Glass half full or half empty? Mona Eltahawy channels the old bliss was it in that dawn to be alive spirit:
To understand the importance of what's going in Egypt, take the barricades of 1968 (for a good youthful zing), throw them into a mixer with 1989 and blend to produce the potent brew that the popular uprising in Egypt is preparing to offer the entire region. It's the most exciting time of my life.
On the other hand, more Edmund Burke than William Wordsworth, we have Barry Rubin:
There are two basic possibilities: the regime will stabilize (with or without Mubarak) or power will be up for grabs. Now, here are the precedents for the latter situation:
Remember the Iranian revolution when all sorts of people poured out into the streets to demand freedom? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now president.
Remember the Beirut spring when people poured out into the streets to demand freedom? Hizballah is now running Lebanon.
Remember the Palestinians having free elections? Hamas is now running the Gaza Strip.
Remember democracy in Algeria? Tens of thousands of people were killed in the ensuing civil war.
It doesn't have to be that way but precedents are pretty daunting.
What did Egyptians tell the Pew poll recently when asked whether they liked "modernizers" or "Islamists"? Islamists: 59%; Modernizers: 27%. Now maybe they will vote for a Westernized guy in a suit who promises a liberal democracy but do you want to bet the Middle East on it? [...]
The Egyptian elite wants to save itself and if they have to dump Mubarak to do so—as we saw in Tunisia—the armed forces and the rest will do so. But if the regime itself falls creating a vacuum, that is going to be a very bad outcome. If I believed that something better could emerge that would be stable and greatly benefit Egyptians, I’d be for that. Yet is that really the case?
Consider this point. Egypt’s resources and capital are limited. There aren’t enough jobs or land or wealth. How would a new regime deal with these problems and mobilize popular support? One route would be to embark on a decades-long development program to make the desert green, etc. Yet with so much competition where would the money come from? How could Egypt try to gain markets already held by China, for example?
More likely is that a government would win support through demagoguery: blame America, blame the West, blame Israel, and proclaim that Islam is the answer. That’s how it has been in the Middle East in too many places. In two cases—Lebanon and the Gaza Strip—democracy (though other factors were also involved) has produced anti-democratic Islamist regimes that endorse terrorism and are allied to Iran and Syria.
Is America ready to bet that Egypt will be different? And on what evidentiary basis would that be done?
We shall see.
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