Squirming in their shoes ...

Some potentates - Kings, Presidents, or Heads of States in the Middle east - are surely now squirming in their shoes for fear that the conflagrations that started in Tunisia are going to affect their countries. Now, it's the turn of Hosni Mubarak whose 30-year old stranglehold on the Egyptian people will soon come to an end. The Egyptians are simply getting fed up of the present regime and want those responsible to get out. Like King Farouk before him who was kicked out by the people, Mubarak is soon facing the inevitable. Anuar Sadat was lucky for being assassinated by his military.

The common thread running through the countries in the Middle East, with the exception of Iran, is the US government's influence. All of them are pro US if not for because of US aid or simply for being staunch US allies like Saudi Arabia.

I foresee Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, even Libya and Saudi Arabia to be the next countries to be afflicted with "tunisiami" floods. Now with communism gone and Al Qaeda not really influencing anyone for the US to blame on, the root cause of the problems are simply economics - the people have no jobs, prices of goods are high, incomes are low, the poor are getting poorer, and so on.

Thus we see Heads of States like Mohd Reza Pahlevi of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philipines and Suharto of Indonesia being forced out of office by their own people who had aggressively demonstrated that their kind of regimes, democratic or otherwise, that brought misery, hardship, corruption, death and sufferings to their own people have only one destiny - their own demise.

Meanwhile, Israel is watching the whole situation with glee and waiting for the right time to pounce.