Arianna Discusses Egypt On 'This Week' With Christiane Amanpour

Arianna Discusses Egypt On 'This Week' With Christiane Amanpour
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Arianna appeared on ABC's "This Week with Christiane Amanpour" on Sunday, as part of a roundtable discussion on the protests in Egypt with George Will, Robert Kagan and Mona Eltahawy.

"Right now there's been a perfect storm of three conditions," Arianna said. "The growing connectivity in the Middle East. It's phenomenal what is happening -- 5 million people on Facebook in Egypt. There's been the growing unemployment among the young, which has been a tinderbox, especially after the global recession. And also there's been this real organization of a dozen to fifteen real leaders, including Ghonim from Google, who've been a lot of very creative and very important things. And so even though there isn't a Lech Walesa, there is real leadership behind this movement."

Regarding the political power dynamics in the Middle East, Kagan said, "We've been under the illusion that these dictators were somehow bulwarks against radicalism, and we've got to understand that stability is not dictatorship. Stability may mean gradual change toward genuine democratic society."

"So many powers, including Iran, are under the illusion that they can control what's happening," Arianna replied. "Whether we endorse it or not, may be irrelevant. Whether Iran calls for an Islamic revolution, as it did, or not, is irrelevant because this is not an Islamic revolution. There are Christians and Muslims, and it has a real non-ideological tenor, which is what makes it so strong."

Arianna also said that the United States has a role to play in helping to foster democracy in Egypt. "We have this leverage of the $2 billion that we give Egypt every year. Of course, let's compare that with the $2.8 billion that we spend in Afghanistan every week, just to see how we also need to refigure our priorities in the globe."

WATCH:
The discussion continued in the Green Room after the show:

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot