Quote Originally Posted by ganulv
Gaddafi and Mubarak are gone. Have the lives of ordinary Libyans and Egyptians improved for all that? .
The problems in Egypt and Libya are structural - they won't be fixed just by removing the old regime; there has to be an active process in constructing a new system of political and economic relations. In Egypt specifically this means bypassing or removing the entrenched military elite that owns something like 20% of the country's economic activity. With that kind of dependency on the military as an institution, there should not be any surprise that changes faces in power doesn't really change who exercises that power. We talk about state-building in the context of rebuilding a state after destroying it in war - why not talk about state-building in the context of reform prior to war?