Saturday, February 05, 2011

Essential reading on the Egyptian Uprising

Issandr El Amrani, writing in the London Review of Books.

There has been a lot of great analysis of this ongoing intifada, but this is one of the best.

Did you know that the recently cashiered minister of interior, Habib al-Adly, had received FBI training. Good job, G-men! This is the guy that unleashed the thugs and opened the prisons to inflict chaos on the democracy movement and the Egyptian people.

Here's the conclusion:

When Ben-Ali fled from Tunis, he created a vacuum at the top of the state that was imperfectly but quickly filled. The initial interim government did not please many, but a sense of civic duty appears for now to have stabilised the situation without a resort to authoritarianism. Mubarak, on the other hand, created a security vacuum in order to spread panic. In agreeing to step down, he tried to ensure that the regime would survive. Egypt is not Tunisia, at least not yet.

No comments: