The news and images coming out of Egypt are deeply troubling. At least 36 people have died since last Friday, and over 1,250 have reportedly been wounded in clashes around Tahrir Square in Cairo (and in several other cities).
On Monday, the Egyptian government resigned and on Tuesday the military regime offered further concessions, and yet the crisis goes on. There is much at stake in the outcome of the confrontations, both for Egypt and for the Middle East as a whole. To anybody who has been following the decline of the Egyptian economy and the repeated failure of key sectors of internal security since the ouster of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February, none of this is surprising. Neither is the disappointment of the crowds surprising to any one familiar with the course of the countless democratic and "color" revolutions in Eastern Europe over the past 20 years; some of the latter - specifically the one in Serbia against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic - inspired the organizers of the anti-Mubarak movement.
The danger of chaos is clear in this report, and others; we can only imagine what a power vacuum in the most populous Arab country would look like, and this specter has been drawing nearer by the week since February, as Egyptian currency reserves have dwindled and the Egyptian economy has continued to stagnate. Some analysts, such as Asia Times Online's Spengler, have warned about this danger since the very start.
However, the exact timing of the protests suggests that something more than economics and the inevitable popular discontent may be at play. It is hard to tell what exactly stirs under the surface of Egypt, and this is as true now as it was in early February, or over the summer, when Sinai gradually slid out of control and angry mobs stormed the Israeli Embassy in Cairo.
In January and February, most international media offered a romantic portrayal of what they described as a leaderless resistance facing a vast security apparatus; it took a number of weeks until the first accounts appeared that contradicted this framing, and even then the latter did not receive sufficient attention.
