you know you often hear the stories of migrants in the jena but the children translated for the parents in that and that created a different dynamic. in a sense, this entire generation around the world has translated to their parent. it is a very interesting dynamic and i think in all of these places this is part of the reasons why it is happening in part of the reason why we are going to -- is going to be interesting to see how it develops. that relationship between authority and age and so forth is just different. but i have to say one of the most becoming things about this is the extent to which their parents think their kids are the cat's whiskers. perceptions of the united states less adorable. the united states has seemed, she went avidly know from the

perspective of the region, to be behind every single time, not having caught on to what was going on in tunisia and not cutting onto what was happening in egypt and back onto what was going on in the list -- libya. in fairness, you wouldn't want to necessarily extrapolate from one to the next automatically. but there are other reasons why from the perspective of the region the american policy statements just didn't seem like they were very agile, very quick, very informed, very knowledgeable. that may not be fair but that is what it looks like from the region. in terms of what kinds of things the united states can be doing now, there is, as i say, again particularly in tunisia and egypt, and i think this is happening so credit where it is due, this hunger for information about how politics works is quite genuine and there are ways

to address that and to add to that, which is sending people who know things like that. get those, you know, debates going. one of the things we have been doing at auc which is not american foreign-policy related as such but one of the things that everybody wants to hear is what happened in latin america? what happened in chile and how did they get to pinochet? what happened after pinochet and what happened in eastern europe? how did that work? not because they think they are like that. they don't think they are like that but there are learned lessons or mistakes not to make. they know were around. so the more that kind of discussion and debate than particularly if it is if i could put it this way, particularly not american political societies coming in and you have a provincial system in a parliamentary system. notice exited people active in writing those constitutions,

speaking about who knew the difference between albania and poland and therefore be able to say do you know what? what works here might not work in libya. that is what is really important right now and there is an enormous appetite for that and i think you know in some respects that is the trouble with evenings. the evenings are filled up with talking to each other about what we are going to do and then you have seminars that are bringing in people from hungary and it is very busy and it is very hectic and so forth. but that kind of saying, there are ways that people have thought about these kinds of conditions. they may or may not apply here but it is worthwhile knowing about them. that is grooving to be already productive and i think in some respects that sort of democracy promotion work that has been done in the past, done properly and particularly by bringing in laterally people who have had that sort of experience, people are really hungry and interested in integrated by that so that sort of thing i think would be

useful. obviously that will not be adequate in libya. but it would be very helpful and instructive in tunisia and egypt for example. on the question of the constitutional amendments, there was a lot of discussion about why it was, whether we should have the constituent assembly and all that sort of stuff. everybody i knew was reading the federalist papers were about a week and a half. how do you do this? i mean. that is what i mean. this is a deeply engage -- for a political scientist everybody need to choose a political scientist right now. so it is very gratifying although i think people will fall off after a while. it does get tiresome for those of us who don't do it all the time. part of the way the military i think adroitly framed all of this was after the president is elected, so you have the constitutional amendments that permit changes in the

presidential term and who can run for office and so forth so relatively modest changes but to open the system for candidates who would not have been permitted under the existing constitution. then you have those elections. you hume of the new parliament because the parliament was universally produced by rig the the elections in the fall so you need a new parliament. you need a new president. new presidential elections so that you have, that point, the military withdraws and they go back to the barracks and then if you want to talk about the constitution again, go ahead. so it was framed that way. nobody has said that the constitution with these amendments is necessarily the permanent constitution. it was just modest reforms to permit getting to the next six months or so. so there may be a revisiting of all of that. there are very apropos models. there are very lively discussions about why it is that

the american constitution is only six pages long and the egyptian constitution is dozens of pages long. do you want a constitution that outlines all of the rights or says it is not mentioned here it is a right? different philosophies of constitution so i wouldn't be surprised at if those things didn't come up again at people want to get through this transition period and that was the plan. >> jessica. >> jessica matthews with carnegie endowment. thank you for a wonderful talk and all we have heard and all we have read we still learn so much new. listening to your description of libya, it was hard on two different grounds for me to imagine a happy outcome of the intervention. either on the grounds of the fight to the death on both sides expectations or on the grounds of when can libyans manage themselves and the western forces leave? is that a fair set of

conclusions to draw from what you said, or can you see a happier future? thank you. >> david. >> could you think ahead a year. let's say we have had the political transition relatively smoothly. they have had elections. they formed a government. what will be the top of the agenda in public debate, in egypt at that point? will it be government issues like corruption? will it be bread-and-butter issues, jobs, high prices are will it be foreign-policy issues which usually comes down to being palestine? >> david.

