by Gary Farber
There are many expert reporters on Egypt, obviously, and tons of scholars. But let's start with the excellent generalist on international policy that everyone has, I hope, been reading for many years — and if you haven't you should start last year or whenever — Laura Rozen. Some good news and bad news:
Earlier today, I was on a panel discussing coverage of the Egypt unrest, and someone mentioned that no one had seen it coming.
But that is not the case. Several foreign policy scholars and former officials have been urging the U.S. administration for months to prepare for the end of the Hosni Mubarak era and the instability that would accompany it.
Now that the administration has found itself scrambling the past few days to, first, try to avert a bloodbath in Egypt and more broadly, figure out what to do amid a hugely complicated power transition there with much at stake for the U.S., it's worth noting the people who have been pleading for policy attention on this issue long in advance. Chief among them, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Michele Dunne, a former NSC and State Department Policy Planning official, and the Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan, who co-chair a bipartisan working group on Egypt.
I (and others) wrote about their efforts to get the U.S. policy community to pay attention. See "W.H. pressed on Egypt democracy," from September: