February 1, 2008
Kurds’ Power Wanes as Arab Anger Rises

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD — As a minority group in Iraq, the Kurds have enjoyed disproportionate influence in the country’s politics since the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003. But now their leverage appears to be declining as tensions rise with Iraqi Arabs, raising the specter of another fissure alongside the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiites.

The Kurds, who are mostly Sunni but not Arab, have steadfastly backed the government, most recently helping to keep it afloat when Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki lacked support from much of Parliament.

With their political acumen, close ties to the Americans and technical competence at running government agencies, the Kurds cemented a position of enormous strength. This allowed them to all but dictate terms in Iraq’s Constitution that gave them considerable regional autonomy and some significant rights in oil development.

But now the Kurds are pursuing policies that are antagonizing the other factions. The Kurds’ efforts to seize control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and to gain a more advantageous division of national revenues are uniting most Sunnis and many Shiites with Mr. Maliki’s government in opposition to the Kurdish demands.

For the United States, the diminution in Kurdish power is part of a larger problem of political divisiveness that has plagued its efforts to build a functioning government in Iraq. While several political parties can come together to address a particular issue, none can seem to form the lasting allegiances needed for actual governance.

The Kurds, with their pro-American outlook, were a natural ally. But now the Americans are increasingly placed in the uncomfortable position of choosing between the Kurds, whom they have long supported and protected, and the Iraqi Arabs, whose government the Americans helped create.

One major Shiite group, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, has not publicly taken sides, but powerful people within the party have been openly critical of the Kurds. Others expressing frustration are leading members of Parliament and Hussain al-Shahristani, the oil minister and a prominent Shiite politician, who calls Kurdish oil contracts with foreign companies illegal.

Humam Hamoudi, a leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, said, “They are no longer the egg in the balance,” using an Arabic proverb that refers to the item that tips the scale. Mr. Hamoudi added, “The Kurds are not so powerful.”

Independent analysts largely back that assertion. “There’s a strong feeling that the Kurds have overreached,” said Joost Hiltermann, a senior analyst for the Middle East at the International Crisis Group who is based in Istanbul.

“The Kurds had their eye on independence in the long term, and they wanted to use the current window to increase the territory they hold and the powers they exercise within the territory,” he added. “They’ve done well on the powers, but not so well on the territory. They now face real restrictions.”

The jousting threatens to undermine much of what the Kurds have achieved in political influence and to supersede, at least temporarily, the far deeper divide between Sunnis and Shiites.

And by helping unite Sunnis and Shiites, the Kurds’ overreaching has strengthened the hand of Mr. Maliki despite widespread doubts about his ability to govern effectively. The tensions could even persuade the central government to further postpone an already delayed referendum on whether to make Kirkuk part of the Kurds’ semiautonomous region.

“The government got a lot of support when they stood against the exaggerated demands of the Kurds,” said Jaber Habeeb, an independent Shiite member of Parliament who is also a political science professor at Baghdad University. But to capitalize on this support, which is almost certain to be temporary, he said, the government must move quickly to improve electricity, water and other basic services.

The Kurds have been locked for decades in a power struggle with Sunni Arabs, most recently with Mr. Hussein. That led to the Hussein government’s Anfal campaign, in which about 180,000 Kurds died and 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed, according to Kurdish counts.

The United States and its allies created a no-flight zone over the Kurdish areas after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and the areas have since become increasingly affluent. While much of Iraq has been engulfed in violence since 2003, Kurdistan has been notably peaceful, with streams of foreign investment and a building boom in Erbil, the largest city. Against that backdrop, the Kurdish aspiration to bring more territory, including Kirkuk, into its semiautonomous region looks greedy to the Arabs.

In a signal of its displeasure, Parliament has refused to approve a new budget because it awards the Kurds 17 percent of the total revenues, which many representatives say is more than their share based on population. Because Iraq has not had a census in decades, it is impossible to know the true size of the Kurdish population. Some Kurdish leaders say it could be 23 percent; some Arabs say it is 13 percent.

The Kurds are also believed to collect millions of dollars in duties on goods coming into Iraq but they neither send the money to Baghdad nor share accounts of the income, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Parliament members are also angered that the Kurds want Baghdad to pay salaries of their militia, the pesh merga, from the Defense Ministry’s budget. The pesh merga operate primarily in Kurdistan rather than serving the country as a whole.

