Why are the Arabs so Weak?
Saudi Arabia has three times the population of Israel, twice the GDP, and immensely more land area than Israel, but it is militarily completely helpless by comparison. It has had immense oil wealth and a large income from it for a couple or three generations yet relative balance of power has continued to tilt the same way. Why so?
Of course Iraq tried to increase its military power too, but came acropper through several kinds of stupidity, notably attacking Iran and Kuwait, but also by other kinds of folly.
Saudi Arabia doesn't have that kind of excuse, so why don't they have a technological society and military power. Some of the answer may lie in the fact that Israel, and it's pit bull (that's us) didn't want it to happen, but I suspect the real reason was the greed, shortsightedness, and insecurity of its rulers. Those rulers chose to indulge in imperial luxury, feeding their appetites to the detriment of their country. Of course there was enough money to build an air force and still afford quite a few palaces, and they even bought some good planes, but they never bothered to train the pilots.
I doubt that that was a simple oversight. I think that rather it was fear of allowing any alternative power base in their country that has kept them weak. If those rulers had spent their money on building a modern industrial society and modern institutions rather than on having hundreds of wives and palaces, Saudi Arabia would most likely be the most important power in the Middle East today.
Greed and corruption is not the only factor though. The deal the rulers struck with religion is also a huge factor in keeping the country backward. Oil wealth apparently provided the means to avoid the transition to modernity rather than to quickly effect it.
It's a truism that unearned wealth destroys the recipient. Spain was in many ways destroyed by the vast gold horde it plundered from America. It looks a lot like the same has happened to the Arab oil rich.
Of course Iraq tried to increase its military power too, but came acropper through several kinds of stupidity, notably attacking Iran and Kuwait, but also by other kinds of folly.
Saudi Arabia doesn't have that kind of excuse, so why don't they have a technological society and military power. Some of the answer may lie in the fact that Israel, and it's pit bull (that's us) didn't want it to happen, but I suspect the real reason was the greed, shortsightedness, and insecurity of its rulers. Those rulers chose to indulge in imperial luxury, feeding their appetites to the detriment of their country. Of course there was enough money to build an air force and still afford quite a few palaces, and they even bought some good planes, but they never bothered to train the pilots.
I doubt that that was a simple oversight. I think that rather it was fear of allowing any alternative power base in their country that has kept them weak. If those rulers had spent their money on building a modern industrial society and modern institutions rather than on having hundreds of wives and palaces, Saudi Arabia would most likely be the most important power in the Middle East today.
Greed and corruption is not the only factor though. The deal the rulers struck with religion is also a huge factor in keeping the country backward. Oil wealth apparently provided the means to avoid the transition to modernity rather than to quickly effect it.
It's a truism that unearned wealth destroys the recipient. Spain was in many ways destroyed by the vast gold horde it plundered from America. It looks a lot like the same has happened to the Arab oil rich.
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