"...by reigning in the (albeit "anti-Western", apparently still "free") press?
"
That wasn't really my point (I didn't express it very well). My point was rather that Egypt and Saudi Arabia are not really our friends if, being authoritarian, they allow us to be the whipping boy for their failed policies. If those regimes were replaced by radical Muslim regimes, from the press vantage point I don't know that we'd really notice the difference.