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Tuesday, 31 May 2016

Egypt is giving the US “a slap in the face,” The WaPo’s editorial page believes

The Washington Post’s deputy editorial page editor piles on: The US should ask how the 762 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles delivered to Egypt fit into its “fourth-generation war,” Jackson Diehl writes. Diehl says President Abdel Fattah El Sisi is pointing at the US when he talks about the fourth-generation war, where “modern communication channels, psychology and the media are … deployed to create divisions and harm Egypt from within.” Diehl is uneasy with the notion that “Egyptians are being fed propaganda describing the United States as the sponsor of a massive plot to divide and destroy the country.” An acquaintance of his suggests one assurance could be: “a prime-time televised statement by [El Sisi], in Arabic, assuring Egyptians that the United States is not plotting to destroy the country and has nothing to do with a fourth-generation war.”

(On the subject of what Egypt will do with MRAPs, we’d suggest the need here might be a bit higher than in Neenah, Wisconsin, as Diehl’s competitors at the New York Times note in “War Gear Flows to Police Departments”: “ Inside the municipal garage of this small lakefront city, parked next to the hefty orange snowplow, sits an even larger truck, this one painted in desert khaki. Weighing 30 tons and built to withstand land mines, the armored combat vehicle is one of hundreds showing up across the country, in police departments big and small.)

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