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The peregrinations of history are fascinating, and one thing that has particularly fascinated me is what would have happened if the declining Ottoman Empire of the late 19th Century had become the beneficiary of the oil in its boundaries. Would it have rebounded? Or would the oil simply have allowed an obsolete system to have a new lease on life, hence no Attaturk or modernity?

"The peregrinations of history are fascinating, and one thing that has particularly fascinated me is what would have happened if the declining Ottoman Empire of the late 19th Century had become the beneficiary of the oil in its boundaries. Would it have rebounded? Or would the oil simply have allowed an obsolete system to have a new lease on life, hence no Attaturk or modernity?"

The Turks have spent their history at the confluence of major trade routes, and as such, have inculcated free-market values, although somewhat unrecognizable by U.S. standards. Moreover, they spent the cold war sharing a border with the USSR, and the last decade facing down Iraq. If we have a friend in the ME, it's Turkey. We really need to go out of our way to maintain that relationship, because, if it's not already glaringly obvious, the rest of, "western" europe intends to drag us down the globo-socialist rat-hole which they've already indulged. IMHO opinion, the true American rugged individualist has far more in common with the Turkish shopkeeper than he does with the french corporate CEO.