Though if the activist movement goes on in Egypt such nefarious plans will be stopped on their tracks sooner or later. While it looks like the civil society of Egypt is in tatters it will raise.

The Endowment has been a vital instrument in the deployment of “soft power” to further US interests, acting as a conduit for funding the “color revolutions” that were sparked by US-funded activists in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. It is, in short, a weapon in the US arsenal designed to effect “regime change” in countries deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about becoming – or staying – a US protectorate.

The ‘Cairo 19′ Got What They Deserve, Regime-changers up against the wall in Egypt
by Justin Raimondo, February 10, 2012 antiwar.com

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Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy funds non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. It is through the operations of NGOs that Washington added the former Soviet Republic of Georgia to Washington’s empire

Will Iran Be Attacked? Paul Craig Roberts

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n December also, a top Chinese official charged U.S. Consul General Stephen Young in Hong Kong with trying to spread disorder. "Wherever (Young) goes, theres trouble and so-called color revolutions," said the pro-Communist Party Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po...And if we are intervening in Egypt to bring about the defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis, and the Islamists win as they are winning today, what do we expect the blowback to be? Would we want foreigners funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into our election of 2012?...How would Andrew Jackson have reacted if he caught British agents doing here what we do all over the world?

Our Innocents Abroad? by Pat Buchanan townhall.com

Field Marshal Shaikh Khalifa, commander in chief of the Bahrain Defence Forces, told Al Ayam newspapers that 22 NGOs, most of them funded by the US, were plotting against the regime.
"Nineteen of them are based in the US and three in a Gulf country," he said, although he would not name the Gulf state.
Read more: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/299163/20120215/bahrain-protests-iran-hezbollah-connection-regime-blames.htm#ixzz1mUBwIVQe

i just find it hard to believe that this happens without US pre-approval for the accusations. My speculation can go much further, but with no proof, I will just make the point that there is tacit approval from the patrons regarding these public accusations.

If interventions are going to be done this way, then one cannot be surprised (I'm not saying that you are, I'm saying that other people have been) that Libya is now a mess but hope that the same formula can be repeated elsewhere: for example, a recent Foreign Affairs article on Iran calling for regime change that says "Go Big -- Then Go Home." This is the kind of thinking Libya has engendered. The idea that regime change can be done on the cheap and that once the dictator is down, everything can work out without further involvement and we've done the right thing and can go home. To act and consider only the "clear and present" danger risks creating more problems than it solves. I think it is possible to act and consider beyond that and still be able to act. The JCS and NATO chiefs are smart guys, despite what I may mumble under my breath sometimes, and what I'm talking about - militias, internment camps, freebooting ex-soldiers and loose arms - are military problems they should understand intimately and be working to address.

And yes, there IS a whole other dimension on R2P - which at least one critic has called "the irresponsibility to protect" - I'm not really addressing here: whether it needed to be done at all. Granted, it's hard for an American (me) to argue that all foreign intervention is evil and can never, *ever* be justified or ever even considered when "foreign intervention" is partly why America exists today. I guess that makes me a hypocrite, but I'm no philosopher. :)

That argument there tries to grapple with the red lines you mention, and that's a whole other debate. Here, I am pointing out that if statesmen and women are going to resort to the most extreme force of statecraft - military intervention - and cite R2P, they ought to be preparing for what comes after they've gotten involved if they're seriously committed to "helping" these people or "defending" their respective national interests as Europeans or Americans (or Qataris, etc.). That's actually why, rather than making reference to the "irresponsibility to protect" argument, I chose the title I did. I believe that these current problems in Libya could be mitigated without the sort of massive economy-crippling, sovereignty-smashing and government-toppling sort of engagement that the West now fears after Iraq. In some ways, they've set that debacle up as a strawman to swear they won't imitate it while ignoring lessons on intervention and peacekeeping learned elsewhere - some good, many bad - from places like Lebanon, Somalia, Bosnia or Sudan in the 1990s.

My main problem as a realist is with the way they've presented their case. More explanation of their position is needed, especially on the matter of transitioning from wartime to peace. It never ends when the planes fly back to base. And *especially* if the US Senate or our UN mission is going to start treating Libya as a blueprint for action in Syria or Iran.

(If I remember right, your Libya podcast touched on the imminent threat to Bengazi as an important part of the considerations involved. And it might be worth thinking about whether there is some sort of red line of slaughter in Syria that might compel someone to intervene all other considerations be dammed.)