middle of it. richard and his crew are fine. we will have that amazing footage for you in a moment and richard will join us live. but put yourself in richard engel's shoes for a moment. if you had the job of being nbc's chief foreign correspondent, and say like him you speak arabic, your special area of expertise is the middle east, it's hard to imagine at this point when you get to come home, isn't it? i mean, the uprisings in tunesia that began four months ago, continued to rickochet, swell through north africa and through the mideast, bahrain, yemen, syria, now libya. as our country tries to get our american heads around not only what's happening in the mid east but also our relationship to it as americans, the great american awkwardness at the heart of this is how close the united states is and how supportive the united states has been to all of the leaders that are now getting overthrown by their own people, or where there are people trying it. from tunesia to