We haven’t had very much to say about Egypt. We haven’t watched TV news on the subject. We’ve read a lot of course, including accounts from educated and goodhearted Egyptian participants in the demonstrations (here and here, for example), and some Americans watching Egyptians and getting the vapors. We’ve read realpolitik views of the situation, and people who blame Israel or the US itself for the situation.

We don’t have answers, but we have a few questions. Chief among them: if Mubarak has been a US ally for 30 years, why did the US ditch him after a week of street protests? Is US foreign policy that feckless? America has few enough allies in the Middle East. If US foreign policy can be turned on its head by TV coverage of a week or two of protests, why would anyone want to be an ally of the US? It seems that we are not the only ones asking this question.

UPDATE

From a report on NPR about unrest in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere:

In the past six months, the price of wheat and corn has nearly doubled in many parts of the world. And in areas where people spend as much as half their income on food, that’s making it very hard for people to feed their families…on corn, we’ve seen those commodity prices increase about 75 to 80 percent, wheat has increased about 75 to 80 percent in the last six months, and rice has gone up about 50 percent

Last month the NYT reported that in 2007 and 2008 there were food riots in Egypt. And things have apparently gotten much worse now for the many Egyptians who live on less than $2 a day. Did you know that the State Department says that over 40% of adult Egyptians are illiterate? There are plenty of reasons for disquiet and unrest besides those based on the TV interviews of young, urban, university-educated Egyptians who speak English. But perhaps that would overly complicate the storyline.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Religion, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.