>> thank you. david pollack from the washington institute. thanks very much. i wanted to ask about the military in egypt and its views about its own longer term or medium least interest. some people have argued, including a lot of the tahrir square revolutionaries that by handing over power as quickly as it wants to in a way that is democratic but it may also mean that the remnants of the ndp and the muslim brotherhood will be the ones that the military will end up working with and is most comfortable working with because they are -- they have a headstart so to speak. do you see the military's role in egypt as one of let's say hanging onto its economic privileges, opposing worker rights, opposing serious economic reform? in other words, something that

would be not that different from what we have seen up until now despite the revolution? and one more question. >> thank you. allen from the middle east institute. i would like to encourage you to go back and think big. 10 years he wrote an article called arab democracy, dismal prospects. i outlined it has my graduate students to look at it. and asked the question, what has changed since? you have already suggested the soquel -- social implications of technology that could you take on the broad question? >> okay. i will try that. but this time i'm going to get to that one and go back. the intervention in libya i do think, the international community, not just the united states, is really in a very

difficult position because as the tide turns against the rebels, you increasingly confronted the possibility that they would actually be defeated. by the gadhafi regime. and that would have been hugely demoralizing across the region, and it would have -- i mean it was palpable in egypt, not that the egyptians particularly care about libya, oregon that they particularly care about you know, the prospects of the protests in libya but they didn't want protests to be destroyed like that. they just didn't. and so they really was a sense that the protest movements in the region and you know in a sort of strange bedfellows way, the governments that make up the arab league all wanted to take this opportunity to say no, we

don't want gadhafi to prevail. we just don't. and perhaps for different reasons. partly because people were enthused that a protest might succeed in libya, and some because they were just sick and tired of gadhafi, as everybody is. but that meant that again, the international community was confronted by a choice of saying, we are not intervening and the prospect that gadhafi would have prevailed was quite high, or we are, knowing that is going to get us into a really difficult set of dilemmas about how we get out and what happens and since gadhafi himself knows and has known for a long time that this was his likely end to his regime as any other, he is actually literally personally going to be very hard to find and people will not finish until they find him. so it could go on for a long time in that kind of stalemate

house-to-house so forth than that sort of thing. nobody wants to have anything there. they are willing to drop bombs if we have seen but beyond that nobody wants to do anything more, so it is -- it has come to -- i don't think there was any choice honestly. i don't think that the prospect that gadhafi would be able to destroy the rebellion and all of its supporters, which would have been a massacre, was palpable. i mean people couldn't do that. the problem is, we now have a situation which may lead us to also on palpable, palatable prospects and i think that is a significant problem. and i had hoped, speaking things i had written before, that we would have been able to intervene with something more of that kind of what we hoped would happen later than we did.

and i understand we are all busy and we don't have to do that -- time to do all that kind of thing but to talk a little bit about who we think will be responsible for assisting libyans when they start their reconstruction would have been becoming even if it turned out we couldn't implement it but to say something that we did not expect to be -- lead the united nations -- we have united states, anybody that there was a sense that we were going to return responsibility to the libyans, whoever they are, and we would provide some kind of assistance to them as they gathered around a table as people that literally not talked face-to-face in a year. and that is what it will be. it will be people from tripoli and people from benghazi who have not talked to each other for years and years and years. people from inside and outside who have not talked to each other for years and years and years and somebody is going to have to be a facilitator there frankly. but i think if we have been able to talk a little bit more about

how we imagine that happening, it would have permitted us to say that you know from the beginning in good faith we did not intended intend it to be anything but an effort to ensure that gadhafi did not win. unfortunately right now it is not clear what it is, so everybody is wondering about why we bothered when we are not doing it in other places, and so forth and so on. i think there was a legitimate rationale for what we did when we did it. but that will get lost because we didn't really describe what we anticipated to happen afterwards. egypt in a year. egypt in a year will be about economic issues. i mean at that point, there will be some kind of coalescence of a political landscape. there will be a left and the right and an bp makeover and the brotherhood. youyou know, there will be a political landscape in there

