Democracy in Egypt is Going Nowhere

Here's an interesting article from the New Yorker by David Remnick. An excerpt

When I asked Kassem his opinion of the American invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed, he said, “When you look at the intervention itself, you look at the people who will die as a result. Well, a great many more would have died from sanctions and from Saddam than from any intervention. All those arguments about how you can’t bring democracy in on the wings of a B-52 are garbage. The only thing that can bring about a change here is American foreign policy. Egyptian brutality will not change and neither will the apathy of the people. Change in the Middle East will be slow, but we needed the air cover. There was no way we could have done this on our own. We were going nowhere.”

The article doesn't entirely endorse Operation Iraqi Freedom. In fact, parts of the article argue that the cause of liberalization in Egypt and in the Middle East in general have been set back by it. But, there has been much more discussion about democracy and freedom in the Middle East since Operation Iraqi Freedom and that region was going nowhere before Iraq's liberation.