Is Egypt an Ally of the U.S.?

Protests against a poorly produced but perfectly targeted video critical of Islam continue to spread. While they should taper off in the coming days, we can already identify short-term and potentially strategic impacts from this latest cycle of protest, violence, and tragedy in the Middle East.
The protests demonstrate yet again the growing power of individual actors nursing a sense of grievance achieving regional if not global significance, using weapons in some cases, but primarily digital images and communication technology.

This is where the new Middle East meets the modern interconnected world.

But if the nexus of social and traditional media can inspire as we saw last year in Tahrir Square, it can also inflame. Technologies have the ability to bring us together, but they are also being employed to drive us apart.

Through the Internet, bit players on all sides can find each other, play off each other, and use each other to build what has been termed a “grievance industry.” This dynamic, once out of the bottle, is hard to contain.

“Actors in the region have lots of incentive to gin them up, and lots of material to work with,” cautions Tamara Wittes, director of the Brookings Institution Saban Center for Middle East Policy. “Once anti-American protests start in on some supposed grievance, our ability to tamp down tensions is very limited.”

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/16/is-egypt-an-ally-of-the-u-s.html