Egypt: My Mistake.

My first mistake was not thinking up a catchy title like "Operation Oil Theft" that I could use over and over again rather then having to think up a new title each time. I mean look at how effective simply re-naming the interim military leadership "SCAF" has been at whipping up protest.

My second mistake was telling Egypt's interim military leadership to push back the first round of elections to avoid clashing with the UN General Assembly in September. So if you've got a problem with that then I've got a comments section below that I very rarely read. Judging by the number of Egyptians who continued to protest yesterday (21/11/11) I think I'm about to receive a lot of abusive messages.

That's perfectly understandable because 11 months after their revolution really not much has changed. The Egyptian economy is still barely functioning and there's still high unemployment. On top that there is a big public safety problem caused by the security vacuum created by the dismantling of Mubarak's police and court system. At the same time far too many people have been put in jail by unfair and unjust military courts that have no place in civilian life. Undoubtedly members of the Egyptian military have abused the privilege of military courts to settle old scores and must be punished for that but I don't see how we can do away with the military courts entirely. Without them there will be absolutely no system for catching criminals and keeping them away from so society. That will mean that the thieves and thugs that inhabit any society will be free to do whatever they like and I don't need to tell a growing number of Egyptians why that is a bad idea.

The only solution I can think of is for Egypt to build a completely new police and criminal justice system. This is no simple task because to train a police officer it takes two years in the classroom followed by a year of training on the street followed by another two to three years before they actually become any good at doing the job. For Judges you're looking at 10-15 years of study and practice. Obviously the Egyptians need to start on this as soon as possible but they can either force the interim military rulers to do the job for them or they can use next Monday's (28/11/11) election to vote for a civilian Parliament who will make this important task their first priority.

Alternatively they can just continue to protest, cause the election to be delayed further and things will remain exactly as they are now.