However, the Kurds contend that in the event of an invasion they would be on the front lines. Such a situation seems all too real to the Kurds, because Turkey has recently threatened to invade to rout the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party. The rebels have been mounting attacks over the border into Turkish territory.

Perhaps most grating for Iraqi Arabs, the Kurds have refused to back down on the oil exploration contracts they have signed with foreign companies. Arabs view the central government as the only entity empowered to approve contracts, albeit in consultation with the regions where the oil is located.

The Kurds argue that the central government has been dragging its feet on an oil law and that they cannot afford to defer oil exploration and development further, said Ros Shawees, a former vice president of Iraq and point man in Baghdad for Massoud Barzani, the president of the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government.

The Kurds acknowledge that they are worried by the opposition that has developed, although they are reluctant to concede that they may have overplayed their hand. “It is necessary to keep such feelings to a minimum,” Mr. Shawees said. “We have to work in different respects to show that the Kurdish region doesn’t just make demands and take things, but that the region is an example for all regions and it can benefit all Iraq.”

For now, however, the budget has yet to be approved, the oil law and revenue sharing laws are in limbo, and there is a new and visible fault line on the Iraqi political scene.

Caliph Wanted
Why An old Islamic institution resonates with many Muslims today

By Jay Tolson
Posted January 2, 2008

Osama bin Laden and his fellow jihadists repeatedly claim that the ultimate goal of their violent struggle is to restore the Islamic caliphate, the system of political-religious leadership that originated with the first successor to the prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. But they are not alone in favoring its return. A number of nonviolent Islamic organizations, such as the pan-Islamic Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation), champion the same cause. And more than two thirds of people recently polled in four Muslim nations say they support the idea of unifying all Muslim countries in "a single Islamic state or caliphate."

A Hizb ut-Tahrir rally in Indonesia.
(Achmad Ibrahim/AP)

(Jill Bevier for USN&WR)
The idea of the caliphate is a poorly understood, vaguely threatening concept in the West. But it is deeply rooted in cultural memory throughout the Muslim world, where the caliphate existed in various forms for almost 1,300 years. By the eighth century, about 100 years after Muhammad's death, the authority of the caliphs extended over parts of three continents, from what is now Pakistan across the Mideast and North Africa to what is now Spain and Portugal."Ninety-four percent of Muslim history took place under the caliphate," says Jamal Harwood, a former chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir's London-based executive committee, giving perhaps the simplest reason his party works to restore the institution that Kemal Ataturk—the founder of modern, secular Turkey—abolished in 1924.

But what does the caliphate really mean to those who claim to favor its return—or, for that matter, to those who oppose it, whether Muslim or not? Does such a proposed restoration involve a practical political agenda, with usable historical precedents? Or is it merely convenient political rhetoric, a slogan and rallying cry for those seeking power or at least change?

While most scholars and analysts conclude that it is mainly the latter, they also say that the "caliphate debate" goes to the heart of the current crisis of authority and leadership in the Islamic world. That crisis is complicated by a view held by many Muslims, and particularly by Islamists, that political and religious authorities are ultimately inseparable.

"The notion of reinstating the caliphate is the way that some Muslims struggle with the colonial and postcolonial situation," says Tamara Sonn, a professor of religious studies at the College of William and Mary. "It's the reflection of people's dissatisfaction with politics in the postcolonial Muslim world."

That dissatisfaction traces back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when various Muslim intellectuals sought to reform Islam so that it (and particularly Islamic law, or sharia) could be used as a source of practical social and political guidance. This, they believed, would liberate Muslim societies from European-imposed laws and institutions. Hassan al Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher and founder (in 1928) of the Muslim Brotherhood, coined the word Islamism to assert the political character of his faith, but he believed he was only trying to recapture the political and spiritual unity of the first four (so-called rightly guided) caliphs, who spread Islam in the years following Muhammad's death in 632.

Global politics. The Brotherhood and its offshoots nevertheless devoted little effort to restoring the caliphate. They focused on welfare projects and the institution of Islamic justice within the structure of the existing nation-states, while only more conservative figures like King Fouad I of Egypt made any effort to revive the caliphal office in the early years after its abolition.

