Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt
If you care at all about the Israeli Front in the Global War on Terror, this is the most frightening paragraph you’re likely to read all week:
So to recap as we head into September, with the Muslim Brotherhood poised to take over Egypt and the Palestinians — encouraged by Israel’s enemies at the U.N. — poised to declare statehood unilaterally, we have al-Qaeda now active in Israel; a successful terrorist attack inside Israeli territory through Egypt; Israel and Egypt in a faceoff over the killing of Egyptian soldiers by Israel after those soldiers allowed (and perhaps even facilitated) an attack on Israel; and the Palestinians — with whom Israel is expected to make peace — celebrating the murder of a Jewish family and the killing of other Israelis.
That’s from Andrew McCarthy at National Review, and it means that we’re looking at the nearly-worst case scenario for Israel and Egypt. Look at this map of Egypt’s population density. By and large, Egypt is the Nile River valley. The great bulk of Egypt’s 80 million people live in a Third World maze of hovels along the river’s shores from Aswan to the Delta. Should that warren ever become — with a wink and a nod from Cairo — infested with al Qaeda, it would be the Devil’s work to root them out again.
Well, there is one easy solution — the one John Birmingham used in Without Warning. Its back to the wall and under immediate threat of nuclear and chemical destruction, Israel launched a preemptive nuclear strike on its Muslim neighbors. Egypt was most easily dispatched with a single, low-yield nuke fired by F-16 into the base of the Aswan Dam. The end result was as horrific as it was effective: Egypt’s length of the Nile Valley, flooded with boiling, irradiated water.
Please note that I am not endorsing this “solution” any more than Birmingham was. I mention it only to illustrate the difficulties involved in dealing with an Egyptian Islamic Republic. We’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for ten years now, against an enemy with meager resources beyond a willingness to kill and be killed. Egypt has F-16s and Abrams tanks. In Afghanistan, the enemy hides in caves and amongst tiny villages. Egypt has those 80 millions packed tightly in a post-urban rat’s-nest nightmare — and the locals are known to be quite friendly to al Qaeda’s aims.
But at least Mubarak is in chains and on trial, right?
At his age, sooner or later Mubarak would’ve passed on anyway and one way or another, Egypt would likely have arrived at this place. And Barack Obama’s ultimate contribution? Like everything else he applied his genius to, he did nothing to help and probably made things a whole lot worse.
Check out satellite photos of Egypt. The daytime shots show a ribbon of green tracing the Nile, surrounded by seas of beige (sand dunes, IOW). The nighttime shots show a ribbon of bright light surrounded by seas of black.
You know Israel will be at war on 3 fronts and this administration will have been largely responsible for that. They also will likely get no help from the Whitehouse once it all begins. And STILL Anerican Jews will vote Democrat.
The mind reels…
I remember many years ago visiting a kibbutz in Israel’s south. The people we met with made a distinction between themselves as Israelis and the American Jews. Apparently, that observation runs deeper than any of us realized!
BTW, Steve, the polemical account of a low yield nuke demolishing Aswan and flooding the Nile valley with “boiling, irradiated water” is a bit fantastical. Taking out the dam would likely need several shots of 100-200 kt, probably delivered by IRBM or SLBM. Also, any radiation that does not go up in the mushroom cloud would be diluted pretty quickly by the huge quantities of “cold” water behind the dam. The only real threat (and it is still lethal) is the wall of water inundating everything from Luxor to Alexandria within 24 hours and the fact that there is pretty much nowhere to run. Egypt would still be toast, regardless.
A penetrating warhead — 15 feet — was “used.” Ought to do the job, really.
If I remember the story correctly, Israel dropped a couple of nukes on Cairo, too, for good measure. You can never be too sure.
I’ve stopped reading JB. Right after Gabbie was shot, he posted a guess on his blog that it was some radical right-winger who did it, without giving any time to let the facts come out. The resulting discussion in the comments was an unmitigated assault on the Tea Party and anyone to the right of Maxine Waters. He did nothing to temper the conversation, even after it became obvious that the Tea Party had absolutely nothing to do with it.
He’s not so good a writer that I’m willing to spend any of my hard-earned shekels on him anymore. Without Warning was pretty good, but After America was shallow and uninspired. He could have done much better.
The other effect will be to decimate the electrical production of Egypt. The damn produces 15-20% of all the consumed electricty in Egypt.
When I read that I had, and still have, absolutely no concern for the Egyptians. If you let jihadists take over, you deserve any and every bad thing you get. (Humorous side note: spell check didn’t recognize “jihadists”, offered “sadists” as its one and only guess as to what I meant
).
For shutting all non-jihadist political forces out, Mubarak deserves to die. If the Egyptian people chose to be run by jihadists, then so will they.