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Any time you have countries that are either small democracies or even quasi-democrasies,
such as Egypt with a little authoritarian control, whenever the economies suffer and
people don't have jobs, these uprising are easily identifiable--throughout history.
This particular one is not going away because some of the issues on the periphery, such
as terrorism, has cut into 25 percent of the economy for example.
And how that is actually played out for them is that there are no jobs, there is a lack
of infrastructure, where they have the authoritarian control. The people are just tired, I mean
it's just a very basic human level. They are tired of the elites running the system. Most
of the elites have taken the money and left the country.
For us, the bigger problem in the United States is the concern over U.S. foreign policy interests,
not just regarding Egypt, but also with regard to Israel. There are a lot of players on the
periphery of this that are very concerned.
We need the region to be stable because we have a lot of economic oil interests in the
region. Any type of regional instability, while it may be isolated to the region, leaves
us very vulnerable to external forces that can change the path.
The danger in Egypt right now, the biggest danger I think, is the concern of who will
be the successor. A lot of times what the protestors may be expecting to be the end
result, may not be the way they necessarily like it either.
It depends on who winds up in office and how much control they have over the military.
Right now it is being suggested the mil...the army has said it will not use force. And,
if that's the case, then how far is that going to go if the next leader that comes in is
tied to the military, will they be able to then have a tighter control over them? There's
a lot of things at risk here.
Sure, Mubarak is being pressured not only by the U.S., but by our European allies to
create a level of new openess in society and all these things. The problem is it's a little
bit too little too late, I think. I don't think Mubarak is going to survive this. I
really don't think there's a way for him to survive this without...and this is going to
escalate the violence. But, if he does that, I think it will be worse for him than if he
decides to capitulate and actually leave the country or do something else.
On the upside, if we get a new leader in who's progressive, who's moving the economy in the
right way, the risk side is that you end up with a either a potential military dictator,
or you end up with...potentially what could be worse, which could be a sort of...you know,
Islamic conservative who comes in with a very sort of strong...with a preaching sort of
the theocracy notions of or theorcratic rule.
Either way, I would say that if you're going to create stability for any leader to survive
in, you're going to have to figure out how to create an economic base. And unfortunately,
we've got a tremendous amount of people and the per-capita income is very low and because
of the terrorist rise and the income level, the tourism level has dropped off tremendously,
which is a big part of Egypt's economy.
People aren't travelling there as much, so it's really been losing money, especially
in the last few years. That's impacted the jobs, and so, until you find...anybody that
goes in there, and I would say in almost any type of system, like I mentioned at the very
beginning, if you can't build an economic base for yourself, the chances of your regime
surviving is next to impossible.