Egypt: Now the Hard Work Begins

Well, well, well, how the worm turns. I refer the Honourable Gentleman to the post I wrote some hours ago. Again, it’s worth noting that this is just the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.

The Pessimists may yet be proved right but this, at last, is a day for the Optimists. There’s no guarantee that Egypt can build the kind of future that will satisfy the economic and political aspirations of its people but nor is it inevitable that it will swap secular authoritarianism for religious authoritarianism.

At the moment, and today at least, one of the losers from this process is Osama bin Laden. The irony is that, albeit for very different reasons and with very different destinations in mind, bin Ladenism and reform-movements have agreed upon the diagnosis that repressive, sclerotic regimes in the middle east (bin Laden’s “near enemy”) are part of the problem, not a solution.