Egypt

It must have been 1997 or perhaps 1998, I was in Egypt acting as counsel to a multinational investment bank, writing the prospectus for the offering of an Egyptian hotel/resort company. We were on the Red Sea at one of the portfolio hotels when we received news of the killings in Luxor ... a terrorist attack. One day later we were headed back to Cairo and onwards, the offering cancelled without hope of resurrection in the near future.

Egypt, you see, is trying to become a Mediterranean rim nation, and not merely a Middle East nation. They have aspirations of becoming at least a Greece-grade player and do not want to be seen as a backward third world banana republic (OK, cotton). Egypt is also painfully short of foreign exchange and relies heavily on tourism to augment its income. They want to develop a 365 day tourism base, using its Red Sea resorts to provide the bulk of the income, the Med coast being too cold in Winter. Pharaonic tourism is great, but it does not create the huge income streams possible in the "sun and sand" category: there are only so many monuments and relics, and only so many people that are willing to spend extended visits viewing them.

So the "sun and sand" sector is also Egypt's achilles heel with regard to maximum terrorist bang for the buck. If you want to hurt Egypt, hurt the tourism industry which is desperate to move upwards from the package deals for Eastern Europeans into the real bucks of luxury resorts with golf and all the bells and whistles. The Eastern Europeans (and Russians) will come, irrespective of bombs and bad food, its still the best value they can aspire to. But the Egyptians want the English, the Germans and even the Americans. They won't come if there is even an outside risk of getting their heads blown off (notwithstanding the reality that the risk of getting hurt is higher in NYC, London or Berlin on any given day). That said, you would not want to rely on Egyptian hospitals....

Egypt has also been foolish in turning a blind eye to all but the most threatening of Islamic fundamentalism within its borders. Sure, Egyptian prisons are full of the Muslim Brotherhood types (the same group that whacked Sadat), but if you do not separate the inmates and remove them from other fundamentalist teachings, all you do is create an indoctrination center. And you also need to eliminate the imams, clerics and mullahs that preach hatred and violence. Here Mubarak has tried to walk a thin line, not wanting to irritate his Islamic support groups (not wanting to end up like Sadat), encourage foreign aid support from more fundamentalist states (Saudi Arabia ... again), and still advance Egypt as a western-oriented advancing country. The tension is that the people he is trying to appease do not want "advances" into a secular lifestyle. They do not want western tourists spending their money in sin on Islamic soil. They want a theocracy (and a presumed return to the Middle Ages in terms of personal liberties, with thelseves set up as the arbiters of right and wrong according to their version of Islamic Law).

With almost unlimited funds available for the spread of Wahabbi thought and practices (kill the infidel), Egypt cannot really believe that it will end here. Today the soft targets of tourism. Tomorrow, the revolution setting up the Islamic Republic. Shortly thereafter, the march on Jerusalem.