Friday, January 28, 2011

The Egyptian Method

Since we just had "The Sri Lanka Option", I thought I'd give you something in a similar vein: here, instead of violent insurgency control, we have democratic uprising control.

In case you haven't heard, Egypt has been having a popular uprising against their President Mubarak. The people clamor for democracy (otherwise fondly known as "mob rule"), and when the people clamor, things go either violent or Ghandi's involved. And Ghandi was shot by one of his supporters...but I digress.

In Egypt, though, things haven't quite gotten to the "shooting young people in the street" crazy yet, but as a way of thwarting the young people's ability to communicate, the Mubarak supporters in the regime have shut off the Internet and shut down the wireless communication infrastructure. I love that they turned the Internet off, like they have a switch...but in a place with telecommunication is still pretty much state controlled, it is probably that easy, to simply shut down cable feed at key access points.

The fact that young people are rising up against Hosni Mubarak and demanding democracy is good news for us and George Dubya since, with Egypt having the highest Arabic population in the world, it would show that Arabs and democracy can do alright together, which is something "the Dub" felt very strongly about.

1 comment:

  1. i did wonder about "turning off the internet" when I heard that this morning... really you can turn off the whole internet... and cell phones...well that is someplace I'm not interested in living... but good for the young folks to demand change... praying it doesn't end horribly for them....

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