Roundup: Media's Take

Jonathan Schanzer: The Answer to Egypt’s Problems?

[Jonathan Schanzer is vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Khairi Abaza is a senior fellow at FDD, and a former Wafd Party official.] President Mubarak’s government may soon collapse. Popular support for him has evaporated, and while the Obama administration has declined to officially take sides in the Egyptian protests, it is clearly looking toward some sort of endgame. But what form would such a transition take? Oddly, the most obvious po

Josef Joffe: A Completely Unpredictable Revolution

[Josef Joffe is the editor of Die Zeit, a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, and an Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution.] Only fools would predict the unpredictable, and thus with the course of the Egyptian revolution. Imagine yourself as a pundit in Paris at the start of the French Revolution, the mother of them all. In August of 1789, you would have celebrated the “General Declaration of Human Rights,” an ur-document of democracy, as t

Tyler Green: The Smithsonian's Lost Integrity

[Tyler Green reports and edits the website Modern Art Notes and is the U.S. columnist for Modern Painters magazine.] On Monday, the Smithsonian Institution's board of regents holds its first meeting since Secretary G. Wayne Clough pulled a controversial video artwork out of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It was a blatant act of censorship and a betrayal of the institution's mission. Now the question is, can Clough be an effective leader given the damage he's done?

Clayton Jones: How History Might Really Be Made in Egypt

[Clayton Jones writes for the CS Monitor.] Anyone watching the protests in Egypt might want to remember this old saw of history: For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost. Unexpected events often do suddenly create a surprise tipping point during a political or military struggle. It’s still unclear, for example, whether an American minuteman or a British soldier fired the first shot at the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775, launching the American War for Independence.

Ronen Bergman: Lessons on Egypt From Carter and the Shah

[Mr. Bergman is a senior military and intelligence analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily. He is currently working on a book about the Mossad and the art of assassination.] The White House's reaction to the rioting in Egypt is shortsighted—and typical of what is wrong with the Obama administration's Middle East policy. Only days ago, President Hosni Mubarak was a longstanding and valued ally of the U.S. His regime was the beneficiary of a $2 billion annual American aid packa

Michael Gerson: The Mubarak Legacy

[Michael Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in the Washington Post.] In June 2005, along with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, I met nine Egyptian opposition figures, including presidential candidate Ayman Nour, in a shabby Cairo conference room. Rice was in Egypt to deliver a speech calling on President Hosni Mubarak to allow free elections. We hoped and half-believed the door to reform was open. Nour, with more direct experience, said it

Steve Richards: Egypt is a reminder of the errors that drove the Iraq war

[Steve Richards is a columnist at the Independent.] While regime change from within is sought in Egypt, the more sedate investigation into the lessons of the Iraq war draw to a close at Westminster. This week, the Chilcot inquiry completes its questioning of witnesses. Soon it will make a judgement on a venture aimed at bringing about regime change in the Middle East through a military campaign conducted from without. The questioning, especially during the later stages,

Adrian Michaels: The Middle East 2011 ... how does it compare with Eastern Europe 1989?

[Adrian Michaels is Group Foreign Editor at the Telegraph Media Group.] How far can contagion in the Arab world go? Two weeks ago street protests forced out the Tunisian president and there were smaller protests building in one or two other Arab countries. But most commentators said there was little chance of a wave of cataclysmic upheaval spreading across the Maghreb and Levant into deeper Arabia. It would have been tempting but daft, it seemed, to think of 2011 as another 1989, th

Arch Puddington: The legacy of Arab autocracy

[The writer is director of research at Freedom House.] Coming on the heels of the Tunisian upheaval, the demonstrations in Egypt and Yemen have triggered considerable speculation about the prospects for change in the Middle East. Some have compared today’s conditions with the situation in 1989 when, much to the world’s astonishment, the entire edifice of European communism collapsed in the face of (with the exception of Romania) nonviolent opposition. There are, of cour

