…for the Arab Spring. I’m banging on about this, partly because of the bloody fool in my comments section a while back. Anyway:
These statistics are all the more tragic because they could have been avoided. The February 2011 ouster of Mubarak was followed by a pronounced fiscal downturn, leading many to conclude that the country’s new, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government—for all of its bluster to the contrary—wouldn’t impose radical changes on the country’s political direction. Instead, conventional wisdom held that the new powers-that-be in Cairo would, for both economic and political reasons, opt for a process of “creeping Islamization”—a slow, gradual changeover of the country’s civilian bureaucracy and legislature which wouldn’t rile international markets or spook jittery investors.
The conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong.
No kidding, really?
