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29 This attitude shift proved universal across the region. Iraq was almost never mentioned, nor was 9/11 or al Qaeda, and rather than rail at what America had imposed on them, the young Arabs instead criticized how America reacted to them. (President Obama’s failure to support Egyptian revolutionaries until after Mubarak was clearly a goner, and his inconsistency helping Libya’s rebels, but not Syria’s, were both widely criticized.) By taking control of their own fates, in reality and perception—highly important in this prideful culture—the conversation has become more respectful and adult. So it was that in 2011 I found myself having the kind of dialogue that Hi, whose funding was pulled in 2005, had always aspired to have. Over lunch in the dark basement of Tabouleh, a restaurant in Cairo’s Garden City, seven Egyptian bloggers, including many of the digital heroes of the Tahrir Square Facebook revolution, debated U.S. subsidies to Egypt. “We don’t want money,” says one blogger, Safa. “We want to make sure we go the right way.” No, counters Ahmad, “we need the money, but it must be with no strings attached.” Eventually, the talk turns to nuts-and-bolts democracy, the real Jefferson-Hamilton stuff (one of the bloggers, Karim, had already requested a translated copy of the Constitution): federalism, the role of the military, and, above all, the peaceful transfer of power that inspires quadrennial awe worldwide. Such technology-fueled enlightenment comes with an equally perilous downside, as evidenced by my conspiracy-minded Beirut coffee-shop friend. Ask this group, or any others about basic political facts—al Qaeda’s responsibility for 9/11, or the death of Osama bin Laden—and even the most educated, whether blogger or student or lawyer, will start popping off inanities. “Aw, they’re sick about plots,” Gibran Tueni, the Western-oriented editor of Beirut’s Al- Nahar had warned me on my first trip to the region, less than two years before he was killed by a car bomb. “Whenever they see HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025025