Don't Turn Your Back on Egypt

Robert Kagan published a very good column on the situation in Egypt on September 13.

The suggestion that we cut off aid to Egypt and, in essence, disengage from the largest country in the Arab Middle East is part of the dysfunctional American tendency to withdraw from contacts we fear might contaminate us. This is the first democratically-elected government in the history of Egypt - that's 8,000 years of history, folks. We should be celebrating that fact, and then assisting the Egyptians to deal with the challenges to come. There are certainly aspects of the Morsi government that raise serious concerns, the first being that Morsi represents the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). But the correct response, as Kagan indicates, is to work with the Egyptian government to encourage them to move toward positions we would see as improvements. Abandoning Egypt at a moment when it has finally done what we long urged it to do is not a productive stance.

I might note that there is a business slogan: Work Smarter, Not Harder. One interpretation of this motto is that one should work with an existing process, application, or tool, and make incremental improvements to it, rather than discarding the existing system and starting from scratch. Trust me, I've seen both approaches at work, and I am fully convinced that making improvements to one's existing processes is the right course.