The uprising in Egypt is bad enough that jails are being attacked, with a bunch of Islamists released in the process:
Gangs of armed men attacked at least four jails across Egypt before dawn Sunday, helping to free hundreds of Muslim militants and thousands of other inmates as police vanished from the streets of Cairo and other cities.
The escape of Moslem Brotherhood members highlights the problem looming in the background of this crisis that raises the stakes enormously: Iran.
If a pro-Iranian regime emerges in Egypt rather than a more moderate regime based on either the existing ruling class (without the Mubaraks) or the military (a subset of that, but with a better image), war in the Middle East becomes more likely. The Egyptian military isn't up to the task of defeating the Israeli army, as I noted earlier. And the Israelis have the benefit of learning from their air-centric debacle in the 2006 Hezbollah War, which taught them that they really did need an effective army in the age of precision air power.
A post I wrote nearly four years ago about our relations with Pakistan pretty much applies to Egypt. We couldn't push Pakistan too much for reform because we needed Pakistan too much for the fight in Afghanistan. We did navigate the transition from a military dictator to a democratic (if corrupt and ineffective) government. But we continue our high wire act there. As I wrote close to five years ago and which I linked to in that post about Pakistan applies to Egypt:
One of the benefits of overthrowing the mullah regime in Iran and replacing it with a government that reflects the pro-American sentiment of the people of Iran will be the land corridor it will open to Afghanistan.
Now, our access to Afghanistan is from the north through the unstable "Stans" and back through an increasingly unfriendly Russia; or through Pakistan which we have to coddle to keep land-locked Afghanistan from being cut off from us.
Open up a supply route through Iran to Afghanistan and suddenly we don't need to be quite so reliant on our Central Asian bases or so careful with a Pakistan that will not crack down on the Taliban who hide and organize inside Pakistan. We won't have to be so shy when it comes to hunting bin Laden there, either.
It's not about a supply route, of course. Although that is important, we could adapt to that loss. It is about Iran and our freedom of action in Egypt and more generally in the broader Middle East.
A hostile Iran makes anything we do in regard to Pakistan a higher stakes game. Similarly, a hostile Iran makes anything we do in regard to Egypt a higher stakes game. Support pro-freedom demonstrators in Egypt (even if the protesters don't know what exactly they want or how to get it) and we risk the pro-Iran elements using that mass of angry people to leverage a takeover. Support the Mubarak regime out of fear of the Iranian influence and we risk angering the Egyptian people who hate living under the autocratic rule of Mubarak.
We need Egypt to not fight Israel or be a factor for our enemies, and for access to the Middle East further east through the Suez and air corridors. So foreign policy realism reigns supreme in our dealings with Egypt despite the efforts post 9/11 through 2005 to push Arab allies for reforms. Yes, we had a pro-American government in Cairo for decades, but now we don't know what will happen. And we feel constrained in what we do in response to the chaos in Egypt.
We fear the worst if Egypt turns against us because an anti-American Egypt won't be an isolated country that we could contain and try to work with. Egypt could link up with the anti-American coalition that Iran inspires, supports, and sort of leads--Syria, Hezbollah (now controlling the Lebanese government), Hamas in Gaza, and the Sadrists in Iraq (although I don't fear Iran could take over Iraq, if we draw down our visible support for Iraq's government and rule of law, who knows what could happen), as well as radical elements in other Arab states as we see in Egypt.
One of these days, we'll realize that Iran under the mullahs is our biggest enemy in the Middle East. They cast a dark shadow over every problem, much as the Soviet Union did in the Cold War. We can't reach out an open hand to the mullahs. We can't persuade them not to become a nuclear power. We can only decide to defeat them or continue to see every crisis in the Middle East as a potential catastrophe if Iran manages to take advantage of the situation.
Just imagine if all we had to worry about in our decisions about Egypt was what happens to Egyptians?
