Who Owns the Nile?

They probably can. But then what? History is not over yet.

Egypt thinks of Ethiopia as enemy state. A lot of Ethiopians believe Egypt supports every rebel group in Ethiopia. But Ethiopians still don't view Egypt as an enemy, more like a thorn on the side. For thousands of years the Nile has been flowing toward Egypt without much objection. Bombing the dam will change that. It is the equivalent to creating a monster at your water source. Ethiopia will not try to block the water or anything like that. But it can and probably will start small irrigation projects everywhere. And it will stop consulting with Egypt. In the end, this will be much more devastating to Egypt than a hydro-electric dam which isn't even used for irrigation.

What baffles me about the Egyptian stance is, climate change is coming. Projections for fresh water in Africa in the coming decades don't look rosy. Mitigation for this is, fresh water sources should be developed and protected from environmental degradation. And you need the cooperation of upstream countries to do that. Being source of 85% of the Nile, Ethiopia's support is needed to do that.

Even if Ethiopia stops constructing the dam right now, in 50 years, at a time Egypt is sporting 200 million souls, there is potential that water levels on the Nile are probably going to decrease purely from climate change.

The talk of war is stupid. Playing zero sum game of "Only Egypt" is a bad idea.

The Black African countries have as much right to benefit from the river as Egypt and the idea that they must submit to some agreement created by the British who ignored the needs of Nile countries is simply absurd.

If any people "own" it is the Ethiopians, the Kenyans and the Ugandans in whose countries the Nile originates not Egypt, and they have as much right to it as anyone else. Instead of having proper negotiations on how the Nile should be shared they bringing up colonial agreements which none of the African countries were parties to. This is simply absurd and as racist as anything else.

Gadaffi created huge pipelines to draw water from aquifers, a resource which is way more valuable than oil, and offered to supply a substantial portion of Egypt's water needs and these fools supported his overthrow and turned the whole country into a scene of chaos, and now they are making silly noises about war with Ethiopia and other crap.

If I lived in Siberia I would probably think that most rivers flow north to the Arctic Ocean.

For those that are interested, here is some more context on official cooperation between countries that surround (and are dependent on) the Nile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile_Basin_Initiative

Egypt can just occupy them, install a puppet regime and then move on. They definitely have that capability.