Was Mubarak Setting a Trap With Defiant Speech?

It was the rhetorical equivalent of hitting a hornet's nest.

After Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak addressed his fellow citizens and the world about the future of his government, the mood of hundreds of thousands of protesting citizens turned from one of celebration to outright rage.

Across the globe, observers commented that Mubarak was tone deaf, out of touch and essentially not hearing the voices of his own people. But what if the Egyptian leader were actually trying to incite the protesters?

CNN's Fareed Zakaria argued that Mubarak's words may have been more calculated than clueless:

The danger here is that things will get radicalized. ... The opposition, the protesters, the crowds are going to get angrier and angrier. They're going to draw perhaps more violent people. That is, in a sense, what the regime is hoping for. In a strange sense, I think the Mubarak regime is trying to bait the crowd in Tahrir Square and is hoping for violence and is hoping for some kind of march on the presidential palace that seems to get violent. Then they can step in and in the guise of restoring order, return to the military rule, return to the martial law that they want to consolidate. That's the danger here. This might be a turn that history will record as the moment things went awry.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the man whom many Egyptians would like to see as the country's next president, seemed to concur with Zakaria that the speech had put the situation in a precarious spot. On Twitter, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition figure sounded resigned as to what the morning will bring.

Egypt will explode. Army must save the country nowless than a minute ago via webMohamed ElBaradei
ElBaradei

As President Barack Obama said today before Mubarak's speech, the world was "watching history unfold" in Egypt. The problem is, no one is sure how that history will play out over the next days and weeks.

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