Information Quantity is Prevailing - and Failing - US Policy in Egypt

With a hat tip to the Lowy Institute Interpreter blog, which for those who don't know is the best blog in the southern hemisphere of planet Earth, comes this rather interesting video. It is an interview with Wael Ghonim, a Google Executive, who was taken into police custody on January 25th and was held 12 days. This interview was done within hours of his release. Make sure you hit the CC in the bottom right for subtitles.

I have been very disappointed with the reporting from Egypt. There is very little actual analysis, and a bit too much cheerleading from folks I would normally expect to get analysis from. I mean come on folks, Mohamed ElBaradei is seen in front of a microphone and within hours we start seeing these types of news reports? You can bet your house they are related, but you haven't seen that discussion on CNN.

The reporting from Egypt strikes me as odd. Al Jazeera has owned the narrative, of that I can be certain. They report several things throughout Egypt that no other media outlet apparently can find a reporter to confirm, despite having their HQ sacked and being specifically targeted by the internal police. I'm not saying Al Jazeera is making things up, I'm simply noting what concerns me. When it is said and done, Al Jazeera should probably be added to every cable outlet in the US for the work they are doing in Egypt, but only as long as someone goes back and confirms their stories no one else has ever reported along the Nile coast, for example.

This special comment at Nightwatch from last week makes a lot of sense to me:

Most old hands will attest that little is ever straightforward in the Middle East. The mainstream Western media interpretation of events is simplistic, linear and narcissistic: huddled Egyptian and other Arab masses yearning to breathe free but thwarted by sclerotic, venal dictators and their cohorts. It's an underdog story that is spontaneously fresh, it's just not true.

The sclerotic, venal dictator part might ring partly true, but none of the rest is. There are just too many anomalies, inconsistencies and signs of planning. Unlike Tunis, the protestors in Cairo have been organized and supported for ten days. Their banners have been huge and professionally printed. Security forces have been more restrained than in any prior uprising in Egypt.

It is not credible that the Egyptian Army would tolerate protests against the commander in chief without having been directed to do so by people in the chain of command. This is deep Arab politics.

The protests never connected, but in a real revolutionary scenario they always connect. Demonstrations occurred in outlying cities, but they appeared to have no linkage to events in Cairo, where power resides. This was obvious after cell phone and social media services were cut.

In hindsight, the cutting of these services looks like an indicator of an Egyptian government investigation into the backers/instigators/financiers of the demonstrations in Cairo. The demonstrations continued to follow the script, but with much less energy. Without cell phones and internet, the demonstrations should have collapsed into confusion, but they did not. That is a manifestation of planning.

Also worth noting that as cell phone and social media services have returned to Egypt, the strength of the protests has been rejuvenated - with yesterday's protests the largest to date.

There are two statistics that I think would tell us a lot. How many Egyptians have signed up for Twitter and Facebook since January 25th? I think those numbers would reveal the extent to which this is a growing youth movement, or this is a movement growing by gaining outside allies.

I think the video by Wael Ghonim is very revealing. There is evidence that a large segment of the political uprising in Egypt is a youth driven, internet organized attempt at modern revolution. They probably counted on support from folks like Muslim Brotherhood without ever needing to coordinate, much in the same way a lot of people can plan for opportunistic folks to take something done online and run with it without having to ever say a word to them directly about it. I do it all the time on the blog, on Twitter, and on Facebook; and I know other bloggers do it in various mediums as well.

It is a combination of targeted strategic communications and herding cats. The strategic communication is for an audience outside of Egypt, and the cats being herded are inside Egypt. Rally points, symbols of nationalism and patriotism, as little violence as possible, and as best as can be maintained - no outwardly inflammatory rhetoric towards those outside Egypt. It is a perfect elixir for driving a sympathetic narrative to sympathetic audiences, because everyone loves an underdog.

The Obama administration has been easily influenced by a foreign political movement that from the beginning appears to have been counting on the administration to be bleeding heart, sympathetic optimists about large, organized protests in Cairo. The administrations reaction has been half emotion and half logic. The inability of the Obama administration to consistently articulate a message well on Egypt reflects the tensions within the administration between their emotional and logical sides. It is fairly sad how very few media organizations will call out the administration for the naivety demonstrated to date on Egypt, trying to be everything to everyone.

US options from the beginning have been to either support the youth reform movement or support the regime; we can do one really well or do both very poorly. To date the US has done both very poorly.

I do not know what will happen next, but one observation on what is happening now. Even with tremendous flows of information out of Egypt in various forms and from numerous sources, it is still very hard to figure out what is going on, but it is very easy to see that we are consistently only getting the part of the story they want us to get. Without NY Times reporters being detained or interviews with Google executives, it would be hard to see past the constant imagery and reporting on television, or the rapid fire Twitter feed from the multiple dozens of people on the ground.

As it always does with information, quality trumps quantity every time. Who is the voice of quality in the Obama administration on Egypt, because policy to date suggests the quantity approach is prevailing, while failing.