Middle East Welfare States
link Obama to Unveil New Aid Plan for Mideast – WSJ.com.
Aid to the Middle East. Hmm. This is as logical as a telethon for Vancouver realtors. Wasn’t there a rumor of plentiful oil there? The West has been providing aid to the Middle East in some form since someone figured out there was black gold in the otherwise barren moonscapes back at the turn of last century. With western technology, the gusher of oil and money have continued unabated since then. Somehow we are to believe that the font of the most lucrative commodity revenue on the planet requires welfare payments? Somebody has some explaining to do. What has happened to the shiploads of dollars paid to those sheikdoms all of these years?
Over the decades, the great oil wealth created by world demand has enriched only a very small number of insular autocrats fortunate enough to be the gatekeepers to the west. The enormous gulf that has developed between these small numbers of oil haves and the vast majority of oil have-nots have created a tinderbox for the religious swamis who have never bought into the idea of western ideologies, particularly with Israel as a neighbor. As we are seeing now, that tinderbox is being lit throughout the Mid East. Now, none of the Mid East states even pretends to be nice to the West.
Somebody may want to send Price Waterhouse in there to figure out where the billions upon trillions of dollars of oil wealth is, because it’s beyond belief that the West, particularly the Americans, are still sending aid to this region at all, especially given their own precarious financial state. The relationship between the West and the Middle East is somewhat analogous to a patron paying higher and higher prices for restaurant food to a chef who keeps all of the money for himself. The patron is then required to supplement the other disenfranchised restaurant workers to appease them and keep the food coming. So, even though he is the biggest customer, the patron risks food poisoning from the resentful workers every time he goes in. As well, the part of town where the restaurant is located gets increasingly dangerous. This tortured analogy falls short of modelling reality, but you get the idea. At a time when the demand and price for their staple product has never been higher, it’s about time someone told the chefs to start paying their own workers. Time to start paying their own bills.