WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Sunday that Egypt is not going to go back to the way it was before pro-democracy protests roiled the country, and played down prospects that the Muslim Brotherhood would take a major role in a new government.
“I think that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt,” Obama said. “They don’t have majority support.”
The president said it it’s important “not to say that our only two options are the Muslim Brotherhood, or to suppress the Egyptian people.”
Even so, Obama said the Brotherhood, a banned political and religious group in Egypt, is well-organized and “there are strains of their ideology that are anti-U.S.”
Still, he said he had confidence that a representative government the U.S. could work with would emerge “if Egypt moves in an orderly transition process.”
Obama, speaking on Fox television ahead of its broadcast of the Super Bowl, would not be drawn into predicting whether Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would step down.
“Only he knows what he’s going to do,” Obama said.
“The U.S. can’t forcefully dictate, but what we can do is say the time is now for you to start making a change in your country,” the president said. “Mubarak has already decided he’s not going to run again.”
Nearly two weeks into the Egyptian crisis, the Obama administration is still struggling to find a path forward that protects U.S. security interests without abandoning the pro-democracy protesters.
The president said the U.S. had long tried to influence Egypt to avoid the kind of revolt that has unfolded.
“We have also consistently said both publicly and privately that trying to suppress your own people is something that is not sustainable,” he said. “When you resort to repression, when you resort to violence, that does not work.”
