That scenario would leave intact the things which I'm most worried about, would prevent some problems, and would create others.
My ideal solution would be that a. first, nothing happens for a while. Egypt gets a robust, free democratic government, in which extremist parties play only a marginal role -- say, a few seats in the government, from which they can make lots of speeches but have very limited power to actually create policy. The rest of the Middle East starts to do the same. And, as average people start having genuine ability to affect their country through peaceful democratic means, centralized government starts to become more stable throughout, and banditry and warlordism starts diminishing as people have other choices.
Then someone submits a Freedom of Information Act, and the government drags its feet in bureaucratic red tape for a month, and then hands over the photo. And the person releases it quietly, and it's put on the Internet, where everyone on Reddit declares that it's a total fake, and they can tell by the pixels, and that it's Photoshopped, and that it's a still from a movie that they saw, so it's clearly fake, and the picture goes all around the Internet, with people not really taking it seriously, and, eventually, it becomes clear that, okay, yeah, that's the real photo, by which point everyone who's interested in gory pictures has already seen it, and nobody really cares.
There will still be some people who are radicalized by the photo. But it is to be hoped that a critical mass of the people who MIGHT be radicalized by the photo will be too busy in attempting to sway their fellow citizens through the political process to have TIME to care much about the photo.
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Date: 2011-05-08 04:05 am (UTC)My ideal solution would be that a. first, nothing happens for a while. Egypt gets a robust, free democratic government, in which extremist parties play only a marginal role -- say, a few seats in the government, from which they can make lots of speeches but have very limited power to actually create policy. The rest of the Middle East starts to do the same. And, as average people start having genuine ability to affect their country through peaceful democratic means, centralized government starts to become more stable throughout, and banditry and warlordism starts diminishing as people have other choices.
Then someone submits a Freedom of Information Act, and the government drags its feet in bureaucratic red tape for a month, and then hands over the photo. And the person releases it quietly, and it's put on the Internet, where everyone on Reddit declares that it's a total fake, and they can tell by the pixels, and that it's Photoshopped, and that it's a still from a movie that they saw, so it's clearly fake, and the picture goes all around the Internet, with people not really taking it seriously, and, eventually, it becomes clear that, okay, yeah, that's the real photo, by which point everyone who's interested in gory pictures has already seen it, and nobody really cares.
There will still be some people who are radicalized by the photo. But it is to be hoped that a critical mass of the people who MIGHT be radicalized by the photo will be too busy in attempting to sway their fellow citizens through the political process to have TIME to care much about the photo.