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on whom to blame next.

The Curse of Oil

Nothing has contributed more to retarding the emergence of a democratic context in

places like Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran than the curse of oil. As long

as the monarchs and dictators who run these oil states can get rich by drilling their

natural resources-as opposed to drilling the natural talents and energy of their

people-they can stay in office forever. They can use oil money to monopolize all the

instruments of power-army, police, and intelligence-and never have to introduce real

transparency or power sharing. All they have to do is capture and hold the oil tap.

They never have to tax their people, so the relationship between ruler and ruled is

highly distorted. Without taxation, there is no representation. The rulers don't

really have to pay attention to the people or explain how they are spending their

money-because they have not raised that money through taxes. That is why countries

focused on tapping their oil wells always have weak or nonexistent institutions.

Countries focused on tapping their people have to focus on developing real

institutions, property rights, rule of law, independent courts, modern

education, foreign trade, foreign investment, freedom of thought, and scientific

enquiry to get the most out of their men and women. In an essay in Foreign Affairs

called "Saving Iraq from Its Oil" (July-August 2004), development economists Nancy

Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian point out that "34 less-developed countries now boast

significant oil and natural gas resources that constitute at least 30 percent of their

total export revenue. Despite their riches, however, 12 of these countries' annual

per capita income remains below $1,500 . . . Moreover, two-thirds of the 34 countries

are not democratic, and of those that are, only three score in the top half of Freedom

House's world rankings of political freedom."

In other words, imagination is also a product of necessity-when the context you are

living in simply does not allow you to indulgein certain escapist or radical fantasies,

you don't. Look where the most creative innovation is happening in the Arab-Muslim

world today. It is in the places with little or no oil. As I noted earlier, Bahrain

was one of the first Arab Gulf states to discover oil and was the first Arab Gulf

state to run out of oil. And today it is the first Arab Gulf state to develop

comprehensive labor reform for developing the skills of its own workers, the first

to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States, and the first to hold a free

and fair election, in which women could both run and vote. And which countries in

that same region are paralyzed or actually rolling back reforms? Saudi Arabia and

Iran, which are awash in oil money. On December 9, 2004, at a time when crude oil

prices had soared to near $50 a barrel, The Economist did a special report from Iran,

in which it noted, "Without oil at its present sky-high price, Iran's economy would

be in wretched straits. Oil provides about half the government's revenue and at least

80% of export earnings. But, once again under the influence of zealots in parliament,

the oil cash is being spent on boosting wasteful subsidies rather than on much-needed

development and new technology."

It is worthy of note that Jordan began upgrading its education system and privatizing,

modernizing, and deregulating its economy starting in 1989-precisely when oil prices

were way down and it could no longer rely on handouts from the Gulf oil states. In

1999, when Jordan signed

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its free-trade agreement with the United States, its exports to America totaled $13

million. In 2004, Jordan exported over $1 billion of goods to America-things

Jordanians made with their hands. The Jordanian government has also installed

computers and broadband Internet in every school. Most important, in 2004, Jordan

announced a reform of its education requirements for mosque prayer leaders.

Traditionally, high school students in Jordan took an exam for college entrance, and

those who did the best became doctors and engineers. Those who did the worst became

mosque preachers. In 2004, Jordan decided to gradually phase in a new system.

Henceforth, to become a mosque prayer leader, a young man will first have to get a

B.A. in some other subject, and can study Islamic law only as a graduate degree-in

order to encourage more young men of talent to go into the clergy and weed out those

who were just "failing" into it. That is an important change in context that should

pay dividends over time in the narratives that young Jordanians are nurtured upon

in their mosques. "We had to go through a crisis to accept the need for reform," said

Jordan's minister of planning, Bassem Awadallah.

There is no mother of invention like necessity, and only when falling oil prices force

the leaders in the Middle East to change their contexts will they reform. People don't

change when you tell them they should. They change when they tell themselves they

must. Or as Johns Hopkins foreign affairs professor Michael Mandelbaum puts it,

"People don't change when you tell them there is a better option. They change when

they conclude that they have no other option." Give me $10-a-barrel oil, and I will

give you political and economic reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Iran. If America and

its allies will not collaborate in bringing down the price of crude oil, their

aspirations for reform in all these areas will be stillborn.

There is another factor to consider here. When you have to make things with your hands

and then trade with others in order to flourish, not just dig an oil well in your

own backyard, it inevitably broadens imagination and increases tolerance and trust.

It is no accident that Muslim countries make up 20 percent of the world's population

but account for only 4 percent of world trade. When countries don't make things anyone

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else wants, they trade less, and less trade means less exchange of ideas and openness

to the world. The most open, tolerant cities in the Muslim world today are its trading

centers-Beirut, Istanbul, Jakarta, Dubai, Bahrain. The most open, tolerant cities

in China are Hong Kong and Shanghai. The most closed cities in the world are in central

Saudi Arabia, where no Christians, Hindus, Jews, or other non-Muslims are allowed

to express their religions in public or build a house of worship, and, in the case

of Mecca, even enter. Religions are the smelters and founders of imagination. The

more any religion's imagination - Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist-is

shaped in an isolated bubble, or in a dark cave, the more its imagination is likely

to sail off in dangerous directions. People who are connected to the world and exposed

to different cultures and perspectives are far more likely to develop the imagination

of 11/9. People who are feeling disconnected, for whom personal freedom and

fulfillment are a Utopian fantasy, are more likely to develop the imagination of 9/11.