By the 1990s, though, Islamists were changing, having lived through the failure of Pan-Arabism and disappointments with national leaders like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, who refused to implement Islamic law and cracked down on the Brotherhood, which he saw as a threat to his power. "You begin to see groups that do not see the world according to the state-oriented model of politics," says Georgetown University historian John Voll. "You get postmodern Islamists, notably jihadists, who see politics in a global way...and with Ayman al-Zawahari [the Egyptian physician who became bin Laden's chief strategist], you get the idea of global jihad."

To name the transnational order they now sought to create, the jihadists resorted to the word caliphate as what Voll calls "a term of conceptual convenience."

Hizb ut-Tahrir officials would partly agree with that assessment. "Al Qaeda has never elaborated its meaning of caliphate," says Harwood, a Canadian-born convert to Islam. By contrast, ever since it was founded in 1953 by a Muslim scholar and jurist in Jerusalem, the Hizb ut-Tahrir party has been elaborating its own program (including a provisional constitution) for a modern caliphal state. That agenda includes a popularly elected caliph whose paramount executive function (subject to monitoring by the highest court) would be to guarantee the application of sharia to all areas of civic, economic, and national life. "We don't distinguish between political and religious," says Harwood.

Practically the only area where caliphal oversight would not intrude, it turns out, is in the realm of worship. Hizb ut-Tahrir believes that such freedom would make it possible for Shiites and other minority Muslim sects to live under an office that was, for most of its history, an almost exclusively Sunni institution.

Promoting "ideological struggle" through its many websites and large pro-caliphate conferences (one in Indonesia last summer drew around 100,000 attendees), Hizb ut-Tahrir boasts more than 1 million followers in 40 countries. In November, the group raised its previously low profile in the West Bank by organizing Palestinian protests against the Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, which a spokesman denounced as "a conspiracy against the Islamic nation."

The group has been banned in many countries and came under investigation in Britain after London's July 7, 2005, bombings. Zeyno Baran, a program director at the Hudson Institute, sees the organization as an ideological factory and "de facto conveyor belt for terrorists." But many other analysts see it simply as a refuge for disappointed utopians in search of alternatives to capitalism and liberal democracy.

Historically, in fact, the caliphate model poses huge problems, including the crucial schism between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that is now playing out so dramatically in Iraq. That schism began with a dispute among the early Muslims over who qualified as a legitimate successor to the Prophet. Those who insisted that only a relative of Muhammad could do so claimed that Ali, the fourth caliph, and his kin were the only legitimate office holders. But the party of Ali (Shiite) lost out to the majority Sunnis, who held that the consensus of the community should determine the selection of the caliph.

Questions about who the caliph should be and what he should do have sparked other controversies, both theoretical and real. The problem begins, Voll says, with the Koran: It never discusses a caliphal office but refers only to Adam as "God's caliph"—a usage that some have taken in an almost environmentalist way to mean God's appointed steward of the Earth.

Spiritual authority. Another contentious question is the amount of spiritual and political authority caliphs actually had. Some historians claim that the first four caliphs exercised even greater religious authority than most standard pro-Sunni accounts suggest, making the office more closely resemble that of the imam in Shiite Islam. At least up to the ninth century, caliphs weighed in on interpretive matters.

But the office started to become more exclusively political in the 10th century. And even the century before, a social class consisting of learned scholars, the ulema, assumed the dominant role of interpreting the sharia. "The job of the caliph was now not to interpret the law," Voll says, "but to enforce what the ulema thought was correct." Even the political authority of the later caliphs grew shaky, particularly when there were simultaneously competing caliphates in different parts of the larger Islamic empire.

Despite debates over such historical realities, is there any reason to think that a new kind of caliphate, something more closely resembling the Roman Catholic papacy, could restore needed authority and order to the currently chaotic situation in which almost any shopfront imam or mullah can issue rulings on life-or-death issues, including the legitimate uses of jihad? Most scholars think not. "I cannot see a caliphate that would be embraced by all Muslims," says Baran. "Hizb ut-Tahrir says it doesn't care where the caliph comes from, but the Brotherhood would say that it has to be a Sunni."

Ebrahim Moosa, a Muslim legal scholar at Duke University, entertains an intriguing idea: a caliphal synod, or assembly of thinkers, with representatives of the laity as well as members of the ulema, collectively recognized as the successor to the teaching authority of the Prophet. Yet Moosa's hypothetical "caliphate redux" cannot withstand even his own pessimism about the real cause of the crisis of authority in the Muslim world: corrupt, authoritarian regimes. "I'm afraid that a caliphal body would be used by existing governments, he says, "and caliphal authority would just end up reinforcing tyranny in religious disguise."

