The Last Page

And yet Egypt's democratic moment has arrived. It has arrived through the heroic efforts of a young, progressive generation, and in the teeth of the world's great powers who in their desperation could not scare it away by raising the bogey of the Muslim Brotherhood (which, they seem to forget, has survived half a century of being outlawed thanks in no small part to Cold War funding and organizational support from the CIA and Saudi Arabia). This heralds more than the decline of a single empire. Having exhausted just about all of the world's empires, Egypt has now exhausted empire itself. Afghanistan may be the "graveyard of empires," but Egypt might prove to be the graveyard of empire as such. It has rinsed away empire's wonted colors and exposed it as a hoary miser with empty shows of grandeur and force. How puny is empire that its millennia of spurious claims on a nation can be shrugged off in eighteen days by that sleeping giant Demos!