So Much For the "Toned Down" Political Rhetoric

INDIANAPOLIS -- An Indiana deputy attorney general "is no longer employed" by the state after Mother Jones magazine reported he tweeted that police should to use live ammunition against Wisconsin labor protesters, the attorney general's office said Wednesday.

The magazine reported Wednesday that Jeffrey Cox responded "Use live ammunition" to a Saturday night posting on its Twitter account that said riot police could sweep protesters out of the Wisconsin capitol, where thousands have been protesting a bill that would strip public employees of collective bargaining rights.

Cox also referred to the protesters as "thugs physically threatening legally-elected state legislators & governor" and said "You're damn right I advocate deadly force," according to the magazine. He later told an Indianapolis television station the comments were intended to be satirical.

The Indiana attorney general's office said it conducted "a thorough and expeditious review" after the report.

"We respect individuals' First Amendment right to express their personal views on private online forums, but as public servants we are held by the public to a higher standard, and we should strive for civility," the office said in a statement.

Spokesman Bryan Corbin said the office confirmed Cox wrote the tweets but declined to offer further details about its review or Cox no longer having his job, citing confidentiality of personnel matters.

Cox told Indianapolis television station WRTV on Wednesday that his comments were satirical but acknowledged they were "not a good idea."

"I think in this day and age that tweet was not a good idea and in terms of that language, I'm not going to use it anymore," Cox said. But he also said public employees shouldn't have to surrender their free-speech rights.

"I think we're getting down a slippery slope here in terms of silencing people who disagree," he told the television station.

The Associated Press called several Indianapolis phone listings for a Jeffrey Cox, but could not immediately reach him Wednesday.

U.S. Vows to Assist Lybian Opposition

Libya's opposition movement has seized control of territory close to the capital, Tripoli, as anti-government protesters gear up for what could be a final battle for leader Muammar Gaddafi's stronghold.

Three areas in the east were reported to be under the control of protesters on Monday, a day after pro-democracy demonstrators took control of the city of Az-Zawiyah, just 50km west of Tripoli.

Men opposed to Gaddafi patrolled the streets of Az-Zawiyah, saying they had seized weapons and even tanks which they would use to defend themselves.

But they were also bracing themselves for a potential showdown with forces loyal to Gaddafi, who have reportedly surrounded the city.

Ezeldina, a Zawiyah resident, told Al Jazeera that people in the city had raided military camps to prepare for a potential raid by government forces.

"We are expecting an attack at any moment," he said. "We are forming rotating watch groups, guarding the neighbourhood."

Pro-Gaddafi rallies

Government forces manned several checkpoints between Az-Zawiyah and the capital, and supporters of the Libyan leader demonstrated in the Harsha district, 5km from the centre of Zawiyah.

Government loyalists also took to the streets just outside the capital, waving posters and chanting slogans.

The rallies appeared to be evidence that Gaddafi had not lost complete control of the capital.

Ibrahim Sharquieh, deputy director of the Brookings Doha Centre, said the battle between pro- and anti-Gaddafi forces for Tripoli is not likely to be won immediately.

"We know that [Gaddafi] is in the Bab al-Aziziya area [of Tripoli] and Bab al-Aziziya seems to be very secure. He has his militia around him and they are doing a good job protecting him," Sharquieh told Al Jazeera.

"He has even made some attacks outside the Bab al-Aziziya area.

"We can comfortably say that he is still in control in Tripoli. Although there is some resistance in some areas I don't think we can talk about the city falling today or tomorrow."

'US assistance'

Meanwhile, the calls for Gaddafi to step down multiplied, with the Canadian and British prime ministers urging the Libyan leader to leave.

Gaddafi said the UN council could not see that the capital, Tripoli, was secure.

Earlier, Gaddafi's son denied in a US television interview that turmoil was sweeping the country and said the military did not use force against the people, despite reports to the contrary.

Their calls come as the US secretary of state prepares for crisis talks in Switzerland. Hillary Clinton is due to meet other foreign ministers on the sidelines of a UN human rights meeting in Geneva on Monday.

Speaking ahead of the meeting, Clinton called for an end to the bloodshed in Libya.

"First we have to see the end of his regime and with no further bloodshed," she said, adding that Washington is eager for his ouster "as soon as possible".

"We want him to leave."

