If you have nothing to hide, there is no reason not to be transparent.
Democracy is not an instant coffee.
People talk about smart sanctions and crippling sanctions. I've never seen smart sanctions, and crippling sanctions cripple everyone, including innocent civilians, and make the government more popular.
You don't get the fox to be in charge of the chicken coop. You don't give the outgoing regime - which has been practicing dictatorship, is an authoritarian system, it's a bunch of military people - the task of changing Egypt into a second republic, a new Egypt with democracy, freedom, rights, etc.
Young Egyptians, gazing through the windows of the Internet, have gained a keener sense than many of their elders of the freedoms and opportunities they lack. They have found in social media a way to interact and share ideas, bypassing, in virtual space, the restrictions placed on physical freedom of assembly.
You need to form a grand coalition, and you need to put your ideological differences aside and work together to focus on people's basic needs. You can't eat sharia.
Israel claims it needs nuclear weapons as a deterrent against any threat to its existence. The Arab world in return feels that this is an imbalanced system; there is a sense of humiliation and impotence.
Psychology is as important as substance. If you treat people with respect, they will go out of their way to accommodate you. If you treat them in a patronizing way, they will go out of their way to make your life difficult.
I grew up in a conservative household. That was the life of the time in Egypt: a conservative, middle-class household.
Discipline is part of my professional training as a lawyer.
Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.
I think one country with nuclear weapons is one country too many.
There is no religion that was founded on intolerance - and no religion that does not value the sanctity of human life.
Sanctions are a bad idea.
The gap between rich and poor is widening dramatically. There's a hangar at the Cairo airport for private jets, billionaires are on the Forbes list, and Egypt's annual per-capita income is two thousand dollars. How can you sustain that?
How can you run for president if you don't know the job description?
So, we need to delegitimize the nuclear weapon, and by de-legitimizing... meaning trying to develop a different system of security that does not depend on nuclear deterrence.
If Egypt were going to change, it is going to change through the young people.
The U.S. engages with North Korea, so I don't see why they can't engage with Iran.
America is always a good target for a populist. In many countries, particularly authoritarian systems, if you want to get an extra bonus, you bash the Americans.
