WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama appeared on Tuesday to have persuaded his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, to take a middle course of promising to step aside later this year.
It was unclear if that would satisfy the hundreds of thousands of protesters who gathered across Egypt to call on Mubarak to immediately relinquish power.
After days of putting pressure on Mubarak while seeking to avoid unleashing instability in the longtime U.S. ally and most populous Arab nation, Obama sent an envoy to privately urge the Egyptian president to prepare for a transition in power.
Hours later, Mubarak said in a speech that he would not run for the presidency in September and would work in the last months of his term to allow the transfer of power, saying the main priority was the stability of the nation.
"It won't work. This just really won't work," Elliot Abrams, a former deputy national security adviser, told CNN.
"I can't see anybody in Tahrir Square accepting that he will be president for eight more months and that he would, after 30 years, be trusted to be the man in charge of the democratic transition. Why would anyone believe that?"
Former U.S. ambassador Frank Wisner met with Mubarak earlier and delivered a message about the need to prepare for an "orderly transition," according to U.S. officials.
Obama has struggled to balance pressure to back protesters' calls for political change against any perception the United States is meddling in another country's affairs. U.S. officials have been concerned that publicly urging Mubarak to quit would unsettle other authoritarian U.S. allies in the region.
Mubarak, 82, has been a close U.S. partner for decades.
Critics have accused the U.S. administration of being slow to grasp the scale of upheaval in Egypt after similar protests toppled nearby Tunisia's longtime president on January 14.
Brian Katulis, security analyst at Center for American Progress, said he viewed Mubarak's move as the start of a "very complicated political transition and negotiated process."
"It is unclear what comes next," Katulis said.
Also on Tuesday, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Margaret Scobey, spoke to Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, an opposition figure who has seen rising support from a broad swath of Egyptian groups.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke with Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Egypt's defense minister. The Pentagon declined to give details about the call.
Oil prices jumped above $102 per barrel on Tuesday amid concern about port disruptions in Egypt.
ElBaradei, the former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, returned to Egypt last week and has since seen growing support from opposition groups, including the banned Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, Christians, intellectuals and others.
Some influential U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday called for Mubarak to go, including John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an Obama ally.
(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Phil Stewart and David Alexander; writing by Caren Bohan; editing by Mohammad Zargham)
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