Clinton also said that Washington was "reaching out" to opposition groups, prepared to offer "any kind of assistance" to Libyans seeking to overthrow the regime.

However, opponents of Gaddafi forming a National Libyan Council in the east said they did not want any foreign intervention in the country.
Blaming al-Qaeda

Despite the international calls for him to step down, Gaddafi has remained defiant.

In an interview with Serbian television, Gaddafi repeated his message that he will stay in Libya and blamed foreigners and al-Qaeda for the unrest that is threatening his more than 41-year rule.

The interview with TV Pink in Belgrade was carried out over the phone while Gaddafi was in his office in Tripoli.

The Libyan leader also condemned the United Nations Security Council for imposing sanctions on him and launching a war crimes inquiry.

There was a "big, big gap between reality and the media reports," Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, told ABC News' "This Week" television programme. "The whole south is calm. The west is calm. The middle is calm. Even part of the east."

His assessment came as much of the oil-producing regions, including the second city of Benghazi, was in protesters' hands.

Saif Gaddafi also denied allegations that the military was targeting Libyan citizens.

"Show me a single attack, show me a single bomb," he said in the interview. "The Libyan air force destroyed just the
ammunition sites. That's it."

However, the death toll from the violent crackdown on protesters is estimated by some diplomats to be about 2,000.

U.S. Mideast Policy: The Case for Sitting on Our Hands

Dear world, sorry about the last 10 years. Peter Beinart on how the new wave of Mideast revolts may finally be ending America’s wasteful war on terror—and why it would have been smarter not to intervene in the first place.

They’re exhilarating, of course. But from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They’re sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been. Since September 11, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those wars have cost thousands of young Americans their lives and maimed many more. And for what? We were told (and I, for one, believed) that in jihadist terrorism we faced a threat of epic military and ideological power. We were told that unless we toppled anti-American regimes and imposed American ideals, the military and ideological balance would tip decisively in our enemies’ favor. “I will not wait on events,” vowed George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address. We were told to wage war because time was not on our side.

Turns out, time was on our side. It was on our side militarily, because Saddam Hussein had no nuclear-weapons program and because in almost 10 years Al Qaeda hasn’t managed another attack on the scale of 9/11 anywhere in the world. But it was also on our side ideologically, because although our foes appeared ideologically strong, they were actually ideologically weak. From Egypt to Libya to Bahrain to Iran, the lesson of the last month is that any regime that offers its people neither free speech nor a decent job is ideologically weak, whether it wraps itself in the mantle of leftism, secularism, or Islam. Had America’s leaders understood that after 9/11, they might have realized that waiting on events, rather than trying to remake the Middle East at gunpoint, wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

We are relearning the lesson that the architects of containment understood more than a half century ago. Then, key conservative intellectuals argued—George W. Bush style—that because the Soviet Union would grow inexorably stronger, the U.S. must launch preventive war while there was still a chance. Conservative writers like James Burnham and Republican leaders like John Foster Dulles and Barry Goldwater demanded an “offensive” strategy aimed at rolling back Soviet communism while there was still time, even if that meant initiating combat. The United States, insisted Dulles in 1952, must abandon “treadmill policies which, at best, might keep us in the same place until we drop exhausted.”

By treadmill policies, Dulles meant containment: the Truman administration’s policy of building up America’s noncommunist allies, both economically and militarily, so they could withstand Soviet subversion. The strategy’s architects believed the U.S. did not need to vanquish Soviet communism militarily because beneath the bravado, our enemy was weak. Eventually, in a showdown against a freer and more prosperous West, communism would vanquish itself.

Truman and his successors made terrible mistakes in the Cold War, but America’s ultimate success stemmed from this basic insight: that as an economically vibrant democracy facing an economically destitute tyranny, the U.S. could afford to wait. And because America did wait, the Cold War ended without catastrophe.

Now we may be witnessing the end of the “war on terror” as well. The rise of democratically elected Arab regimes that are less beholden to the United States represents Osama bin Laden’s and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s worst nightmare. The only source of their appeal was their opposition to American foreign policy at a time when other Middle Eastern leaders looked like corrupt flunkies for the U.S. and Israel.

