That jibes with what else I’ve learned over the years. Mubarak maintained a suffocating grip on the Egyptian polity, turning it into a grim, gray, impoverished tyranny, while throwing bones to the Islamists and only stomping on them when they did something violent. Meanwhile, he used the Muslim Brotherhood has his foil, continually telling us that it was him or them. Now, after thirty years of riding the tiger, it has finally bucked him off and is about to devour him, us, Israel and certainly itself. Dictatorships are not “stable”, they are inherently unstable. Dictators don’t cultivate their people, they suppress and exploit them. Egypt is indeed a textbook Malthusian nightmare. It is way too overpopulated for it’s resources and the recent inflation has proved the catalyst just like the climatic conditions of the 1780’s sparked the Bread Riots of the French Revolution.
If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over, Egyptians will find themselves in a worse nightmare than they could have imagined. Close the Suez Canal? Declare war on Israel? How is that going to get them bread and jobs?
BFL