Egypt On the Edge Again

It is hard to believe that almost two years later Egypt is again having large scale protests in the street. As we all know last summer the " free " elections took place in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood candidate was declared the winner. This was not something that the military was pleased with.

It even, once he was declared President, an uneasy peace. Much of the judiciary that is still in place are judges that were placed by the Mubarek regime. The military certainly is used to being in control. The government on all levels has been run as a corrupt enterprise and the Islamists taking over certainly should not alleviate that in any way.

If one wants to look at Egypt and try to find a correlation you probably need to go back to Iran at the end of the regime of The Shah. You have a Muslim nation with a strong secular portion of the population, if anything Iran had a larger group of secularists, and a recently deposed dictator who had been supported by the West as a placeholder for Western interests. It has become apparent that as we learn more and more about the rule of Mubarak that his corruption and treatment of dissenters was equal to or close to that of the famed Shah.

Egypt being the largest country in the Middle East and the country that controls the Suez Canal has to be a country that concerns the West. Last week the new President made a power grab that would give him powers over the judiciary, thereby eliminating one of the checks and balances that the democracy movement had desired.

The result. For the last few days protests have been building in Tahir square in Cairo. What will happen. No one really knows. It all, as in all things in Egypt, depends on which side the military comes down. At this point no one knows.

One thing is for sure. There is nothing, Nothing, that matters more to the long term security of the Middle East than what happens here. Stay tuned.