BUT WHAT COMES NEXT? – AT 8:00 P.M. ET:  An Arab tyrant bites the dust, but the next guy at bat may turn out to be worse.  From Fox:

SANAA, Yemen – Yemen's embattled president agreed Saturday to a proposal by Gulf Arab mediators to step down within 30 days and hand power to his deputy in exchange for immunity from prosecution, a major about-face for the autocratic leader who has ruled for 32 years.

A coalition of seven opposition parties said they also accepted the deal but with reservations. Even if the differences are overcome, those parties do not speak for all of the hundreds of thousands of protesters seeking President Ali Abdullah Saleh's ouster, and signs were already emerging that a deal on those terms would not end confrontations in the streets.

A day earlier, protesters staged the largest of two months of demonstrations, filling a five-lane boulevard across the capital with a sea of hundreds of thousands of people. Day after day of protest have presented a stunning display of defiance in the face of a crackdown that has included sniper attacks and killed more than 130 people.
The uprising and a wave of defections by allies, including several top military commanders, have left Saleh clinging to power and now appear to be pushing him to compromise on his earlier refusal to leave office before his term ends in 2013.

COMMENT:  Yemen is a main center for Al Qaeda in the Mideast.  Saleh has been kind of an American ally, although I wouldn't put him up there with Churchill.  In that part of the world  you never know what those boys are really doing.

A fear in some American circles is that the power vacuum will give Al Qaeda new opportunities.  In the Mideast it's very rarely a battle between good and bad.  It's usually a fight between different levels of bad.

April 23, 2011