Choosing Walt is even more embarrassing than you might think, Andrew, since he’s not actually an Egypt or Middle East expert — he’s a scholar of international conflict (which this is not) and foreign-policy theory. You can see whether his Harvard profile cites any scholarly articles relevant to understanding Egyptian civil unrest (it doesn’t) — except insofar as the U.S.’s relationship to Israel is guiding our policy there. Harvard’s Kennedy School suggests media inquiries to him for the following areas of expertise: “Europe, Foreign Policy, Iran, Military Strategy, National Security, United Nations.” No one’s, of course, limited to commenting only on topics he’s written scholarly papers about, but if you’re going to have someone on from Cambridge, Harvard has plenty of experts on civil conflict, Egypt, and Islam — and I’m sure some of them even don’t like Israel, too. If Al Jazeera had any shame at all, they would have called one of them up — one of them might have even realized it’s a bit of a stretch to say that whatever happens in the capital of the Arab world, which controls the Suez Canal, “is not likely to affect Americans’ strategic interests in any fundamental way.”