Tcobb @ 16 said:
“We ain’t seen nothing yet in the ME. The big wave comes when Egypt runs out of money to buy food for itself. And that tidal wave is coming soon.”
That scenario is very scary and virtually certain to happen (probably within a year). Egypt is poised and ready to do a full repeat of what happened in Iran after the fall of the Shah.
Obviously what happened in Iran was very bad. It lead directly to the Iran-Iraq War where almost a million people were slaughtered and almost a trillion dollars squandered. The only good thing that came out of that war was it weakened both sides sufficiently that they were less of threat to the rest of world (Imagine how formidable Iraq under Saddam Hussein would have been without suffering those losses).
Unfortunately, Egypt under a theocracy will be much worse than Iran. Bad things that are almost sure to happen:
1) The Copts will be slaughtered and/or forced to flee Egypt.
2) The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel will be torn up and hostilities resumed.
i) Israel will be forced to retake the Sinai peninsula in order to have a buffer.
ii) Reconquest of the Sinai means the Suez canal gets shutdown permanently.
iii) Failure of the Egyptian and Israeli Peace Treaty means diplomacy has NO
positive track record for the MIddle East. Negotiation with Moslems will have
been proven futile with war the only option.
3) Egypt has long been the intellectual beacon for the Islamic world with the Al-Azhar University one of the ultimate authorities concerning Islam. That whole process becomes corrupt after Egypt falls under control of Islamic extremists.
4) Some of the world’s worst Islamic fascist bastards were Egyptians, e.g. Mohamed Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The process in Egypt that produced those two villains will be supercharged after Egypt becomes an Islamic theocracy that is also an economic basket case.
5) Many of Egypt’s priceless historical treasures will be destroyed because they are “unIslamic”.
I find myself wondering how Egypt can be saved. I fear the only way is to crater Iran. If Iran is reduced to a smoking ruin then maybe the Egyptians will see that this is not the path that they should follow.
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