Word: oiling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Houston, Walter Rachelson sold 12,000 bumper stickers in a week for $1 each. They flaunted slogans such as IRAN-TAKE YOUR OIL AND SHOVE IT, and WARNING: I DON'T BRAKE FOR IRANIANS...
Some Muslims, of course, insist that Islam and modernization are perfectly compatible. Many Islamic countries supply the oil that is, for now, the indispensable ingredient of modernization, and they have tried to use their staggering and sudden wealth to buy the machines of progress without the devils that often inhabit them. Conservative Saudi leaders, for example, a pursue a selective strategy regarding the technological riches of the West: they seek to modernize without the garish libertine free-for-all that Western secular individualism has promoted...
...Muslim tradition provides the language and symbolism to express a wide social message: it is not necessarily a religious phenomenon. It is not antiChristian. In fact, Muslims really regard modern Westerners as a species of pagan. Ironically, some of the resentment has been aroused by the emergence of oil-rich classes within the Islamic countries themselves. With that wealth came a widening gap between rich and poor, a dangerous ambivalence of rising expectations and an anxiety that old ways might be endangered. The resentment of modernization is not anything so simply and piously self-abnegating as a wish to avoid...
...Still, oil has convinced the Islamic world-or half-convinced it-of its worth and power. The presence of oil in the complicated psychology of anti-Westernism makes the volatility of the Islamic world especially perilous. It is an interesting point of Muslim psychology that the Arabs who grow unimaginably rich off Western payments for oil (and squander their petrodollars on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Rolls-Royces and golden bathroom fixtures) have still in them enough desert asceticism to be contemptuous of the West's energy addictions. So here the old relation is reversed: the West...
From the U.S. viewpoint, the linchpin of the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, which currently supplies the West with about 22% of its oil imports. U.S. security depends, quite literally, on continued oil production by Saudi Arabia-and thus on the staying power of a royal family that faces many of the problems of religious and tribal instability that afflicted the deposed Shah. The Saudis, whose semifeudal society is trying to cope with both Western technology and hordes of unassimilated foreigners, are exceedingly vulnerable to both external and internal threats. That was proved by the recent seizure of the Sacred...