the wake of the mubarak speech, it struck the white house unexpectedly. i think the bottom line here is that if the people in that square are happy, and evidently they are, i think the west wing is going to be happy. it's been clear over the last 18 days of this uprising that the people are in the control of this situation were the hundreds of thousand of people in the streets of cairo. yes, there were conversations between president obama and mubarak. yes, there have been several conversations on a military to military level between the secretary of defense, between the joint chiefs of staffs and their counterparts, the secretary of state has spoken with suleiman as has vice president biden. there has been a lot of influen influence trying to get a coalition together to get mubarak to step aside. still, he would not do so and it was very evident at this point that the united states' options