Qatar is the link to Egypt as the elephant in the negotiation room of the prisoner swap, in terms of Egypt's attitude toward the jailing of the Al Jazeera "journalists" and the Brotherhood. So we got in bed with the Brotherhood to get one guy back in exchange for a bunch of high commanding officers. Got it.
So what if the Dems and Reps are squabbling over the role of Congress--they always squabble about that. The view from Egypt, I'm afraid, is considerably different and it's that already-shaky relationship that's gonna go down the tubes first, and because of who we employed as negotiator in addition to how unequal the swap was. Not a whole lot of people buy the claim that Al Jaz is "editorially independent" of the Qatar government, you know.
A more hostile Egypt has consequences for Israel, so I expect that the people in the U.S. to whine the loudest won't be your generic Republican--it'll be AIPAC.
Al Jaz article on the swap
Tuesday mini-UPDATE: I've been up to my eyeballs in alligators recently, hence the terse blog posts of late--but I still keep an eye on blog stats. As Enid closes in on Chautauqua week, traffic to some very very very old posts on that topic have picked up quite a bit. It's this that makes me feel guilty about failing to mention here, in a timely fashion, the filmmakers now in Oklahoma with Kickstart financing doing a movie about (groan) the Civil War era, but in particular, a particular steamboat on the Mississippi River (YAY AND A HALF!!). I've said before that I don't do the Civil War even as a time traveler because it's been done to death, particularly in the South, but a Mississippi River steamer will definitely turn my head every time.
More about the S. S. Sultana
S. S. Sultana's Wiki page
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