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Post-Revolutionary Egypt

(Tablet) Lee Smith - Mubarak fought the Islamists tooth and nail for two decades, and they tried to kill him in Sudan. The reason that the Muslim Brotherhood still exists in spite of Mubarak's ruthlessness is that Islamism is a powerful political current that represents the flower of Arab modernity and will always have a constituency in Muslim-majority countries. Since the country's 2004 economic reforms, spearheaded by Gamal Mubarak and his band of technocrats, the country's economy grew at an average of 7% annually. It is not the rural or urban poor who engineered the revolution, but rather a large segment of middle-class youth enjoying the economic upturn who took to the streets. American taxpayers are expected to pick up the tab for someone else's street theater. The $2 billion that Washington has been giving Cairo every year for 30 years is essentially a bribe to convince Egypt not to shoot itself in the head by going to war with Israel.
2011-06-03 00:00:00
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