother! 9. Which is why Israel is so nervous right now. Among the fears: the &amp;quot;cold peace&amp;quot; gets colder, fast; what has long been a nice military-to-military relationship heads south; ElBaradei is not seen as a friend; and Palestinian-crammed Jordan could be next. No wonder Bibi Netanyahu told all his ministers to keep their mouths shut. 10. Nobody&amp;#039;s invading anybody. Five years ago in the magazine, I wrote that the next U.S. military intervention wouldn&amp;#039;t in be Iran but Egypt (&amp;quot;Let me give you the four scariest words I can&amp;#039;t pronounce in Arabic: Egypt after Hosni Mubarak.&amp;quot;) Now, before you go drawing up invasion plans, understand that the vast majority of the Pentagon&amp;#039;s crisis responses are one helluva lot more subtle than the 2003 &amp;quot;shock and awe&amp;quot; show in Baghdad. Our military&amp;#039;s relationship with the Egyptian military is long and deep and broad \u2014 as in, tens of billions of dollars of support since the mid-&amp;#039;70s. There&amp;#039;s just no way Washington will stand by and watch all that gear fall into the Brotherhood&amp;#039;s hands (like in &amp;#039;79), so rest assured that a vast network of personal relationships \u2014 as in, general to general \u2014 is being aggressively massaged right now. And remember: The Egyptian military has the ultimate veto, and the Pentagon holds the purse strings. But nobody knows what&amp;#039;s next. According to the collective wisdom of my fellow strategists, per the latest voting on the scenarios we came up with at Wikistrat, there&amp;#039;s a strong expectation that the military steps up soon and dumps Mubarak; that the U.S. dithers until the Egyptian military debuts its preferred interim leader; that, across the region, there will be &amp;quot;frantic firewalling&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;head-in-the-sand stalling&amp;quot; among next-up candidates (Jordan, Yemen, and are we eventually talking Saudi Arabia?). There will be hand wringing in the capital cities of the world&amp;#039;s great powers (&amp;quot;Who lost Egypt?&amp;quot;), but, if the crowd is to be believed, there will some unity-government-segueing-to-freedom thing going down in some neutral European capital. And in terms of an exit strategy, it&amp;#039;s unclear whether, post-Mubarak, we&amp;#039;ve got a Turkey or a Pakistan on our hands. I&amp;#039;m pretty sure we&amp;#039;re all hoping for Turkey. Esquire contributing editor Thomas P.M. Barnett is the author of Great Powers: America and the World After Bush and chief analyst at Wikistrat, where you can find more video bulletins like this:       "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a9326/egypt-news-5130520/>