Tags: religion | Islam

One out of five voters (43 million) sit between 18 and 29, the so-called echo-boom, and given its hyperconnectedness, a lot of political pundits spot a bit of seismic shift going on here.
So far, the turnout numbers in the primaries seem to bear this out, and yeah, it does favor Obama plenty.
But here's an interesting list of the top 12 issues for millennials:
Health (top at 84%)
economy
education
Iraq
Jobs
Terrorism
Environment
Taxes
Moral values
Social security
Budget deficit
Energy (down to 48%)
Not exactly a "war generation," but rather a generation that sense a lot of collective risk has devolved into individual risk. Good example? Huge college loans and then entering the flat world job market.
The breakdown by party:
40% Independent
35% Democrat
25% Republican, for now …

COVER STORY January 9, 2008, 6:26PM EST
Youthquake
They're called the Millennials—and they're fed up. Why? Try angst about jobs, health care, and debt. Now they're getting pols to listen

by Michelle Conlin

Earlier than most of his rivals, Barack Obama sensed that a youthquake was rumbling deep inside the American electorate. For months, his campaign has put a premium on reaching out to YouTube (GOOG) disaffecteds. So far the strategy is paying off, helped along, no doubt, by the candidate's hip, un-boomer persona. The 46-year-old Illinois senator's surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses and close second-place finish to New York Senator Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire Democratic primary were fueled largely by hordes of twentysomethings in hoodies—the oft-pierced-and-tattooed generation that has come to be known as the Millennials, or Gen Y.

No one can predict with certainty how much influence this cohort will have on the coming election. After all, youth-backed candidates have faltered before. (Ask Howard Dean.) But the so-called echo baby boom has size on its side: nearly 43 million people aged 18 to 29, according to the Census Bureau, or 20% of registered voters. That and this group's hyperconnectedness (all those Facebook friends and MySpace (NWS) pages) have convinced many pundits and economists that something seismic could be coming.

Across the political spectrum, they say, Millennials are mobilizing around the idea that the federal government's operating system is in dire need of a sweeping update. Iowa and New Hampshire proved that candidates ignore these voters at their peril. Youth turnout surged by 25 percentage points in the Granite State over 2004, according to the Student Public Interest Research Group, which is dedicated to getting young people to the polls.

John McCain and Clinton attracted most of the 25- to 29-year-olds, while Obama won over those aged 18 to 24. The candidates seem to understand that the Millennials could have a disproportionately loud voice in November and are starting to target them more assiduously. Note the near-comic zigzagging of campaigns after Iowa, when politicians refined their talking points to appeal to Gen Y. Clinton even replaced the oldsters surrounding her on camera during her Iowa concession speech (including a certain former President) with more youthful props at her New Hampshire victory.

"IT'S GOING TO BE SO DIFFICULT"
Gen Yers have plenty to be exercised about. They're inheriting an economy in which many of the things their parents took for granted are evaporating: company-provided health insurance, attainable housing, Social Security, affordable education, well-paying jobs. Weaned on self-esteem and jacked up on Digital Age entitlement, they take themselves seriously—and expect their elected representatives to do the same. "I think about the costs of having a family, and it's going to be so difficult," says Edward Summers, 25, an Obama supporter and assistant to the president of Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. "The government needs to intervene to revive the middle class."

At first, the Millennials were the Children of the Rising Dow. They grew up during the greatest period of wealth creation in modern history, but watched their elders consume resources and run up deficits as if the party would never end. Then came the dot-com crash, terrorism, war, climate change. Epic uncertainty informs their worldview. When asked to name the issues they care most deeply about, bread-and-butter concerns such as the economy, health care, and education routinely rank high. In an October Pew Research Center poll, 80% of voters aged 18 to 29 cited the economy as a "very important" concern, vs. 61% who felt the environment was a major issue—a telling finding given all the campus activism swirling around global warming these days.

Talk of recession, a weak dollar, and rising unemployment all animate Millennials' economic angst. But there's a lot more to it than that. Young people may not know that the inflation-adjusted earnings of new college grads have fallen 8.5% since 2000. But they can feel it in the deflated salaries and shriveled benefits they command, even in white-collar jobs. They don't need an economics degree to understand that the middle class is squeezed. This generation has grown up watching parents struggle to stretch a buck. They lived through the mass layoffs during the corporate scandals earlier this century.