Just One Good Example

Stanley Fischer, the former deputy managing director of the IMF, once remarked to

me, "One good example is worth a thousand theories." I believe that is true. Indeed,

people do not change only when they must: They also change when they see that

others-like themselves-have changed and flourished. Or as Michael Mandelbaum also

points out, "People change as a result of what they notice, not just what they are

told"-especially when what they notice is someone just like them doing well. As I

pointed out in Chapter 10, there is only one Arab company that developed a world-class

business strong enough to get itself listed on the Nasdaq, and that was Aramex. Every

Jordanian, every Arab, should know and take pride in the Aramex story, the way every

American knows the Apple and Microsoft and Dell stories. It is the example that is

worth a thousand theories. It should be the role model of

a self-empowered Arab company, run by Arab brainpower and entrepre-neurship,

succeeding on the world stage and enriching its own workers at the same time.

When Fadi Ghandour took Aramex public again in 200 5, this time in Dubai, some four

hundred Aramex employees from all over the Arab world who had stock options divided

$14 million. I will never forget Fadi telling me how proud these employees were-some

of them managers, some of them just delivery drivers. This windfall was going to enable

them to buy homes or send their kids to better schools. Imagine the dignity that these

people feel when they come back to their families and neighborhoods and tell everyone

that they are going to build a new house because the world-class Arab company they

work for has gone public. Imagine how much dignity they feel when they see themselves

getting ahead by succeeding in the flat world-not in the traditional Middle Eastern

way by inheritance, by selling land, or by getting a government contract-but by

working for a real company, an Arab company. Just as it is no accident that there

are no Indian Muslims in al-Qaeda, it is no accident that the three thousand Arab

employees of Aramex want to deliver only packages that help economies grow and Arab

people flourish-not suicide bombs.

Speaking of the Aramex employees with stock options, Ghandour said, "They all feel

like owners. A lot of them came up to me and said, 'Thank you, but I want to invest

my options back in the company and be an investor in the new IPO.'"

Give me just one hundred more examples like Aramex, and I will start to give you a

different context-and narrative.

From Untouchables to Untouchables

And while you are at it, give me one hundred Abraham Georges as well-individuals who

step out of their context and set a different example can have such a huge impact

on the imagination of so many others. One day in February 2004, I was resting in my

hotel room in

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Bangalore, when the phone rang. It was a young Indian woman who said she was attending

a private journalism school on the outskirts of the city and wanted to know if I would

come by and meet with her class. I've learned over the years that these sorts of

accidental invitations often lead to interesting encounters, so I said, "What the

heck, sure. I'll come." Two days later I drove ninety minutes from downtown Bangalore

to an open field in which stood a lonely journalism school and dormitory. I was met

at the door by a handsome, middle-aged Indian man named Abraham George. Born inKerala,

George served in the Indian Army, while his mother immigrated to the United States

and went to work for NASA. George followed her, went on to study at NYU, started a

software firm that specialized in international finance, sold it in 1998, and decided

to come back to India and use his American-made fortune to try to change India from

the bottom-the absolute bottom-up.

One thing George learned from his time in the United States was that without more

responsible Indian newspa

When we eventually reached the school complex, though, we found neatly painted

buildings, surrounded by some grass and flowers, a total

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contrast to the nearby hamlets. The first classroom we walked into had twenty

untouchable kids at computers working on Excel and Microsoft Word. Next door, another

class was practicing typing on a computer typing program. I loudly asked the teacher

who was the fastest typist in the class. She pointed to an eight-year-old girl with

a smile that could have melted a glacier.

"I want to race you," I said to her. All her classmates gathered round. I crunched

myself into a tiny seat in the computer stall next to her, and we each proceeded to

type the same phrase over and over, seeing who could do more in a minute. "Who's

winning?" Ishouted. Her classmates shouted her name back and cheeredher on. I quickly

surrendered to her gleeful laugh.

The selection process to get into Shanti Bhavan is based on whether a child is below

the poverty line and the parents are willing to send him or her to a boarding school.

Shortly before I arrived, the students had taken the California Achievement Tests.

"We are giving them English education so they can go anywhere in India and anywhere

in the world for higher education," said Law. "Our goal is to give them a world-class

education so they can aspire to careers and professions that would have been totally

beyond their reach and have been so for generations. . . Around here, their names

will always give them away as untouchables. But if they go somewhere else, and if

they are really polished, with proper education and social graces, they can break

this barrier."

Then they can become my kind of untouchables-young people who one day can be special

or specialized or adaptable.

Looking at these kids, George said, "When we talk about the poor, so often it is talk

about getting them off the streets or getting them a job, so they don't starve. But

we never talk about getting excellence for the poor. My thought was that we can deal

with the issue of inequality, if they could break out of all the barriers imposed

upon them. If one is successful, they will carry one thousand with them."

After listening to George, my mind drifted back to only four months earlier, in the

fall of 2003, when I had been in the West Bank filming another documentary about the

Arab-Israeli conflict. As a part of that project, I went to Ramallah and interviewed

three young Palestinian

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militants who were members of Yasser Arafat's paramilitary Tanzim organization. What

was so striking about the interview were the mood swings of these young men from

suicidal despair to dreamy aspirations. When I asked one of the three, Mohammed Motev,

what was the worst thing about living in the context of Israeli occupation, he said

the checkpoints. "When a soldier asks me to take off my clothes in front of the girls.