will be those parties will be advocating policies which will mostly be about domestic economic issues. i think everybody anticipates substantial inflation. we know the stock exchange is -- at this point. tourism has disappeared entirely so you have a huge sector with millions of employees, people are employed as imposed -- opposed to the unemployed who are now unemployed. there is a lot to worry about in the domestic economic front and i think there will be a lot of that. that i think will actually play a little bit into the military which i will get to in a minute. i don't, you know, just something foreign policies going to be the principle issue unless for some reason we are somebody else decide to make it the issue, but this wasn't about foreign policy. it is still not about foreign policy. it really is about accountable government and fairness and a lot of the labor protest that are going on all over egypt right now are as much, partly

about money but again partly about dignity. you employer are not paying me a living wage. which is probably true. so it is as much about the right to a living wage as it is to a certain number of pounds. that will continue, and there will be lots of debate to the policies on what should be the minimum wage and how to accommodate the fact that, what do you do with all of your unemployed and what will the minister minister of social solidarity be doing on welfare and so forth? keep in mind that the current minister of finance is actually a labor economist and that should tell you something already about the kind of ironies the military has. they are not interested in washington consensus economic reform. they are not. and actually one of the problems in egypt in my estimation is if you look at the people who are charged with corruption, some of the former ministers. some of them are corrupt, but some of them were advocates of

economic privatization. not personally corrupt at all. taking a policy position which is now unpopular. so they have gotten caught up. big business is corrupt and it is impossible to be a big business without being corrupt and it is impossible to be a minister that was supporting business without being corrupt. so that needs to get pulled apart and we need to take the people who were actually corrupt of whom there were some, and disaggregate that, but i think it is an early signal of the kind of policies that the military are likely to be advocating in insofar as they advocate for a successor regime. it is going to be a much more statist kind of middle of the marc mubarak set of policies,

much more about equity than growth. that serves the military purposes. i mean they are big owners of state enterprises and so forth so why should they be interested in privatization? they are not. in addition to that though, going beyond that it little bit, i think the military wants to be behind the curtain. they want what they were before. that works very well. and they don't really care as long as there is an implicit deal that they can stay behind the curtain and say what they were before, they don't care what goes on. they don't care for the government is, as long as those prerogatives are not challenge. and to tell you the truth, i think the vast majority people are perfectly content with that. even the people in tahrir square, they realize it embraces the mentality -- military with

all they have. they were the ones climbing on the tanks kissing everybody. they were the ones willing to say get back behind the curtain, let us debate everything else. there is plenty else to debate and sunday in the future, the question military prerogatives may, but not for now. and i think that would be perfectly reasonable resolution by the likes of most people. now obviously there are a few intellectuals who are going to push this but by and large, people will be content with that because there are lots of other issues that can be -- free expression and issues of labor rights and wages and all that kind of stuff. there is lots of other stuff to discuss in egypt before you start saying the military has a big chunk of economy, so i think that is what they want and if they get it, they are pretty liberal. >> the gentleman in the back there.

[inaudible] >> oh, right. i skipped it, didn't i? a freudian slip if there ever was one. [laughter] i do think it is partly the maturation of this generation i have to say. when we were thinking about you know, that these regimes are getting sort of long in the tooth and we were seeking its 10 or 15 years ago suggesting they had gotten very long in the tooth by now, we were sort of speculating about the next generation and who would be the people who would come up and so forth. and that was the era when gadhafi and mubarak and so forth and so on, all these people in one of the things we talk about about ben ali didn't have a son who would serve that same purpose and all that kind of stuff. that seemed to be kind of inevitable transfer of power and

there didn't see any other way of how you would get to the next generation. it was only through this cause i monarchical way which nobody thought was satisfying or thought would work but there didn't seem to do way to get to the next generation. one of the things that is interesting here is across all of these three countries and i would argue the sister in the region as a whole, there is the lost generation of the parents. and they are going to have to concede in a sense and this gets to this, is it my turn because i'm now old enough to do it or am i simply going to say the kids can do it for us? but that generation that is between 82 and 32 is just stuck. they didn't figure out how to do it themselves, and they are probably in a surprising way going to have to concede to the kids.