America will still face huge challenges in the Middle East, mostly because Arabs and Muslims no longer stand in awe of our power. But they won’t be the challenges of discredited, destitute tyrants. They’ll be the challenge of politically accountable, economically modernizing regimes that throw in their lot with China, India, Russia, or Brazil, and question America’s right to patrol the Middle East and cheaply consume the oil under its soil.

Now, as in the Cold War, the health of our system will prove decisive. We were strong vis-à-vis our enemies on 9/11—strong enough to wait them out as long as we confronted challenges at home. But we didn’t, and will now likely face more formidable competitors from a weakened state. It’s a glorious time, and a time for regrets.

Can Al Qaeda Survive Revolts?

Dictators weren’t the only ones caught off guard by the sweep of revolts across the Middle East—so was Al Qaeda. Bruce Riedel on how the revolutions will affect the future of global jihad.

As the Arab world undergoes the most profound changes it has seen in over a half century, and the first-ever democratic revolutions in its history, al Qaeda has been caught off guard like everyone else. Now it is trying to regain its footing by looking for ways to gain advantage. So the stakes in Arabia’s earthquake include not just the outcome in each country, the price of oil, and broader regional security, they also involve a battle for the future of the global jihad.

Al Qaeda had nothing to do with the Jasmine revolution in Tunis that began the winter of Arab revolutions, nor did it have anything to do with the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. In both cases its various media mouthpieces were remarkably slow to catch up with events. Osama bin Laden has yet to utter one word about the changes in his native Arab world. But time will give it a chance to recover. Egypt especially matters enormously to al Qaeda as the center of the Arab world—its historic, demographic and cultural heart. How events play out in Egypt will directly impact al Qaeda’s ideology and narrative profoundly.

Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian number two in al Qaeda, was silent about the revolution that removed his nemesis until last week. He released the first of what promises to be several messages on the revolution through Sahab media (which literally means ‘in the clouds”). In this first commentary Zawahiri only repeated well-worn al Qaeda propaganda. Mubarak was a stooge of the American embassy. The Egyptian state is a creation of western imperialism. The great villain of Egypt is Napoleon Bonaparte! His 1798 invasion was the first plot “to call for the Jews to settle in Palestine,” Zawahiri claims, prefiguring Israel by a century and a half. Al Qaeda urges the complete overthrow of the corrupt Egyptian state, imposition of Islamic Sharia law, and Egypt’s merger into a new caliphate.

All of this is old stuff from Ayman (even the charge that Napoleon was a closet Zionist). This probably reflects the fact that what happened in Egypt is a total contradiction of al Qaeda’s ideology and he is playing catch up. For him change in the Islamic world should only come from violent jihad and terror, not broad based popular movements using Facebook and Twitter. Change should also not include the Muslim Brothers, Egypt’s largest and oldest Islamic party, which Zawahiri quit decades ago because it renounced violence. He has written a book, The Bitter Harvest, published in Pakistan on the Brotherhood’s many betrayals of jihad. The book is one of the gospels of global jihad.

Now Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi has claimed he is fighting an al Qaeda led rebellion in his eastern province of Cyrenaica. This is a vintage Arab autocrat’s effort to try to smear any opposition as al Qaeda. Al Qaeda’s North African franchise, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb through its al-Andalusia media arm (AQIM demands the re-conquest of Spain for the jihad), belatedly endorsed the uprising in Benghazi and other eastern cities but only days after it started. Again it looks caught off guard.

But al Qaeda’s history is one of resilience and adaptation. It will seek opportunity. It has not had a significant presence in Egypt since Mubarak smashed its cells in the 1990s but if the army tries to slow down the process of holding elections and devolving power to a civilian regime, al Qaeda will be quick to call foul. It will argue the revolution has been stolen by a military coup backed by America proving that only terror and jihad can produce real change.

In Libya, al Qaeda has long had a larger presence. Its Libyan arm has tried to stage revolts in the past in Cyrenaica. Libya has produced proportionally a larger number of al Qaeda recruits than its small population would warrant. One of the reasons the Clinton and Bush administrations began a dialogue with Gaddafi was because his intelligence services had a great deal of information on the terrorists because many are Libyans. If Libya dissolves into a lawless state with armed gangs of various militias, in effect a Somalia on the Mediterranean, al Qaeda may get a foot hold. But that does not mean the revolution today is our enemy. Far better would be for Gaddafi to be toppled and a new regime emerge that reflects a cross section of Libyan society.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has embraced the uprising in Yemen but it too is not in the driver’s seat in the demonstrations in Sana or Aden. It will of course benefit from prolonged unrest which diverts attention from counter-terrorism efforts. AQAP has no role in Bahrain where the opposition is predominately Shia, who are by definition anathema to al Qaeda’s Sunni world view.

