A French tourist has just been killed by a bomb explosion in Cairo. Another 17 people (also mainly foreign tourists) have also been wounded.

No one has yet claimed responsibility but it is likely to be another Islamicist terrorist attack.

There are three reasons for such attacks:

1. Killing foreigners gets foreign publicity. Killing locals only gets local publicity. The purpose of terrorism is to "kill one and scare a million" and so the best way to do that is to kill people whose deaths will be publicized overseas.

2. There is a political theory (which I don't yet accept) that a good way to seize power is to first create chaos and that will create a window of opportunity for a political coup. Foreign tourism is very important for the Egyptian economy. The Egyptian tourist industry has already been hit hard by the global financial crisis and so attacks on foreigners will add to the downturn. This, the Islamicists hope, will bring the Government into chaos and create their opportunity to grab power.

3. A peculiarity of Islamic terrorists (not found in others who subscribe to the theory in #2) is that they want to rid their countries of their pre-Islamic heritage. It is almost like Pol Pot's "year zero" in 1975 - except that the counting in Islam began in the 7th century. For example, on March 9 2001 the Taleban Government in Afghanistan - despite international pleas to the contrary - destroyed the giant Buddha statues which recalled how Afghanistan not only has an Islamic past but also a Buddhist one. Similarly if the Egyptian terrorists were ever to take over, they will destroy what they can of the pre-Islamic heritage of the Pharaohs etc (the Pyramids themselves may be difficult to destroy but the antiquities in museums could quickly be destroyed or even sold off by terrorists wanting some black market money on the quiet),

The Egyptian crisis is another foreign policy dilemma for the Obama Administration - which already has enough foreign policy issues to think about!

On the one hand, the US (especially under President Bush) was committed to spreading democracy throughout the world (that was one of the justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq). Therefore Egypt - as the second most important Arab economy after Saudi Arabia - is an obvious target to become a democracy.

On the other hand, given the unpopularity of the current Hosni Mubarak Government (not least because it is not as an Anti-American as many others in the Arab world), one person one vote would probably result in the current Government losing power and some extremist Islamicist Government taking over. Then it may well be one person, one vote, once. There would still be a dictatorship but this time it would be an anti-American one - and one probably unwilling to continue the mediating role that Hosni Mubarak has been doing between Hamas in Gaza and Israel. This would make the Middle East Peace Process (such as it is) even more difficult to accomplish.