If one had to "fight" with four-five decades of eastern bloc junk, it is not surprising that they went for quality finally.
I don't know about anything else, but as far as Egypt's Air Force during the Arab-Israeli wars goes, the equipment we (Egypt) got from the Soviets was actually very good.
It was just the training that they gave our pilots that sucked. During the 60's the Soviets only trained our pilots to fly at Mach 2 and at high altitude to intercept a target with an IR-missile. In fact an Egyptian pilot was later interviewed saying that because he flew low and subsonic he got in trouble.
The Soviets believed so much in the idea of flying high and fast to intercept a target with a missile that the first MiG-21's they gave us didn't have any guns.
Our pilots got very little training when it came to dog-fighting. They were taught the very basics of dog-fighting and didn't practice them much.
This ended up screwing us later on because (as it turned out) all the Israelis were doing was learning how to dog-fight (in Mirage III's no less).
Training moved away from this kind of thinking after the Six-day war and the Egyptian Air Forces training improved throughout the War of Attrition.
But even then our pilots performances' we hampered because our senior military officials had a knack for forcing pilots into different planes at different times. One Egyptian Mirage 5 pilot who was trained in France ended up dying in a MiG-17!
So it was really Egypts fault that those planes didn't perform as advertised.
They should have listened to the people in the Egyptian Air Force who were complaining to them about the extremely unrealistic Soviet training their pilots were getting. It's also Egypt's fault that it made pilots fly different planes at different times.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_263.shtml
The link above explains it in better (and more accurate) detail and has interviews of Egyptian Air Force personnel.
What would be interesting would be an anti-shah styled uprising a la 1979 which will once again put sophisticated arms into the hands of the mullahs.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been trying to take over since the 40's now with no success. Their movement isn't very popular because their Saudi-style Wahhabi mentality doesn't sit well with many Egyptians but after years of living under a US-supported autocrat and witnessing your country fall victim to moral decay, government corruption and poverty, you become willing to support anything which isn't corrupt which is the only good thing about the Muslim Brotherhood.
Other than that they are bunch of fanatic idiots who tried to assassinate Gamal Abd El-Nasser before and are probably the ones who killed Anwar Al-Sadat and are responsible for staging terrorist attacks against tourists. I really don't know why human rights groups even defend these people.
Any support for them is dying down because people are expecting Gamal Mubarak to succeed were his father failed. People who dislike the current regime usually suggest people like Amr Mousa for President, not any Muslim Brotherhood member.
The recent stand-off with Iran also scared alot of people into not supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
The chances of the Muslim Brotherhood ever being in power are very low at best and non-existent at worst. Even if they try to stage a coup the military will just start slaughtering and imprisoning them en masse. Just like Gamal Abd- El Nasser did after they tried to assassinate him.
Still, its oil money now, nobody cares about the future.
We have no oil money.
It would be awesome if we did though...
