This looks like a wish list for Us policy makers, all of the nominees are or were enemies of the Us , what about Saudi Arabia , Morocco , Yemen , Afghanistan and the micro states in the gulf. What about the lobbyists dictatorship in the Us itself.

Ah Freedom House- Egyptian state TV has a bone to pick with you....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiCJaVxvpc8&feature=youtu.be

Mehwar channel- who did such a good job scaring all my friends on January 29th with their call-in lines, but when we called in- the lines didn't work.

Good riddance.

Freedom House is a suspected front. Certainly. political NGOs have been the trojan horse of American intervention in foreign countries. No, Israel does not assist America in funding these fronts because America is wealthy enough. But Israel has its own fronts. The SPLA has colluded with America and Israel for decades. The PKK has Israeli support.

Political NGOs are indeed a front for American foreign interests. It has been established that the CIA funnels money to foundations which in turn funnel money to other foundations which in turn funnel money to NGOs and organizations which are organized and designed and led with the purpose of accomplishing American interests in a region. And the preceding stages that opened up the door to these NGOs was the globalization plan which America has been instituting for the past 20 years, pushing nations to reform and reorganize to allow for privatization, dergulation, and permitting foreign NGOs and civil society organizations. They have often gained ground in emotional issues, like animal rights, womens' rights, etc. or in the case of Egypt, political rights.

And the end result is foreign countries become subject to American corporate interests and subservient to American intrests in the region to the detriment of the people's interests. It is well known that many American corporations have greater power in various nations than those nations' own governments by controlling resources, food, etc.

kingdom of Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa is in the short list. If US loses this strategic ally in the reign then US will lose both sides of Strait of Hormoz (20% of the world oil usage passes through this strait) US Navy's headquarter in the reign will face a big issue. Oil price will goes up and up and up ... then Western countries citizens can not pay their bills... Oh my god it seems US is on the list! Some one need to call Obama! Watch carefully! You are losing the chess.

have no idea whether they should step down or not for not knowing too much about them
strangely, americans like to throw over some countries' leaders

whether it is historic or not, any country has its own way going, why are americans so curious to prove their own is the best, in the name of freedom ,and present "advice(?)" by the president...

the world is made up by air and stones, water and fire, animals and plants, not just freedom/democracy...

...clearly shows where US (or should i say CIA) wants to install their little puppets at.

with consideration to the persecuion of Syrian People, hungry, and prevent of their freedom, Syria must be the next, but because the opposition parties are not united yet, so it may take a time meanwhile,

For sure, the next in change is Aljeria

This list ignores the circumstances that lead to the overthrow of Egypt and Tunisia. The biggest factor is the decline of the West. While the US is keeping up the fight, what our journalists haven't told you is how much NATO has retreated. EU people don't like war/defense, and with their economic troubles, many countries are dissolving their military. Germany, the EU economic powerhouse, is tired of war too, and very close to Turkey. These pressures combined with Western central banking stimulus has created a commodities bubble that has really strained budgets of resource poor countries like Tunisia and Egypt. Many of the countries the list offers are also resource poor and the leaders are certainly unpopular abroad.

My list includes Jordan, and Morocco. Like like Egypt and Tunisia these countries are resource poor and are being hit by the commodities speculation bubbles that the Fed has allowed the banks to fix their balance sheets at the cost of the world economic recovery.

Libya has ample oil reserves and few people, it shouldn't be tough to maintain control. Algeria too is rich and its leaders have the means to keep their people happy. Morocco and Jordan DON'T. When Jordan falls the Zionists may just leave. They are brave cowards who vanish once the protection of US defense dep't might leaves. Watch Jordan

The father of our country, the wisest of all our presidents, warned us so keenly of the perils to our now past republic: standing armies (militarism), irresponsible resistance to reasonable taxation and engaging in foreign entanglements (see his farewell message of 1796).

When our political leaders install, support or depose tyrants they are engaging us in foreign entanglements, exactly about which George Washington forewarned us. Our rulers, the corporate and military elite, would have us look upon Washington as quaint, outmoded, of a different era. That effort to have us ignore his words serves them. It makes them wealthy and us poor. It has destroyed our republic as Chalmers Johnson, 220 years later, described to us in his books ("Nemesis").

Washington's warning against a powerful military establishment has been unheeded. His warning about wealthy persons who complain about having to pay taxes has not prevented the division of this declining country into the super-rich and the rest of us, who are getting poorer. Finally, our corrupted presidents and congresses have ensnared us in perpetual wars in order to pursue and control the wealth and the lives of foreigners and to keep us chained to a military machine out of the terrorsim that that machine has fostered.

Of course, they were! No country has threatened to attack us since Germany and Japan. Not even the Soviet Union! Yet, since the end of WWII, we have been led to become a militarized society. Our jobs depend on military appropriations. Our safety and prestige, we are told, depend on military strength. Ironically, it has been our militarism that has weakened us in international trade and civilian production. We have allowed the production of armaments to be our key industry (besides the financial paper-mill of Wall Street). We became a nuclear power when that was no longer necessary. We foolishly started a nuclear arms race with the USSR. Did we expect that other nations would allow us to be the only nuclear power? Yes! We foolishly did, and now we continue to expect countries that do not have such weapons to shun them!

We have been very badly led in the past 66 years. We have lost our republic to a plutocracy that thrives on death and destruction world-wide, from Haiti to Afghanistan. We don't have to look for tyrants outside our borders. We have have enough at home to keep from the citadels of power, but as a nation we would rather watch TV.

Look at all I write against our system! Do you know the old joke about the difference between speech in American and the Soviet Union?

In the USSR, you can say nothing, because everything you say matters.
In the US, you can say anything, because nothing you say matters.

