Agreed. Any solution, no matter how bad in our eyes, that the majority of Egyptians want and recognize, is better than any siltation, no matter how great we think it is, if not so viewed by the Egyptian people.
This is a low trust environment, as is often the case. As a transitional mechanism, the people (and the US) trust their military. Clearly for the people this trust is melting as this transition lingers on. The US Constitution was designed to create a mechanism that diverse people could trust in when they had nothing else that they could. So to the quota system in Lebanon that ensures that no single interest group grows too powerful. Egypt needs a new trust mechanism that makes sense to them. Not us. That should be the 50 meter target.
As an aside, the current Egyptian Defense Attache in Washington is an old friend who I worked and lived with for months during the first Gulf War. I will get to see him a gain in a couple weeks for the first time since the end of the ground war, where parted and went our separate ways. I look forward to catching up and discussing such things with him. What I learned then, was that how the US and how Egyptians see things are startlingly different. We need to respect that difference.
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