A Brief History of the Political Unrest in Egypt

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This article gives a brief history about the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region that led to the political and economic strife of Egypt and the role of United States in it.
The political turmoil in the North African region including Egypt have raised a lot of voices around the globe about what the United States should have done to either curtail or support the situation. However, the truth of US policies is that it tries to fulfill not just one goal but a number of objectives with one stone, even if sometimes a few aims become contradictory.
Although the world hurled a lot of criticism against the United States for its stand against Middle East, the position of United States is itself very challenging. President Mubarak had been ruling the country of Egypt for over thirty years.
President Hosni Mubarak was Anwar Sadat’s successor who himself was not a strict democrat. However he did realize that Egypt’s best interest lay in having a peace treaty with Israel, with a caveat of Israel’s return and demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula plus striking a relationship with the western governments.
Egypt has maintained good relationship with the Soviet Union from the 50s to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. A major part of this was connected to its anti-British sentiments and the Franco-British invasion of 1956 to seize the Suez Canal after Egypt had it nationalized.
Anwar Sadat paid a heavy price for this move to create peace between nations and was assassinated later for it. President Hosni Mubarak came into power after the death of Sadat and continued their alliance with the United States.
The peace treaty with the Israeli government and the new alliance with the United States was solidified along with military aid of 1.3 billion dollars a year for Egypt. Although as compared to the expenses of the US military, this amount is quite small, it has still contributed a lot in developing the Egyptian army.
It has also been used to combat the fundamentalist violence in the country created to make a more religiously conservative Egypt. People who have been in opposition of the United States support of Mubarak’s regime in both the Republican and Democratic administrations do not realize that this support was beneficial in two ways.
The first aim was to keep peace with the Israeli government. The oil embargo in 1973 and the confrontation of the Soviet Union with United States were enough to determine that peace and stability were much more important than carrying out democratic elections, which themselves might result in fundamentalist parties in the government.
These parties can cause an end to the peace with Israel and close up the Suez Canal as well as the militant organization support. It is important to understand the complicated nature of events when approaching subjects of political sensitivity; strategy consultants Middle East can help with this.  Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com Juhanah Abir is a political consultant working for i-Strategic.
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