The revolutions in Arab states this winter have demonstrated that the epicenter of al Qaeda’s global jihad has long moved away from the Arabs to Pakistan and south Asia. Aside from its branches in Iraq and Yemen it has been marginalized in the Arab world. Even in Iraq the Muslim Brotherhood has attacked it, and even in Gaza, Hamas has attacked it. It has sympathizers and may yet stage a comeback but for now it is on the margin. Thus these democratic changes have tremendous opportunity to weaken al Qaeda further and deal it death blows in countries where new open societies emerge with responsible democratic processes.

In Pakistan by contrast, al Qaeda has a host of allies and fellow travelers. It works very closely with the Pakistani Taliban and with Lashkar e Tayyiba. It has long standing ties to the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network. Its leaders still find sanctuary in Pakistan and it helps to murder Pakistani leaders like Benazir Bhutto who fight it. You can’t argue with al Qaeda’s priorities. Pakistan has the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world so it makes sense to put your main effort there.

NATO Action Mideast?

(CNN) -- If the U.S. military were to intervene in an increasingly chaotic Libya, it would most likely be part of a NATO action in which Libyan bloodshed has reached a humanitarian crisis, analysts said Thursday.

As reports emerged Thursday about deadly clashes between leader Moammar Gadhafi's forces and anti-government protesters in the town of Zawiya near Tunisia, analysts highlighted how Gadhafi has already pledged to fight a rebellion to martyrdom.

Military intervention "is something which I hope doesn't happen, but it looks as though at some point that it should happen," said Simon Henderson, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"What's an acceptable number of civilian deaths? I don't know. Choose your figure," Henderson said. "At the very least, instead of having a casualty list certainly in the hundreds, possibly in the thousands, we don't want a casualty list numbering in the tens of thousands, or 100,000 or so."

After 10 days of protest, Gadhafi has lost control of the eastern portion of a country he has ruled for 42 years, and analysts portrayed him as a dictator desperately clinging to power. Members of his government have defected, and in a sign of growing international pressure, Switzerland ordered Thursday that Gadhafi's assets be frozen.

"You've got to assume the worst about Moammar Gadhafi," Nicholas Burns, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former under secretary of state between 2005 and 2008, told CNN. "With his back to the wall, he's going to go out in a blaze of vicious attacks."

North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense chiefs ought to be holding discussions about "not taking action but preparation" for the Libyan crisis, said Robert Kagan, a Mideast expert who worked in the State Department under President Ronald Reagan.

"I don't think anyone is talking about immediate military actions now," Kagan told CNN, especially as 167 U.S. citizens are waiting on a ferry to leave Libya.

U.S. officials have said all options were under consideration, including sanctions and enforcement of a no-fly zone, to try to keep the Libyan government from attacking protesters.

Ibrahim Sharqieh, deputy director of Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, interpreted that statement as indicating that military force remains a possibility.

"In my opinion, it's still premature to talk about U.S. military intervention in Libya at this point, but we should not eliminate it completely," Sharqieh said.

Meanwhile, the Department of State recommended Thursday that the 6,000 or so Americans in Libya "depart immediately due to the potential for ongoing unrest."

Libya's disintegration, the latest Middle East uprising that has already toppled autocracies in nearby Tunisia and Egypt, poses greater impacts to Europe than the United States, analysts said.

Africa's largest oil producer, Libya exports 1.5 million barrels a day, mostly to Europe, which relies on the country for 10% of its energy needs, analysts said.

Meanwhile, refugees fleeing Libyan violence are expected to land in such European countries as Italy, analysts said.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama spoke with the leaders of France, Italy and the United Kingdom on coordinating an international response to the crisis in Libya, the White House said.

In separate phone conversations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and British Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama "expressed his deep concern with the Libyan government's use of violence, which violates international norms and every standard of human decency, and discussed appropriate and effective ways for the international community to immediately respond," the White House statement said.

While some critics say the Obama administration has been slow to react to Libya, the statement said Thursday's discussions were to "coordinate our urgent efforts to respond to developments and ensure that there is appropriate accountability."

"The leaders discussed the range of options that both the United States and European countries are preparing to hold the Libyan government accountable for its actions, as well as planning for humanitarian assistance," the White House statement said.

Complicating any consideration of military intervention is how American and European armed forces have been strained from repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq for almost 10 years, analysts said.

Libya's factions and tribalism would make an intervention perilous, said Nathan Hughes, director of military analysis for the global intelligence firm Stratfor of Austin, Texas.

"It's not clear what a post-Gadhafi Libya looks like," Hughes said. "It's a very messy situation. It would be a very difficult situation to jump into militarily.

"There are no geographical boundaries. There are soft demographic, cultural and tribal boundaries. To get enmeshed in that without understanding the local culture ... it would be a pretty tough spot to put troops in," Hughes added. "Once the writing is on the wall that Gadhafi is going to go likely to go, the incentive for the various tribal factions and other factions within Libya is to maneuver to make sure they have a place in whatever comes next."

Were NATO to send armed forces into Libya, the rest of the Arab world wouldn't protest much, the analysts said.

"I don't think they would have any problem with this. I would suspect that the Arab world would support this," Sharqieh said.

Added Henderson: "On day one, they would probably think it's a good idea. On day two, come back and ask...me."

Oil Production to "Shut Down Completely"

LONDON, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Oil production in Libya is expected to shut down completely and could be lost for a prolonged period of time, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said on Thursday.

"We expect Libyan production to be shut down completely and we might lose sweet crudes from Libya for a prolonged period of time," Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Sabine Schels told Reuters.

Schels said that the world faced the prospect of real supply shock in which the loss of 1.6 million barrels per day of sweet oil could potentially trigger a steep rise in prices and force a sharp reduction in demand to balance the system.

"Some of the supply can be replaced with Saudi light crude and some from SPR, but if the disruption is prolonged, we will need demand to drop to balance the system," Schels said.

The bank is currently discussing scenarios and outlooks, and will publish a report on its findings in the coming days.

"We already faced a demand shock last year with global demand increasing by 2.8 million bpd and on top of that, what we have now is a real supply shock," Schels said.

"In a price shock scenario whereby we lose 1.6 million bpd, the rise in prices can be a lot greater than in the case of a demand shock.

Middle East Solidarity

CAIRO — Hundreds of thousands of protesters turned out in cities across the Middle East on Friday to protest the unaccountability of their leaders and express solidarity with the uprising in Libya that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is trying to suppress with force.

In Iraq, demonstrations for better government services spiraled out of control in many places. Protesters burned buildings and security forces fired on crowds in Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi and in Salahuddin Province, north of the capital, killing at least four people.

Large-scale demonstrations in Yemen appeared to proceed more peacefully, even festively. More than 100,000 people poured into the streets on Friday, after Yemen’s embattled president pledged on Wednesday not to crack down on protesters.

In Egypt, tens of thousands of people returned to Tahrir Square in central Cairo to celebrate one full month since the start of the popular revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

In Bahrain, pro-democracy demonstrations on a scale that appeared to dwarf the largest ever seen in the tiny Persian Gulf nation blocked miles of downtown roads and highways in Manama, the capital, on Friday. The crowds overflowed from Pearl Square in the center of the city for the second time in a week.

In a shift from Tuesday, when antigovernment protesters brought more than 100,000 people to Pearl Square, on Friday it was the country’s Shiite religious leaders who called for people to take to the streets. That development could change the dynamic in Bahrain, where Shiites are the majority but the rulers belong to the Sunni minority.

“We are winners, and victory comes from God,” protesters chanted in Manama.

A small number of black flags — a Shiite mourning symbol — could be seen for the first time in the vast sea of red and white, the colors of Bahrain. Crowds stretched two miles to the Bahrain Mall, east of Pearl Square, and about another two miles southwest of the square to the Salmaniya Medical Complex.

Throughout the unrest that has gripped the region for more than a month, protest organizers have mounted their largest demonstrations on Fridays, when most people are off work and the day is punctuated by an important Muslim prayer service at noon.

