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The Poisoned Well

(New York Times) Fouad Ajami - OPEC's oil policy in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War led to the largest transfer of wealth in the annals of nations. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, "Never before in history has a group of such relatively weak nations been able to impose with so little protest such a dramatic change in the way of life of the overwhelming majority of the rest of mankind." There was a diminishment of Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, and a new ascendancy of the oil states. A fault line opened between those who fell into riches and those left behind. This second group soon fell back on an aggrieved nativism. The new wealth had a new nemesis: Americanization was overtaken by a fierce anti-Americanism. The shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, had been one of the chief architects of OPEC's policy; he had wanted to turn his country into an Asian Germany and to herd his people into the modern age. A bare five years after he engineered the big price hike, he gathered a handful of soil and left his country for exile. That wayward son of Arabia, Osama bin Laden, is a child of the oil revolution. He came of age amid the new wealth; it was petromoney that he took to Afghanistan. And it was petromoney that brought about the demographic explosion that has swamped and unsettled Arabia. The writer is professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey.
2003-10-17 00:00:00
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