Arabic question..........?

I'm looking into learning Arabic so that I may be able to use it later on down the road in a Government/Military capacity. So I've been looking into certain programs to decide which dialect to learn, and I'm not fully getting it. I was looking into Pimsleur since I've had nothing but good things come from working with the Spanish and Russian tapes, but they only have the Egyptian and Levantine Arabic. But it did say that Levantine Arabic is spoken and understood in Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Which is good, but it seems like Egyptian arabic may be more useful since I heard it's widely understood through out North Africa (I ume someone would know on here if that's true)