The Historyscoper's Islam Watch Blog: More ideas from Bremmer Ian Bremmer: We should not go looking at Egypt as if it’s a successful revolution. It’s not. It’s a managed transition. Mubarak is gone. The military is still there and it will be the most powerful player in that country for a long time. There will be a democratically elected government and that’s a good thing. But it will be a weak government. It will have weak political parties. It will probably form weak coalitions that will have a very hard time actually getting meaningful political and economic reform done. So is Egypt a success story? Well it’s not like Iran where the demonstrators were brutally repressed, but it’s also not like Georgia where you ended up with a complete shift of regime so great on the political economic and security front that the Russians invaded them a few years later. Now that my friends is a successful revolution. Egypt is a managed transition. It’s kind of right in between the two and in the United States the media, Time Magazine has faces of Egypt’s revolution and they look beautiful and they speak English and all that. It’s wonderful, but it doesn’t really reflect the reality on the ground of what has actually happened across the entirety of Egypt and as we move from the CNN to the C-Span phase of Egypt, which is the phase that nobody actually watches and it gets a little more boring, but where governance actually gets done we’re going to find that the transition in Egypt is a little less dramatic than what was being reported in the early days. Discuss You must be logged in to comment. Log in or Register Stephen Morin on April 11, 2011, 5:56 PM I couldn’t disagree more with Mr. Bremmer. He says Egypt is going through a “managed transition”. My question: who was, or is, the manager? He’s implying that the army was the hand behind the scenes. That’s giving them a lot more credit than they deserve, or want, from what I can tell. The logical conclusion then is it is a military coup. But that as an explanation of recent history makes no sense given the Army’s unfettered access to land and property in the Egyptian economy, it’s unparalleled access, at the time, to power and privilege (through and with Mubarak ex-military himself), its favorable rating among the Egyptian citizenry, and, probably most telling of all, the fact that, if they wanted a military coup they could have had one long ago but really haven’t staged one yet. The fact is the youth staged this revolution and therefore it is anything but a “managed transition”. It is a revolution: initially chaotic with powerful (old guard) players now competing to fill the political void created by the energetic and idealistic youth. And, since it is not managed, there is no telling how it will end. Steve Morin Cairo Egypt Why Egypt Was Not a Successful Revolution