Life in Egypt is not a bowl of virgins feeding you peeled grapes:
The prognosis is exceedingly grim. Two years after the ouster of long-serving strongman Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is in the throes of a full-blown economic crisis. Government reserves have dropped by more than half, plummeting from $36 billion in 2011 to just $15 billion today. That’s enough to cover just three months of imports of vital commodities such as food and petroleum. GDP growth has slowed to under 2 percent, and the country’s national currency, the Egyptian Pound, is in freefall. At the same time, unemployment has surged, now estimated at nearly 13 percent and rising. It’s no wonder that Maher Hamoud of the English-language Daily News Egypt recently likened the country’s economy to “a mud house in the rainy season.”
Fancy that. Tourists and investors aren't coming to Egypt under the current government with their current policies.
This is what the majority of people in Egypt wanted, of course. The government and policies, that is. I assume they didn't take the next step and want the results that logically follow the inputs the people chose.
The Arab Spring gave the Egyptians the chance to start a new path to freedom and prosperity as the original protesters in Tahrir Square wanted. The people then proceeded to screw up. For now, anyway.
Let's be grateful that Egypt lacks the oil to mask the logical outcomes of their chosen path. With some luck, Egyptians won't remain locked in the deadly embrace of the Islamists as Iran has for more than three decades. This is a long process. We need patience and a commitment to working the problem over the long haul.
We couldn't prevent the Egyptian people from screwing up their first chance to choose a new path. I had hoped that we could help engineer a constitution that would exclude those who reject rule of law and democracy. We did not do that.
Given the strength of the Moslem Brotherhood in the elections, it was probably beyond our capacity to engineer. Too many Egyptians wanted what we did not want them to want.
Let's work to make sure that the Egyptian people have regular opportunities to choose again until they make a better choice. It won't be easy since the Islamists will surely appeal to paranoia about how lack of tourists and investment is a Western and/or Jewish plot to destroy Egypt rather than a logical outcome of Egypt's choices.
The Arab Spring is a rocky road. But the pre-Spring Arab world was disaster masquerading as stability. At least we have the hope that things might get better rather than just forever teetering on the cusp of different forms of bad or worse.
