There were other voices of caution. Brennan had spent much of his career working on issues related to the Middle East. Unlike some of the other principals, he knew Mubarak couldn’t weather the storm. But he warned that Egypt wasn’t ready for democracy, that the population had no experience of a politics that wasn’t zero-sum. The same Saturday, as I was working to clarify Wisner’s statement in the press, Brennan gave me a note: “It is a truism to say that there is a far greater unity among the masses in Egypt on what and who they want to see gone than there is on what and who they want in
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