Question: if Iraq hadn't been invaded back then, would we be seeing the same kind of thing in Baghdad as we saw in Cairo yesterday? I don't think you can definitively say yes. If revolutions were predictable, they wouldn't happen at all. But it seems equally impossible to say that it couldn't have happened in the light of events over the last two months. Of course, between 2003 and whenever it did happen the Iraqis would have had to put up with Saddam. But given what they've had to put up with since then that would not necessarily have been the worst option.

A little more about that missile relationship I mentioned earlier. The one between Egypt and North Korea:

At the same time, Egypt has counted on North Korea for military aid in the 1970s and began purchasing Scud missiles from North Korea around the time that Mubarak became president. North Korea also provided the technology for Egypt to manufacture missiles on it own.

“Cairo is the hub of North Korea’s missile export,” says Choi Jin-wook, who follows North Korean affairs as senior fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification. Mr. Choi says North Korea’s embassy in Cairo is headquarters for the North’s Middle East military sales network and ranks as the North’s “most important embassy” after its embassy in Beijing.

Choi believes the deal with Orascom calls for North Korea to pay for the telecom network in hard currency earned from the sale of missiles and technology to clients including Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

Orascom is the Egyptian telecoms firm behind the North’s Koryolink mobile network. It’s kind of interesting that Pyongyang would work on something so sensitive with a country which has extensive intelligence co-operation with the US. It apparently has Vice President Suleiman’s nephew on retainer.

But what’s even more interesting about all this is that it was allowed to go on in the face of what was supposed to be a rigorous sanctions regime against Pyongyang and its weapons sales, also the source of collateral charges of evil against Iran, Syria, Myanmar etc.

Incredible stuff:

The pro-Mubarak crowd suddenly retreated, and the pro-democracy protesters advanced a moveable wall of metal shields to a new front line much further up.

A side battle erupted down a street behind the pro-Mubarak lines, with rock throwing and molotov cocktails.

which means that the anti-regime protestors have organised flank protection. Army input here?

An armored personnel carrier opened fire into the air, shooting red tracers up over Cairo, in an apparent effort to disperse/frighten the pro-Mubarak crowd, who contracted again.

The pro-democracy protesters are now advancing their line of staggered metal shields farther and farther and seem to have gained decisive momentum.

This war nerd piece is absolutely recommended (cheers to Chris).

The journalists on scene are obviously trying to make it clear who, in the general picture, is doing the attacking and who are the victims. But what's equally clear is that there's terrific resistance from the demonstrators; that's why they're still occupying the square. And they appear to be making a fantastic job of it.

The Jacksonauts make their contribution to public discourse:

MPs were given a stark warning this week: "We've already lost Turkey, Lebanon is gone too" – and now the west can't afford to lose Egypt.

The bearer of this message was Mort Zuckerman, the American newspaper and property mogul. He was in Westminster as a guest of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society, which boasts Michael Gove and Nick Boles among its supporters.

Well, yeah: thanks for that. Allegra Stratton says that the Tories are divided over Egypt and suspicious of their soft-on-the-muslims coalition chums. Well, probably. It’s not a three line whip issue. Personally I think Cameron has been a distinct improvement on this predecessor but one on this. I heard him yesterday going on about how despicable the violence was and thought he sounded…well, quite sweet, really.

The worst prospect for people like the Henry Jackson Society is if the Egyptian revolution succeeds and doesn’t lead to the Brothers establishing the Nilotic branch caliphate. It’s not a result you’d welcome if your financing and raison d’etre is threat-mongering. A lot of so called anti-jihadists have already flipped over into alternate reality, but that’s not an option if you have pretensions to respectability. Not so much, anyway.

Mubarak’s goon squads remind me a bit of the countergangs organised by the Indonesian army to try and terrify the population of East Timor into voting against independence in 1999. They’re described at length in Richard Lloyd Parry’s In the time of Madness.

A number of recruits for these outfits – with names like Red and White Iron – were drawn from children orphaned by the TNI in the original round of massacres after the 1975 invasion and raised in Indonesian orphanages. There was a payroll vote, as you’d expect, and criminal elements raised through various rackets run by Kopassus* partly as a means of harvesting street muscle as required. Quite a few were recruited through an organisation called Gardapaski, supposedly a local version of the Grameen Bank. What it actually did was front money to unemployed young men in return for their support when necessary.

Obviously, Mubarrak’s people will have their own channels for getting the meat on the street. I guess the point here is that a reasonably imaginative dictatorship has all sorts of ways to get the people it needs to do the things it wants done while not wearing official uniforms and that we won’t find out what they are until the system that does it is brought to an end.

And it’ll have to end now. A couple of days ago it was pretty clear that if they put Husni on a plane then the policy status quo could stay basically unchanged; that the removal of Mubarrak would carry enough of a symbolic charge to preserve most of the power of the local overclass, though of course things would have to become more inclusive. I thought that was the strategy: make Husni, or his absence, the change we can believe in, and yay reform. But not now. How can you hope to have an even partially fair election in nine months with the power structure that caused today’s carnage still basically in control?