A New Desert Storm Looms

Military operations are often assigned code names meant to disguise or even sanitize their true intentions. The operation in which close to a million allied troops were called up to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control was dubbed “Desert Storm.” The campaign to develop the atomic bombs that reduced two Japanese cities to rubble was benignly called the “Manhattan Project.”

Egypt’s recently launched “Operation Eagle” may or may not portend the same global overtones or ramifications. Only time will tell whether the operation’s deployment of an estimated 2500 troops and 250 armored vehicles including tanks to el-Arish Sheikh Zuwayd and Rafah deep into the Sinai Peninsula will be a short-term maneuver to defend its security and natural gas exporting interests or the beginning of the end for the Camp David Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt.

The Sinai has been everyone’s land and a no-man’s land. Egypt controlled it until 1967 when Israel captured it from them in the 1967 Six Day War. Israel hung onto it after an initial scare in the early days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and relinquished it and oil fields worth billions of dollars in return for a peace treaty with Egypt in 1978. It lay fallow for decades until recent years when it has been infiltrated by and essentially taken over by terrorists using it as a land bridge to connect the dots between the various and sundry forces of Islamic jihad proliferating throughout the Middle East.

The foreign media only accorded Operation Eagle brief mention but they did not escape the watchful eye of Steven Cook senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York: “Wait the Egyptians did what? They sent thousands of troops into the Sinai? That’s not supposed to happen right?”