Michael Totten has been getting deserved attention for his travels in Kurdistan/ Northern Iraq, but other countries have been the focus of his journeys from his Beirut base. Egypt is one:
"Mubarak’s regime doesn't fail merely in politics. It spectacularly fails in every way a state can possibly fail. The economy is moribund -- even downright Latin American. The habitable regions of Egypt are so overpopulated that cemeteries and garbage dumps have been transformed into slums packed with millions of people. Barely half the population can read or write. The state is a mafia with an army; its grubby paws stifle and profit from practically everything. Cairo is bigger than New York City, but most of it looks and feels like a bloated and vertical North African village blown out of its proper proportion by desperate urban migration. Just walking around I felt hopeless depression and dread like a dead weight.
It has been this way for some time in Egypt. But before Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Arab Nationalist revolution in the 1950s, things were different..."
Read Michael's article and observations from his time in Egypt. You may also be interested in a piece I did here in December 2004: "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Mubarak?"
Great set of links. Not to sound like a broken record on this, but we (US taxpayers) subsidize the Egyptian Gov't. to the tune of several billion per year.
What are we "buying" with that money, aside from large amounts of state controlled anti-US propaganda (and, of course, endemic waste/fraud/corruption?). Preventing Egypt from rejoining the USSR's sphere of influence or losing another war with Israel? Making the Muslim Brotherhood look better and better by comparison to the Mubarek regime, which we're propping up? Lining the pockets of US arms manufacturers (and their congressional "staff")? This has to be a textbook example of the unkillability of a bad government program.
I had an MD co-worker a few years' back from Cairo who described the place as critically dysfunctional, such that getting a building permit approved might require over a dozen years (even with bribes!). Some of the Cato economists have argued that foreign aid over the long term essentially ruins a developing nation, creating disincentives for productivity/development, increasing corruption as well as creating a highly corrosive culture of entitlement. Perhaps if we can't actually make the situation better, we could at least stop supporting the status quo.
GeneThug, one of things I note in "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Mubarak?" is that if they simply fixed this permits problem and made title to protperty efficient, the result would be an injection of wealth into their economy that's 30x the TOTAL of ALL foreign aid Egypt has received. Not just this year, but all of it, period.
THAT is how much wealth Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto estimates is tied up in bureaucracy, corruption, and fettered title.
Hm.
Not really what I got out of your earlier essay - it seemed to me like you were recommending that the US economically incentivise Egypt towards a Turkish (or perhaps reverse Iranian) sort of democratic reform, by disqualifying Islamists. FWIW, I trend toward letting democracy reveal the people's will/folly - if they vote for extremists, war, misery and/or religious oppression, at least the government will reflect their collective senselessness, and they can get it battered out of them (provided there's still democratic accountability when the smoke clears). In the most optimistic sense, perhaps idealists (even odious ones) are necessary to cleanse the system of corruption (though I realize that this argument is akin to irrationally hoping that Hamas is civilized via political power).
Like so much of the rest of the middle east, US foreign policy choices are limited here. Egypt as a failed nation state would be a nightmare, but propping up a venal and ineffective government isn't doing the US any PR favors either. On the bright side, one of your suggestions to 'Translate key documents of liberty and western ideas into Arabic' was just reported this week as a sort of libertarian memetic counter strike (http://reason.com/rauch/030606.shtml). It'll be interesting to see what Arabic websurfers make of Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Bastiat's The Law. Property rights, rule of law and effective, transparent government would benefit any populace, eh?