"They saw their parents get burned," says Claudia Tattanelli, CEO of Universum Communications, a research firm that specializes in Millennial workplace issues. "They watched 401(k)s that never got paid, parents losing health plans."

STARTING OUT BEHIND
As the government and employers shift more responsibility for benefits like health care and retirement onto the shoulders of individuals, many Millennials see themselves as unwitting victims. Although that trend has been building for decades, this may be the first generation to fully feel the great shift of risk in their bones. "This is a group of people who understand what it means to have no safety net," says Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard University School of Law professor and co-author of The Two-Income Trap. "Millennials walk the economic high wire. If nothing goes wrong, they will make it safely to the other side. The slightest disruption—a layoff, an illness—and they are off the wire and falling hard."

That sense of uncertainty is omnipresent for 22-year-old Tessa Jamison. Growing up, the George Mason University senior took ski trips with her family every winter. But after the dot-com bust, her father's insurance business in Virginia Beach, Va., suffered. The family's financial precariousness seemed compounded by the danger Jamison saw around her. She watched a friend's family struggle to pay the mother's monthly $6,000 chemotherapy bill after insurance wouldn't cover it. She saw her grandmother, a teacher for 30 years, unable to make ends meet on her pension and Social Security benefits. Jamison wants to go to law school but fears taking on the massive student loans that would require.

A more apt name for people like her may be Generation Debt. No group has ever started life so deeply in the hole, due mainly to mounting college costs, dwindling financial aid, and credit-card debt. The average college student now graduates with $20,000 in loans. Drew University sophomore Dominique Wilburn, 20, works three jobs—at a bookstore, as a resident assistant in a dorm, and at the school gym—to support herself and pay off her $41,000 debt. "In today's day and age, you have to have a degree, a graduate degree, to be competitive," says Wilburn.

What Millennials want done about student debt depends on which candidate they support. But Wilburn, a Clinton supporter, speaks for many of her peers when she says: "It's a huge issue for our generation and not enough attention is being paid to it."

Yet even a degree does not insulate twentysomethings from the vagaries of a winner-takes-all society. After graduation, Millennials move on to conduct job searches in what has become the new, global discount labor bazaar, competing against their pennies-on-the-dollar counterparts in China and India. Almost every young person you talk to knows a relative or family friend whose job has been sent overseas. Matthew Kracher, a 26-year-old who works for the Massachusetts state government and is leaning in favor of former Republican Governor Mitt Romney, says his sister lives in constant fear of losing her fashion industry job to outsourcing. "Entire companies get up and leave the U.S.," he says. "That's terrible."

NOT COUNTING ON SOCIAL SECURITY
Millennials also have to contend with the fact that the quality of jobs produced in the U.S. is not what it was. When their parents came of age, the paternalistic corporation was the dominant employer, offering career paths with generous, lifetime benefits and middle-class salaries. Today's biggest job growth is among the service jobs held by the working poor; the largest employer, Wal-Mart (WMT). That's a key reason why economist Jared Bernstein sketches out the Millennial plight as "starting lower, growing slower."

No wonder this generation is so obsessed with structure, savings, and security. Job recruiters say these are the primary themes in interviews. When asked about the most desirable attributes in an employer, students listed "good benefits package" far ahead of high salaries or opportunities for advancement, according to the National Association of Colleges & Employers. In part, that's because most expect Social Security to be dead and buried long before they reach retirement age. Dan Burke, a 28-year-old supporter of Representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.) who lives on Long Island and owns a Web retailer, believes it's unfair that he must contribute to Social Security. "We are forced to put our hard-earned money into it," he says. "And yet my generation won't see a penny of it."

And don't get these voters started on health care—they won't stop talking about it. Today's 19- to 29-year-olds make up the fastest-growing group of uninsureds in the U.S. "My friends can't afford to get sick," says 23-year-old Alana Kohn, a Clinton supporter and 2007 University of Michigan graduate. Most Millennials who consider themselves Democrats or independents support some kind of national health insurance program, which the leading Democratic candidates all favor. Erin Armstrong, a 20-year-old Obama supporter who attends St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., is on her parents' health plan but dreads the day she graduates and has to pay the premiums herself. "Health care is something that needs to be provided for every American at an affordable price," she says.

