Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Where to Begin, Where Will it End
Egypt second only to the State of Israel being the largest recipient of United States military aid in the form of grants. With Saudi Arabia being the largest paying foreign customer of the United States Military Industrial Complex with the latest deal totaling sixty-five billion dollars. This in a region where the vast majority of the population lives in poverty with a very few people living like kings. For the most part a closed and tightly controlled monolithic religious region with a lot of the world’s oil reserves.
If there was no oil in the Middle East region. There would probably be no Suez Canal and major oil pipe lines in Egypt connecting the East to the the Western industrial nations with little to no oil. With the vast majority of the Middle Eastern people’s ancestral family’s roots going back over four thousand years in the region. Just under a hundred years ago the vast majority of the Middle Eastern people were living as they did in the fourteenth century. With the discovery of the earliest and largest oil reserves in the world this brought great changes very quickly to the Middle East region.
The oil for military weapon and support programs that have been going on for many decades between the the Middle Eastern nations and Western industrial oil poor nations is not sustainable. Traditional closed societies with autocratic rulers will not be able to survive in an open and free world. The internet with a higher educated population has changed the way people get information including the news. There is a certain irony that in Egypt one of the world’s oldest in tack societies is the first to have a revolution sparked on the internet.
Today we are living in a time when things are changing very fast in the world around us. That many of the ways of the past that are seen and are perceived as being bad, do not change as quickly as many of other things in the world. Creating even larger problems in the future. Unless we get to the modern day root of many of our problems we will continue to sow the seeds of war and despair around the world. With a lot less United States foreign military aid and a little more international humanitarian aid we would have a much better and different world tomorrow.
If there was no oil in the Middle East region. There would probably be no Suez Canal and major oil pipe lines in Egypt connecting the East to the the Western industrial nations with little to no oil. With the vast majority of the Middle Eastern people’s ancestral family’s roots going back over four thousand years in the region. Just under a hundred years ago the vast majority of the Middle Eastern people were living as they did in the fourteenth century. With the discovery of the earliest and largest oil reserves in the world this brought great changes very quickly to the Middle East region.
The oil for military weapon and support programs that have been going on for many decades between the the Middle Eastern nations and Western industrial oil poor nations is not sustainable. Traditional closed societies with autocratic rulers will not be able to survive in an open and free world. The internet with a higher educated population has changed the way people get information including the news. There is a certain irony that in Egypt one of the world’s oldest in tack societies is the first to have a revolution sparked on the internet.
Today we are living in a time when things are changing very fast in the world around us. That many of the ways of the past that are seen and are perceived as being bad, do not change as quickly as many of other things in the world. Creating even larger problems in the future. Unless we get to the modern day root of many of our problems we will continue to sow the seeds of war and despair around the world. With a lot less United States foreign military aid and a little more international humanitarian aid we would have a much better and different world tomorrow.
Labels: Egypt, Middle East, military, oil, social justice, United States foreign policy