Free Burma

I have no argument regarding these leaders being on the list. They are unquestionably tyrants and belong here.

i am amazed how hypocritical it is for the US to torture people - to have ex-presidents of the US actually gloating about it - in print, none the less - then create list after list of how horrible everyone else is.

If you ask the street in the mid-east the overwhelming majority of the people there believe that Israel and the US are the top 2 most dangerous countries in the world.

We like to talk about our 'liberty' yet we were ranked in the middle of the most free nations in the world, spend more on our military than the rest of the plant combined, have been in perpetual war for the last 100 years, and wonder why everyone thinks we are such a threat.

Ugh.

To all tourists that left Egypt recently
Please come again
Egypt welcome you
Egypt is now very safe and free

There is a difference between which regimes/leaders "ought" to go next and which are the ones "likely" to go next. "Ought" should be determined by measures like whether they maintain their power by killing their own people, how many they kill, and whether they kill based on ethnicity, politics, etc. Such regimes should be on any short list of those that "ought" to go, but in most cases, these regimes are largely immune to removal from within; they have their people too cowed.

Economic performance is a second dimension. A regime that insists on pursuing policies that systematically mess up its national economy ought to go, while one that learns to adopt policies that result in economic progress should be tolerated even if it makes some mistakes.

Civil liberties is a third dimension, but there don't seem to be any examples of a regime falling when its domestic economy is working and there aren't extensive killings, but there are restrictions on the press or freedom of speech.

By these criteria, North Korea and Zimbabwe are at the front of the "ought" line, but neither regime is likely to fall anytime soon.

The "likely" line is rather different. It includes regimes that are messing up without being effective at suppressing opposition. Arab regimes dominate this category, which is why we have Tunisia and Egypt so far, with others to come. Yemen is a good bet for a change, and I suspect Sudan will experience a similar change after the separation with the south has been completed. A candidate outside the Arab world is Pakistan; if food prices cannot be controlled, a probably violent outcome is almost certain.

Both of you are in violation of Blaise Pascal's first moral obligation to think clearly.

THEAZCOWBOY believes the United States and Israel, his "homicide twins," are responsible for the violence in the Middle East. He couldn't be further from right. The root of Mideast violence lies in Islamic culture where the sense of superioty by virtue of being Muslim has given rise to powerful antinomian tendencies and has enabled rulers to do as they wish, often at great cost to their subjects.

I doubt he knows anything about history, but the conflict between the Sunnis and Shia started in the Seventh Century, more than seven centuries before Columbus came to the New World and more than a thousand years before the establishment of the United States. It has given rise to the bloodiest wars in the region during the last century. The Iran-Iraq war, conducted along Sunni-vs-Shia lines, killed more than seven times as many as all the Arab-Israeli wars combined. The Shia offshoot Allawi government of Syria killed more of its own civilians in an attack on the Sunni city of Hama than have been killed in all the Arab-Israeli wars.

If Muslims, both Sunnis and Shia, could learn to accept the legitimacy of people who don't accept their creed, they would make major progress toward peace. Making peace with the Jews in Israel could be the first step.

The US role since World War II has increasingly been to maintain the status quo. While there are cases in which change is not just inevitable, but also desirable, most changes that are brought about by violence are not desirable. The US has opposed these changes, and in the process, may have done a lot of good. Does THEAZCOWBOY really think that more Kim Jong Il's would be good for the planet and the people they control, because that is the likely result of the US not doing what it has done.

GOEDEL likes to denounce the United States and the "corporate interests" that control it. I will grant that corporations are powerful in the United States, but that is not the principle problem in American society. The real problem is that government after government has sought to ensure its continued control by promising the people more than it can deliver and by encouraging people to consume more than they produce. That is why we are in the financial bind we are now in.

Americans have a higher standard of living than people who live elsewhere largely because the government has encouraged us to consume more than we can really afford. Rather than encouraging thrift and investment, now largely abandoned to those evil corporations, we have been urged to take on more debt than we can afford. All of this is possible because, in large measure thanks to education reform, most American are economically illiterate. An electorate that understood how the world actually works would never have elected Barack Obama; indeed he probably would never have been taken seriously in the Iowa caucuses.

I fear that too much of democracy to a relatively uncivilized nations will be a disaster. Instead of achieving growth and prosperity they will waste time with arguments over trivial issues. There is some point where people of a nation be ready for democracy. I guess good politicians should know that tipping point. That's what I think all these revolutions really make sense and serve in the best interest of that nations citizens.

Debora
LPN Training

This list is somewhat disappointing. As another commenter pointed out, I came to this list assuming that it would be analysis as to what leaders "might/are likely" to leave, instead of an "ought to" leave list. Interestingly, this list is essentially just a rehash of Condi Rice's 2005 "Outposts of Tyranny", minus Burma and Iran and plus Libya. Not terribly informative, and completely neglects Saudi Arabia, much of Central Asia, Venezuela.

A quick quibble about Lukashenko: he is definitely a neo-Soviet dictator who has been responsible for political torture and killings, but describing Belarus as an "economic wasteland" is post Soviet stereotyping and hyperbole. The country's GDP per capita is on the high end both under nominal and PPP terms (about where Russia is) and is lightyears above politically freer countries in Europe, such as Serbia, Bosnia and Albania. Belarus is no more an economic wasteland than other corrupt developing countries with big income disparities.

As for the Castros: they are going. They're both in their 80s. Change of some kind is coming to Cuba. The author should've focused more on the problems in Venezuela or similarly-aligned countries. And North Korea and Zimbabwe are not changing any time soon.

Libya? We can only hope and pray that the change will come without too much further bloodshed!