Given all the pressures and economic gloom, you might wonder why today's twentysomethings don't despair and disengage. There's a simple answer: They weren't raised that way. Growing up in the era of cater-to-kids politics, the V-Chip, and helicopter parenting, they were the most coddled generation ever, infused with their elders' belief that they possessed unique abilities. They also have been the most marketed-to generation, giving rise to their BS-despising, post-ironic disdain for any political solution—or candidate—that doesn't seem straight up. Thus their attraction so far to candidates, like Obama, McCain, and Paul, who they believe are outsiders representing change.

As any chief marketing officer knows, this generation believes in "owning" its favorite brands. Its members carry the same ethos to their political activism. Bringing the music and media industries to their knees was also empowering—providing Gen Yers with the self-confidence for a third-way, post-partisan manner of doing things. It's striking that the largest group of 18- to 24-year-olds, some 40%, consider themselves independent, according to a recent survey conducted by Harvard University, with 35% identifying as Democrats and 25% as Republicans. Millennials, like many Americans, may have lost faith in the political Establishment, but they have utter faith in themselves and their wiki-inspired abilities to get things done.

VYING FOR CRED
For all these reasons, yesterday's solutions don't interest them. They understand the power of networked humanity. So a candidate who says, "Vote for me and I'll create a lot of programs," leaves them cold. One who says, "Join me, and together we can change this country and the world," takes a page right out of Web 2.0 and summons them to action.

To a greater or lesser degree, all of the campaigns have been targeting Millennials. Romney talks on the stump about how, as governor of Massachusetts, he instituted a scholarship program to defray college costs. All are positioning themselves as digitally aware. GOP hopeful and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee lists his favorite movies, which include The Godfather and Casablanca, on his Facebook page. Romney's MySpace page features photos of backers who are far from the Young Republican stereotype. They include one young woman, calling herself Christena, shot topless from the back and sporting a massive tattoo and also a heavy-metal band from California called "Fatal Attraction."

But in the wake of Iowa and New Hampshire, expect to see the candidates scrambling after Gen Y voters as never before. No one, so far, is going after them harder than Clinton. The moment she got off her plane in New Hampshire, she told reporters: "This is especially about all of the young people in New Hampshire who need a President who won't just call for change, but a President who will produce change." Then her campaign began holding roundtables with young undecideds, including one on the campaign bus that featured the suddenly very visible Chelsea Clinton, a demographically correct age 27. The Clinton people also launched an "Ask Hillary" feature on their Web site allowing young voters to pose questions directly to the candidate. And before long Clinton, surrounded by what sometimes looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch ad, began peppering her speeches with references to Gen Y.

They're all playing catch-up to Obama, of course. For more than a year, the senator's "adultescent" campaign staffers have been swarming college campuses in beat-up cars with college logos, collecting names, building databases, and creating a social networking juggernaut that would make Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg proud. The Obama youth movement may burn out before November. But by taking the economic concerns of America's twentysomethings seriously he has put the spotlight on a generation intent on wielding their power for change.

With Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Paula Lehman, Eamon Javers, and Lindsey Gerdes
Conlin is the editor of the Working Life Dept. at BusinessWeek

The first story is cited just for the numbers. The Gulf Co-operation Council Six (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain) are expected to hit oil export earnings in the range of $400b this year and $450b next year.

Between 2005 and 2020, it’s estimated that GCC will bank $3 trillion. About half is expected to stay in region, a quarter goes to the wider region, and a quarter hits the global streets looking for returns through SWFs. Roughly $1t is slated for local investment, which is why the region starts to rival Asia for its construction crane demand. Indeed, a lot of Turks, Indians and Chinese are doing the construction in the region, so they fight over worker bodies too.

The second story profiles a gargantuan petrochem plant going up in Saudi Arabia that will link the economy to a wide variety of global production chains, like cells, TVs, and thousands of other products. This factory is but a blip in Saudi Arabia’s planned $500 billion in internal diversification investment. The House is building four massive “economic cities” that intend to create about 1.6 million jobs.

Aramco wants to become a bigger Exxon Mobil, a serious supplier of petrochem products as well as oil.

No more “idle mode” for the Saudi economy, and yes, that’s a good sign.

So should we be afraid of all this oil money?

Like just about anybody else hoping to get deeply plugged into the global economy, Saudi Arabia and the GCC are running desperate races against their own demographics and the inevitability that the advanced world must move past oil—for environmental reasons alone.

The oil producers are facing their last great swing at the ball. Failure is really not an option here.