That’s a legitimate concern, but it’s one that the Egyptian opposition is fully aware of and has a variety of mechanisms to address. And a new opinion survey shows that the Muslim Brotherhood has only 15 percent approval and its leaders get just 1 percent support in a presidential straw poll (the candidate to watch: Amr Moussa, the chief of the Arab League).

To many Egyptians, the U.S. is conspiring with the regime to push only cosmetic reforms while keeping the basic structure in power. That’s creating profound ill will. In Tahrir Square, I watched as young people predisposed to admire America  the Facebook generation  expressed a growing sense of betrayal. In a country where half the population is under 24, we are burning our bridges.

Americans, perhaps, don’t fully appreciate that the regime is mind-bogglingly corrupt and instinctively repressive. On my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, I’ve linked to a video that appears to show Egyptian forces shooting an unarmed, unthreatening protester in cold blood and to another that apparently shows a government vehicle driving through a group of protesters, striking them and hurtling on. Those videos are heart-wrenching, and it is because of long experience with the regime’s callousness that ordinary Egyptians don’t trust people like Mr. Suleiman one bit. They think he’s stalling in an effort to retain the system  and they’re probably right.

Human Rights Watch has confirmed 302 deaths in the Egypt upheavals, based on visits to hospitals in three cities, and says the real toll may be significantly higher. To put that in perspective, that is several times the toll when Iran crushed its pro-democracy movement in 2009. And it’s approaching the toll when the Chinese Army opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989. Yet when it’s our ally that does the killing, we counsel stability, gradualism and order.

These are Egypt’s problems to work out, not America’s. But whatever message we’re trying to send, the one that is coming through is that we continue to embrace the existing order, and that could taint our future relations with Egypt for many years to come.

Many years ago, when I studied Arabic intensively at the American University in Cairo, I was bewildered initially because for the first couple of months I learned only the past tense. That’s the basic tense in Arabic, and so in any Arabic conversation I was locked into the past.

The Obama administration seems equally caught in the past, in ways that undermine the secular pro-Western forces that are Egypt’s best hope. I hope the White House learns the future tense.