Over the last week, we’ve had the spectacle of the Western media speculating about what is going on in Egypt in the absence of much understanding of the forces at work (this article by Paul Amar is a notable exception).
Needless to say, there has also been a great deal of consternation as to how the West’s supposedly vaunted intelligence apparatus failed to see this one coming. This lapse is as bad as the inability to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union (it’s arguably worse: a lot of people profited from the Cold War, and they’d have every reason to fan fears and thus look for evidence that would support the idea that the USSR was a formidable threat. By contrast, one would think that conveying word that the domestic situation in Egypt was charged would have led to more intense scrutiny which ought to have served some interests (like various consultants and analysts). That suggests the US was so wedded to Mubarak that anyone who dared say his regime was at risk would get “shoot the messenger” treatment, and thus nary a discouraging word was conveyed).
John Dizard at the Financial Times tells us the IMF, which issued a country report last April based on two weeks of visits in February 2010 (with government officials and “representatives from the private sector, academia, labor organizations, and the parliament”) also failed to see the crisis coming. As he notes:
The first point the report makes is that “Sustained and wide-ranging reforms since 2004 had reduced fiscal, monetary and external vulnerabilities, and improved the investment climate. These bolstered the economy’s durability, and provided breathing space for appropriate policy responses”.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/02/the-imfs-epic-fail-on-egypt.html
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