Winning Coalitions

There is a very interesting interview Charlie Rose has with Hosni Mubarak in 2000 (below). The most interesting thing Mubarak states is when he is talking about Syria's Assad: Mubarak states that Assad cannot give land concessions to Israel for peace and that even if we assume Assad is a dictator, he cannot act unconstrained. Charlie retorts by saying "but he can do whatever he wants." "No!" replies Mubarak, that's an assumption Westerns always carry. Assad may be a dictator, Mubarak continues, but he rules the country through his party, and while those forces are hard to see, he has to ultimately be answerable to them... unfortunately for Mubarak, he learned this the hard way when the Army forced him from office.