Gideon Rachman: Democracy is back, how awkward

[Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs commentator at the Financial Times.] It has taken just six weeks for the arrest of a fruit-and-vegetable seller in Tunisia to spark a chain of events that now threatens to topple the government of Egypt. Watching the revolt against autocracy spread across the Arab world is exciting, uplifting – and also deeply alarming for the world’s major powers, all of which are, in different ways, fond of the status quo. The discomfort of the

Elliott Abrams: Bush Was Right About the Middle East

[Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he writes a blog called "Pressure Points" on CFR.org. He was a deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration.] For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their "freedom deficit" signaling the political un

G. Murphy Donovan: The Egyptian Revolt and Imperial Islamism

[The author is a former Intelligence analyst with tours at HQ USAF, DIA, CIA, and NSA. He writes also at Agnotology in Journalism and G. Murphy Donovan.] The Arab revolt underway in Egypt may be unique. Previous popular uprisings were underwritten by anti-colonial sentiments. Contemporary revolts (including unrest in Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen, and Jordan) target nationalist or secular governments. The wealthiest Arab states, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, have been financing the i

Michael C. Moynihan: The Sorry State of Our Union

[Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason magazine.] State of the Union speeches generate much buzz amongst the Washington press corps, most of whom won’t remember its contents in three months, and little from the American public, most of whom understand that politicians excel at reading empty, contradictory, and frequently baffling promises from a teleprompter. All of this talk about our bright future, our glorious past, and our terrifying present, is leavened with treacly

Charles W. Dunne: The Right Side of History

[Charles W. Dunne is a scholar with the Middle East Institute in Washington and a former staff member of the U.S. National Security Council. He served as political-military officer in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo from 1999-2002.] The end is now at hand for the government of Hosni Mubarak, ruler of Egypt for the last thirty years. Two outstanding questions face us now: What will the army do? And how should the United States react? Called into the streets by President Mubara

Jonathan Cristol: Doubling Down on Arab Dictatorships

[Jonathan Cristol is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies.] A few years ago a friend of mine called me “Edmund Burke” as a pejorative. I took it as a compliment. I prefer slow, careful, incremental change to broad-based, fast-paced change. I believe that deliberative change is generally more beneficial to the American people, than the widespread rioting and upheavals sweeping the Middle East. These anti-government riots may seem like a good thing because they are occ

Robert D. Kaplan: The New Arab World Order

[Robert D. Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.] The most telling aspect of the anti-regime demonstrations that have rocked the Arab world is what they are not about: They are not about the existential plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation; nor are they at least overtly anti-Western or even anti-American. The demonstrators have directed their ire against unemplo

Stephen M. Walt: A Realist Policy for Europe

[Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.] Like nearly everyone-including, I assume, Hosni Mubarak himself -- I've been surprised by the speed, scope and intensity of the upheaval in Egypt. As I write this, it's still not clear whether Mubarak will remain in power. Nor do we know how far-reaching the changes might be if he were to leave. We should all be somewhat humble about our ability to forecast where things are h

Nonie Darwish: Dictatorships and Revolutions

[Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian-American human rights activist, and founder of Arabs For Israel, and is Director of Former Muslims United.] The pressure in Egypt has been building for a long time and has now finally exploded – inspired by the events in Tunisia. The fact that the Egyptian government has been taken by surprise is a sign of how disconnected the regime has become from the reality on the ground. Mubarak has wasted many opportunities to transfer power to another administra

David Rieff: Wilting Jasmine

[David Rieff is a contributing editor for The New Republic.] In early December, 1989, rioting broke out in the western Romanian city of Timosoara. Within weeks, the Ceaucescu dictatorship had fallen, the self-styled ‘Genius of the Carpathians’ and his wife, Elena, having been shot by an impromptu firing squad after a trial that was little more than a kangaroo court that condemned them for one of the things they were not guilty of: genocide. Before she was killed, Mme. Ceaucescu is s

Abbas Milani: A Note of Warning and Encouragement for Egyptians

[Abbas Milani is a contributing editor for The New Republic and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, where he is the co-director of the Iran Democracy Project. His latest book is The Shah.] After days of unrest, after declaring martial law in some of the country’s main cities, the authoritarian leader gave a much anticipated television speech. His tone was repentant. He promised change and reform. The people wanted democracy and he promised to be