[inaudible] >> yes, like prince charles. exactly. [laughter] >> i live here in washington d.c.. i am an egyptian american and i am giving up to my kids and grandchildren the future. i'm so delighted with what they have done. i have a question about possible hijacking. we are not done. there are a lot of groups and that have been mentioned. is it possible that we will get shifted from two democracies from hijacking? i would like your opinion. i'm delighted that you have felt optimistic about the future of egypt. i'm glad to hear that. the other question as an egyptian american, what can we do to help? thank you.

>> a quick couple of questions. first of all, why the latest referenda? why was there participation -- i believe it was the mid-40s. could you please elaborate on this? second, secretary of state clinton was there just last week and one of the group of the youth movement rejected meeting with her. was it a reflection of the sentiment among the egyptian youth? is there real deep grudge against the u.s. for the last three decades or five -- five decades or or was it just the temporary? the last question is you talked about talk about some models, latin american waddles and other models and whether turkey took

the model. it was a topic of entertaining a washington turkey. would you please touch on that? >> you my name is connie and i am at the american kurdish american network. in 2003, the document was discovered in the headquarters of intelligence headquarters of saddam hussein in baghdad. 13 kurdish women were sent to egypt, to its -- the parents of these women appealed, the first lady of egypt sues on mubarak and unfortunately their appeals fell on deaf ears. do think something could be discovered about these women? >> one last question. yes, sir. please.

>> thank you lisa for your sharing with us. in your capacity as the head of the american university in cairo and the current change now, specially that most of the people were young people in the revolution, do you see there is anti-american sentiment and what you see as the role of the american university in the upcoming years regarding the change in egypt? >> i'm going to start with the last one and i will give you my inaugural address. no. [laughter] i think a you see -- first of all i do not think, despite the fact that the youth group did not meet with secretary clinton and so forth and so on, i do not see a lot of anti-american sentiment in this. this is intra-egyptian. it is about relations between

governments and citizens. over the course of time, and his as policy positions begin to congeal a little bit, i suppose just as with economic policy you will see foreign-policy positions and so forth and so on but it really is not about that. and i don't think in any of these countries at this point that is what the principle question is. i do think that one of the things -- i will brag amended a you see because i am paid to but also because i would anyway. i think we as an institution that it played a hugely important role in promoting the kind of education for citizenship, which is what animates these kinds of movements. so, without saying that other kinds of education are not also important, i think the idea that a liberal arts education which encourages critical thinking, which encourages people to ask

questions and think nimbly and so forth creates better citizens, and i think much of that sentiment and impulse and spirit was evident in, not only in the protest but in their effective management and the relationship between many of the leaders as the movement with the wise man if you will, who negotiated with the government and so forth and so on. so i think there is enormous opportunity for us to continue playing that kind of role. i think we have -- it is actually going to be easier to do that than it had been in the past. it will be amplified through free expression and so forth in a way that it wasn't before, so from my vantage point, the kinds of values that a you see represent should be even more deeply appreciated and abetted in this society. so as you can tell i'm very optimistic.

one small gesture that we have made to this end in the short run is, a you see is governed by a protocol that was signed in early 1970s between the egyptian government and the american government and one of its prisoners -- revision says the auc has a university counselor who is fully a son to the egyptian government. we have had for the last three years at university counselor who has among many things watched how an american university routinely operates. he is now on public service lee, an idea that is new to egypt as the minister of higher education. so we hope that the experience of seeing, from the inside, the workings of a genuinely not-for-profit, private institution and and so forth will have some utility to him as he thinks about the fact that all of the national universities are now in an uproar because the

students want all the presidents endangerment because they were all appointed by the president of the republic. that is mubarak. so how do you design a mechanism for the selection of residents and dean's? well, probably won't be constituting a board of trustees and have them run a search for the president which is obviously what auc did but something different from simply saying the president names these people is likely to come out of that. so i think it lots of ways like that, large and small, we will prove to be contributing to the capacity to think about different ways of doing things, from a political science on we can talk, we can bring experts on parliamentary systems and presidential systems to the way we operate, the way we run our own affairs might be useful examples to consider as we go forward. so, i think auc represents an opportuny,