Banjo,

You need to understand the Poirot mindset--It's not a lot different from the Marilyn Shepherd mindset.
In such a world view the West is the root of all evil, the domain of robber barons.

The West caused the present unrest in Iraq--in fact, the West caused all the woes of the world!

The fact that Sunnis & Shiites have been vilifying & killing each other for centuries,and only desisted because a strong man, Saddam, showed he could out kill anyone else, is immaterial.

It was naive of JW Bush to think that he could export democracy to such a society. I mean, it can be done ---a la Japan post WW2 -but not the way we are allowed to fight & administer these days, with both hands tied behind our backs.

A win-win solution would have been to have left Iraq to its own devices:
--Poriot would have had a win because she could have whined to the cows come home that we should have intervened, should have done something, anything!
--and, the rest of the world team would have had a win because all those billions of dollars could have been re-directed to the space program. Heck! We could be terraforming Mars & Venus by now –and in space you cannot hear Poirot whine!.

SPQR,

".....and in space you cannot hear Poirot whine!"

Don't be too sure of that!.

SPQR, there is actually not much that can be done for Arab populations
until they ban cousin marriage.
It is a custom that comes from their tribal background and was an
attempt to keep land within the family and tribe.
A good objective but any rural population should have known what
inbreeding does to a population, except perhaps they thought their
religion would protect them from its effects.

So next time you see something that causes you to say "Are they mad"
well perhaps you will understand that they really cannot help themselves.

Banjo,

This graph shows Egypt's total fertility rate (i.e., the average number of children per woman) since 1960

http://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&idim=country:EGY&dl=en&hl=en&q=egypt+fertility+rate+graph

Note that the fertility rate has come down, but is still much higher than the replacement level of 2.1. This graph shows the annual population growth rate over the same period

http://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_grow&idim=country:EGY&dl=en&hl=en&q=egypt+population+growth+rate+graph

An average 2.5% population growth rate will give you a doubling time of 27.7 years. If you don't have a scientific calculator, an easy way to calculate approximate doubling time is to divide 70 by the population growth rate in percent.

To see what rate of increase is possible, consider Niger. From the CIA World Factbook, the total fertility rate is 7.6 children per woman, and the population growth rate is 3.643%, implying a doubling time of 19 years.

Divergence,
An interesting exercise is to plot population and oil
consumption against time. They track EXACTLY so it is no surprise that
Egypt's population was also exponential.

The west did not follow the curve, I suspect it had to do with
education and the ready availability of contraception from early time
in the cycle.
However the poorer countries made up for that.
There is a graph on the energy bulletin. I just found this one that
shows how much population growth is due to which fossil fuel.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48677

There are others available.
As depletion occurs and it now seems that no alternative energy is
going to make up the difference it seems inevitable that a large
"die off" is inevitable. The arithmetic seems overwhelming.

Bazz,

When you say "die off" you seem to imply that numbers in excess of a country's unsubsidized carrying capacity will perish. Which could in many cases be tens of millions--short of a total worldwide breakdown, I can't see it.The hue & cry will be we have to take them in as refugees and/or fund their upkeep for however long it takes.

Observation should tell you that every time there is a devastating flood, famine or fire. It's something of a standard now that it's rarely about overpopulation or bad governance. It's the result of past colonial overhangs or increasingly, AGW:

"Changes in the weather and climate used to be blamed on gods or demons, but no longer. If something nasty happens - meteorologically and climatically - in the developing world today, a cacophony of voices invariably insists it is the developed world's fault. Most delegates at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) seventeenth annual meeting of its Conference of the Parties (COP-17) in Durban, South Africa, agreed with this alleged causal connection."
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13002

This is the real "Malthusian trap", the West will get to pick up the tab for other regions breeding habits.