Zakaria: Obama, tell Mubarak 'it's over'

Fareed Zakaria of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS says it is time for President Obama to tell Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak 'you have to go.' 

Here's a transcript of the exchange:

SPITZER: What are we to do? There simply seem to be no good options.

ZAKARIA: There aren't great options. And part of it is people who want the United States to be much more forthright in supporting the demonstrations have to realize.  

Imagine the alternate scenario. The United States were to take ally of 30 years that had made peace with Israel, fought al Qaeda, fought other Islamic terror groups, brokered deals for the Palestinians, tried to moderate Hamas, and say to him, you know what, there are street protests, we're dumping you unceremoniously.

What message does that send to other American allies?

All that said, I think that I have one principal suggestion to the administration.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: Which is - what they're saying publicly I don't care about. There is a balance they have to strike and maybe they can shade it one way or the other. Barack Obama needs to pick up the phone and make one phone call and that phone call should be to Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, and tell him, it's over. You have to go.

How you go, you can choose the manner of your departure. You can try to construct a process by which you leave but there is no circumstance in which you can continue to be the president of Egypt.

SPITZER: Let's talk about the military for a minute, because you said something so important. The military has so far at least said it will not fire on Egyptian civilians. Is there a point at which that would change?

ZAKARIA: They are the absolutely crucial player. Let's remember this is fundamentally a military dictatorship.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: It masks itself in civilian clothes but in 1952 when Nasser took power, it was an officer's coup. It has basically been the backbone of this regime ever since. And the military is trying to figure out - I guarantee you the most important man in Egypt right now is Field Marshal Tantawi, not Mubarak. The head of the military. And he's trying to figure out can they save the regime which provides enormous benefits to the military –

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: - by sacrificing Mubarak?

SPITZER: We've talked - referred to a fair number of countries over the course of these couple of minutes. Which - and everybody is saying which metaphor applies here? Is this Iran where you have the Shah being over thrown and then you have an ideologically driven religious radical group taking over? Or is this Eastern Europe where we saw the fall of communism and we saw essentially democracies rise in its stead?

Which of these metaphors makes sense?

ZAKARIA: I had a history professor at college who said, you know, history never really repeats itself. It only appears to –

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: - to the people who don't know the details.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: I think it's not Iran. There does not seem to be - you know, theocracy in the making here. The Brotherhood even - the Muslim Brotherhood, it does not have the aspirations of the Iranians to create a kind of Islamic state.

And it's not Eastern Europe because you don't have the societies that are essentially western and liberal societies that have been clamped down on.

Look, this is a messy Arab society which will have many, many difficulties. Look at Iraq and Iraq's democracy. I do think, though, it is the center of the Arab world. It is the place that everybody in the Arab world looks to. So what happens in Egypt will have an impact. SPITZER: You said the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't have the aspirations to create a theocracy. Do they not have the aspirations or do they not have the power to do it at this point?

ZAKARIA: For the last 30 years or so, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have moved in a direction of wanting to be a conservative socially religious organization that wants to institute some greater element of Shari. Now I do understand what that means, a lot of that is social welfare stuff. Some of it is things like the veil. Some of it is court procedures in which unfortunately women would have few voices.

But it's not some kind of totalitarian dictatorship. They seem to have accommodated themselves to the idea of democracy and they have done so for decades now.

SPITZER: Of course, the fear of what the Muslim Brotherhood stands for is saying to many people and forcing people so say, we've got to support Mubarak because that is the alternative.

ZAKARIA: Well, you see that most strikingly in Israel.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: Where - you know I mean a lot of the Israeli right tend to be kind of neo-cons. But on this issue they are turning out to be brutally realpolitik. They like Mubarak. They've dealt with Mubarak. Mubarak has been good for Israel and they don't want to see. Shimon Peres praised Mubarak to the skies today.

SPITZER: Given the overwhelming logic what you're saying about why President Obama should pick up the phone and make that call to President Mubarak, why has he not made it? What is he fearful? Is he fearful of the pushback from Saudi Arabia, from Jordan?

ZAKARIA: Oh, I'm sure he's getting pushback from all those countries. I think it's the balancing act, the way we're talking about. I think he's just got the balance wrong.

SPITZER: Will President Obama ever persuade the Saudi regime that forcing Mubarak out is the right thing to do?

ZAKARIA: No, no. Because the Saudi regime has no need to worry. They have a different compact with their people. They bribe them and it seems to work.

SPITZER: Because they have greater oil wealth and so they're able to throw baubles at the entire public.

ZAKARIA: Look at what happened in Kuwait. The Kuwaiti Amir just announced that every Kuwaiti is being given a gift of $3,000. Just a check to celebrate.

SPITZER: Right. Sounds like U.S. politics.

ZAKARIA: Yes. To celebrate somebody I can't remember - the 30th anniversary of the Amir's reign or something.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: So, you know, I think they might be all right, but they will never accept the idea of dislodging the regime. In an odd way, some of what's happening here is because of Egyptian successes over the last few years.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: They've been opening up the economy which stirs things up, and it creates aspirations and it raises expectations. And then to have a political system that's so repressive, it became untenable.

SPITZER: Some of the data about Egypt would make you think this shouldn't happen. Yes, there's massive poverty but the economy has been growing six, seven percent a year. And that is about as good as you can get.

ZAKARIA: It's what social scientists call a revolution of rising expectations. Tocqueville when he wrote about the French revolution said the worst moment for a bad regime is when it starts to reform.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: Because it raises expectations but it's never going to respond to all those expectations because it's still a dictatorship.

SPITZER: And you also had other data. Massive unemployment, wealth that was very, very concentrated at the very top.

Now, where else in the Arab world or elsewhere in the world does this message begin to resonate? We've seen Tunisia. Now we have Egypt. Briefly in Jordan, Yemen. Where does it go next? Is this a virus that is spreading?

ZAKARIA: Well, you have to look at Jordan very closely because it's another nonoil producing state and it's a pretty, you know, it's a pretty closed system as well. Syria has taken an interesting tact which is to do no reforms whatsoever.

SPITZER: Right, right.

ZAKARIA: So in a strange sense, you know, they have the kind of stability of North Korea.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: They may be able to get through it. But I think honestly it's unpredictable. I would be stunned if this was the last one. Egypt is too central to the Arab imagination. I think you have to look at Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Jordan. The gulf states and those monarchies, those are such small countries, they may be exempt. They may have somehow escaped this. But even there I think people are going to say, why don't we have a free press, why don't we have more accountability? Because once they see it in Egypt and it doesn't come from the barrel of the United States, it doesn't come from an American invasion, it comes from an organic uprising, I think lots of people in the Arab world they're saying, this could be me.

SPITZER: Because Egypt has always been the lynchpin emotionally of what happens in the Arab world?

ZAKARIA: Today when the Arabs watch movies, they all come from Egypt. When they listen to songs, they all come from Egypt.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: Egypt is the heart and soul of the Arab world.

SPITZER: Right. Fascinating. Fareed, thank you so much. This will continue no doubt. I hope to have you back.

ZAKARIA: A pleasure, Eliot.