Superbowl Commercial

The one ad that I really enjoyed during the superbowl was the one by Chrysler, featuring Eminem. Detroit has really become a city of despair in the middle of America, an industrial wasteland in parts. But it has an exciting potential for a Phoenix style resurrection if done right. More people should be aware of this cautionary tale, and more Americans on the coasts should take pride in the economic strength that once emanated from Detroit, which for some time defined not only a city, but a nation.

Egypt

The changes that are rocking Egypt are historic, and it’s difficult to understate their importance to the Middle East – a Middle East not defined simply as Egypt to Iran, but one that stretches from Tunisia to Pakistan: a vast swath of oppressive governments that have for too long stifled the economic and political development of their people.

And yet, it seems that Americans still don’t seem to understand what’s going on here. It baffles and scares me that the reports on this revolution by responsible journalists are filled with references to Twitter and Facebook, with doubts about the benefits of such a revolution to the region, and with an ignorance of the basic workings of the politics of the Middle East. I'm equally startled by the indifference shown by many Americans, who think all they have to do is read the headlines to figure out what's going on, instead of taking the 10 minutes to read a news article or two a day. It's like saying you know what's been going on in Iraq without knowing the difference between Sunni and Shia. It leads to a dangerously simplistic view of a complex and powerful social struggles.

This is a revolution sparked by those protests earlier in Tunisia, which opened the psychological gates for the Egyptian people behind which they had been growing angrier and more frustrated. This is not about Twitter, this is not about the Muslim Brotherhood, and this is not about Israel. All of those factors play into the dynamics of such an uprising, but they are peripheral. This is bunch of people who have gotten so angry at Mubarak, because of his absolute refusal to cede power and his tyrannical grasp over policy and politics, that they are willing to mobilize to that end. And why now? Who knows. That is the sort of difficult sociological question that will never be definitively pinned down, and really, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it happened. And it worked.

However, let us not forget that this only really worked because the army stayed on the sidelines, thanks in part to the influence of the U.S. and our massive aid program. A violent crackdown on the protestors could very well have worked to disperse them (see, e.g., Iran after Ahmedinejad’s "election"). When you have to take a week off work to protest with your friends and family, it’s one thing. When there’s a good chance you’ll get arrested and beaten, or shot and killed, or blacklisted by the government, it’s something else entirely.

This revolution, because of its peaceful nature and because of the precedent that the Egyptian military has set, could be the catalyst for a democratic earthquake in the Middle East. One much along the lines that George Bush claims to have wanted to start with the deposition (and eventual execution) of Saddam Hussein. Our hard power didn’t work in that case. But in this case our soft power was used more effectively to assist a movement that was grassroots in nature. That’s the role we need to play if we are to see this change spread across the rest of the region over time.