The violence in Iraq came after demonstrators responded to a call for a “day of rage,” despite attempts by the government to keep people from taking to the streets. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki made a televised speech on Thursday urging Iraqis not to gather, and security officials in Baghdad banned all cars from the streets until further notice.

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As protesters took to the streets around the region, many kept their eyes on Libya, where the government has been waging a brutal crackdown against protesters, whose efforts over the past week have developed into a full-scale rebellion. Much of the east of the country is now in the hands of antigovernment rebels and clashes continue in the west. In Tripoli, which is under the control of mercenaries and militias as Colonel Qaddafi’s attempts to preserve the capital, protesters pledged to brave threats of violence to take to the streets.

In at least three neighborhoods of the capital, gunfire was reported after worshippers left Friday prayers in the early afternoon, with security forces acting either to disperse protesters gathering to march on the streets, or to deliberately target them. Those reports, in telephone interviews by news agencies, could not be independently confirmed.

Opposition leaders had also pledged to march to Tripoli from other cities, though the roads were reported to be thick with checkpoints and heavily armed forces that remain loyal to Colonel Qaddafi’s 40-year rule. But tens of thousands did turn out in Benghazi, the eastern city where the Libyan rebellion started over a week ago, and which is now in control of the opposition.

In Yemen, where protesters have faced sporadic violence from security forces and government supporters, roughly 100,000 people massed in the southern city of Taiz for demonstrations dubbed “Martyrs’ Friday,” in honor of two protesters who died in a grenade attack last week.

While weeks protests in the capital, Sana, have been tense, with repeated clashes between pro and antigovernment forces, the demonstration in Taiz, the intellectual hub of the country, took on a hopeful, exhilarated feel. Along with the youth who organized the protests on Facebook, older residents of the countryside flowed into the area of the town that protesters have dubbed Freedom Square.

“There are no parties, our revolution is a youth revolution,” read one banner. In emulation of Egypt’s Tahrir Square, the center of the protest zone in Taiz was filled with some 100 tents, where people had spent the night for more than a week, and there were national flags and large signs.

A cleric delivered a morning speech, reminding the people that the revolution was not against a single person but against oppression itself. And as noon prayers ended, the people broke out into the roaring chant that has now become familiar around the Arab world: “The people want to topple the regime.”

At the same time in the capital, tens of thousands of people were pouring into a square near the main gates of Sana University to call for the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh amid a tight security presence, The Associated Press reported.

In Cairo, tens of thousands of Egyptians flooded Tahrir Square as much to renew the spirit of Egypt’s popular revolution, which resulted in Mr. Mubarak’s resignation on Feb. 11, as to press for new demands. The square felt like a carnival, filled with banners in Egypt’s national colors of black, white and red. Vendors sold cheese and bean sandwiches and popcorn, a man fried liver on a portable grill, and others sold revolutionary souvenirs, like miniature flags, stuffed animals, and stickers for sale.

The utopian spirit of the revolution, which had included people from all aspects of Egyptian society, was still evident, as secular leftists, members of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and women wearing full Islamic veils with children on their arms circulated through the crowd. Ismael Abdul Latif, 27, a writer, chatted with the religious women, only their eyes showing, as they drew revolutionary posters.

“I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that we would be talking to a munaqaba”— as women in full veils are called — “in Tahrir Square,” he said. “A secular artist is having a political debate with a fully veiled lady and having a meaningful conversation. What’s the world coming to?”

But there were also signs of tension, as well as reminder that it was the military that ultimately remains in charge. Several hours into the demonstration, an army officer demanded that protesters dismantle the tents they were erecting in the center of the square, touching off a series of angry arguments.

There were fervent political demands as well, foremost among them, the resignation of the cabinet that Mr. Mubarak had appointed before his downfall, as well as the dismantling of the security apparatus, the release of prisoners still held under Egypt’s repressive emergency laws, and the prosecution of former leaders guilty of corruption.

George Ishaq, one of the founders of Kifaya, an early protest movement here, led chants through speakers, saying, “Our demand today is a presidential council in which civilians will take part. We want it to be one politician one judge, and one representative of the armed forces.”

“We are not leaving, he’s leaving,” the crowd chanted, referring this time to Ahmed Shafiq, the prime minister, with the slogan that had foretold Mr. Mubarak’s fall. “Mubarak left the palace, but Shafiq still governs Egypt.”