What’s happening in Yemen is horrific. More people are being killed there than I thought even lived there, civilians are being bombed mercilessly, and there’s no good reason that I can see, except that the Saudis are being dicks. It probably has something to do with oil, but Saudi Arabia has plenty of their own oil, so, yeah, it comes down to just being dicks. And they have the full backing and weaponry of the U.S., which is also at the moment being governed by dicks.
There is just no way that Yemen, which is probably less than 1/100th of the size of Saudi Arabia, was in any way threatening it. Also, their position on the southernmost coast of that barren, godforsaken peninsula means they aren’t a strategic threat to anybody in the world.
So, here is my solution to ‘the problem of the Middle East’ (and I put that in quote marks because there is way more than just one problem in the middle east). Take oil out of the equation. It’s not going to make the Sunnis and Shias suddenly love each other, it’s not going to make the Israelis any less arrogant and genocidal, but it will end the foreign involvement (they’re only there for the oil), and that would go a long way.
How can you take oil out of the equation? Solar energy. Saudi Arabia could put up hundreds and hundreds of miles of solar arrays. They’ve got the land mass and it’s sitting there doing nothing. So could Iran, Egypt, Libya and Algeria.
Any country with lots of sunshine could be a wealthy, energy producing country in a very short period of time.
A Partial Solution to the Problems in the Middle East
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